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“I’ve been really saddened to see the way it’s torn our community apart,” City Councilor Kate Sykes said at a meeting last month.
Over the objections of both the Planning Board and Historic Preservation Board, Sykes and her colleagues have, for now, sided with the museum, giving it a green light to tear down a building that is — or was — part of a federally recognized historic district and replace it with an ultramodern 60,000-square-foot addition that will double the size of the museum.
But the proposed expansion, a four-story, glass-and-timber structure expected to cost upward of $100 million to build and operate, is hardly a done deal. Preservationists are exploring legal options to prevent the museum from proceeding with its plan to bulldoze the stately, columned structure next door, and city officials have yet to scrutinize and approve the design details of the massive addition.
“There’s a lot of stuff in the plan that is problematic,” said Alex Jaegerman, Portland’s former planning director and now a trustee of Greater Portland Landmarks, a preservation group that wants to save the abutting building.
The ambitious project comes at a complicated time for the museum, whose attendance, like that of many other cultural institutions, has not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. Last year, 115,411 people visited the Portland Museum of Art — about a 35 percent decline from 2019, when 176,699 visitors walked through the door. In February, citing financial pressures, the museum laid off 13 employees, or about 10 percent of its staff. At the same time, the museum has announced a lofty capital campaign to raise the money for the new building.
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“You can’t pick or choose your moment to do the work you need to do,” said Bessire, conceding that the optics of layoffs amid such a large-scale development are not good. “If we wait too long, we could fall so far behind that we can’t actually get to the future.”
Founded in 1882, the Portland Museum of Art today consists of four buildings that range in age from very old to old. The compound, a five-minute walk from the Old Port, includes the McLellan House, built in 1801; the Clapp House, built in 1832; the Sweat Memorial Galleries, built in 1911, and the striking Charles Shipman Payson Building, a four-story redbrick structure — designed by Henry Cobb, a partner in I.M. Pei’s architecture firm — that opened in 1983 and spurred something of a renaissance in Portland by attracting tourists and inducing investment in downtown.
But the bloom is off the rose, according to Bessire, who says the PMA lacks not only storage and gallery space for its ever-growing collection, but also “21st-century amenities,” such as a performance hall, classrooms, free space for children and families to roam, a restaurant, and rooftop terrace, which could help draw larger, more diverse crowds. The museum, whose new motto is “Art for all,” predicts the addition will enable it to nearly double attendance by 2027 and bring energy to a moribund section of downtown Portland.
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“We’re thinking about the folks who go to museums, but also the folks who don’t go to museums,” Bessire said. “I love art dearly, but if museums don’t wake up, we’re going to lose the next generation of visitors.”
At a series of public forums to discuss what the expansion should look like, Bessire said several people mentioned the facade of the postmodern-style Payson Building, calling it ominous and off-putting. As a result, the proposed addition, designed by Portland, Ore.-based LEVER Architecture and chosen from among 100-plus concepts submitted by firms around the world, emphasizes transparency and light. (Detractors dismiss it as a “glass box.”)
“To be honest, the Payson Building is not the most welcoming,” Bessire says. “It’s an intimidating building because you can’t see inside. It’s kind of like a fortress on the outside.”
The museum has been contemplating an expansion for several years and, in 2019, purchased an adjacent property that used to be the Children’s Museum. Preservationists didn’t pay much attention, figuring the building’s pedigree — it was built in 1830 and renovated a century later by the celebrated architect John Calvin Stevens — would protect it from the wrecking ball.
Not so, it turns out. Although the building was long ago designated a “contributing” structure to the downtown historic district and thus could not be demolished, the museum persuaded the City Council in May to reclassify it as “non contributing,” clearing the way for its demolition.
In its application to the city, the museum claimed that changes to the front of the building — it opened as a theater before becoming a Baptist church, the Chamber of Commerce, and, finally, the Children’s Museum — had diminished its historical significance. But it was another assertion that angered some here: The museum argued that the building should be razed because it was “erected during the Jim Crow era” and the white columns of its Colonial Revival style “carry unfortunate legacies of the past into the future.”
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In other words, said David Chase, an architectural historian and former curator of the National Building Museum, the structure is a brick-and-mortar embodiment of racism.
“Ridiculous,” scoffs Chase, who lives in York. “I’d guess that at least half the buildings in the Congress Street historic district were built during the Jim Crow era.”
Maine State Historian Earle Shettleworth, who’s been a member of the museum for more than 60 years, agrees. He believes the museum invented a phony argument to get what it wanted. “That’s just foolishness,” says Shettleworth, who resigned as trustee emeritus to protest the demolition plan. “The museum has debased itself in its campaign to denigrate this building.”
But Chris Newell, an educator and enrolled member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe of Indian Township in northern Maine, believes opponents of the museum’s plan are being selective in the history they are preserving. Newell, who consulted with LEVER on the proposed addition, credits the museum for thinking more broadly about the past and the future.
He cites LEVER’s inclusion of a distinctive curved roof line that will cradle the morning sun on the summer solstice — a design feature intended to pay homage to the Native Americans who lived on the Portland peninsula thousands of years before the Revolutionary War.
“Museums are a colonial artifact. Preserving history and art in museums is something that comes with colonization,” said Newell. “Rather than pay attention to just the last 204 years — the length of time Maine has been in existence — why not add the 12,000 years of existence on that landscape of the Wabanaki peoples?”
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Among the most vocal critics of the museum’s plan is Daniel O’Leary, who was its director from 1993 to 2007. O’Leary believes there are better sites for the expansion, including a parcel of land behind the Payson Building that the museum bought two decades ago and turned into a parking lot.
But O’Leary is also dubious of the claim that by creating amenities like a rooftop terrace, performance hall, and play spaces for children, the museum will be able to double attendance. And if it doesn’t, he questions whether the museum will be able to afford to staff and operate such an enormous building.
“If the goal is to expand the ability of the museum to present fine exhibitions, very little of the proposed new space serves that purpose,” said O’Leary. “It’s all for show.”
On a recent weekday, most of the patrons strolling through the Portland Museum of Art were visiting from out of town and hadn’t heard the inflated rhetoric for and against the demolition and expansion. But Carl Richter and Patricia Hatfield, an elderly couple from Brunswick, said they have paid close attention to the debate and worry that a sparkling new structure will spoil a downtown beloved for its old buildings.
“I don’t care for the new design at all,” said Hatfield, a retired financial planner. “In fact, I’m appalled. Portland’s tourism relies on its history. They can’t lose that.”
Mark Shanahan can be reached at mark.shanahan@globe.com. Follow him @MarkAShanahan.
