Traveling over the Casco Bay Bridge at night offers many enchanting views. Depending upon the weather, season, direction of travel and one’s exact location of the bridge, one can glimpse a stunning view of the Portland skyline, church steeples poking through fire-red maples, or a busy working waterfront. Looking east on the South Portland side of the Fore River the view is less than stunning. A lonely “BBQ” sign lit in neon, a wastewater treatment plant, strip development and a whole lot of empty asphalt seem to remind drivers that it is best to keep one’s eyes on the road.
    Waterman Drive, which parallels the bridge as it rises over the Fore River, is an anachronism. Built to accommodate traffic approaching a bridge that no longer exists, it is too wide, too straight and somehow too well lit to serve its current purpose as a neighborhood street. The city of South Portland has long recognized this problem and is currently squirreling away money to make the road less parkway and more park-like.
    Along comes the owner of an underused parcel of land on Waterman Drive. Upon the parcel sits the popular Beale’s Street restaurant and a defunct and vacant “Mister Bagel,” both buildings not very attractive in the first place and of limited utility for any type of reuse. The landowner imagines in their place a sleek, compact office building. The building will not face out, toward Waterman drive, but inward as if looking at the rest of its neighbors in the eye. It’s a beautiful building and people seem to like it, save one small detail: it is about twelve feet higher than current design standards allow. The owner could, and has plans for a squatter, less appealing building (and hence less valuable from a marketing standpoint), but would rather be allowed to build up (a little bit) to maximize the value and visual impact of the development. But he has run into resistance from the Knightville-Mill Creek Neighborhood Association as well as abutters, who fear the extra story will damage the aesthetics of the neighborhood. That argument may carry some weight if the building was proposed for some other part of the neighborhood, but on Waterman Drive, the question is: what aesthetics?
    The neighborhood group should be commended for its tireless work in breathing life into the Knightville area and has demonstrated it is not against development that is bold, but if it truly is against the owner’s plan it needs to come up with a more compelling reason shorter is better than shorter is better. –Ward Peck