Bayside has always been a neighborhood in transformation: from industrial center in service to Portland’s growth, to central hub providing essential services for our most vulnerable populations, to now a vibrant mixed-use neighborhood offering urban lifestyle amenities.

As a residential neighborhood, Bayside has a shorter history than the rest of Portland. Bayside used to be water until the 1800s, when developers and builders started filling the area with soils and debris from other projects throughout Portland, and later from the Great Fire of 1866.

Bayside played a crucial role in Portland’s economic growth during the early to mid-20th century. The central landscape presented a convenient location for the utilitarian infrastructure needed to run the city: manufacturing, scrap, the rail yard, lumber. It also became home to the immigrant and migrant labor populations that worked those industries.

In time, as industry moved out of Portland, the city took the vacancies as opportunity to tear up much of the neighborhood, build Franklin Arterial and fill other parts with social services, including a centralized shelter for the unhoused. This has largely characterized the neighborhood in recent history.

It is now recognized that the city’s division of the neighborhood and dense clustering of services in one small area, rather than a more distributed approach across the city, created challenges and disparities for the population already living in Bayside. Today we call this discriminatory zoning. In an effort to revitalize those disparities, the City recently made a controversial decision to relocate its largest facility, an emergency shelter, off the peninsula, while keeping the smaller family and teen shelters in place. The aim was to balance redevelopment for existing and future residents with the needs of the city’s most vulnerable unhoused.

The evolution of Bayside is a common narrative in urban growth and development. It reminds us of other abandoned, industrial neighborhoods revitalized as vibrant residential communities, like Soho in New York City. Closer to home is the change seen in Munjoy Hill over the last two decades. Like Munjoy Hill 15 years ago, Bayside development and real estate values are on the upswing. But unlike Munjoy Hill, the redevelopment has been planned between the city, local nonprofits and existing residents. They are trying to responsibly meet the demand of new neighbors attracted to Bayside for the convenient location. Bayside sits between the Old Port and Back Cove, two of the city’s prime attractions.

Today, visitors come to Bayside for breweries, restaurants, art venues, their favorite Pilates studios, bakeries, Whole Foods and Trader Joes. As the true mark of a changing neighborhood, Bayside has attracted sleek, new construction condominium developments. However, in this new housing you can observe the tug between Bayside’s history and its future: sale prices are more accessible than comparable units in the neighboring Old Port or over in Munjoy Hill, attracting buyers in search of opportunity and value.

One new development is the Daymark building. Daymark is a high rise with 54 mixed-use units, mostly one-to-two-bedroom condos, designed around impressive, shared amenities for community-focused living. Before Daymark was built, the lot was vacant and overgrown. Today, as units sell and new residents move in, it’s a blossoming community with diverse neighbors from all over the state of Maine, throughout the country and across the world.

Daymark is listed for sale by Nova Tower and Tyson Wilkins of Waypoint Brokers Collective. Wilkins notes that the people who buy in Daymark are attracted to the neighborhood for its mix of old and new. “They love all the new business in the area, how close it is to the Old Port and Munjoy Hill,” he said. “They are very aware that this is a neighborhood with exciting growth happening. It’s a big part of why they buy here.”

Tower talked about the changing lifestyle in Bayside. “When I first moved to Portland 16 years ago, I didn’t find myself in Bayside often, maybe once or twice a year, to go to the Portland Architectural Salvage,” she recalled. “Then there was Bayside Bowl and suddenly we were down here a lot. After that, it was one thing after the next: restaurant patios, events at our friend’s art studio, our favorite stores, my bank. Bayside is now a regular date night destination for us.” Tower explained how investment from the business community eventually attracted developers to build condos, “because people wanted to be here.”

Still, there are challenges to a changing neighborhood. The active Bayside Neighborhood Association, which maintains the city’s only neighborhood run community garden across the street from Daymark, summarizes this well on their website: “There are unique opportunities in Bayside for community investment, growth, and placemaking, and challenges in preserving its affordability and identity.”

Hopefully we can seize these opportunities while meeting those challenges with the Bayside Master Development Plan, a comprehensive redevelopment plan expected to complete over the next 10 or so years. The plan is focused on sustainability and inclusivity, transforming vacant and underutilized lots into more than 800 new mixed-use rental units. Most of them will be market rate, but a quarter of them will be allocated as affordable units for residents making up to 80% of the area median income. It will further include people-centered features like artful pedestrian walkways, green spaces, outdoor dining capacity and more.

Transformation is the one certain trajectory for the future of Bayside. With some reflection on its origins and evolution, Bayside can grow into an exciting, accessible neighborhood for a diverse population of residents and businesses.

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