Downtowns: A glimpse at Farmington’s and why downtowns are important to all

By Paul Mills

I spend most of my time at a second floor office at the crossroads of Downtown Farmington, the corner of Broadway and Main streets. I’m also president of the Farmington Downtown Association. I’m understandably a partisan of this neighborhood.

Unlike many downtowns in Maine, it’s a place that seems to have had some sustainability. To be sure, there’s always some empty office and business spaces for sale or rent – right now over 25,000 square feet or about 15 percent or so of the overall space – but it seems to be a terrarium that’s attracted a lot of interest. Last year, for example, the Maine Development Foundation chose it as the location of its annual downtown conference and it wound up being the best attended it had ever hosted.

Though the customer base for downtown Farmington is largely local, tourists do make more than just a cameo appearance. Right now, the fall foliage season brings a regular fleet of tour buses. Typically they drop by for an hour each noon time, midway through a day for them that began in Bar Harbor and will have its destination in North Conway.

Many of them comment on the offerings of local products found in the downtown establishments. They prize the Maine-made products at the furniture, jewelry, farmers market grocery and clothing stores, for example.

For those that linger around a bit longer, there’s a seven screen movie theater, called “Narrow Gauge Cinema,” whose theme recalls the railroad history of the region. (A shortcoming, of course, is that the railroad vanished from the area more than 35 years ago.) There’s also farmers’ union hardware and agricultural supply store that’s owned by its most regular customers, in effect a cooperative. Each year it issues a trade dividend, typically upwards of 10 percent to the 3,400 customers who hold stock in the company. It’s hard to find another place in Maine quite like it.

So why or how is Farmington’s downtown seemingly more viable than most? A commitment by the community, walking distance proximity to a 2,000-plus student state university, alert recognition of the potential of state and federal infrastructure funding, are a few of the factors.

A part of the answer is, however, both old and basic. Back in the 1790s – the same decade when Pierre L’Enfant was designing the parks and boulevards of our nation’s capital – two Connecticut natives, a hotel owner named John Church and a physician named Aaron Stoyall, were doing the same in Farmington. (Their Connecticut origins are surprising as nearly all other early land owners were from elsewhere in Maine or Massachusetts.) The outcome for Church and Stoyall, who owned most of the land that was the footprint for the present downtown, was to bestow on Farmington two of the wider main streets of any downtown in Maine. Farmington’s Main Street itself, for example, is as wide as Manhattan’s Broadway just above Times Square. Farmington’s second main downtown thoroughfare, Broadway, is only just three and a half feet narrower than its New York namesake.

Thus, when this DNA of street width was encrypted on the map of downtown Farmington, it was genetically predisposed to accommodate a successful neighborhood. The outcome today: two way main streets. Contrast this to that of most other major Maine communities with narrower main street widths. Think of the one way travel of Congress Streets in Portland and Rumford, Lewiston’s Lisbon Street, and the main streets of Augusta, Waterville, and Skowhegan. (Those in Freeport must have been designed by a relative of Church or Stoyall. Its main street seems to share the expansiveness of Farmington’s.)

Downtowns overall seem to have been in a decline. The case for viability and against extinction is made, however, perhaps most persuasively in a recent book by Jeff Speck, The Walkable City. In it Speck ardently observes:

“The downtown is the only part of the city that belongs to everybody. It doesn’t matter where you may find your home; the downtown is yours, too. Investing in the downtown of a city is the only place-based way to benefit all of its citizens at once.

“And there’s more. Every relocation decision, be it a college graduate’s or a corporation’s, is made with an image of place in mind. That image is palpable and it is powerful. It is resolutely physical: a picture of buildings, streets, squares, cafes, and the social life that those places engender whether good or bad, that image is hard to shake. And, with rare exception, that image is downtown.”

Speck also reminds us that communities with viable downtowns, communities where you can find everything in one place and within walking distance also have healthier citizens. Seattle and Portland, Oregon, both emphasizing in-town development, have a dramatically lower fatality rate from vehicular accidents – one of the largest causes of death in America – than such sprawled out counterparts as Houston or Los Angeles.

I have occasionally been part of a delegation from the Downtown Association that welcomes the tourist buses to town.Their handshakes often have a European, an Asian or even an Australian grip.

Oh yes, and the next time I greet them and spy one from Connecticut I’ll have this to say, “Thank you for the two Connecticut natives who gave us such wide streets to provide a foundation for Farmington’s Downtown.”

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached by e-mail: pmills@myfairpoint.net.