Transcription of Chris Thompson for the show Under the Big Top #194
Speaker 1: You’re listening to Love Maine Radio with Dr. Lisa Belisle. Recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in family and preventative medicine, acupuncture and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See the Love Maine Radio Facebook page or www.lovemaineradio.com for details. Now here are a few highlights from this week’s program.
Chris: Our end, kind of creative culture making a part of how we think about the fabric of the project right from the beginning has been really key.
Peter: It’s the whole point of circuses, what can a human being achieve and what is that experience like, and how do you make that into art and entertainment and performance.
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Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 194, Under the Big Top, airing for the first time on Sunday, May 31st, 2015. Maine is known for constantly reinventing itself often in fun and interesting ways. Recently, a group of developers has been making significant changes to Thompson’s Point in Portland.
They will be offering space to businesses, artists and a variety of creative folk including a new circus group. Today, we speak with Chris Thompson at Thompson’s Point and with Peter Nielsen of the Circus Conservatory of America about their exciting new ventures. Thank you for joining us.
As a long time resident of Maine, I made many journeys across the bridge looking towards the Portland Jetport. Overtime, I’ve noticed things like a train and the bus station and all kinds of new and exciting things happening over to … If you’re going south, happening over to the right. Now, something really exciting is happening and that is Thompson’s Point.
Today, we have with us Chris Thompson who has developed several hotel and mixed-use projects in New England. Current projects in Maine include Thompson’s Point in Portland and a 93-room Hampton Inn Hotel in Lewiston. Chris is an associate professor at the Maine College of Art and author of Felt: Fluxus, Joseph Beuys, and the Dalai Lama. Thanks so much for coming in and talking to me today.
Chris: My pleasure.
Lisa: Thanks for doing something with that piece of land. I think those of us who have lived in Maine a long time we wondered what’s going to be done there because it’s waterfront, it’s riverfront.
Chris: Yeah, it is. It’s an extraordinary site. It’s a 30-acre peninsula with really … It’s water on all sides. It’s got 295 right next to it, the transportation center right across the tracks. I mean, it’s an extraordinary piece of land. I mean, you’d search the world for something with that much in a potential but that’s always been the key, its potential and how do you activate that.
That’s why it sots along. It was a really a challenging site to pull all the pieces together, the access, the environmental, all of that. We’ve been at it for about 6 years and it’s taken that much time to do all the ground work really when it come to life.
Lisa: If I remember correctly, there was more of an industrial use to it previously?
Chris: There was, yeah. It’s an amazing site with a great history. It’s an old rail yard and all of the existing buildings, there are a couple down there today still standing or at least parts of old buildings still standing that were all part of the old rail complex.
All the buildings were positioned so that trains could move in them, through them and get shuttled across the site and there was this spider web network of tracks leading in and out of buildings. Just an extraordinary site that there’s still a couple of pieces left that we’re trying to bring back to life and then of course add new construction to that.
Lisa: What drew you to that site? What was it about that landmass?
Chris: I think a lot of folks like you made that trip passed Thompson’s Point said, “How can that not be something else? What will it take for that to be something else?” The answer was a lot of mixed-uses that worked together in synergy because otherwise it’s virtually impossible to carry the cost, the infrastructure cost alone of a large project like that.
You really need a few uses to gather that make sense and can happen more or less together. Our group has done hotel development. A lot of mixed-use projects like a lot of small development companies in Northern, New England. Our group became a fairly multidisciplinary one and that worked in a lot of different commercial real estate product types.
Over the last maybe 10, 15 years hospitality and hotel development and management has been our key focus. A lot of our projects are either hotel projects or mixed-used projects that have a hotel and hospitality component. We love that business of welcome and greeting, making sure people have a great experience whether it’s in a hotel or in a larger project as a whole.
We had been interested in … and this was back, this was probably 7 years ago before a lot of the new hotel rooms had come in to the market. We were looking at a couple of different sites in town for a potential hotel site. Our family were owners in the Red Claws team. We were talking about the Red Claws that had a first season and we’re looking at possibly doing a practice facility.
We have been interested in doing a hotel. We were looking at Bayside as were they, down near where Whole Foods is today. We said if the Red Claws want to do a practice facility and we could do the hotel project and there was another group who is interested in doing an office building and pretty soon the project outgrew Bayside and we said, “Well, let’s look at Thompson’s Point. If we have this kind of a mix, we probably could put something together.”
That’s what led to it, feeling like there was enough critical mass to really make it make sense and leap of the curve and take a risk. Of course, it’s like anything in life, any creative project, what you start with and what you end with are often radically different in form but not often in terms of the impetus and the goal behind it.
I think right from the beginning for the last 6 years plus, our goal has been to transform that site into a really great mixed-use project that feels like it’s part of Portland. I think when we started we had a slightly different approach to the site. We had other pieces of the site that were not available that since then we’ve been able to pull in the Suburban Propane site for example when we started.
We were just working around them. Since then, we’ve been able to put a deal together to get them to relocate. We’ve been able to really pull that whole peninsula together and really look, I think afresh at what’s there. It’s obvious in hindsight and surprising that this wasn’t the way we began the project. I think we assumed it would have to really essentially scrape the site and build new and make the whole site come out of the ground at the same time.
In hindsight, I think we didn’t spend enough time really paying attention to what was there that could be kept. Those 2 old existing brick buildings are just extraordinary resources. Then there’s a piece of the old Union Station actually at the site which is remarkable. It was the building that for a long time was covered with corrugated metal and plywood and surrounded with debris.
It was the thing that everybody saw when they looked over at Thompson’s Point and said, “That’s terrible. We got to be able to do better.” Lo and behold, when you strip all the junk of the outside of that building it’s an extraordinary old steel structure that was part of the old Union Station.
It’s about a third of the old rail depot that people used to come in and out, coming into St. John Street. We restored that and we rebuilt the structure of it and put in a new slab and a roof. That’s where we had the Beer Camp event last summer.
Lisa: Well, tell me about that. This was the Sierra Nevada Beer Camp which was the summer of 2014.
Chris: It was. It was our first event. It was about a 3500-person event. At the time we were still finishing up all the offsite infrastructure. There’s a lot of work that development projects require that you don’t see which things like road widening and underground infrastructure and rail crossings and all that sort of stuff. That work was nearly complete and really, it was a real hustle to get everything ready to accommodate that event.
Sometimes having an event like that is what you need to really push everybody to move at warp speed to get everything done, ourselves included. That event was just remarkable. It was Sierra Nevada’s Beer Camp which was a cross country tour that Sierra Nevada was part of and there were a couple of key craft brewers, Allagash, others, that were part of the train.
Then at each location they would assemble this great collection of local. Wherever they were, it was the local brewing community who would get together around this core event. Maine just had this unbelievable turnout and of course Maine has an amazing craft brewing both history and present. There’s just some amazing folks doing amazing things with beer and all of its forms.
The all converge for this event and it was just spectacular. It was really interesting too because that depot structure, that old pavilion building, Sierra Nevada and all of its other locations had just used temporary tents. That was the way they had assembled it and that had been their plan before they came to Portland.
Even though they knew that structure was there, their model was a different one and then saw that and said, “Let’s really think about how to use that thing.” Set everybody up, all the local brewers and the beer hall environment underneath that roof. It was just an amazing experience. Everyone who we talked to just had a blast. That was our first event. It was just I think a really remarkable one that let us I think see what the site could be when it really became a hospitality center.
We’ve been talking with Laura Wayne and the state theater folks for a while about how to put an outdoor concert series together. That goes live this summer. We’ve got 3 concerts already confirmed and there’s one or 2 others that may get done this summer too.
Lisa: Who will be there?
Chris: We have Ingrid Michaelson on June 28th, we have Primus and Dinosaur Jr. on July 27th which I’m particularly excited about. I live on primus during college. Then we have Grace Potter on August 1st, so those are the confirmed shows. It should be fun.
Lisa: It’s a diversity of music represented there, I think.
Chris: I think it’s a natural extension of what the state theater is doing which is growing this just world class modest in size. I mean, the state theater is a couple of thousand capacity and then they got Port City. It’s this great and then of course when they know, when they have something like Mumford & Sons, I mean they know to do a big show and really do it right.
I think Mumford & Sons really showed everybody what Portland could do and that’s really Laura and her team really making sure the experience is good because that’s what it’s all about. I mean, people will come back if you treat them right and make them feel like they’ve had a good experience and good value.
Maine, Portland has such an amazing music community and she’s really I think led the charge and giving that a form to really be as great as it can be and bring in some great acts. We’re really excited about the partnership with her this summer.
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Lisa: We at Love Maine Radio are fortunate to have a collaborative relationship with Apothecary by Design and to offer an ongoing speaker series. The next speaker in this series is me. We invite you to join me and hear more about finding wellness in water and nature. We’re going to be discussing the brain, the body and the deep blue sea.
During this event, we’ll explore the power that water has to relax, restore, and revive our spirits from a neurobiological perspective. We’ll give you some tips for putting these things into action in your own life. This event will take place on Monday, June 1, 2015 from 5 to 7pm at the offices of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street in Portland.
For more information, visit the Love Maine Radio Facebook page or lovemaineradio.com. This event is free, but we would love to know if you’re coming. We hope to see you on Monday June 1, 2015 from 5 to 7pm. It’s going to be a great time and you’ll learn a lot, plus I just like having my friends around me. Thanks. You also had Sam van Aken and the Tree of 40 Fruit.
Chris: We do.
Lisa: You’ve had music scheduled and art in the past, on the future, I’m assuming.
Chris: Sam van Aken and Tree of 40 Fruit project is this wonderful experiment that has rarely born fruit where he began with a question like all great all starts with asking the right question. He wondered what had happened to all these great varieties of heirloom stone fruit that he knew were out there in the world, the such and such plum from the 14th century.
I mean, in theory someone is still growing this but I can’t find them anywhere and it’s because the world of monolculture takes hold. Our kid doesn’t want to eat the yellow plum so we don’t want to buy it. The store doesn’t want to carry it and pretty soon the farmer doesn’t have any reason to grow it. Of course that’s the trend overtime.
Maine used to be I learned from this great artist Sam van Aken who I’ve been working with. Maine used to be one of the nation’s top producers of stone fruit which is a fruit with a pit, plum, et cetera. Now, where did that go? He started trying to figure out where are these varieties and how can I find them.
He was a Syracuse … Actually still a professor at Syracuse and found this orchard in upstate New York that have been part of the state university system or something that was about to get bulldozed because they couldn’t continue to support the growing of these varieties because they couldn’t find a market for them.
He convinced them to let him take over the lease for a while and call what he could and bring it home with him and figure how to get it at least stabilized. Then he figured well, I don’t have X thousand acres of a farm of my own. How do I get creative and efficient and figure out how to graft multiple different varieties under the same tree.
He calls it an orchard on a tree. You got one trunk up to these 40 different varieties that he works with. It’s this really interesting pretty radical preservation of these great historic varieties that our grandparents and great grandparents use to be able to find and eat and taste.
That’s one of the fascinating things that we learn from him is that in the old days the first thing that use to matter was how does it taste, second was how does it look and third was how well does it ship because it would come off the tree or come out of the ground to be in the store within moments or days. Now, it’s the complete inverse of that.
How does it ship, as question 1? How does it look in the display shelf, question 2? Then how does it taste is the distant 3rd. One of the things that’s really remarkable about this project is when you could pull one of these things off the tree and eat it. It’s a taste that no one gets anymore. In fact some of them no one’s had around here anyway, ever.
You get a 14th century French plum. I mean that’s pretty cool to be tasting something that’s 500 years old. Anyway, so this all goes back actually to the Sierra Nevada Beer Camp event. When we were planning that event, we remembered that Sam, this artist had done this really cool project back in 2005 called the Time Machine.
When he was at University of Maine, he used to show work at the Whitney Art Works Gallery on York Street which was great, contemporary art gallery that was around for a few years and he did a show and one of the great pieces. I’ll never forget was this Time Machine which was a workman’s trailer, just a regular old work trailer from the outside but on the inside it was a replica, Irish pub that he had recreated with the green walls and the wood paneling and the oak table.
He had the great innovation that in my mind made a better than any pub you ever go to of actually having the pump register on the table. You could sit and fill your glass without even getting up and have the shelf for the Irish whiskey and all the stuff that’s cool. I mean, it’s a tiny space. Maybe 5 by 9 square … I mean it’s a tiny space and you can fit 4 in there comfortably, maybe 6 if you really get cuddly.
This is just a great project. We said, “With the beer camp coming, I wonder of the Time Machine is still out there. Maybe we could get it and hitch it up to the trailer and bring it to Portland.” All these artists do all these great projects and end up paying someone to store them. They never see the light of day again and indeed that was the case with the Time Machine.
It was just sitting in his barn and he said, “I’m happy to hitch it up and bring it to Portland. In fact, I’m coming to Maine for this tree project that I’m working on.” Of course we said, “What tree project?” and that was the Tree of 40 Fruit. He sent me about 10 different links. There was a TED talk that he had done and interview in Epicurious, just all these great stuff. I just consumed it.
I read 1 interview in Epicurious where he had talked about wanting to do a grove of these trees. I thought that’s it. That’s what we got to do. We got to be the first grove of the Tree of 40 Fruit anywhere in the world. What a great link to the goal behind our project which is to take this really interesting hybrid form and figure how to let it … Not to get too poetic, but how to let it bear fruit.
The idea is that we planted the first 4 trees which is the core part of the grove last October. They’re in the ground now. You can drive down and check them out. There’s all these little white tags on the branches. In each one of those is a different variety. You can go down and see the tags fluttering in the wind and you can imagine that those all will be multiple varieties of these really cool peaches, plums, et cetera.
The plan is that as the site gets built out the grove will grow so that when a building comes online, we plant another couple of these trees of 40 fruits so that overtime the site and the grove grow together, sort of Johnny Appleseed style to be able to really create, I think this pretty fantastic orchard for the residents of Portland.
One of the great things, I think about how the project is unfolding is the infrastructure, the sidewalks, getting into the site. Those are the first things to come so before the buildings are even all built out there, there’s an invitation and a way to get to the site. That’s the first thing that occurred.
As the people who live in Libbytown and Rosemont and elsewhere in Portland, see these things coming online. They just walk in to the site that can function as their backyard and have an orchard there which I think for us is what it’s all about.
Lisa: You were an active professor at the Maine College of Art in art history and cultural history. You have a PhD from the University of London. You have a …
Chris: Seamless move into real estate.
Lisa: Well, I think it’s interesting that you have incorporated your art background into the work that you’re doing with real estate. I actually think that it’s important because not everybody is able to see the business and the art side of things. I think they often are held separate and then that causes frustration if you’re an artist. The business side comes hard or if you’re a business person and you can’t access that art side of yourself. It’s interesting that you’ve been able to bring these together and it’s largely as a result of your own background.
Chris: I think that’s a big part of it and I think I grew up with a real estate developer. My stepfather was a developer. He’s great, just fantastic. He passed away a couple of years ago. We were fortunately able to work together for a number of years before he died. One of the things that I learned early on was how much real estate development and really all entrepreneurship in general is a creative practice, one where it’s like being a painter or being a culture and musician.
It rests with you. If you don’t get out of bed and do it, it’s not going to get done and real estate development is the same thing. You have your attorneys and your architects and your contractors, but if you don’t get out of bed and move the ball forward, the project doesn’t occur at the end of the day.
There’s nothing necessarily special about me or him other than you get out of bed and be the cat herder and figure out how to make this project that you know can occur actually happen. It’s like having a studio practice in that sense. I guess for me, right from the beginning, it made sense that taking something and turning it into something else which is what real estate development ultimate is.
I mean, there are people who made great careers doing nothing but class B office buildings. They may not look at it like I looked at it but I think what they’re doing is creative practice like anything else. It takes building things and steps and responding to things that change because the world changes. We’ve been working on this project for over 6 years.
Portland has changed a lot. When we started, it was the hay day of the recession. I mean we could literally walk into the planning board. Now you got to wait months because Portland is thriving. You got to be able to change and rethink and respond to changing conditions in the world like art makers do. I think the other thing as a professor at MCA I learned was how truly creative art students and artists are.
It’s not just in the ways that they think they’re creative. They look at history differently than a trained historian. They look at entrepreneurship differently than a business person. They’re no less creative, inventive and motivated. In fact to me, the history of real estate and the history of artist are really one in the same and that you take all these great places in the world that became cool, think of SOHO or Williamsburg or East Bayside.
I mean, these are places where creative work found a home and figured out how to flower and then the city suddenly realized that that was great and cool and other things starting to occur around it. That’s really I think the story of great culture happening in cities that either are great or become great.
For me that’s just a fascinating model and one that I think artist and people who trade in making culture, I think need to be mindful of and need to understand what role they play in making that happen and require some of that equity that they’re creating, they have some ownership in.
For me, how to build that into a model, how to actually make sure that that occurs, that it doesn’t just become a cool place no one can afford to live anymore. I mean, you have to balance that. I guess conversely, that’s the other side that I think coming from the real estate side you bring to the table is you need to have a balance of kinds of risk and a project.
You can’t just do 100% highly risky, let’s hope that this occurs. You have to balance that with some more stable component of your project so that the ones that are really fairly radical and progressive and need help and support in order to thrive. Take for example at Thompson’s Point, we have this great project called open bench which a guy named Jake Ryan put together.
It’s this really interesting model. It’s a membership structure for makers of all kinds to be able to have a facility that they can use and share. They’ve got private workspace. They’ve got access to shared equipment. They’ve got great programming. That’s a project to me represents how Portland is changing and becoming.
I think this really fascinating small city. It’s growing in ways that I think make facilities like that possible in a way that, would they have been a few years ago, I don’t know. I think for us, we can’t have a whole project of entirely open bench. That wouldn’t work but neither can we have a whole project of office buildings. I mean, who needs more of that? You need a couple.
Having those and open bench be on the same piece of the earth, with a circus conservatory and a hotel and really putting all these uses together and balancing them out I think is to me what makes a great place possible, not just a great commercial estate project. You can do an office park anywhere in the world, why do it in Portland?
Well, someone else might really want to do that. That’s not what we do. I think you’re absolutely right that that comes from … at least for me and everybody will have their own trajectory that gets them to where they are but for me seeing how integral artist and people who make culture really are to cities becoming great.
Figuring out how they get woven in to the project from the very beginning and not being the whole concern about public art or coming in later. We’re done with the project. I guess be grudgingly, we have to let someone put up a mural now. I wish that didn’t have to happen that way and it really doesn’t. I mean, things like that don’t add complexity to the process, they don’t add a lot of cost.
If you think about them early, they often add tremendously to your project and save you money. For us, I think making sure that our end kind of creative culture making a part of how we think about the fabric of the project right from the beginning has been really key.
Lisa: I’m excited to go up here maybe Ingrid Michaelson and Jim or to see the tree. I haven’t seen the tree yet, the Sam van Aken, Tree of 40 Fruit. Chris, is there a website, how do people find out more about Thompson’s Point?
Chris: There is. If you go thompsonspointmaine.com, you’ll find a wonderful website that launched several months back. Then there’s also links to the state theater site in there. They’re essentially the keeper of the concert logistics and information if you want to know how to book it, take it or where to park or what have you.
You can go to either. You mentioned Ingrid Michaelson on the 28th of June which is our first show, then there’s Primus on July 27th with Dinosaur Jr. That’s a duo that I’m particularly excited about. Grace Potter, August 1st. Then there’s a couple of other events. The circus conservatory is hosting the American Youth Circus Organizations festival which is actually a pretty remarkable thing for a startup institution.
There’s institutions all over the place that buy to get this event. They secured it so there’s 400 gifted young circus folks from all over the country converging on Thompson’s Point in mid August. They’ll be at least one public performance down there so that should be pretty cool. There’s a couple other things in the works, couple other smaller events. There’s a Makers Market that’ll start and become a regular thing on every Saturday morning down there. There’s lots of activities starting in June and going forever.
Lisa: Excellent. Well, I’m very glad to know that now as we’re flying in to Portland or we’re driving to the airport or we’re going to the bus station and we’re going to be looking at this great project that’s bringing art and business and culture to the City of Portland. We appreciate you’re doing that.
Chris: It’s our pleasure.
Lisa: We’ve been talking with Chris Thompson who has developed several hotel and mixed-use projects in New England. We look forward to hearing more about Thompson’s Point here in Portland. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Chris: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.