We locked our doors, shut off the lights, and compared numbers to find out — How scary is the Old Port?
By PORTLAND PHOENIX STAFF | June 20, 2007
The Old Port. We all know it in one capacity or the other. Some of us love it, some of us fear it, and some of us have peed in public there. If you agree with Portland city councilor Will Gorham, who led the successful charge last month to further limit the number of bars and clubs downtown, you probably think the eight square blocks making up the Old Port are like Mad Max’s Thunderdome — drug deals in the street, ladies perpetually being goosed, big, sweaty men throwing scrawny guys around like rag dolls. Well, the Phoenix offices are located a mere two blocks from the party epicenter on Wharf Street and councilor Gorham kind of spooked us. So rather than sit around and wait to be pounced and pounded, we decided to get busy finding out exactly how dangerous, how liquored-up, and how protected our fair city and its Old Port actually are.
Lucky for you we make charts when we’re frightened. That and pee in the street, but, again, we were too afraid to leave the building.
What we found when comparing Portland with other smaller and larger cities in the region is, in the end, what you might expect. We end up statistically square in the center. We have a level of crime, amount of police, and number of liquor licenses relatively comparable to other youngish, happening urban locales in New England. So good news: the sky is not in fact falling here — at least, not any more than it is in any of the other cities we checked out.
All the same, we’re keeping our doors locked. You people are crazy.
Topics:
News Features
, Max Rockatansky, Will Gorham
