The year was 1978 and the fledgling Old Port District, Commercial Street and Long Wharf were decidedly different places.
No trendy shops, hotels, coffee shops or narrated tours. It was the era of David “The Dogman” Koplow who fed his dozen or so loose dogs raw fish as they roamed the waterfront.
DiMillo’s, then on Commercial Street, The Old Port Tavern, Williams Brothers Welding, The Blake Company, The Harris Company, Moran Tugboats, Sergeant and Lord, Lundgren’s Market, Shurtleff Salt, The Porthole Boone’s Restaurant, Wasson’s Lunch, Parr’s Dairy Lunch, Sulkowitch Hardware, a lot of fishing boats and many boarded up buildings were just about all that greeted those who ventured to the Portland waterfront 30 years ago.
I was working for Big John Gibson and his son Scott and we were involved in the project that was to become the centerpiece of the renaissance of the historic Portland waterfront; DiMillo’s Marina. It was a few years before the idea of DiMillo’s Floating Restaurant was hatched in the ingenious mind of Tony DiMillo. Everyone who was involved in the project knew that it was special and we were all glad, even proud, to be a part of its history. John Gibson was the builder, Norm Gray, the engineer, and Tony DiMillo was the visionary.
Tony Dimillo had just purchased Long Wharf and certainly some snickered privately at the notion of putting an upscale 120-slip marina for pleasure boats in the middle of stinky Portland harbor amidst the rotting piers and fishing boats. To further complicate the plan, a huge dilapidated wooden sewer trough ran under the remains of the wharf. The city still ran its sewage through the trough and into the channel.
Long Wharf was at one time a coal depot where trains and ships delivered and picked up the precious resource. Many years earlier the coal caught fire, burning for months, and in 1979 all that remained was about 1,200 rotting piles with charred tips. Today’s parking lot was then a quagmire of mud and potholes with multiple 30-foot high piles of rotting wood interspaced around a winding road that led out to the completely dilapidated pier. The Canal Bank on Commercial Street was the only tenant.
John Gibson attacked this ambitious project like a general with an advancing army. By land, we first moved in dump trucks, flatbeds, loaders, dozers, and backhoes to remove the years of stockpiled burned and rotting wood. We created some level space to work and park. Next we assembled a 60 by 22 foot “Kelly Closure” an aluminum structure that would be the shop in which the multitudes of floats would be constructed. A wood stove that was constantly roaring that frigid winter was an early priority. Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing” played endlessly on WBLM.
By sea, we moved in the Hercules, a 60-foot, wooden, self-propelled barge with a Bucyrus Erie crane atop her deck, and the Seboomock, a small 32-foot powerful tugboat that had done her previous work on northern Maine lakes; a couple of skiffs with outboards completed the armada.
Work began on three fronts. The parking lot clean up was first and then simultaneously the float construction and the removal of the 1,200 charred pilings began. Working from skiffs with chain saws we cut the charred tips from the remaining pilings. Next, we moved the Hercules with the crane in place that was outfitted with a new piling extractor that we slipped over and secured to the freshly cut pilings. Then, the extractor slowly vibrated the ancient southern pine pilings from their more than one hundred year old home of mud in Portland Harbor.
While the pile extraction was happening, the float construction was in full swing. In our temporary building we created a system where two floats could be built simultaneously with two men on each float. The floats were built on rollers and when finished they would be rolled of the building onto the cleared lot next to the dock. The Bucyrus Erie crane would pick them up and lower them into the water where men in skiffs would tie onto them and commandeer them out into the bay beyond the old pilings and around to where the new marina was taking shape. Competition was fierce inside to finish the float being built first, to answer the trivia question posed, to name the song artist being played, or to have the last word on the wisdom of nuclear power in Wiscasset, the political issue of the day.
Tony DiMillo was a frequent visitor often bringing his teenage son, Steve, who ultimately became the manager of the soon to be floating restaurant. Tony was a master PR man for his own project. He also met with city officials on location on several occasions in an attempt to get them to divert the sewer into the new wastewater facility at the foot of the Eastern Promenade. Tony would get the officials to visualize his ambitious project and point out the obvious benefits it would ultimately mean to the city and then he would get them to envision the pleasure boats as the waves of sewer would wash over their hulls. The switch of the sewer to the new location was done before we completed the marina.
The marina was completed in 1979. The restaurant soon followed and now the restaurant and the marina are an enormous and sparkling gem in the middle of Portland’s booming Old Port District. Tony DiMillo, the mastermind of it all, is gone, but he lived long enough to see it reach its full potential.
And, as that cold winter turned to spring and the days grew longer and warmer the Gibson crew observed daily how the buzz over this project swept through the area like a tidal wave and we all loved being a part of it.
This is an excerpt of an essay written as part of the November celebration of the 30th anniversary of the completion of DiMillo’s Marina.
Eric Moynihan summered on Chebeague Island and is a resident of Yarmouth.