Little Canada: Lewiston, Maine

If you're seen AL posts on Biddeford, Brunswick, Phippsburg, Munjoy Hill, etc., you know that we're always interested in the shape, size, and structure of Maine cities, towns, and neighborhoods. On a summer day a few years ago I drove around Lewiston with the late, legendary, Jeff Chouinard, who had stories attached to most street corners. When I revisited the city last week, it was 13 degrees (Fahrenheit) downtown under a crackling blue sky. Too cold for much freelance walking around--so I focused on the Little Canada neighborhood, squeezed between the commercial center, along Main Street,  the old Bates Mill complex, and the Androscoggin River.
"P'tit Canada" is also proximate to the old Grand Trunk Railway station. The GTR began funneling emigrants down from Quèbec in the 1850s to work in the textile mills. No longer a mill town, Lewiston is still a largely Franco-American city, but over the last dozen years Somalian and Bantu immigrants have settled there, bringing new life and energy. Lewiston is on the rebound. When it gets a little warmer we're going back to have a closer look.
To understand Lewiston, you need to start with the Androscoggin River (that's Auburn on the other side)...

 & the textile mills, which relied on the river to power the looms...

 

Last week it was just too cold to explore downtown in any detail, but I had a great lunch at Le Marche, and Main Street did seem much livelier than fifteen years ago, even if the 19th century Music Hall is now a...courthouse. Fact is, the criminal justice system/industry--along with the healthcare industry--has become a economic mainstay for Lewiston, as for midsize ex-industrial cities all across America.

Main Street has some handsome buildings of the sort you find in many midsize American cities. What's usually missing in downtowns (even in warmer weather!) are people on the sidewalks. In Lewiston, like most cities, major shopping happens these days exclusively out in the commercial mall-sprawl. (Christopher Wells explores some of the reasons why and how this happened in his book, Car Country.) It's not just the cold!

After lunch I headed for...Little Canada. The housing stock there is smaller, tighter, denser, than in other New England mill towns. In much of the region, the three-decker wood frame tenement or apartment house is standard. But when I asked about three-deckers in Lewiston I was told, "Three-deckahs? In Little Canada? Foh-deckahs!"

Somehow that white siding under the azure sky gave P'tit Canada an almost Mediterranean vibe. Almost. But it's grim. It's bleak. C'est pas fun. I suppose the gaps represent buildings that have burned down and not been replaced. The neighborhood a perfect illustration of that phrase, jerry-built, though it's also true that some of what's there now has managed to survive for a hundred years or so. But it's housing built fast and cheap for poor people.
It was so cold the day I was there, no one was on the street. So I can't really tell who lives in Little Canada now. Somalian immigrants? Bantu? Franco Americans? I plan to go back when it gets a little warmer, and find out.

From a Canadian point of view, towns like Lewiston represent a painful piece of history that has been pretty much edited from the narrative. Canada is supposed to be a nation of immigrants, not emigrants... 

...but between 1850-1960, hundreds of thousands of people from Quebec and the Maritimes made the often-desperate trek to New England to find work in the mills, and most of them stayed.
The French Canadians of New England tended to preserve archaic forms of the culture they came out of, as emigrants often do. As a kid even I was aware that the French overheard in towns like Biddeford and Lewiston was quite different than the argot of Montreal, and the tempo of life in those places was very different from life in the metropolis. By the 1960s, even forms of New England Catholicism seemed very old-fashioned and quite different from the way religion was practiced--or not--in Quebec, where nationalism was replacing Catholicism as the passionate religion.