PORTLAND, Maine — A cable television station’s list of the 50 best places to live in the U.S. set off a small but huffy internet kerfuffle a few weeks back when it claimed locals refer to their city as “Portlyn,” after the hip Big Apple borough of Brooklyn.
But locals weren’t having it.
“There’s probably two people who have ever called it this,” wrote one Reddit commenter. “They both moved to Portland from Boston or Long Island in 2022 and consider themselves local Mainers now.”
“Sounds like something an out-of-state social media influencer would say to try to make it go viral,” said another doubting commenter online.
The first known, printed use of the term “Portlyn” appears to have been in January 2017, when it showed up in a Down East magazine column by novelist and Portlander Ron Currie Jr.
Currie claimed to have heard others use the term, and it’s possible HGTV, the cable station which compiled the list, found his column via a simple internet search. But in an interview last week, Currie said he couldn’t recall anyone actually ever using the offending term.
“Honestly, I don’t remember. Maybe I made it up,” Currie said, sounding sheepish. “I don’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, let alone conversations that happened, what, eight years ago now?”
But even if he did invent “Portlyn,” Currie is doubling down on his nearly decade-old column’s main point: Portland has been forever changed by Brooklyn-style, moneyed gentrification.
In the original piece, he described the city’s transformation from blue collar backwater to gleaming tourist destination, as well as how he got priced off Munjoy Hill and banished to the suburbs on the other side of Interstate 295.
“The plaintive sound of the foghorn in Casco Bay, our Munjoy Hill soundtrack on murky or stormy nights, has been replaced by the rumble of jets taking off and landing at Portland International,” Currie wrote in the 2017 column.
On the phone last week, Currie said the “Portlyn” moniker was his shorthand for what out-of-town money has done to the city, rather than how transplanted people have changed it themselves. It’s not so much that they’re outsiders, Currie said; it’s that they’re rich, leisure-class outsiders, and their money has had an outsized influence on Portland.
They drive up home prices, he reckons, which in turn sends local packing. When those locals are forced out, so are the working-class watering holes and close-knit neighborhoods.
“Of all the things that allegedly divide us as a people these days — what’s at the base of most of it, in my view, is class,” he said. “I’m hardly a Marxist, but I do believe [Karl] Marx was on to something with that.”
Currie said he’s seen the same kind of expensive transfiguration happen before, around the pond his family used to swim in when he was a child, just outside his hometown of Waterville.
“It’s what I thought of as ‘The People’s Pond’: McGrath Pond in Oakland,” he said, “it used to be just ramshackle cabins made from scrap, and now it’s all McMansions.”
Likewise, in Waterville, where wealthy Colby College has bought and renovated large swaths of downtown, Currie said some locals have a hard time accepting it.
“Most of the people who I know in Waterville are deeply suspicious and even hostile toward the very idea,” he said. “There’s something about that sort of sea change, especially, I think, when it’s attached to overt questions about class, that is hard for people to navigate.”
But, that being said, Currie understands that nothing stays the same, and he tries not to have knee-jerk, borderline xenophobic reactions to rich out-of-staters calling Portland — or the rest of Maine — their new home. He knows things change. Cities shift over time. Fashionable destinations rise and fall. Sometimes change is even good.
“Do you want things to be a hardscrabble for eternity? I’m not sure that you do,” Currie said. “As usual, I’m of three or four minds about the whole thing.”
Besides, he said, what’s done is done. There’s not much use in complaining about the shifting face of Portland, or “Portlyn.” The transformational power of wealth is too powerful to fight, anyway.
“It feels, very firmly, like Portland has changed in a way that is irreversible,” Currie said. “It might change, then it might change again, as things always do, but it’s not going back to what it was, or even a semblance of what it was.”
Ron Currie Jr. is the author of five novels, including the forthcoming “The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne,” due to be published by Penguin Random House in 2025. He also teaches at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast creative writing program.
