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07/15/08

Category: Editorial-Michael Cook

Posted by: Alaine

At first glance, most people would say they could not be more different; these two "Ports" I feel so fortunate to call home at different times of the year.
 
The "Port City", with its brick sidewalks, early American architecture, and towering church steeples, seems to have not a thing in common with the "Old Port" and its dirt roads, single story wood frame houses with zinc roofs on stilts, towering palm trees, sloths, and herds of feral horses roaming the town's streets and beaches.
 
But, on closer inspection, it becomes clear the two "Ports" share more in common than one might think.
 
Both were once  bustling with marine related commerce.
 
Newburyport was at the hub of New England's shipping industry.
 
Puerto Viejo drew merchant ships from around the world in pursuit of cacao, the nut that is the prime ingredient in the world's finest chocolate.
 
But both then fell on hard times.
 
Newburyport, in the early years of the twentieth century, lost its status as a shipping hub, whether in terms of trade or ship construction, and fell on some very hard times indeed.
 
I am old enough to remember when, as a kid summering on Seabrook Beach in New Hampshire, Newburyport was a place people drove right by.
 
Much of the downtown area, and this is really not an over exaggeration, looked like Beirut after years of civil war
 
Buildings were abandoned and in horrible disrepair.
 
Similarly, Puerto Viejo fell on very hard times decades ago when a blight, much like the one that wiped out potato crops in Ireland in the 19th century, destroyed the cacao.
 
Suddenly, a once prosperous community was destitute.
 
To explore Puerto Viejo today is to find hidden vestiges of those good times; elaborate wrought iron gates still attached, even if barely, to posts that were once the entrances to the grand properties of locals who prospered in the cacao trade.
 
Those gates and posts are now rusted, rotted, and overgrown with hibiscus, a pretty but invasive tropical weed if ever there was one.
 
Just as I feel lucky to have known the Port City "when"; I feel fortunate to have had the privilege, thanks to numerous friends, who are life PV'ers, to have learned so much about the "Old Port".
 
Newburyport in the 1970's may have been down on its luck but, because of that, it proved attractive to artists, writers, theater people, and assorted other true bohemians. They saw the natural beauty of the surrounding area and were willing to deal with some of the negative stuff to live amidst that beauty.
 
To live in Newburyport in those days was also extremely affordable. Heck, at that time you couldn't give away the big houses on High Street that now sell for millions.
 
It was, truly, a different era.
 
In some ways I think it was a better era.
 
As the artists, writers, and musicians moved in, a slow transformation began to take place.
 
Things began to get spruced up. Shops, one or two of which would not be allowed to operate in town today because of a certain type of paraphernalia they sold, began to reopen.
 
A sense of revitalization and energy began to grow.
 
Newburyport was becoming truly hip and funky.
 
Suddenly, with artists and other bohemians sprucing things up on literal shoe strings, other people began to look beyond the blight and see the great potential the city held.
 
The wisely rejected plans for "urban renewal", gave birth to grand talk of restoration.
 
That process began in the 1970's, accelerated in the 1980's when the first yuppies  brave enough to move here arrived and then, when the train came in the 1990's, the Port City seemed to quickly morph into little more than a very upscale, seaside, bedroom community of Boston. 
 
On the surface, it all  looked and sounded great.
 
But we all now know such progress and improvements have come at great cost to a city that could once take pride in its socio-economic diversity.
 
Having grown up in the region, I cannot count the number of native born Newburyporters, young, middle aged, and elderly alike that I know who have been forced to leave the city where they were born because, be it  a result of rents, the price of a home, or the tax rate if they own a home, they can simply no longer afford to live here.
 
They have been forced to migrate, in some cases to other parts of the country, where things are less gentrified and more affordble. 
 
Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon, but I think there's something wrong and unjust about that.
 
And it appears, with all the talk of grand plans for the waterfront, another transformation is upon us, and with it come all the questions.
 
Will the gentrification that fundamentally changed the city over the last twenty five years intensify still further, making Newburyport even less socio-economically diverse than it already is?
 
Will the downtown become little more than a touristy, Disneyesque version of an old New England seaport that caters to the whims and fancies of wealthy yachters, nouveau riche newcomers, and transient, trendy day trippers, while ignoring the underlying needs of the local community?
 
The "Old Port" is now facing many of those same questions.
 
Like Newburyport in the 1970's once the redevelopment started, things in Puerto Viejo began to change rapidly after 1989 or 1990 when electricity was made available to every household on the southern Caribbean shore.
 
Prior to that, the only people with electricity were those affluent enough to own a generator.
 
It did not take long after electricity arrived for the changes to come.
 
But even ten years ago, when I first washed ashore in the "Old Port", it was a pretty funky place. In many ways it still is.
 
But over the course of those ten years, many changes have occurred.
 
Very few of the restaurants, shops, and other businesses on the "main drag", for example, are Costa Rican owned anymore.
 
And with the Pacific coast of Costa Rica already largely over developed, not to mention over priced, the last ten years have seen more and more Americans casting their sights upon the once less pricey Caribbean and the "Old Port" in particular.
 
What is happening, however, just as it did in Newburyport, is that the influx of newcomers is driving up the cost of everything.  

With the arrival of all these upscale, bourgoeis bohemian ,foreigners, property values have exploded. Even rents have gone through the roof.
 
Affordable housing in the "Old Port" for working class Costa Ricans is becoming as endangered a species as it is in the "Port City" for working class Americans.
 
Tourism is the only industry now in and around the "Old Port".
 
That means the wages of Costa Ricans who work in the industry are not keeping up with rising costs. The prices of most everything, from rice and beans to rent, are now based on what the foreigners, not the locals, can afford to pay.
 
As one might expect, that is causing more than a little tension as Costa Ricans watch it become harder and harder for them to get by in their own country.
 
The latest controversy in the "Old Port", just  as it is here in the "Port City", is what will become of much the town's waterfront if a group of  developers succeed with their plans to build a 100 slip marina and self contained, all inclusive resort in the area known as Playa Negra.
 
To be honest, I am more concerned about the impact such development will have on the "Old Port" than I am about the impact the proposed changes for the waterfront here will mean for the "Port City".
 
Why? Well, no matter how Newburyporters feel about the proposed plans for the "Port City's" waterfront, they can all be reasonably well assured that the changes will be made in such a way as to protect the environment in accordance with very strict local, state, and  federal regulations. 

The same high standards are unheard of, by and large, in a Developing World country like Costa Rica.
 
Lest anyone doubt that assertion, about eighteen months ago La Nacion, Costa Rica's daily paper of record, rocked the government, not to mention the real estate and "eco-tourism" industries, to their cores when it revealed 97% of the country's raw sewage flows directly into Costa Rica's rivers and then, ultimately, into the oceans.
 
President Oscar Arias, not too long ago, imposed a gag order on Costa Rica's version of the Environmental Protection Agency after it released documents to a journalist at The Tico Times that exposed the grossly inadequate waste disposal systems that were put in place at a huge hotel and condominium project in the Pacific coast town of Papagayo. 
 
So, to all my friends in the "Port City" worried about what further development of our waterfront herewill mean, at least you can rest reasonably well assured that the impact on the environment will be minimal because stringent safeguards are in place that developers must adhere to or face enormous legal and financial penalties, not to mention intense public criticism and scorn, if they do not.
 
The concerned people of the "Old Port" in Costa Rica can take no such comfort.
 
Yes sir. The next few years are going to be very interesting indeed as this "Tale of Two Ports" evolves, and I feel fortunate to have a front row seat from which to watch and write as one change after another unfolds before my eyes in both places.

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