With all the hip breweries, restaurants and art studios sprouting up all over East Bayside, it might be easy to forget that people live there, too. Once known for crime, it’s recently avoided neighboring Bayside’s ongoing problems with drugs and violence.
In an effort to keep it that way, the community celebrated Tuesday night with a cookout and block party. The fun, which included dancing, music and all-beef hotdogs, took place on the basketball court at Fox Field in Kennedy park.
The event was part of the National Night Out, an annual community-building campaign promoting police-community partnerships.
While nearby Bayside has seen troubling increases in crime — police have said calls for service have gone up 71 percent there over the past decade, and there have been at least three stabbings and two shootings there since spring — East Bayside has become a hotbed for food and arts.
East Bayside Middle Eastern restaurant Baharat, for instance, was among those named by Bon Appetit magazine in its declaration that Portland is its “City of the Year” for foodies, and the growth of local brewers like Rising Tide Brewing Co. and Lone Pine Brewing once gave the neighborhood the nickname “Yeast Bayside.”
But it’s the eclectic mix of people that make the neighborhood perhaps one of Maine’s hippest.
That diversity was in full effect Tuesday night, as singers from the local Boys and Girls Club and dancers with Ikirenga Cy’Intore, a traditional Rwandan group, wowed the crowd.
It was a reminder about how a neighborhood could come together and grow. It wasn’t long ago that East Bayside suffered from the same danger zone reputation as neighboring Bayside.
Speakers Tuesday night included Acting Police Chief Vernon Malloch and City Councilor Belinda Ray.
Ray told celebrants Tuesday the event was about “making sure this remains our community.”
“It doesn’t matter where you came from,” 12-year-old East Bayside resident Motasim Abdalla said Tuesday. “We welcome you to our community.”
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