By Scott Taylor,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – The folks at Lewiston City Hall agree that the satellite dish switching station on Lisbon Street is a clean, attractive new building.

But the peaked-roof structure sticks out amid the area’s flat-roof store fronts like a triangle among squares.

“It’s a fine building,” said David Hediger, deputy director of planning for the city. “But it’s not really the kind of building you want along Lisbon Street.”

The city didn’t have a good plan for the area when Oxford Networks built the switching station, sandwiched between the city’s new parking garage and the Pontiac Building. If it had, Hediger said the city might have tried to steer it toward something that fit.

“It might have had a similar-looking entrance, the same kind of scale as the other buildings,” he said. The city didn’t have guidelines for the area, and architects simply did their best.

That should change by the end of the year, Hediger said, as the city ponders design guidelines for four downtown neighborhoods.

A committee of city staff, councilors, Planning Board members and downtown business owners are reviewing a draft plan to “kindly regulate” future downtown development. The city doesn’t plan to create any rules or force developers to abide by them, at this point.

“We’re not trying to throw up road blocks or chase any developers away,” Hediger said. “We’re just pointing out what we’d like to see.”

Hediger said he hopes to have drafts before the City Council in November. Plans could be finished and sent off to area architects and urban planners by the first part of the year.

The effort began soon after the city announced the Southern Gateway initiative. Investment money began pouring into the area, but the city didn’t have a say in how the end result looked.

“We don’t want a log cabin down there, for example,” Hediger said. “That might be fine in another part of the city, but it wouldn’t go down there.”

Lisbon Street is part of the Centreville District, according to the design guidebook. It’s characterized by retail and government and lots of pedestrian traffic. It’s made up mostly of historic buildings.

The Downtown District, south and east of Kennedy Park, features wider sidewalks and small lots with buildings close to each other. The goal there is to encourage investment and redevelopment while retaining the community feeling.

One goal is to find a theme for the riverfront area, which runs from the Cowan and Libbey mills west along Lincoln Street, Hediger said. That has everything from old three-story buildings and new stucco-sided restaurants to cinder block storage houses.

“There’s huge potential for that area, and its character will be set in the next few years,” Hediger said. “That’s what we’re trying to recognize.”

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