LEWISTON — When Michael Blier finished his job — imagining the site of a museum devoted to the Twin Cities’ history — he kept on working.

The 47-year-old landscape architect in Boston conjured a boathouse on the east bank of the Androscoggin River, a tree-lined boulevard across Lewiston’s downtown and fish in the city’s canals. And he did it for nothing.

Why?

It was for his Meme, his paternal grandmother.

Josephine Peters Blier, an immigrant from Quebec, spent years working in the grand brick building known as Bates Mill No. 2.

Museum L-A is working to preserve the community’s history, including the stories of workers who made countless shoes and blankets in these massive mill buildings. The organization plans to relocate to the former Camden Yarn Mill, which sits in a corner of the downtown with the river on one side and Payne-Simard Memorial Park on the other.

Blier and his firm, Landworks Studio, were charged with planning for the property that surrounds the building.

“We didn’t realize he was a local boy until he was hired and he came,” said Rachel Desgrosseilliers, the museum’s executive director. Though Blier’s firm is based in Boston and maintains an office in Salem, Mass., he grew up in South Paris and often visited family in Lewiston as a child.

He hit it off with Desgrosseilliers immediately.

“You just want to achieve her dream, automatically,” he said. He returned to Boston and went to work.

He worked on concepts for the museum building, including a terraced boardwalk that could take people to the water’s edge. He tried including the museum leaders’ aim to integrate the building into its surroundings, using the river and the nearby park.

“We don’t want to just plunk a building downtown,” Desgrosseilliers said.

To Blier, who has worked in several New England mill communities, it all seemed to matter — from the industrial and environmental elements to his own family ties. 

“Those projects are near and dear to my heart,” he said.

So he just kept working.

“To get things started, you think, ‘What if we could teach kayaking on the canal?'” Blier said. “If you wanted to teach fly-fishing or ice-skating, what would you need?”

“It was a way to get energy,” he said.

It led him to branch out into the community and examine properties as far away as Kennedy Park, several hundred yards from the river. He examined the canals. He imagined them being filled. In the winter, they might be frozen and used for skating. In the summer, they could be picturesque amenities rather than ditches.

It could happen, Blier insisted.

“When I was a kid, living around the area, the river wasn’t considered an amenity,” he said. “You think, ‘All of this is right here; why do we have to go to the end of the city to make new stuff?'”

His concept designs include the creation of an outdoor amphitheater with a high, sweeping roof, a boathouse and a walkway that follows the path of the canal. One possible treatment included rows of trees along a canal, kayaks in the water and people fishing from platforms.

He knows none of his drawings will be recreated in the real world.

Rather, he hopes to inspire people to see the city in a new way, much as General Motors might build a concept car to explore a technology. Just as the concept car won’t go into production, Blier doesn’t expect his designs to be interpreted literally.

Maybe someone will see the image of the canopy, for example, and they’ll decide to string lights over the canal.

If it happens, he’ll be successful, he said.

Desgrosseilliers said she was surprised by the extra hours of work.

“When he showed me that I said, ‘We’re not fixing the canals but, boy, I love it,'” she said. “He did this on his own. We couldn’t have afforded to pay him to do stuff like that.”

Desgrosseilliers sits on a city committee that’s looking at the downtown and its relationship with the river. She has already shared the drawings with the city folks.

“Michael was dreaming about what we could be,” she said. “This is a young man who’s dreaming for his former city.”

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