M AY 2 0 1 8 8 7 photos by franÇois gagné for LandVest Glass Palisade Listed for $2.25M, Cliffside truly becomes a legend. By Colin W. Sargent P erched on the Ship Channel’s edge, this soaring hideaway at 13 Birch Knolls in Cape Elizabeth has been sanctuary to a legendary jewelry designer and advocate for the homeless and many non-prof- it organizations since 1995. Lucinda Yates’s story opens when, as a 16-year-old South Portlander, her life was shattered with the sudden death of her dad. It tore her family apart, leading her to float to Cal- ifornia, where she married and divorced very young. She returned with her daughter to Portland in the glitzy 1980s, not expecting a safety net. “I was 20 when I first came back. I waitressed at The Splendid. Then I waitressed the graveyard shift at Harbor View. Was it Har- bor View? Harbor something. It was on Commercial Street, close to the waterfront. That place was crazy! You’d get everybody in Port- land coming in there, drinking. But I learned a lot. I used to tell my daughter, ‘I will not pay for your college until you become a waitress.’ It teaches you so much about everything.” Single-mother Lucinda was already designing jewelry in stolen moments, dreaming of putting the world back together again, when she spied a collection of discarded matte boards in a trash can near a frame shop. She seized upon and rescued that trove, and while play- ing around with their right angles had a Eureka moment–a hypnoti- cally spare house design she turned into a pin. Not just any pin. In 2012, Huffington Post reported “Designs by Lucinda has sold more than 5 million pins, raising more than $25 million for thou- sands of nonprofits in the U.S. and globally, as far as Iceland and Malaysia. And though living on the streets was traumatic–even life- threatening–Yates acknowledges her life wouldn’t be what it is today had she never been homeless in the first place.” Lucinda updates the 2018 figure to “$30 million” for the nonprof- its. Many Mainers admire Lucinda’s fairy tale, her generosity and creative courage. But what became of the frame shop where trash be- came treasure? “It was the Artisans, a small custom frame shop right near where