urban renewal

8 Friday, January 15, 2010, Bangor Daily News Bangor Daily News, Friday, January 15, 2010 1

BY TOM McCORD GRAPHICS AND DESIGN BY ERIC ZELZ

See Pages 4 and 5

for a view from this

spot.

Kenduskeag Stream

Kenduskeag Stream

PenobscotRiver

PenobscotRiver

AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY OF DOWNTOWN BANGOR BY BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTOGRAPHERS KEVIN BENNETT, SEPT. 4, 2009, AND SPIKE WEBB, JUNE 1960

Changing BangorBangor in 1960 was a much different place from what it is today. Wholesale and retail activity was concentrated in the downtown area. An Air Force base employed thousands. There were no malls.Traffic, buildings and warehouses lining the Kenduskeag Stream bordered a much wider expanse ofwater running through the city. And historic preservation districts were years away.

1. 1960: CITY HALL 2010: COLUMBIA STREET PARKING DECK2. PICKERING SQUARE3. 1960: FLAT IRON BUILDING 2010: NORTH CORNER, PICKERING SQUARE4. GRAHAM BUILDING5. 1960: U.S. POST OFFICE 2010: BANGOR CITY HALL6. 1960: BIJOU THEATER 2010: BANK OF AMERICA7. 1960: PENOBSCOT EXCHANGE HOTEL 2010: MALISEET GARDENS8. 1960: UNION STATION 2010: PENOBSCOT PLAZA

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BANGOR DAILY NEWS GRAPHIC BY ERIC ZELZ

Christina Baker remembers bundling her 3-year-old daughter into the car on the morning ofMay 23, 1975, and rushing down to Valley Avenue in Bangor, ready to stop a bulldozer.

Two years earlier, she and her husband, Bill, had stood by, watching the demolition of Bangor’s Bijou Theater as part of the city’s nearly 10-year-old urban renewal program. They collected a few bricks that dayand went home.

Baker couldn’t forget it.In 1975, when she read of plans to demolish the city’s last remaining sawmill, a ramshackle red-brick

building along Kenduskeag Stream, Baker decided to launch a petition drive to keep Morse’s Mill frombecoming another wrecking ball Bijou.

She walked around her Bangor neighborhood and outside stores, collecting signatures. Then she startedhearing from people, including some socially prominent women in Bangor.

“These people began to call and say, basically, ‘We’ve been waiting for someone to speak out,’” Bakerrecalled. While Morse’s Mill was not, properly speaking, part of the federally supported urban renewal program, it was a highly visible connection to the city’s lumbering past — a connection that urban renewalseemed to be eliminating.

“The day came that the bulldozer was down at the site,” said Baker, who is retired and lives in Bass Harbor. “And $500 was needed to stop theball-and-crane. And I put out a call and peoplewere at my door with hundred-dollar bills.”

Baker parked across the street from the mill, thenran over, “waving my bills.” But a corner of thebuilding was already gone.

Morse’s Mill was demolished and a parking lotput in its place. It’s still there.

But Baker’s petition drive and a series of stepsshortly afterward became a serendipitous momentin Bangor’s long effort to cross the threshold intosomething new, something modern. By 1977, thecity had taken its first big steps toward includingpreservation, not just demolition, as an option forurban renewal.

“Bangor actually passed what I consider to be thefirst comprehensive municipal historic ordinancein the state,” said Earle G. Shettleworth Jr., state his-torian since 2004.“That’s not to say that some othercommunities had not adopted local historic preser-vation ordinances. But the Bangor ordinance wasand still is one of the finest, most well-crafted, mostwell-structured ordinances to protect historic areasand individual buildings in a municipality inMaine.”

The preservation ordinance was a reaction toabout 20 years of steps taken to eradicate poorhousing and commercial deterioration in Bangor, acity of 30,000 whose existence had been closelylinked to its location at head of tide on the Penob-scot River at Kenduskeag Stream. Complicatingmatters was the explosive growth of Dow Air ForceBase in the early 1950s — and its closure by 1968.

In effect, the city’s leaders attempted a triple play:upgrade housing, revive the downtown commer-cial district, and reshape a 2,000-acre air base forcivilian uses. It wasn’t easy.

1st edition Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

2 Friday, January 15, 2010, Bangor Daily News

Located in the historic Graham Building in downtown Bangor

On The Threshold: The Story of Bangor’s UrbanRenewalA four-part series examining how Bangor has changedsince voting to create an Urban Renewal AuthorityThis installment title hereVisit bangordailynews.com for the complete seriesPart 1: Celebration overshadows changesPart 2: The 1960s Kenduskeag Stream project aimed fora renaissance in the city’s downtownPart 3: Downtown demolition in 1960s and ‘70s leftplenty of potential and trauma

For the complete series, visit

Part 1

Bunyan and BonfiresIn 1959, the city celebrated its 125th birthday,but a wrenching transition lay ahead.

Part 2

A Vote to Be ModernThe 1960s Kenduskeag Streamproject aimed for a renaissancein the city’s downtown.

Part 3

Out With The OldDowntown demolition in the 1960s and ’70s left plenty ofpotential, and trauma.

Part 4

A Remedy for RenewalBy the 1970s, tax breaks and a shift towardpreservation rekindle interest in downtown.

A Remedyfor Renewal

Bangor slowly rediscovers the value of its past, but ittakes some plucky people and a new ordinance to help

BY TOM MCCORDOF THE NEWS STAFF

Part 4

BANGOR DAILY NEWS FILE PHOTO BY CARROLL HALL

The demolition of Morse's Mill, Bangor’s sole surviving sawmill from the great 19th century lumbering era, begins in May1975 despite a last-minute effort to preserve the structure. The building made room for a parking lot.

Continued on Page 6

This Bangor Daily News Special Section is sponsored in part by

BANGOR DAILY NEWS FILE PHOTOS BY SPIKE WEBB AND JACK LOFTUS

For the first time in more than 70 years, daylight streamedthrough a cavernous opening in the roof of the Bijou Theater. Afterdecades of tap dancing, vaudeville and drama, giving way to Chaplin and Pickford on a screen, the Bijou fell to demolition crewsto make way for what is now the Bank of America Building onExchange Street.


Bangor Daily News, Friday, January 15, 2010, 3


Mapping Urban RenewalBangor’s urban renewal involved a variety of projects, affecting large parts of the city over manyyears. From the creation of the Bangor Urban Renewal Authority in 1958 to the completion ofthe final building on renewal land, the Penobscot Judicial Center, in 2009, the city has altered muchwithin its boundaries, just as its residents’ notions of what is worthy of preservation and what is not has evolved. Referred to by some detractors as “urban removal,” Bangor’s massive renewal proj-ect eventually helped contribute to a stronger sense of who we are and what we want to become.

SOURCES: Bangor Daily News file photos; photo illustration by Bangor Daily News graphics editor Eric Zelz; aerial photography by Bangor Daily News photographer Kevin Bennett; Mark Woodward, consultant; Peter Witham, City of Bangor Planning Division; MEGIS; Bangor Public Library; “Woodsmen and Whigs, Historic Images of Bangor, Maine” by Abigail Ewing Zelz, Marilyn Zoidis; “Bangor, Maine, An Illustrated History”; Cole Land Transportation Museum; “Downtown Bangor Tomorrow, A Preliminary Plan for the Kenduskeag Stream Urban Renewal Project”; “Beautiful Homesites In Stillwater Park, Bangor’s First Urban Renewal Development”

STILLWATER PARKIn 1962 the Bangor Urban Renewal Authoritylaunched its first big project, the “renewal” of the132-acre Stillwater Park neighborhood betweenMount Hope and Stillwater avenues. It bought orcondemned 218 properties and relocated 69 families. Old streets disappeared while new oneswere laid, and a new house lot on Howard Street,along Stillwater Park cost $2,000.

MORE DOWNTOWN PARKINGBy the early 1960s, the KenduskeagStream had been narrowed consider-ably with construction of theKenduskeag Stream Plaza.

KENDUSKEAG STREAM URBAN RENEWAL PROJECTDesigned to eliminate deteriorated propertiesand mixtures of retail and wholesale uses aswell as provide space for anticipated commer-cial growth it also led to the demolition of 150downtown buildings and the creation of acresof empy space in the city’s center.

HANCOCK-YORK NEIGHBORHOODA plan covering 194 structures, with 85 percent not meeting minimum code requirements, the Hancock-York area(now home, in part, to The Terracesapartments) was the first in a series ofneighborhhood rehabilitation projects.

AIRPORT MALLAn early shopping center on Union Street.

I-395Originally called the Industrial Spur, thehighway connected an unfinishedInterstate 95 with downtown Bangor.

BANGOR HIGH SCHOOLIn 1965, a new Bangor High School wasbuilt off Broadway, leaving its downtownHarlow Street location.

BANGOR INTERNATIONALAIRPORTWhen Dow Air Force Base closed in1968, ownership of the 2,000-acresite was transferred to the city for $1.Bangor International Airport openedin July 1968.

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BANGOR MALL,STILLWATER AVENUE

AND HOGAN ROADDEVELOPMENT

The opening of Bangor’slargest mall on a former

60-acre dairy farm in 1978 immediately attractedthousands of shoppers andfurther eroded a struggling

downtown.

To fully appreciate changes to Bangorover the past 50 years, walk through thedowntown neighborhoods and imagine.See the old buildings on Broad Street bor-dering Pickering Sqaure, following thefootprint of today’s city parking garage

and UBS Financial Services building. Atthe main bus stop in Pickering Square,envision the outbound buses not simplyrounding the northern end of the pedes-trian park there but instead rumbling bythe rounded facade of the old Flat Iron

Building to the left. Cross KenduskeagStream, so much wider 50 years ago, andapproach the Bank of America building,where on so many afternoons andevenings moviegoers would line up for thelatest feature at the Bijou. Cross the street

to Maliseet Gardens and visit thePenobscot Exchange Hotel, where in thelounge you might overhear local archi-tects and builders discussing the latestdesign for a new Bangor Auditorium, onewith a wing-shaped roof. Finally, stroll up

Hancock Street, behind St. John CatholicChurch and imagine families home for theday, the sounds of cooking and conversa-tion drifting from the dense neighborhoodthere. It’s all there and more. Just imagine.

BANGOR, 2010

BANGOR, 1960

BROADWAY SHOPPING CENTERBangor’s first shopping center was also the annual touch-down spot for a helicopter-flying Santa Claus in the 1960s.

PENOBSCOT EXCHANGE HOTELLocated where Maliseet Gardens is today, this hotelwas demolished in the early 1960s.

Right,EXCHANGESTREET1957 and2009

Center,LOOKINGTOWARDPICKERINGSQUARE1960 and2010

Left,BROADSTREET1964 anf2010

UNION STATIONBuilt in 1907, the beloved train station came down in 1961after passenger rail service was discontinued. It stood on the site of today’s Penobscot Plaza, Washington Street.

CITY HALLUntil 1969, it stood on the corner ofHammond and Columbia streets andhoused the Urban Renewal Authority.

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A MISSING NEIGHBORHOODBefore 1969, an entire neighborhoodexisted where Hayford Park and PancoePool are now. The 37 buildings ofFairmount Terrace were homes to AirForce personnel stationed at Dow.

1/2 mile

Then and now

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Bangor Daily News, Friday, January 15, 20104 5


The docklike posts andchains near the BangorSavings Bank driveupentrance once servedmore than a decorativepurpose. They actuallymarked the edge of theKenduskeag Stream.

A VIEW FROM THEOTHER SIDE

The buildings along theKenduskeag Stream as

seen from ExchangeStreet (far left) and

Broad Street.

Before and After Urban RenewalIf you walked along the Kenduskeag Stream in downtown Bangor in 1960, what would you see compared with today?

Kenduskeag Stream, west side

Kenduskeag Stream, west side

Kenduskeag Stream, east side

Kenduskeag Stream, east side

SOURCES: Bangor Daily News file photos; photo illustration by Bangor Daily News graphics editor Eric Zelz; aerial photography by Bangor Daily News photographer Kevin Bennett; Mark Woodward, consultant; Peter Witham, City of Bangor Planning Division; MEGIS; Bangor Public Library; “Woodsmen and Whigs, Historic Images of Bangor, Maine” by Abigail Ewing Zelz, Marilyn Zoidis; “Bangor, Maine, An Illustrated History”; Cole Land Transportation Museum; “Downtown Bangor Tomorrow, A Preliminary Plan for the Kenduskeag Stream Urban Renewal Project”; “Beautiful Homesites In Stillwater Park, Bangor’s First Urban Renewal Development”

BIJOU THEATER164 Exchange Street

BANK OF AMERICABUILDING

80 Exchange Street

UBS FINANCIAL SERVICES BUILDING

1 Merchants Plaza

York StreetSee detailbelow

PENOBSCOT JUDICIAL CENTER79 Exchange Street

UNION STATIONWashington Street

CITY HALLCorner of Hammond and Columbia streets

BANGOR SAVINGS BANK3 State Street

Buildings in these panoramic composites may appear different from how they actually were or are today due to the photographers’ relative position and camera angle.

When Bangor voters approved the creationof an Urban Renewal Authority in 1958, cityplanners, residents and businesspeople hadgreat plans to tackle what urban planners ofthe day considered “blight.” Bangor’s substan-dard housing, congestion, and mix of living,retailing and wholesaling would be a thing ofthe past. The urban renewal taking place in somany other communities would now visitBangor, and with it, residents were promised,would come a return to greatness in a fresh

and modern city.The Bangor Urban Renewal Authority’s abil-

ity to buy and sell properties by using millionsof dollars of federal aid brought rapid results.The plans were big and would affect all partsof the city, but perhaps the most visible andcontroversial were those for the downtown.By September 1960, change was in the air.

The end of passenger rail service to Bangorled to the sale and eventual demolition ofUnion Station in 1961. In 1962, the

Kenduskeag Stream was narrowed from 250feet to 80 feet between Exchange and Broadstreets to add more parking downtown. Andin 1964, Bangor voted 4,044 to 3,568 in favorof the Kenduskeag Stream Urban RenewalProject, a massive, city- and federally-funded program that would eventually demolishabout 150 buildings in the city’s downtowncore. Once demolition began, Exchange Streetand Broad Street and the stream that ranbetween them were dramatically reshaped.


6 Friday, January 15, 2010, Bangor Daily News

The city’s first compre-hensive plan, called theMaster Plan of 1951, hadcondemned Bangor’s

“crazy quilt” pattern of houses,stores, junkyards, warehousesand apartment buildings.

In 1958, city voters agreed tocreate the Bangor Urban Renew-al Authority, which could buyand sell properties and funnelmillions of federal aid dollars.The authority narrowedKenduskeag Stream downtownto add more parking spaces, andin 1962, after another referen-dum, it launched its first bigproject: “renewal” of the 132-acre Stillwater Park neighbor-hood between Mount Hope andStillwater avenues. There, itbought or took by condemna-tion 218 parcels and relocated 69families and four businesses.

Among the displaced was JayO’Loughlin, who ran a green-house and flower business onMount Hope Avenue. His daugh-ter, Jane O’Loughlin French,said her late father hired alawyer to fight it. “It caused hima lot of stress,” she said.

“Someone somewhere decid-ed that, well, these people canget moved,” French recalled. “Idon’t know as they ever boughtany better place to live in. ... Itwas just. ‘Let’s clear-cut. Resellit. And now it will be a bettertax base.”

Construction of the firsturban renewal home in Stillwa-ter Park began in 1966, andFrench’s family managed tohold on to an acre. But the painremains.

An Urban Renewal Authoritypublication in 1968, summariz-ing 10 years of work, pointedout a paradox in housing renew-al: Remaking neighborhoods ona large scale was inhibited by“the lack of sufficient availablestandard housing in which tomove great numbers of fami-lies.”

Part of the city’s concernabout housing stemmedfrom the Air Force’s deci-sion in the 1950s to ratch-

et up its Dow Air Force Base inBangor into a Strategic AirCommand installation.

By the early 1960s, 4,500 AirForce personnel — along with8,100 dependents and 462 civil-ians — were connected to Dow.At one point, 1,500 of the city’s7,500 public school pupils wereAir Force kids.

Then the Department ofDefense announced in 1964 thatit would close the base by 1968,spurring the city to launch adistinctive kind of urbanrenewal: reuse of a Cold War airbase.

From 1965 on, a city staffmember coordinated Bangor’sresponse to the Air Force’s

plans to closeDow. A citystudy conclud-ed that Bangorcould own andrun a civilianairport at theformer base ifthe federal gov-ernment main-tained the run-ways and lighting system. TheAir National Guard maintainedits presence at the airport, andthat helped prod the Federal Avi-ation Administration to keep thecontrol tower open 24 hours aday. Bangor International Air-port opened July 1, 1968.

In an almost comical last-minute break, a federal officialcalled then-City Manager MerleGoff to ask whether the city hadan economic development proj-ect in the $1 million range thatwas near the final planningstage. “Stretching the truth con-siderably,” Goff recalled yearslater, he spoke confidently to theofficial about the city’s plans forits airport terminal. Then helearned that the proposal neededto be submitted in four days.“The staff worked on the applica-tion the entire weekend in the oldCity Hall,” Goff told the BangorDaily News in 1998. The city wonthe grant. And in 1972 the citydedicated its new passenger ter-minal.

Other portions of the air base— and 14 buildings — wereturned over to the University ofMaine, which wanted 2,000 stu-dents on a branch campus in1968. And 118 buildings were ear-marked for use in commercialdevelopment. On Oct. 30, 1968,General Electric Co. announcedplans to locate on 9 acres andemploy 130 workers in steam tur-bine projects.

Dow became a model for U.S.military base closures.

The Stillwater Park hous-ing project was, in asense, the kickoff toBangor’s third major

urban renewal project of the1960s: downtown. By 1964, theauthority and its planners werearguing that a gross budget of$8.3 million would cover a five-year urban renewal programfor 52 acres, including demoli-tion of more than 100 buildings,construction of parking andresale of cleared land. The logicwas to clear the way for newbuildings that would raise theproperty valuations and drawshoppers away from the emerg-ing strip shopping centers onBroadway and across the riverin Brewer.

The new downtown would beoriented toward people, “a placeof stores and shops, offices,restaurants, hotels, a conven-tion center, banks, parking lotsand parks, aesthetics and land-scaping,” according to a promo-tional brochure from 1964. Vot-ers approved the plan that year4,044 to 3,568, and a series ofcondemnations and demolitionsoccurred into the early 1970s.

Among the downtown build-ings torn down: City Hall, dat-ing from the 1890s; the Flat IronBuilding, dating from the 1830s;the Penobscot Exchange Hotel,with portions dating from the1820s; and the Bijou, rebuiltafter the Great Fire of 1911.

Complicating the planners’hopes was the shift, in Bangoras well as in the rest of thenation, of retail from down-towns to outlying areas.

The opening of Bangor Mallon a 60-acre former dairy farmin October 1978 drew thousandsof people. “The mall was a real‘wow’ thing for the area,”recalled its first director, RoyDaigle, in a 1997 interview.“From the time it broke groundin 1977, it was being hailed asthe Second Coming or some-thing.”

When city governmentlooked at the Bangor market in1980, it reported that downtownurban renewal led to 230,000square feet of new bank and

The granite frontportion of the FlatIron Block onExchange Streethoused a bank andand a stove foundryafter its opening inthe 1830s. Promi-nent architectCharles G. Bryantdesigned the block,which boasted aclock and Bryant'strademark orna-mental wreathscarved into thetower. The landmarkwas razed as part ofthe city’s urbanrenewal program.

PHOTOS FROM “BANGOR, MAINE, AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY”

By the 1960s, the ornamentation of the Flat Iron Building (second photofrom top) was gone, as soon would be the entire building. Also slated fordemolition were structures on Pickering Square (third photo from top) andBroad Street (above), some dating from the 1830s.

“Someone somewhere decided that, well, these people can get moved. I don’t know as they ever bought any

better place to live in. ... It was just, ‘Let’s clear-cut. Resell it. And now it will be a better tax base.’”

JANE O’LOUGHLIN FRENCH

From Page 2

Continued on next page

Baker

BANGOR DAILY NEWS FILE PHOTO

By 1962, the city reported that some homes in the Stillwater Park neighborhood had fallen into disrepair. A sales brochure (top) wasdesigned to attract new homeowners.


Bangor Daily News, Friday, January 15, 2010, 7

office space, 20,500 square feet ofrestaurants, and 65,000 squarefeet of retail and service space,totaling $16 million in value.

On the other hand, 1.8 millionsquare feet of shopping centerswere built in the area between1962 and 1978.

There had been thisgroundswell of inarticu-late misery every timesomething came down,”

recalled architectural historianDeborah Thompson, who hasdocumented Bangor’s historicalbuildings.

After Thompson’s neighborChristina Baker had tried tostop the demolition of Morse’sMill in 1975, Thompson toldBaker, “You can’t stop now,”Baker recalled.

So Baker, Thompson and ahandful of others mapped astrategy to take stock of whatBangor still had — and how topreserve it.

“We sat around my round oaktable in the dining room andplotted out a three-day work-shop, where we would bring inexperts from the region to speakto three different groups, the cit-izens, the businesspeople andthe City Council,” Baker said.“The meetings were filled tooverflowing.”

The Maine Historic Preserva-tion Commission had just beenestablished, and Shettleworth,then a 27-year-old architecturalhistorian, was a staff memberwhen the Baker-Thompsongroup got in touch.

First order of business was asurvey of the city.

“And so for the entire summerof 1975, I spent a good deal ofmy time up in Bangor, creating aseries of inventories of historicneighborhoods, house by house,street by street, to documentthese buildings, to identifywhere the most significantgroupings of buildings were,”Shettleworth said. It becameknown as the Bangor HistoricResources Inventory.

“It did have, I think, a veryimportant effect on both privatecitizens and elected officials inthe community in convincingpeople that, yes, Bangor had hada 1911 fire which had destroyedsignificant buildings in thedowntown and, yes, Bangor hadengaged in urban renewal andanother large body of historicbuildings were lost,” Shettle-worth said. “But … there wasstill so much left. And thereneeded to be a local strategy topreserve those remainingresources.”

The city historic preservationordinance set up a panel, theBangor Historic PreservationCommission, which identifieshistoric districts, landmarksand sites.

Shettleworth said Bangor’sordinance has teeth and is care-fully crafted to follow “one ofthe best national standards,”known as the secretary of theinterior’s standards for rehabili-tation. He also cited effectivelocal leadership as another fac-tor in the city’s success with theordinance.

In the 30 years since its cre-ation, the commission has beeninstrumental in designatingnine historic districts in the city.

Meanwhile, federalrules were changing.Urban renewal by the1970s had become

dirty words, and the top-downstyle of controlling projectspaid for primarily with federaldollars was under fire. In 1974,Congress passed the Housingand Community DevelopmentAct, which focused on use ofblock grants that have sincebecome the standard form offederal aid for housing andrenewal projects.

That led Bangor to a new eraof projects, still relying heavilyon federal dollars but allowingmore local control.

Bangor took aim at its Han-cock-York streets neighborhood,identified as far back as the 1951

Master Plan as a prime candi-date for revival. About eightblocks long and two blocks wide,the Hancock-York redevelop-ment plan covered 194 struc-tures — with 85 percent notmeeting “minimum housing,building, electrical and plumb-ing code standards,” accordingto a city report.

The city took years to arrangethe project with a developer, butHancock-York was just the firstof a series: the Curve Streetneighborhood (1979); the eastside neighborhood (1980); theCenter Street neighborhood(1983); the Garland-State streetsneighborhood (1984); the westside neighborhood (1982), andmore. A 2007 summary of theCommunity Development BlockGrant program in Bangor count-ed $40 million filtered to the cityfor such projects since 1975.

Shettleworth said the feder-al government started giv-ing more favorable treat-ment to rehabilitation of

older properties — instead ofdemolition — around the periodof the nation’s bicentennial,1976. And a federal tax creditgave extra incentive to rehabili-tation. Maine began offering itsown tax break in 1991.

“It’s a federal urban strategythat is the direct opposite ofurban renewal,” Shettleworthsaid. “Number one, urbanrenewal gives you money fromabove and tells you to destroyand rebuild. The tax credit says,‘I’m offering the private sector,the private investor, the privateentrepreneur, a benefit if he orshe will properly rehabilitate ahistoric building.’”

Enter Bob Kelly.In the early 1980s, Kelly shift-

ed from work with hydropower(and serving as a PenobscotCounty commissioner) to reha-bilitation of old buildings. Heand his wife, Suzanne, are own-ers of House Revivers and havebeen recognized for their workby preservationist groups.

“When we started, there was-n’t much going on,” Bob Kellysaid. “But the groundwork hadbeen laid because there was ahistoric preservation ordinancein place and a lot of the build-ings we renovated downtownwere in existing historic dis-tricts. And that made it a lot eas-ier for us to use the tax credits toattract investors.”

Kelly, 62, said many of hisinvestors are people who live inthe Bangor area. “A lot of themare motivated by a desire to savethe old buildings as much asanything,” he said.

Beyond preservation ofbuildings, downtownBangor suffered in the1980s and into the 1990s

from on-again, off-again ques-tions about its purpose, focusand viability. Despite a series ofconsultants’ reports, the core, asplanners like to call it, was buf-feted by conflicting ideas.Should downtown try to be likeFreeport, Portland or none ofthe above?

“There was a sense that eco-nomic development was going tocome up from the south,” saidKathryn A. Hunt, of StarboardLeadership Consulting LLC, aBangor-based firm that providesstrategic planning and leader-ship development. “But we’renot very proximate to Boston.”

Hunt said it’s possible for acommunity the size of Bangorto define its purpose by showingsome imagination and courage.She recalled the naysaying sheheard before Bangor began host-ing the National (now Ameri-can) Folk Festival in 2002.

Still, she said, “There’s a pre-cariousness to Bangor. It’s hold-ing on, but not necessarily gain-ing.”

In recent years, a series ofchanges — including renovationof the Penobscot Theatre onMain Street, the opening of arange of eateries and wateringholes, and an increase in thenumber of people living down-

town — has enlivened the place.“Downtown Bangor has bene-

fited from a remarkable resur-gence and renaissance — evenin the past five years,” said anadmittedly biased Rep. StevenButterfield, D-Bangor, who lives“in a beautifully and carefullyrestored apartment in a restoredbuilding” downtown, as hedescribed it. “It’s the perfectcombination of small-town feeland big-city lifestyle.”

Another factor was the cre-ation in 1987 of what at first wascalled Bangor Center Manage-ment Corp., now known simplyas Bangor Center Corp. Anassessment on property ownersin the downtown district pro-vides some funding, and the citykicks in staff help.

Its president, Brian Ames, ofAmes A/E, an architecture-engi-neering firm, said Bangor Cen-ter is working these days onmarketing and promoting oflong-term programs rather thanone-time events to draw peopledowntown.

“It’s much more directed, tar-geted than it has been,” Amessaid. In addition to effortsfocused on signage and aesthet-ics, the center wants programsthat keep people coming back todowntown Bangor — for con-certs, an outdoor market, evenholiday Santa workshops.

It’s a shift that ChristinaBaker has noted, 35 years afterher petition drive to saveMorse’s Mill.

“We still lament the buildingsthat are gone,” Baker said. Butshe pointed out “that amazingphotograph in the Bangor DailyNews last week of 2,000 peopledowntown, celebrating NewYear’s Eve.” Her husband toldher it looked like a NormanRockwell painting.

“The fabric of the downtownis there,” Baker said. “And it’s athrill to know that we have thisnow.”

[email protected]

A Bangor residential neighbor-hood (below) built in the early1940s, Fairmount Terrace offUnion Street ("G.I. Village")was demolished in 1969,removing 37 buildings from 23acres and making way for whatis now Hayford Park.

By March 1975, just two newlybuilt bank buildings (left) wereamong a handful of structuresstanding in the KenduskeagStream urban renewal project.At far left was the new Mer-chants National Bank. To thefar right was the new Deposi-tor’s Trust building. The photobelow (left) dates from 1963.The highlighted building, at thecorner of York and Exchangestreets, is visible in both pho-tos. “There were a lot of prom-ises made,” said Gene W. Sing,who grew up in downtown Ban-gor. “Then they tore everythingdown and it became desolate.”

“Urban renewal gives you money from above and tells you to destroy and rebuild. The tax credit

says, ‘I’m offering the private sector, the private investor, the private entrepreneur, a benefit if he or

she will properly rehabilitate a historic building.’”

EARLE G. SHETTLEWORTH, STATE HISTORIAN

BANGOR DAILY NEWS FILE PHOTOSBY DANNY MAHER

urban renewal

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