Part II of a monthly series showing how Bangor has changed since voting to create an Urban Renewal Authority in 1958.
On a warm June night in 1964, nearly 800 people crowded into the auditorium of Bangor’s 70-year-old City Hall on Hammond Street for a heart-wrenching discussion about their community’s future.
One by one, men and women, old and young, walked to a lighted podium and, for four hours, laid out their ambitions, fears, frustrations and hopes — all tied to an “urban renewal” referendum two weeks later that, if passed, would demolish some 100 buildings covering 50 acres surrounding the heart of old Bangor at Ken-duskeag Stream, including parts of Exchange and Broad streets.
The vote was on a proposal called the Kenduskeag Stream Urban Renewal Project. It promised government-sponsored purchase of dilapidated buildings and land as well as government help with relocation expenses. It suggested — but could not promise — that new businesses, especially retail, then would move in, providing a renaissance for downtown Bangor within five years.
“I cannot agree with those who think we have exceeded our limits, those who look to the past,” said the City Council chairman, Nicholas P. Brountas. Urban renewal “is the one dynamic plan designed to cope with the problems of downtown Bangor, restoring the city to the commercial prominence it once realized.”
An Exchange Street businessman, Albert Friedman, told the crowd he had watched the city languish the previous 20 years. “Today, it is awakening to find that the world has passed it by — almost,” he said.
But Henry Segal, another downtown businessman, called the proposal “a travesty on the American principle of free enterprise and private initiative.” He opposed taking property from some to give to others. “We do not want bulldozers and boondogglers for Bangor,” he said.
Yet Albert Blanchard of the Junior Chamber of Commerce focused on the future, saying, “We as young citizens don’t want to live and work in a society governed by clipper ships.”
On June 15, the city voted 4,044 to 3,568 in favor of the plan. Downtown Bangor would be modern.
—•—
The fabric that helps explain Bangor’s decision to rebuild its downtown has many threads, but they all came together at N.H. Bragg & Sons, 74 Broad St.
Nineteenth century Bangor, at head of tide on the Penobscot River, had been the logical focal point for shipping and receiving from eastern and northern Maine. So the city was a financial and commercial center as well as a key supplier for, first, North Woods lumbering and, later, pulp and paper.
Bragg was launched in 1854 as a blacksmith shop, but 100 years later had become one of the dominant wholesalers of the region.
“We had seven salesmen out on the road in those years who would leave Monday morning and get back Friday night,” said G. Clifton Eames, 81, who worked for Bragg, including 12 years as president. “They would call on all the machine shops, the garages, the hardware stores. … We were in the auto parts business, the weld-ing supply business, heavy hardware — and by heavy hardware I mean steel and bolts.”
Close by Bragg’s brick headquarters on Broad Street near the stream were Utterback Corp., which sold everything from harnesses to Philcos; R.B. Dunning’s plumbing and electrical supplies; Bangor Egg Co. — which was actually a beer distributor — and Arthur Chapin Co. and Milliken-Tomlinson Co., both wholesale grocers. Across Kenduskeag Stream were other old-line firms, such as Snow & Nealley Co., and all around them were smaller businesses — a barber supplier, cold storage provider, filling stations, cafes, hotels and shoe repair shops.
By the 1960s, trucks servicing these companies were backing up and loading or unloading on downtown streets; some of the old buildings on Broad and Exchange were considered eyesores. Even though some wholesalers had already relocated to newly opened industrial parks on the city’s outskirts, much of downtown Bangor remained what it had been since Main Street was plotted in 1834: a working town.
—•—
City voters had approved creation of an Urban Renewal Authority in 1958, which promptly set to work planning ways to tackle what urban planners of the day considered “blight”: substandard housing, congestion and the “mixed use” of neighborhoods for living, retailing and wholesaling.
So under the leadership of an aggressive city manager, the city and its Urban Renewal Authority began preparing plans to remake Bangor on multiple fronts:
• It hired a consultant in February 1960 to start designing what became known as the Stillwater Park housing project, between Stillwater and Mount Hope avenues. The authority acquired the properties, forcing some residents to move, tore down most of the properties, then built new housing that was sold to new owners.
• It put out to referendum and passed a $1.5 million project to narrow Kenduskeag Stream from 250 feet to 80 feet between Exchange and Broad streets. The goal was not flood control but primarily to add parking along the water.
• It hired a consultant in November 1961 to prepare plans for a project reshaping the downtown mix of wholesalers, services and retailers.
With hindsight, two other projects that occurred in the same few months had considerable bearing on Bangor’s move to be modern:
• The city’s first shopping center, on Broadway, two miles from downtown, was open for business by 1961. A consultant hired by the Urban Renewal Authority in 1962 reported that he was “particularly interested to note on a Monday night, which would normally be a slow night, that between 8 and 9 o’clock, cars were entering the [shopping center] parking lot at the rate of 240 per hour, and the parking lot was 20 percent to 25 percent full. In such a one-hour stop, many retail dollars are spent at the shopping center that otherwise might have been spent downtown — IF” the downtown had been a stronger lure, the consultant’s report said.
• And in September 1960, the Maine Central Railroad decided to halt passenger rail service to Bangor, leading to sale of its Union Station near the convergence of Kenduskeag Stream and the Penobscot River. By the fall of 1961, the railroad station had been demolished, leaving only a nearby rail car shed. Destruction of the station left a dramatic point along the river empty — until the land wound up in the downtown urban renewal district and a shopping strip was constructed.
—•—
By 1962 and 1963, Bangor’s Urban Renewal Authority and its consultants were blocking out a way to shape a new look for a 19th century city trying to cope with the 20th century.
The downtown plan was to work along lines similar to the Stillwater Park housing plan: Specific buildings would be purchased and sometimes demolished by the Urban Renewal Authority, which would acquire title to the property. Then the parcel would be sold off to new buyers. Old Bangor would give way to modern Bangor.
Pulling off such a large-scale project posed an inherent dilemma, said Mike Pullen, a principal with the Bangor design firm WBRC Architects/Engineers. “There are cities all over the world that mix old and new and do it successfully. In this case … urban renewal was a bit more of a wholesale program,” Pullen said.
“I think there was a certain persuasion … that urban renewal had a system in place, that they sold a bill of goods sometimes to communities. And part of that sale was the idea that what you had, being old, was somehow decrepit and didn’t serve your needs anymore — and that we needed a fresh, new, wholesale way of intro-ducing business to the core of our city.
“They weren’t saying that just to Bangor. They were saying that to Every City USA,” Pullen said.
In order for the Urban Renewal Authority to proceed with its downtown plans, it needed to present the plan to voters. So the June 1964 referendum was set.
To make its case, the authority prepared a glossy brochure that stressed a decline in property values. It said properties in the proposed urban renewal district constituted 14.7 percent of the city’s total valuation in 1953, but just 8.6 percent by 1963.
For Clif Eames, whose N.H. Bragg & Sons became a leader of the opposition to the project, the real motive for the downtown project was less about property values and more about shifting wholesalers away from downtown.
Ed McKeon, 80, who covered the 1964 referendum for the Bangor Daily News, said the opposition “was not a large, solid bloc” but was vocal nonetheless, campaigning with advertisements and letters to the editor.
McKeon said a “potpourri of uses” for a downtown seemed economically unfashionable at the time.
So by trying to emphasize retail, not wholesaling, planners were promoting “a different kind of thinking.”
“All these ideas made sense — except you were disrupting a lot of lives,” said McKeon, who later became Bangor’s economic development director.
In the days before Bangor’s June 15, 1964, vote, McKeon interviewed downtown business owners, including Hassell Norris, 60, proprietor of a small Pickering Square printing shop.
“Do I start over again?” Norris asked in a BDN news story at the time. “They are supposed to relocate us, but where? This is a good location.”
Despite the emotion on both sides surrounding the June referendum, opponents and proponents of downtown urban renewal issued a joint statement the morning after the vote, saying it was their desire “to unify civic efforts toward the common goal of improvement of our city.”
—•—
Winning the vote did not mean the Urban Renewal Authority could immediately start work on the project. With the federal government paying for much of it, the project had to be approved, stage by stage. And approvals took months.
Just five months after the June 1964 referendum, Bangor’s city manager, Joseph R. Coupal Jr., and a new City Council chairman, John Conti, drove out to Dow Air Force Base for a meeting with the commander of the 2,000-acre Strategic Air Command base. They were unprepared for the commander’s stunning news that day: The Air Force would transfer many of Dow’s functions to other installations and Dow was among 95 military installations that would be closed in four years, by 1968.
Nearly 800 base personnel worked in the Bangor region, “but when you had several thousand Air Force people contributing in very many ways … that was a tremendous impact — that was the impact — on the day-to-day business that those people created,” McKeon said.
Fresh from winning city support for a major remaking of Bangor’s downtown, Coupal had to simultaneously launch a city government campaign to assess Bangor’s options for a very different kind of urban renewal on what he called in a memo at the time “this $100 million” property.
By 1965 the city had completed a study concluding that “part of the base could be run as a city-owned airport on a break-even basis if the Air National Guard maintained the runways and the lighting system.”
But progress on the newly approved urban renewal project downtown would move at a much, much slower pace.
Clif Eames’ N.H. Bragg would wind up moving to the city’s outskirts, but not until 1967. And a long season of wrecking balls and empty lots downtown would ensue, lasting well into the 1970s. The last urban renewal lot downtown has only recently been claimed — by the state — for its new Penobscot Valley Judicial Center on Exchange Street.
“In one sense, it was too much — more than the city could handle in terms of making viable use of all the property that was made available,” Eames said. “But overall, and I guess I’m biased, I can’t picture what Bangor would be like if it hadn’t happened.”
On 12/27/08 at 2:56 PM,
mariahstorm wrote:
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do not allow them to tear down your old historical past.... for so called urban renewal..... wasn't it nice that your building still stands after 70 years....not so if built today...........
On 12/27/08 at 3:14 PM,
OldBangor wrote:
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To DouglasWatts and mariahstorm:
What we're talking about here is something that was enacted
almost 50 YEARS ago, not something that's proposed or impending
today. The fact is that in the 1950s Bangor needed sprucing-up
and a certain amount of demolition was inevitable. It is also a fact
that the demolition got WAY out of control. The final fact is that
lessons were learned from that carnage of the 60s which have
led to many preservation efforts here that are ongoing today. It
was a different WORLD in the 1960s. Many boosters for Urban
Renewal back then lived to regret their shortsightedness.
OldBangor
On 12/27/08 at 4:50 PM,
getreal wrote:
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I have to agree with Mainecommenter. I visited England this year. I don't think they bulldoze anything in that country. They make their modern technology fit into their current countryside. I wish our state and country would preserve and keep our former landmarks. The urban renewal buildings are hideously ugly and add no value to our state. Perhaps the concept was better than the actual results. Our past is very important, it reminds us where we were, where we are, and where we are going.
On 12/27/08 at 5:05 PM,
Mainelyme wrote:
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The out of town heirs to the buildings saw a quick buck in Urban Destruction and for a price the local elected officials supplied their demand!
Mainelyme
On 12/27/08 at 5:10 PM,
OldBangor wrote:
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getreal:
Just exactly what urban renewal buildings are you talking
about? Urban Renewal was a HUD program that provided
money for tearing things down and for urban planning. It
had nothing to do with what went up subsequently. Give
me some examples of the buildings you're talking about, and
I'll probably agree with you. But there ARE some good ones,
too.....
I've spent a lot of time in the UK over the years, and there's
huge controversy over some of the things that have been
leveled. There is Much More sensitivity now in Bangor as to
what goes away and what replaces it. The lessons learned
in the 1960s live on, and for this reason I don't see any kind
of imminent threat to Bangor's architectural treasures -- other
than from neglectful ownership.
OldBangor
On 12/27/08 at 6:35 PM,
AMHI4ME wrote:
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Slots is a blight on the community, archutecture my ass
On 12/27/08 at 6:35 PM,
Mainelyme wrote:
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Like John Ballou spear heading the new I-95 Bridge across the Penobscot and the general mad dash to acquire land on the Brewer end causing the plans to make the height of the bridge too low for the tall sailing ships to actually sail up to Bangor.
Don Soucy, the Mayor of Bangor at the time was confronted at a counicl meeting one night and he said, " The leg of the bridge came right down on the land I owned and, I didn't get what the property was worth. As everyone knows the government never pays much of anything for what they acquire."
Mayor Soucy should have either gotten a more accurate measuring tape before he bought the piece of realty or watched his business associates a little more closely!
Mainelyme
On 12/27/08 at 6:42 PM,
Mainelyme wrote:
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Make that;
"....the government never pays much of anything for what it acquires."
I just got back from 34th Street Macy's Herald Square and I'm exhausted from the crush of the crowd.
I don't even want to see what 42nd Street Times Square is like as, everyone is in town for New Year's Eve.
Mainelyme
On 12/27/08 at 7:15 PM,
pandaslady wrote:
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Urban Renewal hurt many people. My dad's business was taken by eminent domain and Billy Cohen (Yes the senator with the dime a dance mother who was raised by Mrs. Daigle on Hancock Street) was the loudest mouth as to why dad's business had to go. Later that night, he approached my dad and apologized for his leading the vote saying he did not realize that there were eight children in our family who were going to suffer. He said he would not have voted had he been aware. The whole UR was crooked and hurt many people......note though that the Cohen's business was not affected.......they got a new building out of it!
On 12/27/08 at 8:38 PM,
Katofbangor wrote:
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AMHI4ME=
On 12/27/08 at 8:40 PM,
Katofbangor wrote:
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AMHI4ME; you are a blight on your own ASS.
On 12/27/08 at 8:55 PM,
Mainelyme wrote:
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pandaslady:
I'm not saying what you are saying isnt true but, I don't understand your reference to Clara Cohen as having been raised by Christine Daigle on Hancock Street.
Mr. and Mrs Royden Daigle lived on Nut Street which was a small street that ran between Boyd Street and Hazel Street between Hancock and York when I was little 68 years ago, and then they lived at the top of Carr Street at York Street until Urban Destruction relocated them.
I knew all of thier children and perhaps most of the children that Mrs. Daigle raised.
I even know who Vickie's real mother is, and who was supposedly her father.
Clara and Marlene Cohen were at Royden's funeral wake but, I'm not sure who I was with.
It was either my neighbor Helen Hunt or my friend Fred.
I also know the story of Clara Hartly Cohen and her sister, and the two Cohen Brothers they eventually married, but I can't see where Clara was raised by Mrs. Daigle.
As for Billy Cohen, everyone knows he was on the school board and elected to the city council, then was picked up by Curtis Hutchins and pushed higher into politics as a tool in the U.S. Senate for Dead River and its vast holdings.
Even in Abraham Lincoln School Billy had an admittedly snotty attitude, and his senate ads made it sound like he worked hard along side Ruby, his mother, Aunt Gertrude, (Gittle) and his beautiful sister Marlene at the bakery on Hancock Street.
When I told a dear friend of mine that Billy never worked in that bakery the friend contradicted me. Her husband who became a dear friend of mine also contradicted her and said as many times as he had been in that bakery in all the years he lived in the Bangor area he had never seen that boy in that bakery.
As for the land that the Cohen's got on Hancock Street to replace the bakery that was all written up in a Jewish newspaper in Florida because of the fact that U.S. Senator William s.Cohen of Maine was Jewish, even though his mother was a shiksa.
I hate the word Gentile as my dear Jewish friend told me back then that Genitle means a Godless person!
The then City Lawye,r Robert Miller was in front of the council one night explaining that there was an old narrow pathway that ran between the lot that the Cohen's were getting and what I assumed to be what had once been Dolly Jacques', (Marie Wilson"s) house of ill repute, and the city couldn't get a clear title to it. Ruby wanted a clear title to that narrow strip of land and Miller explained that the city had traced the where abouts of the last owner's daughter all the way out to Washington State and couldn't establish the fact that she wasn't married with heirs left to the property.
With the knowledge of what eventually happened to me and my mother's house on Pearl Street I'm sure the title was taken out in the back room at city hall and got an instant clearance on it.
Now would you like to hear the true story of how a woman who never worked a day in her life was renting a kitchen and half bedroom sharing the bath in a house on Frazier Street, and the city took someone's house away from them on State Street Avenue, and used community development money to fix it all up brand new and gave it to her free for having relocated her?
They stole my mother's house out from under me and drove me into the street.
As I was told by the authority at the time, all the properties in the old Ward One are built on land that only has a Quit Claim City Acquired Tax Deed!
Mr. Perley J. Thibodeau
New York, New York
On 12/28/08 at 3:26 AM,
AmericanBandstandPA wrote:
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Whatever and whoever were behind Bill Cohen's political elevations are of no consequence now. Bill did an excellent job ever since he undertook his political profession in any capacity. My grandfather, my mother's father, William H. Gehigan, owned property and a house at the confluence of Washington and Hancock Streets, just behind the current location where Bill Cohen's father had his bakery...and a little north on Washington Street from Dresner's Junk yard. Another home he owned was at 106 Cumberland and another at 92/94 Otis Street. But, due to Urban Renewal, the home on Washington Street was razed. One of the major points of the US Government's purposes of the nationwide Urban Renewal Project was the intercity decays of the older wooden structures, and the old electrical and plumbing fixtures that were installed in the 1800's. The buildings were virtual firetraps and the wood was rotting, electrical wiring was outdated and frayed...plumbing was rusted-out and non-workable...it was a mess! "How can a city grow with this decay in the heart of the business district?'', Bangorians were asked, in reference to the deteriorating and vacant structures in downtown. In June 1964, the voters of Bangor decided to profoundly affect downtown Bangor in favor of Urban Renewal. The model of the City of Bangor, in the new proposal, was at Sears and Roebucks (depicted in the photo above). I saw it there, myself! When I worked at WABI-TV, I took newsfilm and interviews with Ralph Lowe on this project. The goals of UR included modernization, increased parking, and a higher valuation and revitalization of the downtown areas. In the late 1960's, UR destruction of the older buildings razed completely the rat-traps, fire-traps and other unnecessary buildings. Because of poor engineering, and poor decisions on the part of some building ownerships, is why some of the buildings in Bangor became steel-and-plastic-and brick jokes. The old Central station was, as mentioned by another blogger, sold, etc., as he stated. However, the main problem was that the structure itself was deteriorating. It had bricks deteriorated, steel that was rusted in the roofing, wood, also, major cracks in the superstructure and it was found it was no longer financially, necessary to maintain. Then, this warehouse took it's place and housed several businesses and a restaurant. Urban Renewal across the US had some problems, true...but for the most part, it was a necessary program to modernize downtowns across the US, and to eliminate major fires and insurance claims, as well as for health and welfare reasons. Now, cities across the country are revitalizing their "downtowns" as nostalgic, shopping centers unto themselves. For many years, some families still own and operate businesses in their downtown aras. They have upgraded their establishments, much like a number of Bangor establishments have done, to comply with new laws for electrical, plumbing and fire codings. Some had foresight...a lot did not, and protested the change. I feel it is a gret thing that Bangor voters finally voted in favor of UR. It would have happened sooner or later...the old buildings would have never survived, anyway!
On 12/28/08 at 9:54 AM,
pcme2000 wrote:
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Why is this even news. Times change and we need to change with it. What use to be isn't anymore.
On 12/28/08 at 11:20 AM,
Mainelyme wrote:
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I remember Washington Street and the people who lived on it well from the early forties to the time it was all torn down.
I was home for vacation from Warner Brothers Pictures on Madison Avenue in 1962 and Frances Reynolds Stanley came over to my parent's house and picked me up in her new small white Buick convertible.
We went gliding down Washington Street and suddenl;y Fran reacted with a bolt exclaming, "Oh, no. Washington Street has just been made a one way street and I'm going the wrong way. I just know that was a policeman who just passed us!"
Fran was an excellent driver , however and didn't let that minor fear bother her for long as she stopped in front of Jenny Olsen's little flower covered house second down from Louie Murray's filling station, and yoo hoo'd to Jenny asking her if her nephew Frank Nanatonis, the Bangor artist were in Europe or in town.
Told that Frank was still in Europe we proceeded to Fran and Jim's summer cottage at Green Lake, that Bill and Maxine Freese later bought, where Fran got a neighboring doctor to take us for a ride on his small sailboat.
Jim came home from work at Stickney and Babcock Murray Motor Mart, and the Maine State Legislature, and Fran made pancakes for dinner.
I told the late Faith Dort that a few years later and Faith said, "Well, what did you expect them to have; sauteed butterfly wings?"
All the good people of the old neighborhood did what they had to do to survive while they were on earth and are all gone now.
God Bless Them, and may they all Rest in Peace.
I can't decide if it were a different life back then, or maybe that I was just a different person.
Perley J. Thibodeau
Mainelyme
On 12/28/08 at 2:39 PM,
DanielSchwartz wrote:
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It's truly a shame that Bangor lost so many historic buildings during that time. I'm happy to see that today Bangor leaders recognize the importance of preserving historic buildings located throughout the city. Bangor has really stepped up its effort to create new spaces within old buildings while preserving the outside structure. Many buildings in downtown have seen face lifts in the last few years. Downtown is bouncing back and with continued leadership from city leaders and the community Downtown Bangor will be the focal point once again. Since 2000 downtown has grown and improved by leaps and bounds. Looking back at this reminds us today how important history is to a community. Does anyone know what the follow-up to the waterfront condos? Last year, BDN did an article on a developer from Maryland interested in building a condo complex that mirrored the original Union Station. This project seems to be off track.
On 12/28/08 at 3:17 PM,
OldBangor wrote:
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DanielSchwartz:
Given the state of the economy right now, I'd be very surprised
if that condo project went ahead. There was another less ambitious
one as well, and I guess that one's on hold, too.
Perley:
Now, I could be wrong. I have been wrong before. BUT I think that
Jim and Fran's camp was on Pearl Point at Lucerne (Phillips Lake).
I WILL CHECK!
OldBangor
On 12/28/08 at 4:05 PM,
Mainelyme wrote:
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OldBangor
:As Fran said in Bangor's Auntie Mame;
"You just do that, sugah!"
Perley J,. Thibodeau
New York, New York
On 12/28/08 at 4:26 PM,
maineguy76 wrote:
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Urban Renewal or Uban Suicide? Take a walk downtown and see for yourself. Hogan Road is the city's number one destination area for visitors and the powers that be just keep letting more developement on the Stillwater coridor that you can't drive thru there is less than 15 minutes. There was no renewal...and never will be.
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