BANGOR, Maine — Mersadie Ivers of Hampden knelt in the grass next to the Esteban Gomez Memorial on Saturday afternoon.
The 10-year-old girl carefully placed squares of silver paper with sticky backing on the outside of a box, which she had attached to a flat piece of cardboard. On the cardboard she had colored red and white stripes. Across the front of the box, Mersadie wrote in bright colors: “CANDY.”
“It’s a candy factory,” she said. “Every town should have one.”
Mersadie and other children who visited the American Folk Festival on Saturday began work on a box city. By midafternoon Sunday, Ian’s International Airport, the Hollywood Hotel and a Paul Bunyan statue had been added to a growing metropolis.
The event was planned and staffed by the Maine Children’s Museum.
“When we learned we were going to be in this new, larger space, we needed to think about a new activity,” Andrea Stark, executive director of the museum, said Saturday afternoon. “We came up with this idea of a box city. The idea is for them to build the city of their dreams and to put into it what they think should be in that city.”
The children’s area, located in Pickering Square at previous festivals, moved to Broad Street this year in the area where the Heritage Stage had been. That stage was eliminated this year because of the festival’s budget deficit from previous years.
After Mersadie finished constructing her factory, she placed it on a piece of Masonite board under a tent. Near her factory were buildings made of boxes and other materials that resembled churches, schools, stores and skyscrapers. A smattering of houses were dwarfed by more majestic buildings that spewed brightly colored tinsel from cardboard smokestacks or sported pompoms on their roofs.
Elan Radiner, 5, of Brooklyn, N.Y., felt that no matter the size of a city or whether it was made of cardboard or concrete, people weren’t the only creatures to inhabit it. The boy, who stopped Saturday at the festival with his family before heading home after a two-week vacation in Brooklin, built a “house for the animals.”
He used a shoe box to construct what resembled a zoo exhibit. He used four small pieces of wood glued into each corner of the shoe box to raise its lid about four inches above the box. Inside, from the roof of the makeshift cage, he hung paper butterflies from strings. Around the outside of the box, Elan meticulously glued tiny, colorful foam silhouettes of animals.
On Sunday afternoon, the city created by the children bore a striking historical resemblance to the Queen City of their grandparents. Many of the buildings constructed Saturday had been moved to the outer edges of the town leaving its center looking like pictures of the post-urban renewal downtown Bangor of the 1960s.