BANGOR, Maine — Scores of people curious about what it’s like to live in downtown Bangor — and some who are interested in renting there — got a glimpse of the lifestyle Wednesday evening during a two-hour open house that covered a couple of city blocks.
Armed with maps of participating buildings, attendees wandered among eight locations, checking out available and soon-to-be-ready lodgings ranging from small studio apartments to sprawling luxury accommodations fetching rents as high as $2,400 per month for a two-bedroom setup.
Participating were 58 Main St.,16 Broad St., 25-27 Broad St., 28 Broad St., 10 Water St. (Freese’s Building), 123 Franklin St. (Panda Garden), 16 North High St. and 128-130 Hammond St. Most of the buildings house restaurants, bars and other businesses on their street level.
“It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a while, to be able to have sort of an ‘apartment crawl,’ so that you can go from building to building and see all the different apartments that are available,” said Bangor Councilor Gibran Graham, who is part of the Downtown Bangor Partnership, which helped organize the open house.
“And now was really a great time to do it because they’ve got all these new ones that are done, or nearly done, and people are eager to see them, whether they’re looking for something themselves, or they are looking for somebody else, or they just want to snoop and see what they’ve heard about,” he said.
Among those who turned out to take a peek at some of downtown’s rental options was Ginger Fitzgerald of Bangor. She said Wednesday night that she is considering selling her house and spending half the year in Bangor and the other half in South Carolina
“I just retired six months ago, so I’m looking at my options,” she said. “I love Bangor, and it’s beautiful, beautiful down here,” she said of downtown during a stop at one of the Broad Street buildings.