On a warm Saturday evening in September, Andrea Beaulieu’s fingers danced across the keys of a bright blue piano in Pickering Square. Nearby, local band Tomorrow Morning played popular songs along with her.
The event was the unveiling of a street piano by The Kindness Project, an organization co-founded by Beaulieu dedicated to bringing smiles to the people of Bangor. The piano was envisioned as a refurbished work of art to be left out for the public to play and enjoy. However, despite having received a permit from the city, Beaulieu was informed the next morning she’d have to move it.
As it turned out, the permit they’d been granted was only for the unveiling event from 4 to 5 p.m. that Saturday.
“We were discouraged at first, and it was a little scary. We thought it would get hauled off,” Beaulieu said. “We did get a permit and event insurance to launch the project. We knew we were going to be putting it in Pickering [Square]. From there, our plan was to float it around the city at different locations. We simply didn’t know that we needed permits to do so, which is partially our fault. We were under the assumption that it would be similar to someone sitting out on the sidewalk playing a guitar.”
The project was an unprecedented one in the Queen City of the East, so there wasn’t a clear, established procedure for permitting for it at the time, officials said.
“We were told by the city that we were trailblazing this project,” Beaulieu said. “We were the first to do this, and they had to sit down and think about, ‘OK, if people are going to start doing this, we have to have a process that everyone has to follow.’”
Beaulieu, who completed an event permit application required to hold the concert, was unaware the application only permitted the piano to remain in Pickering Square for the duration of the unveiling, not for the extended period intended.
“They misunderstood what that ‘event’ meant and left the piano in Pickering Square,” Tracy Willette, director of parks and recreation, said.
Beaulieu said the problems came down to a miscommunication resulting from an email conversation but found Willette helpful with remedying the situation.
After discussing the process with Willette about placing their piano in a park for an extended period of time, Beaulieu and co-founder Steve Gray decided against it because of costs. A couple of moves later, and the street piano found its home in Pocket Park, a privately owned space next to Central Street Farmhouse.
That has proven helpful as The Queen City Piano Project, spearheaded by nonprofit Launchpad, prepares to launch in October. The project is expected to place four pianos in Bangor’s neighborhood parks to encourage the community to express themselves through music. The project recently was discussed at a meeting of the Bangor City Council’s Government Operations Committee.
“If you were going to fix a piano permanently in park, it may need planning board approval,” city manager Cathy Conlow said during the Sept. 21 meeting. “In this case, there’s no mold for it, so we thought the best thing to do for it was to treat it as a temporary exhibit.”
As a result, the piano project needs only Willette’s approval, as he manages events at the city’s parks.
Meg Shorette of Launchpad said she discussed with Willette her ideas for the Queen City Piano Project and how realistic it would be to place pianos in parks in Bangor, which eventually resulted in the drafting of a use agreement.
“In general it was a really easy process,” she said.
The Queen City Piano Project will is expected to host events throughout October, including pop-up shows that are free to the public, though no dates have been announced yet.
“The project certainly will be utilizing city parks and property over an extended period of time, so we’ll be developing an agreement with Launchpad,” Willette said during the committee proceedings. “[The agreement will include] such things as insurance, the hours which the pianos can be played, securing the pianos during off hours … the length of time both beginning and end that the pianos may remain on city property, as well as what’s going to happen to remove all those pianos once the project is done.”
The pianos will not be under the city’s care with this agreement and will be removed after the event ends.
As for the first of Bangor’s street pianos, Beaulieu found the experience fulfilling.
“The citizens [of Bangor] have been extremely sweet and kind in taking it in as Bangor’s first street piano,” she said.
