After the fire of 1911 destroyed much of Bangor’s downtown, many small businesses immediately found housing in what became known as “shack stores,” temporary structures built haphazardly of rough lumber and whatever other materials were around.
After banning wooden buildings downtown in an effort to avoid further fires, city fathers gave these shack occupants a year to move into more substantial quarters. But gradually the remaining rickety shacks became a headache as the areas around them were improved with new, modern buildings and streets.
The deadline was ignored as were several subsequent ones as these shack businesses struggled to get back on their feet, or else took advantage of the situation to gain financially. By the fall of 1915, some city officials were threatening to take legal action to get rid of the remaining shacks.
That summer, they had set a Sept. 1 deadline, “the net result being the tearing down of one small shack in the rear of the Hugh Jameson building in Harlow Street,” noted the Bangor Daily News on Oct. 25. The results were an embarrassment to the city’s pride.
Alderman Eben Blunt brought up the matter, as reported in the Bangor Daily Commercial on Oct. 23, citing a shack on Harlow Street to which the owner was nailing clapboards in preparation for winter. Blunt got the impression the fellow planned to stay there permanently. (An earlier report in one of the newspapers described a lunch cart entrepreneur who had removed the wheels on his wagon, turning his portable shack into a permanent one.)
Alderman Edward Hickson added that if the shack stores were allowed to stay there much longer, “the city might as well repeal its building code.”
Alderman Fred Ridley brought up a recent shack store scandal in which a lunch cart on Harlow Street was the scene of midnight parties involving prostitutes, liquor and a Bangor policeman. An investigation was underway.
The shacks were eyesores, especially so on Harlow Street where the city had spent a fortune building a new high school, library and post office, as well as making improvements on adjoining streets.
A hearing was scheduled to give shack store owners a chance to defend themselves.
PATIENCE OF ALDERMEN IS WORN OUT AT LAST, declared a headline in a Bangor Daily News story.
Like previous efforts, however, city officials lost their nerve. “‘Temporary’ Shacks Are Given Another Long Lease of Life,” commented the Bangor Daily News on Oct. 27 after the hearing.
Only three businessmen showed up to defend themselves. One of them was Charles W. Morse, a well known dealer in horses. He had recently spent nearly $100,000 to build the new Bowlodrome and auditorium on Harlow Street.
He had intended to use part of the building as a stable but had decided the new building “was too valuable” for such a business. He was now planning to erect a hotel and “big stores” in another new building on another spot he owned on Harlow Street, but he couldn’t start this project until spring.
His lawyer, Terrence B. Towle, pointed out to aldermen that Morse “had shown a good deal of public spirit” and that he paid $3,200 in city taxes.
“He doesn’t expect to carry on his horse business indefinitely at the present shack,” he assured them.
The board gave Morse an extension as well as the other two businessmen. One was L. H. Schwartz of M. Schwartz’s Sons, which sold saws and mill supplies. Schwartz described the business operated in a shack in the rear of their store on Exchange Street as a “repair shop,” the only one of its kind in the state.
“Concrete bases” were built for “expensive machinery,” he said, and a number of men were employed. Their plan was to construct a building around the shack and then remove it after neighbors erected business buildings on adjoining lots. Aldermen issued another extension.
The third businessman who attended the hearing was one Kennedy, a saw filer, who said he was having trouble finding an alternative location for his shack because filing saws made lots of noise. If he couldn’t find a suitable location by spring “he would remove the shack bodily.”
Such were the kinds of businesses still trying to recover from the fire of 1911.
“Nobody else appeared although there are other owners of shacks that are still standing,” noted the Bangor Daily News.
Many small businesses had survived the relocation crisis after the fire, but not without some serious hardships. One survivor was O. Crosby Bean, a well known news dealer who had opened at 203 Exchange St. around 1898, according to a feature in the Bangor Daily News on March 15, 1913.
His business expanding, Bean had moved to 12 State Street around 1905. Six years later “the flames licked up the place in one gulp,” reported the newspaper.
Bean persevered. “For four days Mr. Bean and his able assistant, Georgie Wood, peddled papers from the sidewalk, then found a place in the stairway between Finnegan & Monaghan’s and the Yates Shoe Store.”
Thinking he was back on his feet, Bean bought out a newsstand at 10 Central St., but that arrangement ended when the owner of the building decided to make some alterations and evicted him after only three months.
The newsstand ended up “in the ruins of what was once the Bangor Commercial’s boiler room on the Stetson property reached by a bridge, called the Bridge of Sighs.” That was space left by the fire as well.
A month later, Bean had managed to build “quite a roomy shack fronting on Central Street and has gotten on fairly well for the past 16 months,” the newspaper reported.
The purpose of the story was to tell readers that on that very day — March 15, 1913 — Bean had made a comeback. He was opening in “a fine new place,” expanding his product line to include books, stationery and souvenirs in the new Clark building at 16 State St. — “on the same site as his former place.”
Thus, the scars left by the Bangor fire had slowly healed for dozens of small businesses, even though many shacks lingered on irritating city fathers.
Wayne E. Reilly’s column on Bangor a century ago appears in the newspaper every other Monday. His latest book, “Hidden History of Bangor: From Lumbering Days to the Progressive Era,” is available where books are sold. Comments can be sent to him at wreilly.bdn@gmail.com.