The battle over Bangor’s lunch carts climaxed a century ago this fall when local entrepreneur Fred Tower applied for a license to set one up at Franklin and Hammond streets across from what was then City Hall. Aldermen not only refused Tower’s request, but they revoked the licenses of all the other lunch wagons in 60 days.
Street vendors had been around Bangor for some time selling everything from fruit and nuts to sandwiches. Charlie Catell’s peanut stand on Hammond Street was a local landmark for decades. The smell of frying onions from Joe Kominsky’s cart on the Kenduskeag Bridge was a local joke.
A few street musicians, including hurdy gurdy man Signor Antonio Pedro Galvinius and his monkey Beppo, were part of the lively scene as well.
After the fire of 1911, lunch carts sprang up in vacant lots. Some people complained. Not only were they an eyesore among the city’s new buildings and other beautification efforts, but they were competing with restaurants that paid taxes.
City Councilor Charles J. Bernstein was one of the critics. He delivered a tirade against the lunch carts as reported in the Bangor Daily News in the spring of 1914. A junk dealer had been refused a license to operate on Washington Street, Bernstein noted angrily, yet “the most glaring eyesores are permitted right in the heart of the business district … Take Exchange Street, up which hundreds of visitors pass every day.”
“At Exchange and State streets there are four corners. On two of them are fine office buildings, on the third a theater, and on the fourth — what? A little cheese-box of a lunch cart!” he chided. “How members of the city council can vote thousands upon thousands for civic improvements and at the same time grant licenses for such eye-sores as this is utterly beyond my comprehension.”
The next blow to Bangor’s lunch cart business occurred more than a year later when a Harlow Street lunch wagon became involved in a scandal involving liquor, prostitutes and a police patrolman. The sensational headline on Oct. 22, 1915, in the Bangor Daily News said, “THINGS THEY DO IN BANGOR AFTER DARK: Whiskey for Ladies in Lunch Cart at 2 A.M. and Other High Jinks Revealed by Investigation of Patrolman Robinson.”
The case against Robinson ordering liquor in the wee hours at the lunch cart fell apart because of major contradictions in the testimony of the witnesses, who included two young ladies convicted of street walking. The fact that “high jinks” were going on late at night at the lunch wagon, however, stuck, giving the critics of these omnipresent establishments more ammunition.
After the investigation, one unidentified alderman said fewer licenses would be granted in the future. “… They are out of place in the business section. In the first place some of them are not carts at all. The wheels have been removed and they have been placed on solid foundations — thus converting them into little wooden houses, in violation of the building ordinance.
“They pay no taxes, yet by being permitted in the very best locations, they cut into the profits of legitimate restaurants that do pay taxes and are of some tangible good to the community,” he said.
The alderman also noted that while lunch carts in Portland and other Maine cities were allowed, they were kept on side streets away from public view. “Certainly the ones on Exchange Street and Post Office Square [the current location of Bangor City Hall] are no ornaments,” he complained.
Around this time, the aldermen were trying to shut down the city’s so-called “shack stores,” rough wooden structures built after the fire in 1911 to house homeless businesses. Many of the lunch carts were a subspecies of these shacks. While a few of the remaining shacks were given a reprieve after a hearing in October, the lunch carts felt the full wrath of the aldermen on Nov. 9, 1915.
“LUNCH CARTS ARE TO BE BANISHED,” a headline said the next day. “After the unenviable airing which these carts have had in the last few weeks,” Alderman Eben Blunt said, apparently referring to the Patrolman Robinson investigation. “I think the licenses of all should be rescinded. It would be one of the best things that ever happened to Bangor.”
The carts were “nuisances,” Alderman Fred Ridley said. “They obstruct traffic. They disfigure the streets. More than that, they cut into the profits of the owners of legitimate restaurants who pay taxes, employ labor and are more responsible.”
Alderman Frank Youngs, who was sympathetic to small-business owners, convinced the group to delay execution for two months as a matter of fairness.
The battle appeared to be over. A reporter wrote wistfully, “So the carts will not be with us very much longer.” But who knew if the lunch wagoneers would figure out a way to evade the law, or if aldermen would reverse themselves as they often did?
Sure enough, a little over a month later the aldermen’s action was determined to be illegal, the Bangor Daily News announced on Dec. 14, 1915. The lunch cart operators could continue in business at least until May,when their licenses needed to be renewed anyway, the city clerk said.
One sympathetic alderman declared the change of plans to be “an accommodation to the working people.” Bangoreans would continue to smell Kominsky’s frying onions on the Kenduskeag Bridge at least until spring.
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