60 years ago, Bangor, Maine voluntarily bombed itself into oblivion
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Bangor “Civic Boosters” set off an urban “renewal” explosion — the city has never recovered
When I moved to Bangor in 1981 to practice law, I was struck by the acres of asphalt parking lots and dearth of the historic building that might be expected in a city originally settled in 1769. It was explained to me that the founders of the very firm I’d just joined, George Peabody and George Eaton, had dominated the political scene for decades, taking turns serving as mayor, and they were instrumental in convincing city residents to sign on for a massive urban renewal project. The plan was implemented, the city was razed, and then federal funds dried up, leaving a parker’s paradise, but little else. Bangor looked like hell in 1981; it still does.
Sixty years ago this week, Bangor residents turned out in force to vote on one of the most divisive and transformative measures in the city’s history: the downtown urban renewal project.
The project, which would eventually see more than 100 buildings demolished across 32 downtown acres, passed with 53 percent of the votes on June 15, 1964. With 7,657 Bangor residents voting on the measure, it was the largest local election turnout in Bangor at the time since 1929.
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What started as an effort directed almost solely at improving Bangor’s housing stock began to shift focus in 1959. That year, city staff began floating the idea of adding a new project onto the urban renewal effort: a redesign of the area along the Kenduskeag Stream between State and Washington streets that would create new streamside parking, a project that had strong support among the downtown business community. That project was approved in 1960 and completed in 1964.
By 1961, however, the downtown urban renewal idea had snowballed well beyond just the new streamside parking area, to encompass a sweeping redesign of large swaths of downtown.
The federal urban renewal program was changed once again to allow cities to tack additional projects onto established ones. In June 1961 city staff threw together a preliminary plan to revamp most of the east side of downtown, mostly by tearing down old buildings and selling the land back to interested parties. The major argument was that the area was full of badly designed traffic patterns and substandard buildings, and was more suited to the economy of the 19th century — not of the modern age.
Public opinion on urban renewal became divided. It was one thing to help vulnerable residents access safe, modern housing. It was another to rip up whole blocks of Bangor’s historic downtown. Between June 1961, when the project was first brought forth, and when the measure finally went to the ballot box in June 1964, there were three years of sometimes agonizing public discourse.
Proponents extolled the project’s virtues with town hall meetings and glossy brochures. Five redesign plans were shown to the public, some of which were even more sweeping than the plan that was eventually adopted in March 1963, which would see all but one building on Exchange Street demolished, and much of Pickering Square and what was then Mercantile Square razed to create more parking and buildable land. It would also see Bangor’s old City Hall at the corner of Hammond and Columbia streets torn down, to be replaced with a parking structure. City Hall would move to its current location on Park Street.
A large but disparate opposition questioned the project’s cost, its impact on local businesses and the fact that there were many unknowns as to how it would all work out, including how wise it was to assume all that newly vacant land would end up filled. For the six months leading up to the June 1964 referendum, the Bangor Daily News published near-daily articles discussing the matter. The issue was further complicated by a time element — if the matter wasn’t settled by October 1964, the city would lose out on the federal funds earmarked for the project.
In the end, voters saw downtown urban renewal as a chance to redefine the city’s fortunes, moving it away from its storied but long-gone past and toward the future. It was a big gamble, to be sure, but when faced with huge economic challenges like the end of passenger rail in the city and the rumored closure of Dow Air Force Base — which was announced a few months later in 1964 — something had to be done.
City planners and the public could not, at the time, have known that the legacy of urban renewal would be one of such mixed results. Some good did come out of it — mostly in the form of better housing and housing policy. But most people today associate Bangor’s urban renewal with the wholesale destruction of iconic buildings like the old City Hall, the Bijou and Park Theatres and the Flatiron building, and with a loss of historic character, with little of the promised development taking its place.
“But even today, there are still large, undeveloped swaths of land, mostly used for parking lots, in the urban renewal zone”
A few new buildings were constructed on those razed lots, like One Merchants Plaza, where the BDN is housed today, and the Penobscot Judicial Center, which opened in 2009 and was the last major building to be built on an urban renewal lot. But even today, there are still large, undeveloped swaths of land, mostly used for parking lots, in the urban renewal zone — a visible reminder that good intentions can have unintended consequences.
