20 June 2024
Hard Telling Not Knowing each week tries to answer your burning questions about why things are the way they are in Maine — specifically about Maine culture and history, both long ago and recent, large and small, important and silly. Send your questions to [email protected].
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.
The idea for and eventual approval of the downtown project, however, came relatively late in Bangor’s urban renewal era, which began close to a decade earlier, and which started as an effort focused almost solely on improving the living conditions of Bangor’s poorest residents.
Urban renewal was a federal program that partnered with municipalities across the country to clear out areas of “slum” and “blight” and build safe, modern housing and new infrastructure. It generally involved the federal government paying between 65 and 75 percent of the cost of demolition and construction, and the local government paying the remaining amount. It officially began with the passage of the federal Housing Act of 1954, which codified an early version of the program into the nationwide urban renewal effort.
Tenement housing along Hazel Street in Bangor, one of several streets that were demolished during the Urban Renewal era of the 1960s and 70s. The area along Hancock Street was an Irish immigrant enclave in the city for more than 100 years. Credit: BDN File
The program first came to the attention of Bangor residents in 1955, when city staff proposed approaching the federal government about clearing and rebuilding two neighborhoods in Bangor: the area called Stillwater Park, between Stillwater and Mount Hope avenues, and the area along Hancock Street, by the Penobscot River.
Many of the houses in Stillwater Park lacked running water and safe sources of heat, while tenement housing — single-family homes divided into multiple living spaces — was prevalent along Hancock Street. According to city staff, in 1955 nearly 2 percent of Bangor homes lacked toilet facilities, more than twice the national average. In 1957, Bangor’s public health officer, William Carney, said that his office was a “chamber of horrors,” thanks to his collection of photos of the deplorable conditions of some of those houses.
In June 1958, Bangor voters overwhelmingly voted to approve the creation of an urban renewal authority, which would oversee the city’s planning efforts and apply for federal money for the Stillwater Park and Hancock Street projects.
Despite years of work planning the project and promoting its merits to the public, however, the Stillwater Park project was not officially approved until a January 1962 special election, with some people objecting to the idea of the government buying out or, in some cases, forcibly removing people from their homes, substandard though they might be. Work on Stillwater Park commenced in October 1963, and was finally completed in July 1966.
The Hancock Street project took even longer, with final approval not coming until 1969 and work commencing in the early 1970s. Both projects saw new housing built, including new single-family homes in Stillwater Park, and apartment complexes on Hancock Street.
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 completed Kenduskeag Stream parking project, which created new parking lots of either side of the stream in downtown Bangor in the early 1960s. Credit: BN File
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.
Workers begin reconstructing part of Exchange Street in downtown Bangor. The urban renewal project of the late 1960s and early 1970s would see most of the street torn down. Credit: BDN File
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.
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.