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This is one in a series of stories on historic Bangor buildings.
BANGOR – Seen from the street, the tan brick edifice towers over the visitor, its heavy granite ramparts and steps protecting front gardens with tons of stonework.
The Schoolhouse apartment building looks more like a fortress than a school or an apartment building, its wide front steps leading to hardwood and glass front doors. It is an architectural remnant of the early 20th century when high ceilings, grand windows, ornate trim and expensive building materials were the rule.
On a recent warm spring day developer Robert Baldacci sat in his Schoolhouse apartments office, a work space whose walls are lined with memorabilia Baldacci has accumulated over the years – posters from art exhibits and photographs of former presidents, some with autographs. Ike, Truman, JFK, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and Clinton all have spots on a paneled wall of the inner office.
Bangor and Washington come together in the document-littered office where the development business goes on daily. It is the old principal’s office in what was once Bangor High School, Baldacci explained.
Baldacci remembered getting into the development project nearly 20 years before. How does one get to be a developer? “You just wake up one morning and say, ‘I want to be a developer,'” Baldacci quipped. It’s that simple. The hard part comes with meeting demands of particular projects, and the Schoolhouse apartments were demanding.
Because the building was part of a National Historic District, its historic presence had to be protected; the developer could not just tear it all apart and rebuild it to fit the needs of 60 apartment dwellers. When everything was done, the place had to look just like the old Harlow Street school. Even some of the interior had to remain essentially what it always had been.
A nice touch is the collection of old class photographs from the 1920s and ’30s that hangs in a hallway. The serious faces staring politely in black-and-white from 2-foot-wide panoramic photographs cause a visitor to pause and examine each. Who are these people? Some still live in Bangor, and two – Robert and Dorrice Wetzler – happily live in the Schoolhouse apartments.
The Wetzlers have been here 14 years, since selling their home on Parkview Avenue. Mrs. Wetzler, who is responsible for donating many of the class photos, attended school right where she now resides.
Her large blue eyes came alive with a story to tell, as she pointed to a corner of the cozy living room. “This is the room where I took French I,” she said, “and I sat right in the back row, over there.” She took two other years of French, one in the classroom that is over the Wetzler apartment.
Her father had been a teacher and principal at the school, but she never had him for classes. She came to the Harlow Street school too late for that.
The school’s masonry was nearly brought down in the late 1970s by an austere school budget that caused the former Bangor High School to close and, later, to be reborn as apartments. When the school committee voted to close the building it was nearly vacant – the school committee met there and the school superintendent, a credit union, the Bangor Symphony, and a few school programs had offices there.
In 1965, after lengthy discussions on proper locations and designs, the new Bangor High School was built on Broadway and has served the city there ever since.
The Harlow Street school was built in 1912 to replace a double-frame structure in Abbott Square. Peabody and Stearns designed the school to match the Bangor Public Library, at a cost of $300,000.
The 1912 Industrial Journal said of the new school that it was “destined to be the largest and finest in all Maine.”
The building measured 160 by 200 feet and held 60 rooms, an assembly hall that seated 1,000, and a lecture hall that also accommodated 1,000. Its stage was larger than those of many theaters.
For 65 years it served the city’s children before Bangor school officials decided that the school no longer met the department’s needs and should be closed. Howard Storm, superintendent of schools in 1979, proposed that the school be closed to save the school department money spent on heat. It would be the first of several schools closed during that period, including the Union Street School, Mary Snow and 14th Street schools.
In May 1979, the city sought bid proposals for reuse of the school, piquing the interest of as many as 59 potential developers from Maine and other New England states. In July the desks, lockers and other accessories were sold at auction.
A tour of the building gives the feeling it is still a school, with its wide corridors, its windows that reach high above floors.
In September 1983 Baldacci proposed a $1.8 million renovation of the building into 60 apartments, made possible with a $1.4 million loan from the Maine State Housing Authority. The project grew to $2 million by the following year, and the Harlow Street School became known as the Schoolhouse apartments.
Inside, old blackboards and original well-worn woodwork remain, giving the building a homey, lived-in feeling lacking in modern apartments. The tall windows, through which many a schoolboy gazed longingly outdoors, are there today, admitting generous amounts of sunlight.
Harlow Street is home to other public buildings – the Bangor Public Library and Bangor’s Federal Building. But the Schoolhouse apartments may be the best known on the street to become privately owned, saved from disuse by a local contractor, and great care was taken that the building would not lose the character Bangor natives had come to know.
More than 15 years later, the Schoolhouse apartments are still home to Bangor people and several businesses.
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