Tenants facing a dilemma City to raze houses on Curve Street

BANGOR – Rose Hahn stacked up her empty flower boxes Monday morning outside her Curve Street apartment building, one of nine to be razed by city crews in coming months.

“There’s no point in making anything look nice now,” the 69-year-old woman said as a host of tailless cats wound their way around her feet and the nearby trash cans on the sidewalk where her four grandchildren played.

With a Wednesday deadline – at least on paper – to be out of their apartments, Hahn and the few families who remain on the one-way street are having trouble finding new places to live within their tight budgets, they said.

“I’ve been calling every day, and there’s just no place big enough that we can afford,” said Penny Berry, Hahn’s 32-year-old daughter-in-law, who also lives at 26 Curve Street with her four children, the youngest of which labored to free the back wheels of his tricycle from a pillow left on the sidewalk. “Like a lot of people here, we’re struggling.”

City officials, well aware of the affordable housing shortage in the city, are flexible on the Aug. 1 deadline, they said, citing no particular hurry to demolish the buildings, many of which have been vacant for months.

Earlier this month, the City Council paid $150,000 for nine properties recently acquired by Robert Thomas, a local accountant, upon the 1999 death of his father Ashbury Thomas.

Despite their current state of disrepair, the homes – dating back to the late 1800s – in their heyday housed employees of Morse and Co., a nearby sawmill that operated for nearly 100 years before shutting down in 1948.

With no set plans for the area, city officials are simply looking to clear the small lots near the downtown in coming months to make way for new development, according to Code Enforcement Officer Dan Wellington, who estimated demolition costs at $67,500.

“Who knows what will happen here,” Wellington said Monday as he looked down the street lined with boarded-up buildings, discarded shopping carts and a host of empty beer boxes. “But I think that future councils will say that this council made a wise decision when it took this opportunity.”

Housing officials, citing a 3 percent vacancy rate in the city, have welcomed the possibility of more apartment buildings, while others have pondered the prospect of commercial development in the area off Harlow Street.

The Curve Street project is similar to last year’s redevelopment effort at Union Place, where the city purchased six dilapidated buildings near the corner of Hammond and Union streets. Three buildings have been torn down, and city officials are considering several options for the property, including the construction of three town houses, Wellington said.

But living conditions on Curve Street, a crescent shaped street connecting Harlow and Market streets, are among the worst – if not the worst – in the city, said Wellington after stepping out of a condemned building gutted by fire several years ago.

City police also have had their fair share of calls on Curve Street over the years, most recently responding to complaints that people – most likely vagrants looking for shelter – have ripped off the plywood covering open windows in some of the condemned buildings.

Bangor Police Lt. Robert Welch said Monday that the poverty, coupled with the alcoholism and drug activity experienced in the neighborhood over the years, has made it a common destination for patrol officers.

“Sometimes it looks like Appalachia down there with everybody with their 40-ounce beers sitting out on their porches,” Welch said, referring to the central section of the Appalachian Mountains known for its poverty. “But, to be fair, it’s only about three or four people who’ve been responsible for any trouble, and it’s usually little stuff like loud parties or fights or something.”

Hahn said Curve Street’s rough reputation is only partially deserved, and the neighborhood has improved since a few troublemakers moved out.

“It used to be that you couldn’t have nothing outside because the drunks would steal your flowers right out of the pots,” Hahn said. “They would come right in your house sometimes.”

Despite the sometimes rowdy neighbors, Hahn said she was going to miss her apartment, which she recently wallpapered, not to mention the neighborhood where she and many of her family members have lived for years.

“I’m going to need more than luck,” said Hahn’s 37-year-old daughter, Terry Nicholson, of her thus-far-unsuccessful quest to find a large enough apartment to house herself and four of her children – two of whom are handicapped. “But something will come up.”