Get in ‘touch’ with Bangor Architectural firm sets hands-on tour of downtown buildings

BANGOR – The next time you visit downtown, stop a minute and touch the buildings. That’s the suggestion of Jeff Galvin, a three-year intern at WBRC Architects and Engineers, which sponsors the architecture and sculpture tour of Bangor’s historic downtown.

To demonstrate, Galvin laid his hand against the scruffy brick facade of the Eastern Trust Building as though it were the shoulder of a trusted friend.

The buildings are, in fact, old friends, Galvin said. But we are so familiar with them, we have forgotten how to really see them, something he hopes to remedy as the walking tours progress.

The buildings, he said, are living, breathing entities. When sunlight plays against brick and granite structures, catching in the seams and casting shadows, the surfaces seem to move, he said, and the play of light adds another facet of visual interest to design features cut from granite, cast in iron, or stacked in brick.

Tours run at noon Thursdays through Aug. 29 at the Bangor Convention & Visitor Bureau at 115 Main St.

The first landmark on the tour is the Bangor House, designed in 1833-34 by Isaiah Rogers, who designed Boston’s Tremont Hotel and New York City’s Astor Hotel. Charles G. Bryant also has been identified as architect because of his association with the Bangor House builders.

Described as a “palace hotel,” the Bangor House was built when the city was busy inventing itself as a world-class port from which the goods of the region – lumber, dried fish, bricks, ice and pottery – were shipped around the world. Then, city and state leaders expected Bangor to become the Boston of the north. Now a senior housing complex, the Bangor House sports two porticos embellished with the wreaths that were Bryant’s design signature.

Completed in 1871, the Adams Pickering Block at 105 Main St., designed by George W. Orff, is an Italianate structure of brick faced with rough-surfaced Hallowell granite. Its interior was finished with black walnut and brown ash, with floors of Southern pine. A music hall was located on the upper two stories of the building, which boasts arched window lintels with keystones and a mansard roof shingled in slate. The Bangor Whig and Courier reported that it was “one of the finest halls of its size in the country.”

WBRC won in 1984 a Maine Chapter of American Institute of Architects award for the exterior and interior historic renovation of the Adams Pickering Block.

The Bangor Savings Bank at 3 State St., designed in the beaux-arts style by Carrere and Hastings in 1912, is constructed of Hallowell white granite. The building, Galvin said, was designed to resemble a Greek-Roman temple. Embellished with columns and pilasters, the design was meant to convey the idea that the bank was not only modern, but solid.

The Eastern Trust Building, designed by C. Parker Crowell and located across the street from Bangor Savings Bank, was built in 1911, not long after a fire that destroyed much of downtown in the area of Central, Harlow and Franklin streets. Vinalhaven granite was used for the first story; the upper five stories are of wire-cut brick manufactured by Saco Brick Co. The structure is capped with an ornate entablature featuring brackets and dentil trim. Panels of decorative brickwork give the structure great visual appeal.

Other stops on the tour include the Phenix Inn, The Grasshopper Shop, City Hall, the Tarratine Club, Bangor Public Library, the Hannibal Hamlin memorial and the Luther H. Pierce Memorial.

The cost is $5. For information, call the Bangor Museum and Center for History at 942-5766.