Habitat demolition strikes home Man recalls moving in a decade ago

BANGOR – Ten years ago, Bertrand Landry was tending the flowers in his rock garden outside his family’s brand-new home at 3 Parker St.

“Man, it was like heaven, I tell you,” Landry said Tuesday of the three-bedroom house, built in 1992 by about 50 Habitat for Humanity volunteers. “I was very proud. It was our first house and it was brand new,” he said.

Now boarded up with most of the off-white, vinyl siding removed, Landry’s former home is set for demolition with the planned 10,000-square-foot expansion of the Main Street Shaw’s supermarket.

“It really hurts me, all the time that went into that,” said Landry, 65, who moved from the house in 1995 after he and his wife, Cassandra, divorced. “But sometimes you just have to go along with the world.”

In this case, a Portland-based developer, the Boulos Co., bought the house – along with about a dozen other properties in the area – to accommodate the Shaw’s expansion, construction on which could begin this fall if the plan receives all its needed permits.

While the sentimentality of the house did weigh on the minds of the Habitat for Humanity board members when Boulos first offered to buy the modest, two-story structure, those initial reservations soon subsided, said Habitat’s Bangor director Ed Marsh. Habitat for Humanity is a national organization that builds and finances homes for low-income people.

In addition to paying the homeowners $68,000 for the property, the developer donated $20,000 to Habitat for Humanity of Greater Bangor to buy more land, Marsh said.

“Basically, in this case, disrupting one family is going to help three families,” said Marsh, adding that the home’s last owners are already settled into a new house and Habitat for Humanity would use the $20,000 to help buy two parcels in the Bangor area.

In all, Habitat for Humanity of Greater Bangor has built eight houses – six in Bangor and two in Brewer, officials said.

The Parker Street house, the second Habitat house to be built in Bangor, and several neighboring houses set for demotion with the Shaw’s expansion, are not the first to make way for the supermarket.

The 57,000-square-foot Shaw’s opened on Main Street in 1996, after overcoming some significant neighborhood opposition. All totaled, 14 buildings in the neighborhood were torn down to make way for the new supermarket, the popularity of which facilitated the latest expansion.

Crews were just breaking ground on the Main Street supermarket when Landry moved from Parker Street to his small but tidy mobile home at Martel Trailer Park off Outer Hammond Street.

Although Landry hasn’t lived at 3 Parker St. for seven years, he is still saddened by its planned demolition although he knows of Habitat for Humanity’s plans to build new homes in the area.

While Tuesday morning’s brief visit to the Parker Street house will probably be Landry’s last before its razing, he still has fond memories – and a stack of photographs – of the construction on his family’s first new house.

Back at his current home, his two birds – both named “Baby” – squawked in the background as Landry looked through the pile of snapshots of smiling volunteers leaning on shovels and posing next to dirt-filled wheelbarrows.

“I tell you, I cry,” Landry said, recalling how he felt when he moved from the house after his divorce and handed the title back to Habitat for Humanity. “It was a palace.”