Famed theater was host to icons

On Friday morning, Oct. 16, 1903, a crew of workmen began tearing out the stage on the second floor of one of Bangor’s most famous buildings. The voices of President Ulysses S. Grant and the country’s greatest actor, Edwin Booth, as well as a host of other ghostly dignitaries still rang out loud and clear through the dark recesses of Norombega Hall for the Bangor Daily News reporter sent to cover the nostalgic event.

The quiet park called Norumbega Parkway (yes, the spelling has been changed), where passersby can sit serenely soaking up the sun or reading a book today, was once the site of the massive Greek revival building, constructed and elaborately decorated in 1855 on a granite platform in the Kenduskeag Stream between Central and Franklin streets.

On the first floor were 14 stalls where merchants used to sell their wares. That aspect of the building’s past had gone out of business five years before.

On the second floor was the hall – 117 feet long, 56 feet wide, with a 39-foot-high ceiling. One Bangorean booster had compared the building favorably to Boston’s Quincy Market, but circumstances were changing in the Queen City. New, modern theaters had been built and new ways of marketing developed. In 1903 the Morey Furniture Co. planned to turn the old hall into a giant salesroom.

Designed by architect William Morse and built by his uncle Leonard Morse, the theater seated 2,000 people on movable wooden benches on the floor, in galleries and even on the stage, but as many as 3,000 had packed in for major events. “War time rallies, public fairs, receptions, balls, religious revivals and notable theatrical revivals made it the leading amusement center in the city,” wrote the Bangor Daily News reporter.

Plenty of political rhetoric had echoed through the hall as well. People had come to hear Grant with such enthusiasm that the wooden platform at the front door had collapsed under the weight of the surging crowd. Benjamin Harrison and James Garfield had spoken there. There had been “a half dozen of so vice-presidents” including Bangor’s favorite son, Hannibal Hamlin. Other great Maine political figures such as James G. Blaine, Thomas Brackett Reed and William Pitt Fessenden also had stood at the podium.

But it was the theatrical events that particularly struck the reporter. America’s greatest 19th century actor, Edwin Booth, brother of the country’s most famous assassin, had performed Hamlet and other pieces over three nights. The beloved comedian Joseph Jefferson had played his most famous role, Rip Van Winkle.

This was the stage on which the city’s Buskin Club had produced many plays beginning in the 1870s. The group had acquired a great deal of scenery, including a curtain portraying Yosemite Valley, painted by a Boston artist in one day.

Buskin productions were so popular that theater enthusiasts would line up at night on the sidewalk in front of D. Bugbee & Co., the ticket vendor, to get the choicest seats when the store opened in the morning.

The residents of many cities yearn for a golden age that may exist mainly in the their imaginations, and the reporter for the NEWS was no exception even at that relatively early date. After providing readers with a long list of famous actors and actresses who had graced the stage of Norombega Hall, he concluded, “We don’t get such attractions now – dramatic art is not all that it used to be, perhaps.”

By the end of its existence, “an unfortunate shopfront addition” had impaired the building’s lofty exterior, according to Deborah Thompson in her monumental history of Bangor architecture. So perhaps it was actually a blessing of sorts when the wooden structure – devoid of purpose, its appearance marred – was destroyed in the great fire of 1911.

In any event, the voices of Ulysses S. Grant and Edwin Booth still echo down the corridors of time for those park sitters among us with some imagination.

Wayne Reilly writes a history column each Monday in the Style section. During his 28 years at the Bangor Daily News, he worked as a reporter, editorial page writer and assignment editor.