Auditorium’s end approaches Memories balanced by need for renovation or replacement

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BANGOR – Bill Fletcher vividly remembers the first time he brought a boys basketball team onto the “new” Bangor Auditorium floor.

It was early 1956, and the Mattanawcook Academy Lynx were part of the first Class M tournament at the new building, which had opened the previous fall.

Even then there were obstacles, only those were related to construction rather than obsolescence.

“We had to walk in on some plywood they laid down because to get to the court we were walking on dirt actually,” said Fletcher, who today serves as director of the Eastern Maine Classes B, C and D tournament.

“I think they may have been putting in some kind of a system to create ice and it wasn’t finished yet.”

Fletcher and the Lynx went on to win the regional championship, one of the first of generations full of basketball memories forged in the eastern Maine landmark with the unique V-shaped roof.

Today, nearly five decades later, the question is when and how, not if, the Auditorium will be replaced or undergo massive renovations.

Such public-assembly buildings typically have a shelf life of 20 to 30 years, according to Mike Dyer, since 1988 the director of Bangor’s Bass Park complex that includes the Bangor Auditorium. Effects of aging have strained the facility’s capacity to cope with modern-day usage, leaving Dyer and the City of Bangor to come up with patchwork solutions to problems until a funding source is found for a replacement.

And that is proving to be no easy task, given that Dyer estimates the replacement cost to be as much as $50 million, with up to $15 million needed for a major renovation.

“The building itself, wherever you look, is old,” said Dyer. “Things are failing. If it’s just cracks in the outside hallways, if it’s big problems with the heating plant, if it’s the roof … it’s just a combination of things. The building is old.

“Probably the thing that worries us the most is not what we’re aware of that we can deal with right now, it’s what’s going to happen that we really haven’t taken into account. We try to stay ahead of where we’ve been and what problems we can reasonably think are going to happen. But it’s the unknown stuff, it’s when some major sewer line that’s been underground for years is going to break, that really concerns us.”

The hallowed halls

The “new” Bangor Auditorium opened on Oct. 1, 1955, built over the previous 17 months at a cost of $1.4 million. At the time, it was the second-largest facility of its kind in New England, smaller than only the Boston Garden.

Its primary architectural feature is its V-shaped roof, designed to help the structure brace against high winds and to reduce the area that required heating.

The building would become a prime venue for concerts, conventions, trade shows, ice shows, the Anah Temple Shrine Circus, even a 1978 presidential town meeting with Jimmy Carter – a diversity of activities that brought all of Eastern Maine together.

But to many Mainers, the Bangor Auditorium is synonymous with one thing: basketball.

One of the earliest games on the Auditorium floor was an NBA regular-season contest between the Boston Celtics and Syracuse Nationals on Dec. 30, 1955, a game won by the Celtics 110-103.

The Auditorium also became the regular-season home of the John Bapst and the Bangor High basketball teams, as well as the Eastern Maine tournaments.

“We had good crowds back then,” said Fletcher. “Of course there was a lot less going on. But say if Stearns was playing Bangor, you’d have 5,000 people there. If Brewer was playing Bangor, or Bangor was playing Old Town or Bapst, they’d fill this place for a regular-season game.”

The facility played host to a pair of Continental Basketball Association minor league teams, the Maine Lumberjacks from 1978 to 1983 and the Maine Windjammers during the 1985-86 season.

The University of Maine also played home games in Bangor for several years while Alfond Arena on campus was being renovated to accommodate basketball.

But for modern-day basketball memories, the high school basketball tournaments at the Bangor Auditorium represent the confluence of small-town Maine and big-time dreams.

Two magical moments stand out: Mike Thurston’s buzzer-beating shot from near midcourt to give Caribou the 1969 state Class LL championship and Joe Campbell’s flip-in of a missed desperation shot to give Bangor High the 2001 state Class A title over a Deering of Portland team that featured current University of Maryland standout Nik Caner-Medley.

But not all such memorable moments require championship ramifications. Ask nearly anyone who has stepped onto the Auditorium floor over the last 49 years, and he or she can remember nearly every detail of their tournament experience, from the dead spots in the court to the roar of the fans located virtually on top of the court in a compact bleacher arrangement that from ground level seemingly rises to the sky.

Ordman Alley has more than four decades of such memories, first as a player at Beals High School in the early 1960s, and later as the architect of the legendary Jonesport-Beals boys basketball dynasty that won five straight state championships during the early 1970s and has claimed nine gold balls and 13 Eastern Maine titles overall under his guidance.

“It was always a big thing from the time I was growing up,” said Alley.

For Jonesport-Beals fans, each February the Auditorium routinely becomes the “Ordietorium,” as reflected in a sign placed prominently along the railing that separates the bleachers from the building’s upper deck.

For Alley and thousands of others from the coastal communities of Down East Maine or the rugged woods-based towns to the north and west, the trip to the Auditorium is a true rite of winter.

“It’s different, it’s a special place. I’ll hate to see it go,” said Alley. “Every year it’s always one of our goals, to get up to the Auditorium. It’s the same for all the teams down here, not just to get to Bangor but to get up to Bangor and play on the Auditorium floor.

“It means so much to everybody down here.”

The longest night

Perhaps the first public sign that the Bangor Auditorium was aging came on a mid-February night in 1986.

The Eastern Maine Class B finals were on tap, though jeopardized by a significant Nor’easter that dumped heavy, wet snow on eastern Maine – including the Auditorium roof.

Still, 5,000 basketball fans stormed into the Queen City to watch more high school basketball memories being made, and thousands more curled up on their couches to watch the games on public television.

Shortly before the girls final between Houlton and Mount View of Thorndike was due to start, the roof started leaking, dripping water near midcourt.

As one Dexter fan donned a raincoat and occasionally danced near the midcourt area, the start of that game was delayed by nearly 90 minutes, with the initial solution having an Auditorium worker wipe up the dripping water when play was at either end of the court. Later, a somewhat more permanent solution was devised, with a worker being lifted to the roof to hang a bucket from the rafters to catch the water.

And much, much later – 12:18 a.m., to be exact – Dexter emerged as the Eastern Maine Class B boys champion, outlasting Rockland in five overtimes.

It proved to be one of the more memorable games in Maine high school basketball history regardless of the roof-related complications. Rockland’s John Post and Dan Gargan etched their names into tourney lore with game-saving shots in overtime, but a Dexter team featuring twins Mark and Mike Haines, Steve Bell, Marty Keaveney, and Kevin Edgecomb proved resilient to the post-midnight end.

“It was a surreal night from start to finish,” said current Dexter High boys basketball coach Peter Murray, an assistant to Ed Guiski on the 1986 team.

“And when you get down to the basketball part of it, there were just so many last-second heroic shots, one after another.”

Bell, now his alma mater’s athletic administrator, recalls the evening from the perspective of a high school senior. It was all about basketball, and even the leaking roof wouldn’t stop the Tigers from winning their second straight EM title.

“Before the game, [the leak] was little bit of a concern,” Bell said. “But they did a great job cleaning it up, and they had the leak stopped after halftime, so it really wasn’t even a problem. They went out there with buckets and tarps and kids with towels, so I don’t recall it being a factor in the game at all.”

Financing dilemma

Leaks in the roof have been part of Bangor Auditorium lore ever since that 1986 Eastern Maine Class B final.

For several years, tarpaulins were higher above courtside than the many radio announcers from Fort Kent to Augusta and from Dover-Foxcroft to Calais who bring the EM tournament to the masses.

Today, the tarpaulins are gone, testimony to work done over the years to make the roof last a little longer.

Other relatively recent modernizations include upgraded locker rooms and a new food court.

But Dyer and others are concerned about what might happen next given all that hasn’t been replaced in nearly 50 years.

“We almost had a potentially big problem with one of the sewer lines backing up,” said Fletcher. “We were pretty close to the point last year one afternoon where we might have been closed down because of public health concerns, but it worked out OK.”

Armed with that warning, Dyer sought to address that issue in advance of this year’s tournament.

“What we did this time is bring in a plumber, and they had a little camera on the end of a snake that they sent it down through all of our drains,” he said. “They looked clear, they looked good, but it doesn’t really tell you how solid those things are. That black iron has been sitting in the ground since 1954.”

Dyer sees the current Bangor Auditorium being viable for about five more years, provided adequate attention is given to the most pressing problems that arise in the interim.

“That was my estimate of how long we can really hold things together before you really have to look at doing something else,” he said. “At some point, and that may be five years or it may be seven -hopefully it’s longer rather than shorter – the number of problems that we identify are just going to start to pile up to the point where people are just going to throw their hands up in the air and say, ‘Look, no matter how much money we throw at it, it’s going to be a losing battle; we’ve got to do something right now.'”

Artists’ renditions of a replacement Auditorium have been drawn up, he said, based on plans that include “some pretty specific ideas” of needed seating capacity and the amount of open square footage recommended to accommodate trade shows, garden shows, and other consumer events.

The biggest challenge to replacing the Auditorium is simple: money.

Efforts to establish a local-option sales tax to fund the project have failed in the Legislature, and reports earlier this year said it was unlikely that legislative sentiment was going to change soon in the face of other state budgetary issues deemed more pressing.

Voters statewide last November approved the establishment of a racino at the Bangor Raceway within the Bass Park complex , with some of the profits earmarked for the Auditorium project.

“The obvious answer to all of this is money for a new facility and how is it going to be raised, and will it be done in a way that is equitable and allows enough money to be raised for the job to be done right,” Dyer said.

“Obviously the city at some level hopes that revenues from slot machines at some point produces some of that money. It remains to be seen whether that will be enough.

“It’s a matter of figuring out that you can pay for it now or pay for it later, but somehow you’re going to pay for it, and just getting that across to people is the most frustrating thing.”

Dyer and other Bangor officials hope the city’s status as a service center to outlying communities also would play a role in its efforts to secure public funding for the Auditorium project, although it hasn’t helped yet.

They cite the Eastern Maine basketball tournament as a prime example of how the city, and the Auditorium, serve a region far beyond Greater Bangor, with as many as 70,000 fans attending the tournament each year.

“In my opinion, the tournament is a prime example of what the building exists for. It’s the best of what the building exists for,” said Dyer. “It brings a lot of people from out of the immediate Bangor market to Bangor. They spend money here, but they also spend money in town, and to me that’s the ultimate reason for a public-assembly facility of this type to exist in any market.”

A tournament atmosphere

Dick Durost has been coming to the high school basketball tournament at the Bangor Auditorium since his playing days at the former Aroostook Central Institute in Mars Hill in the early 1960s.

“It’s just been a big part of my winter for more than 40 years,” said Durost, who has since visited the Auditorium in a variety of basketball capacities – boys basketball coach, girls basketball coach, official, school administrator, athletic director, member of the Eastern Maine Class A basketball committee, and currently as executive director of the Maine Principals Association.

He has witnessed first-hand the aging of the Auditorium, and understands the building will not last forever.

“As a fan I’m torn between all of the tradition of the Auditorium and the knowledge that every facility at some point needs to be renovated or replaced,” he said. “Everybody realizes at some point in time that something has to happen.”

Currently the MPA is in the fourth year of its current five-year contracts with all three facilities in Maine that play host to the high school basketball tournaments: the Bangor Auditorium, the Augusta Civic Center, and the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland.

Next year the MPA and the host sites will hold discussions about extending those arrangements, Durost said.

“We have good relationships with all three cities,” he said. “To be honest, the facility and the condition of the facility has to be part of the conversation. A year from now, hopefully things will be clearer in terms of what the city plans to do.”

It’s highly probable the Bangor area will remain the hub of Eastern Maine tournament activity for decades to come, particularly given the scarcity of facilities capable of hosting such an event and the need in Durost’s eyes to address the geographic considerations of the basketball hotbeds of Down East Maine and Aroostook County.

If there is to be any change in the near future, it may involve an effort to rotate the Eastern Maine Class A tournament between Bangor and Augusta, a reflection of the state’s continuing population shift toward southern Maine.

With longtime Class A schools Presque Isle and Caribou now in Class B, the state’s northernmost Class A school is Old Town – just 14 miles north of Bangor.

“With Presque Isle and Caribou now in Class B, it changes some of the dynamic,” Durost said. “We have no plans, and there have been no formal discussions about any changes, but I won’t be surprised if the topic comes up for discussion by some of the ‘A’ schools as we look ahead.”

Fletcher, for one, thinks the likelihood is strong that some sort of change is in the offing.

“Once John Bapst goes back to ‘B,’ which I’m sure they will, then you’ve only got five ‘A’ schools north of Waterville. I have serious doubts that they will draw fans down there [in Augusta] as they do in Eastern Maine. There are a lot of fans here that don’t have a particular team, they’re here because they like basketball.”

And because they are drawn to the unique setting for basketball that is the Bangor Auditorium.

Generations of memories serve as motivation to future generations to take their turn on the Auditorium floor, amid an old-fashioned setting that while physically obsolete remains a vibrant, festive museum of sorts to those who view high school basketball as an important part of growing up in northern, eastern, and central Maine.

“I’ve got kids of my own who are coming up through, and I hope they hang on here long enough so they get that experience,” said Bell. “It’s really something you want your kids – and I don’t mean just my kids, but the kids who are at our school now – to have this opportunity. It’s just a great opportunity; you really can’t put it into words.”

Ultimately, there is a sense of certainty about the future of the current Bangor Auditorium, and the knowledge that change is in the offing.

“I’m glad that I’m coaching now while we’re still playing here,” said Peter Murray, the Dexter boys basketball coach. “I’d hate to think that my coaching career would be in another facility. I realize that inevitably it’s going to happen and it needs to happen, but the fact of the matter is that as I was growing up and when anyone talked about going to the tournament, this is where you wanted to go.

“You could put the Eastern Maine tournament in any number of other facilities and it would not be the same, no way. I’m just glad that I’m coaching during this era so I can coach here.”