BANGOR – A pair of excavators made quick work Tuesday of the Main Street Inn, knocking down pieces of wall and later grabbing mouthfuls of debris with jagged metal teeth to be loaded onto trucks for a trip to the local landfill.

The small, two-story hotel is one of two on Main Street being razed to make way for a $72 million gambling complex being built by Penn National Gaming Inc. The Pennsylvania-based gaming and racing company last November opened a temporary slots facility called Hollywood Slots at Bangor in the former Miller’s Restaurant.

The other hotel, the Holiday Inn-Civic Center, remains open for business but is scheduled to be purchased by Penn National by the end of this year, Jon Johnson, general manager of Hollywood Slots at Bangor, said Tuesday during a visit to the demolition site.

The demolition of the hotel, built in 1961 by Forrest and Betty Grant at a cost of $200,000, marked the first physical event in a development drama that so far has unfolded largely on paper in the form of various agreements and contracts.

The project was history in the making – or unmaking, depending on one’s viewpoint.

“This is an exciting day for us,” Johnson said as he watched the hotel begin to come down. “It’s the beginning of our $72 million permanent facility.”

“I’m just a curiosity seeker,” Jack Rogan, a former Bangor resident now living in Lucerne-In-Maine, said while sitting in his car parked in a lot facing the action.

Rogan, who used to own Rogans Memorials before his retirement, said he looked forward to the permanent slots facility, which he expected will do well because of the interim facility’s success.

“I think it’s great. I think it’s done wonders for the city,” Rogan said.

Holden resident Kimberly Cummings brought her two sons, Lenox, 2 1/2, and Jagger, 4 1/2, to witness a little history in the making. Cummings said that the boys greatly enjoyed watching videos about heavy machinery, like the excavators and other big trucks at the Main Street work site.

“They love construction,” she said, while watching the heavy machinery gobble up the inn from the corner of Main and Buck streets.

“Demolition,” Lenox corrected from his perch in his mother’s arms.

“This is dusty, dirty duty,” Councilor Frank Farrington, one of several councilors on hand, quipped.

As the walls and roof crumbled and slumped into piles of cinderblocks and broken boards, a worker from Cianbro Corp., Penn National’s demolition contractor, watered the debris with a hose in an effort to keep the dust down.

Council colleague Gerry Palmer recalled the days when the bar at the hotel, originally called the Wedgewood Arms Motor Inn, was a favorite haunt of Bangor Daily News employees who worked across Main Street.

The removal of the exterior finish from one end of the building uncovered the inn’s original name, painted in blue on what once was an outside wall. The inn hadn’t been called that in well over a decade.

“A lot of history is coming down today,” he said.

Tuesday was a bittersweet day for Melody Plourde of Greenbush, a longtime inn employee who briefly worked there in the mid-1980s before leaving the area. She returned to the inn in 1995 after moving back to Maine and worked there, most recently as a desk clerk, right up until the day it closed last month.

“It grew on me,” she said of her experience at the inn. “You become close to everybody. [Fellow workers] were like a second family,” she said after visiting the demolition area for one last look.

While she couldn’t recall any famous guests, she did say there were plenty of regulars, most of them business people. The inn became a flurry of activity during major events at Bass Park, such as the annual basketball tournaments, shows and expositions.

According to Steve Lambert, the slots facility’s general manager, Penn National’s permanent facility will take up much of the Riverside Block for which the company is paying more than $7 million. The site encompasses the land between Lincoln and Dutton streets from Main Street to the railroad tracks.

The roughly 120,000-square-foot permanent complex will house up to 1,500 slot machines and will include an attached parking garage, restaurant and retail space and the company’s off-track-betting now operating out of the grandstand at Bangor Raceway.

Construction of the new complex is slated to begin next year and be finished by mid-2008, Johnson said.

The demolition project was expected to take all day to complete.

The two houses behind the inn, on the inn side of lower Lincoln Street, are slated to be torn down today, Johnson said. He said the empty lot then will be used for Hollywood Slot’s overflow parking, now based at Bass Park.