Some of Bangor’s most vulnerable residents are moving into a newly overhauled historic building that will offer them some of the best views of the Penobscot River the city has to offer.

Many of the rooms, which still smell of fresh paint, have windows overlooking the river, where residents will be able to watch boats floating past and the occasional eagle soaring overhead.

In fact, some of the rooms are in a section of the building that actually juts out into the water.

“It’s like being in a cruise ship,” said Jeff McDonnell, chairman of the board of directors for Shaw House Inc., which took on the project through the development entity it formed for that purpose.

McDonnell said board members toured the facility a month ago.

“They were really overwhelmed. To see the transition – it’s breathtaking,” he said.

At long last, the ambitious $6.8 million Bangor Waterworks redevelopment project is on the verge of completion.

The plan: Convert a collection of century-old brick buildings into 35 rent-subsidized efficiency apartments for very low-income adults who are at risk of homelessness.

Rent payments will amount to a third of each renter’s income, project officials have said.

The first dozen or so efficiency units are ready for occupancy. The first group of tenants began moving in earlier this month.

“We’re a month ahead of schedule,” said Lin Lufkin, project manager for Nickerson & O’Day, the Brewer contractor chosen to tackle the effort’s construction component, which primarily involves the main structure.

Most of the interior and exterior work is finished. It involved repairing the brick facade, replacing deteriorated wood and painting the trim a complementary dark green.

The only big task on the to-do list is to lay another layer of hot top on the access drive and parking lot, Lufkin said.

The long, narrow gatehouse building and the engineer’s house will be tackled later, though no specific plans are in place. To make sure the gatehouse remains ready for redevelopment, its roof has been shored up to prevent further deterioration and its broken windows screened to keep out birds which over the years had used the buildings as their restroom.

The waterworks was built in 1875 for water filtration and, later, power generation. But after decades of neglect, the site had deteriorated considerably.

The complex of brick buildings on State Street, between the Maine Central Railroad tracks and the Penobscot River, had been vacant since the 1970s. Then it became the focus of a $6.8 million makeover led by Shaw House Development Inc., a for-profit subsidiary of Shaw House Inc., the nonprofit group that runs a shelter for homeless teens on Union Street.

The development partnership, called Waterworks LLP, is composed of the city of Bangor, the National Equity Fund’s low-income housing tax credit program, Bangor Savings Bank, Maine State Housing Authority, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, WBRC Architects-Engineers, Nickerson & O’Day, Shaw House and Shaw House Development Inc.

Construction workers are busy with the last remaining details, including cleaning up bits of construction debris and washing the waterworks’ tall, gracefully arched windows, which give the rooms a light and airy feel.

Each single-occupancy unit, about 16 by 20 feet in size, has its own bathroom and minikitchen as well as storage space. Each room is wired for cable television and has two telephone jacks, one of which is for computer data.

The three handicapped-accessible rooms are slightly different. They have larger bathrooms with accessible showers. The kitchen sink, countertop and range are all within reach of someone using a wheelchair.

The reception area is located at the main entrance, as are office space for case management staff and links to a variety of community services and resources.

One of the waterworks’ showpieces is the Deane pump, an enormous black cast-iron structure that has been restored and displayed in the central common area. The pump can be viewed from two levels, the ground floor and the mezzanine level above it.

Shaw House Development initially planned to start work in spring 2003. Instead, the project became mired in legal problems after the railroad fought to block a rail and pedestrian crossing key to the project.

The legal dispute finally was resolved in the developer’s favor in the summer of 2005. A complicated real estate closing involving several project partners was concluded that fall, clearing the way for the start of construction.

That work began at the end of 2005 with demolition of the filter plant, the newest of the three structures, to make way for parking, and work to stabilize the structures and raise the floor level to just above the 100-year flood plain level. That took 3,000 yards of concrete to accomplish, Lufkin said while conducting a tour of the complex.

“It was more or less any other project. It was one step at a time,” Lufkin said. “The unusual part was trying our best to preserve the historically significant parts of the building,” which is made up of four kinds of brick that had to be matched.

One element that could not be saved, because of safety and cost considerations, was the tall brick stack that once was a distinctive part of the building’s silhouette.

An unexpected problem that arose involved the roof, which had to be replaced, Lufkin said.

“There went the contingency,” he said.

That the project happened at all is a miracle, said Stan Moses, the city’s assistant community development director.

Developers have being trying to make a go of redeveloping the waterworks since the 1970s, but the site’s size limitations, renovation costs and the need to cross the railroad tracks for access proved too much for private developers to contend with.

“I think that being able to bring a significant historical property back from potential demolition is an enormous coup,” said Roxanne Eflin, executive director of Maine Preservation, based in Portland.

“What [the partnership] has done is demonstrate how, with some creative financing and the right people and good leadership, a project like this can come together.

“Demolition is forever,” she said. Recycling buildings is such an important thing to do now, not only for environmental reasons but for a community’s soul, she said.

“Heritage is something that we all feel deeply about, but in various ways. When we lose part of our visual heritage, we lose a part of our story, a part of our past,” she said.

Built first in 1875 were the wheelhouse, pump house and hose house. The 1907 filter house was constructed after an outbreak of 540 cases of waterborne typhoid fever. Later came the new pump house and wheelhouse, and a long, narrow gatehouse.

The waterworks was expanded and upgraded as the city began generating electricity, an activity that continued for several years after the water operation moved to Otis in 1959. Bangor gets its drinking water from the Floods Pond watershed.

Before undergoing its extreme makeover, the waterworks was dank, gloomy and a bit scary, factors that won it a starring role in the 1990 filming of “Graveyard Shift,” a movie based on a Stephen King novel.

Among the ideas for the complex that have come and gone have been hotels, restaurants, condominiums, a hydropower generation plant, and a freshwater aquarium and river education facility.

More recently, Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems wanted to turn the complex into office space for Eastern Maine Medical Center, its densely developed hospital campus next door to the waterworks.

Moses said EMHS stuck with the project for several years but was forced to drop it when renovation costs reached 21/2 times the cost for new construction, a factor the health care giants could not justify from a fiscal standpoint.

EMHS “couldn’t do it, and this little nonprofit [Shaw House Inc.] pulled it off. It’s a great testament to vision, the creativity and the perseverance of everyone who’s involved,” Moses said.

Had the waterworks complex been razed, Moses said, it’s unlikely the site ever would have been redeveloped.

“There wouldn’t have been enough land area,” Moses said. “And there also was the railroad tracks to get across, a problem that was overcome recently with the installation of traffic lights and the improvement of the rail crossing. ”

As city officials came to see it, the Shaw House project not only would preserve a historically significant city facility but also would fill a need for affordable housing.

Simply put, their options boiled down to reusing the structure or demolishing it – at the city’s expense.

To that end, city councilors agreed to put the $1 million earmarked for demolition into the reuse effort.