Broad Street was once an important thoroughfare in Bangor, an unbroken path from the city’s center parallel to the Kenduskeag Stream to the Penobscot River. It ran beside three squares – West Market, Pickering and Hay Market – each a bustling commercial center for farmers and merchants. Its docks played a significant role in the Queen City’s maritime trade.

To paraphrase Carl Sandburg, it was a street with big shoulders and a lot of Bangor’s heavy lifting occurred there.

Today, Broad Street is a ghost of its former self. Dominated architecturally by a huge parking garage, one end has been amputated by the intrusion of a seven-story office building. Its docks are long gone along with the warehouses. Two of its squares have been turned into empty parks, while the third, Hay Market, was obliterated by a massive bank.

Had some malignant force set out to punish Broad Street for being part of the notorious Devil’s Half Acre in the 19th century, or for hosting the beginnings of the great fire of 1911, it could not have done a better job.

Take a walk on Broad Street a century ago very late at night. The place had character.

A Bangor Daily News reporter traveled with a trio of the city’s finest into the street’s heart of darkness one wind-whipped winter night back then. Broad Street and its connecting alleys were a haunted place of desolate wharves and blackened warehouses inhabited by large rats and hoboes lurking in the shadows like Halloween monsters.

The beat was “the most difficult and dangerous in the entire city,” said Capt. Thomas O’Donahue, who led the intrepid band, which included Sgt. George Pierce and Officer Frank Golden. “If ever another murder is committed, it will be done I think along these deserted wharves,” the captain said.

The anonymous reporter had come along with three of the nine policemen who formed the “second night squad.” These men patrolled the “light route,” named presumably because they would see dawn before they were done. The nine fanned out in different directions throughout the downtown, staying always within whistle call of one another.

They were muffled to the ears in long woolen coats, each armed with a Colt .38-caliber revolver. Each carried a whistle attached to a chain around his waist and a dark lantern that would emit a beam of light when a sliding panel was lifted.

Capt. O’Donahue told the reporter that the light route consisted of “a thorough investigation … of every alley, every building, almost every foot of ground in the business section of the city.

“Every door of every building is tested to make sure it is locked; every window opening near the ground is examined – not once, but many times; every alley where a tramp or vagabond might lurk is illumined by the rays of our dark lanterns.”

Armed with an ample store of purple prose, the reporter and his three guardians set off at 12:30 a.m. into West Market Square, through the opening between the Wheelwright and Jones blocks onto Broad Street, and then immediately down an alley to the wharves along the Kenduskeag Stream, which was wider then.

“From the show windows of the ‘all night’ restaurants [including most likely the illegal liquor establishments that dotted the area], lights gleamed coldly out into the frosty air; overhead the sky was a peculiar green. … And along the waterfront where the moon cast flickering shadows on the silent buildings, a cruel wind whirled the loose snow into a thousand fantastic forms,” penned the reporter in his best dime-novel style.

Considering the cold and the absence of sailors and log drivers wandering the streets at this time of year, the dangers were probably minimal. Nevertheless there were adventures to be had by the imaginative.

The first was an encounter with a half-frozen hobo lying in an alleyway. He was instructed by Capt. O’Donahue to be off to the jail where he could expect a warm bed.

“They burrow around the dock like rats,” threatening the area with fire from discarded cigar stubs, explained O’Donahue. This fear proved prophetic in light of the great Bangor fire that started in the area a few years later.

Lacking anything more exciting to write about, the reporter continued his lurid description of the area: “The little party was now in a labyrinth of dark passages in upper Broad Street – passages untouched by the faint light of the moon. Old beams creaked complainingly in the night wind. Rats, gaunt and ravenous, ran squealing from beneath the feet. … On all sides was darkness, a sense of mystery, the brooding stillness of the night – what wonder that even the stalwart patrolmen of the Bangor police force are sometimes glad to travel by twos.”

A second adventure occurred when they heard three shrill notes of a police whistle – a call for help – from across the Kenduskeag in the vicinity of Lower Exchange Street. The trio of police, with the reporter running for his life close behind, raced down Broad Street and across the bridge to find the night yard master at the railroad station with a smoking gun in his hand. Patrolmen Finnigan and Smith had also arrived.

“Tramps,” explained the yard man laconically. “They were sneaking along behind one of the cars, so I took a shot at them – in the air of course – for luck. I think they went up Washington Street.”

“Oh!” intoned the police quintet.

Back across the bridge, the group crossed the Maine Central Railroad tracks and continued down Front Street. They passed the big storehouse of Armour & Co. Three bullet holes marked where a fusillade of shots had been exchanged one night between two policemen and “safeblowers” escaping across the bridge with “about the entire contents of the Brewer Savings Bank.”

The journey ended with a spooky inspection of Deep Alley, “an apparently interminable alley, blinded by its own turns, which winds in and out between tall brick buildings from Water Street nearly to West Market Square,” recounted the reporter in his story that appeared with photographs on Dec. 27, 1904. “It is not a pleasant place at midnight to a man suffering from an attack of ‘nerves.’ Even the patrolmen never penetrate it alone; they usually go by twos, while a third stands guard at the entrance within easy call. It is an alley within which all kinds of disagreeable things may happen.”

One day recently I walked in the area described in the old newspaper account, armed with a 1905 map of Bangor. Alas, all had changed. I think I found the beginning of Deep Alley, but the “labyrinthine” nature of the neighborhood has vanished along with the warehouses and dives. Gone is the train station that was across the stream at the foot of Exchange Street, and, as I have mentioned, Broad Street has been battered and forked and generally tamed. Fires, urban renewal and other unfortunate mishaps have all taken their toll.

As Bangor residents continue to look for some purpose for their downtown, they should pay homage to the people who came before – the sailors and loggers who paid the bills, the vagabonds and thieves who preyed on the unsuspecting, the policemen who risked their lives, and at least one anonymous reporter who understood the area’s romance on a dark winter night.

Richard R. Shaw’s new book “Bangor in Vintage Postcards” was particularly useful for gaining an understanding of the historic geography of the city’s downtown at the turn of the last century. Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.