When the Bangor Auditorium opened on Oct. 1, 1955, it was hailed as New England’s second-largest indoor sports and entertainment venue. The only bigger one was the Boston Garden, according to news reports from that time.

For at least the last decade, though, many in the city have been saying that the facility has outlived its usefulness.

Its distinctive V-shaped roof has proven problematic. Although it has undergone modifications, its heating system remains inefficient. Its electrical system is no longer adequate for today’s needs.

Its lobby and food court areas are too small to accommodate large crowds, it has too few bathrooms, and its handicap access is less than ideal.

In 2000, city officials vowed they would shut the 5,400-seat auditorium down by Dec. 31, 2004. Without a means to replace it, the city instead poured more money into temporary fixes.

“The auditorium will serve as long as it has to serve – but hopefully that won’t be too long,” said Mike Dyer, whose job as director of Bass Park since 1988 has involved coming up with a patchwork of temporary fixes to keep the building going.

That is because despite its problems, the auditorium remains an important component of the local economy, attracting an estimated 300,000 people to Bangor each year, Dyer said.

Local thinking about a new facility, likely an arena with meeting and conference space, began to change with the arrival of a funding source, namely revenues from Hollywood Slots at Bangor, soon to be replaced by the larger Hollywood Slots Hotel and Raceway.

City Finance Director Debbie Cyr said Friday that the city had received nearly $3.3 million from Hollywood Slots through the end of December.

The city stands to receive more revenue when the new slots complex opens, though it will likely take a few years to get a feel for how much more. It will be needed. Early estimates on the price of a new arena run as high as $100 million with costs expected to rise rapidly with each passing year. As officials contemplate a future facility, the history of the existing structure serves as a reminder of the importance of planning well.

A grand debut

A dream 25 years in the making, according to news accounts from the time, the Bangor Auditorium was built over 17 months at a cost of $1.4 million. It was built at Bass Park after the city explored and rejected two other sites, one downtown at Abbott Square and the other near busy Dow Air Force Base.

The first 155 days of the 17-month construction project were plagued by weather problems, including 48 days of rain and two hurricanes.

When it finally opened on Oct. 1, 1955, the auditorium was considered a state-of-the-art facility. It had an ice-making system consisting of, among other things, 8.5 miles of subsurface piping. In fact, the opening day festivities featured exhibitions by the prevailing New England junior women’s figure skating champion and eastern senior men’s champion.

Though the ice sheet was too small to accommodate regulation ice hockey, it was used for figure skating performances and public skating sessions.

The city scuttled the system in the mid-1960s after the pipes burst and the freezing equipment failed, according to John Frawley, who was city engineer at that time.

The first headliner to appear in the city’s new pride and joy was the combined bands of the Dorsey brothers, Tommy and Jimmy. Nearly 5,000 people from every part of Maine attended, including then Gov. Edmund S. Muskie and movie star Gary Merrill, who during a brief, tumultuous marriage to actress Bette Davis lived in a house in Wells they dubbed “Witch Way.”

The auditorium quickly established itself as a prime venue for concerts, conventions, trade shows, ice shows, the Shrine Circus and the Y Spring Fair and more. Political figures, including former President Jimmy Carter, have appeared there, as have nationally known media personalities, including Don Imus.

The auditorium, however, became perhaps best known as the region’s basketball “mecca,” hosting events ranging from Class A, B, C and D high school championships to the Harlem Globe Trotters.

Tarbell’s ‘pet’

The auditorium’s distinctive V-shaped roof was an innovation of the late Eaton Tarbell, a larger than life figure and resourceful architect who, it seems, rarely met an angle he didn’t like.

In an address he wrote for the auditorium’s opening day, he referred to the project as “my pet,” the product of more than “seven years of schemes, plans, designs and hard work on the part of not only myself and associates but also local civic clubs and officials.”

At the time, Tarbell noted that there were only two similar structures in existence, one in Raleigh, N.C., and the other in Sweden.

He said that the building’s signature roof was designed with two things in mind. It offered better bracing from wind than a pitched roof – and reduced the area requiring heating by 235,000 cubic feet.

Francis Zelz, 83, of Bangor was a young draftsman working in Tarbell’s office when the auditorium was being designed and built.

“It was crazy. It was so radical in its rough shape. I say rough because it was a big gommy type of thing with roofs that sloped down inside,” he said.

“Tarbell was notorious for putting out stuff that was different,” Zelz said. “If it was good, it was different.”

“And, of course, the city didn’t have money even to landscape. We, Tarbell’s agents so to speak, helped the contractor. We’d go up there evenings.

“We weren’t obligated to do that, of course, but they needed a hand and several of us from the firm – we weren’t obligated, of course – turned out to give them a hand on a nice summer evening, raking the lawn, getting the weeds out and the rocks and planting shrubbery and whatever else,” he said.

As Zelz recalls it, the city’s directives to the design firm were that the auditorium have “no obstructed views, no seats behind a post. It was expressed how serious they were.”

Another directive was to keep within budget, which meant having a floor area six inches too short on each end for regulation hockey, he said.

“There was a limited budget, and they wanted to get as many seats as they could get for that budget price that they had, so that was the main reason from my point of view” for the auditorium’s original configuration.

“Basketball was the big moneymaker as far as that place was concerned, and because of what we did, they generated enough money with enough seats to accommodate these sports groups, which helped pay the bills that the city ran up,” he said.

Showing its age

Despite the fond memories and good intentions, the auditorium has long since reached the end of its projected life span, which for such buildings typically is 20 to 30 years.

Dyer notes it isn’t unusual for public assembly facilities such as the Bangor Auditorium to serve as “loss leaders.”

According to Barrett, the city has subsidized the Bass Park complex for several years. This year, the city kicked in $452,956 toward the complex’s total operating and maintenance budget of just over $2 million.

Though designed to save construction and heating costs, the roof eventually became a maintenance nightmare. It began to show its age during the Eastern Maine Class B finals in Feb. 1986.

As a nor’easter blew through Bangor, it left behind wet, heavy snow, which accumulated in the roof’s valley and began to melt, causing a small leak to spring above mid-court.

At first, the water was wiped up. When that failed, an auditorium worker was hoisted to the roof to hang a bucket from the rafters. The bucket was replaced by tarps, which became a semi-regular feature over the ensuing years.

The roof leaked on Kenny Rogers’ head during a 1988 concert, prompting the country music star to quip, “I thought I’d do a free show here, so you could get your roof fixed. But I’d have to come on a day when it wasn’t raining.”

Despite some recent work to increase the efficiency of its steam heating system, the auditorium remains costly to heat.

On a cold winter day, the auditorium can consume as much as 700 gallons of No. 5 heating fuel. Annual oil use now is holding steady at about 55,000 gallons a year, down from as much as 80,000 to 90,000 gallons a year.

Hot days also pose a problem. The auditorium has no air conditioning – which can make the “nosebleed sections” near the roof miserable in summertime.

Looking ahead

So, what does the city need in terms of a new arena?

Though plans are still in the conceptual stage, current thinking calls for a 6,000- to 7,500-seat multiple use arena. The complex also might include about 30,000 square feet of space for meetings and conferences, a parking garage and a hotel, though no firm decisions have been made.

The new arena also might feature an ice sheet for hockey and skating performances, though that could be added later.

The latest cost projections suggest that the arena complex will cost between $90 million and $100 million to construct.

After looking at locations around the city, it appears the general preference is Bass Park, though exactly where has yet to be decided.

Items that have frequently appeared on the community’s “wish lists” for the future facility include a floor area large enough for hockey (which also happens to be the size many traveling shows are set up for), a full-service kitchen and storage space and easier access for pedestrians and vehicles.

Community leaders who attended a recent arena “stakeholders” meeting at City Hall were split on what its primary purpose should be.

Some argued for large-scale arts and cultural events, such as concerts, others saw more benefit in convention and meeting facilities, which are more likely to draw people from outside the area and for multiple days at a time. Some wanted both.

City Manager Edward Barrett recently said the current plan is to begin designing the new facility around 2010 and to complete construction by about 2012.

He said, however, the City Council is considering appointing a special task force to help move the project along “because I know there is a lot of interest in seeing the shovels in the ground tomorrow.”

Location, location, location

After having managed the auditorium for 20 years, Dyer has some thoughts about what Bangor’s future public-gathering facility should be like.

“The first thing I would look at is siting,” he said. Ideally, the city should “lay out the [complex] so that the arena or public assembly space and meeting and convention center space can both be accessed and run events concurrently.

“That is one of the areas we could see some immediate growth in,” he said. “That would be a huge asset right out of the box. Laid out sensibly with adequate signage to me, that’s a huge priority.”

Dyer said he’s seen promoters who otherwise would hold functions at the adjacent civic center back off after learning that a large-crowd activity, like the annual basketball championships, were taking place next door.

He also points to a need for the basics, like an adequate number of bathrooms and concession stands, or how user friendly it is, as key to a future facility’s success.

“I think that the nuts and bolts things will be important. Service elevators and storage space. You’ve got to be able to get forklifts in and out. You’ve got to be able to unload two or three trucks at the same time at a loading dock that’s hopefully at the same grade as the stage,” he said.

“An open floor area with no columns” also would be a plus, as would a well-equipped service kitchen and banquet facilities and breakout meeting rooms designed so that sound doesn’t bleed from one to the next.

Wireless Internet connectivity, teleconferencing ability and an electrical system up to par with current needs are important. The civic center, for example, has 440 running feet of wall space with dozens of outlets – served by only three circuits.

“The bells and whistles, the windows and glass, how the thing looks – those are all really going to be neat things that people are proud of, but the things that are going to make it work is the infrastructure stuff,” he said.

Ideally, it should be designed “totally with the idea of making the spectator, the attendee, comfortable and happy because you’ve got to remember that you’re asking them to shell out money for entertainment, yes, but at the same token entertainment is getting to be so expensive and the ticket prices are so outlandish,” he said.

“People will pay for convenience. People don’t mind spending the money if they feel the entire experience is worth it,” he said.

A city consultant recommends that the new arena also be sized to accommodate an ice sheet for hockey and skating performances, though he said the actual equipment to make ice could be added later.

David Greusel of HOK Sport + Venue + Event, the Kansas City, Mo., firm the city tapped to develop preliminary designs for the arena and evaluate possible locations, strongly recommends that the new arena be sized to National Hockey League regulations, which would provide for an 85-foot-by-200-foot performing area.

“Even if you never put ice in this building, you really need to design around that template because that template defines every traveling show in the business, from circuses to ice shows to bird shows,” he said late last year during a meeting with local civic leaders. “I think it would be a mistake not to design around that floor plan.”

That’s a lesson that echoes from 1955, when the current Bangor Auditorium was completed.

dgagnon@bangordailynews.net

990-8189