A Remedy for Renewal Bangor Slowly Rediscovers the Value of Its Past, but It Takes Some Plucky People and a New Ordinance to Help

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ON THE THRESHOLD The Story of Bangor's Urban Renewal

Christina Baker remembers bundling her 3-year-old daughter into the car on the morning of May 23, 1975, and rushing down to Valley Avenue in Bangor, ready to stop a bulldozer.

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A Remedy for Renewal Bangor Slowly Rediscovers the Value of Its Past, but It Takes Some Plucky People and a New Ordinance to Help

Two years earlier, she and her husband, Bill, had stood by, watching the demolition of Bangor's Bijou Theater as part of the city's nearly 10-year-old urban renewal program. They collected a few bricks that day and went home.

Baker couldn't forget it.

In 1975, when she read of plans to demolish the city's last remaining sawmill, a ramshackle red-brick building along Kenduskeag Stream, Baker decided to launch a petition drive to keep Morse's Mill from becoming another wrecking ball Bijou.

She walked around her Bangor neighborhood and outside stores, collecting signatures. Then she started hearing from people, including some socially prominent women in Bangor.

"These people began to call and say, basically, 'We've been waiting for someone to speak out,'" Baker recalled. While Morse's Mill was not, properly speaking,...

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