At the intersection of Brighton Avenue and Riverside Street, amid a sprawl of big-box stores, chain chow-houses and car dealerships, the skeleton of an abandoned gas station stands like a vision of our Mad Maxian future. The paint on the slab-canopy is faded and peeling, slowly giving way to rust. You have to look hard to discern the name: Mobil.
Just feet away, a big sign declares: “Welcome to Portland.”
Outer Brighton Ave. is what urban planners call a “gateway.” Folks from Westbrook, Gorham and other western ’burbs use Brighton (Route 25) to get into the big city. Travelers leaving the turnpike at what was formerly Exit 8 form their first impressions of our city in this area. Unfortunately.
“It’s got a Third World Revival look going on,” said Chris O’Neil, a lobbyist with the Portland Community Chamber of Commerce. “Between the rubble-ized pavement and the apparent strafe marks on the canopy, it seems more a Mosul station than a Mobil station.”
It’s not clear exactly when this Mobil ran out of gas for good, but the last phone book it was listed in is the 1996/1997 edition. City records indicate it was built in 1987.
A sign on this dump reads, “Problems with this property? Contact IPT,” and provides a toll-free number. Mike Wagner, a spokesman for IPT Service Care — the maintenance company ExxonMobil hired to keep an eye on the place — had no insights into its history, and ExxonMobil representatives shuffled me around to various spokespeople, but no one was available for comment before our deadline.
The property was recently purchased by a man named Kamlesh Patel. Patel is in the process of renovating a motel nearby, and said he plans to secure a demolition permit for the station, but the bulldozers won’t be unleashed for several months, and Patel said he doesn’t have any plans for the lot at present.
“The economy is slow, so people move slow,” he said.
Unfortunately.
Dump Update
The abandoned house on the corner of Brackett and Pine streets in Portland’s West End — the subject of the first That’s My Dump!, in the Winter ’07 issue of The Bollard — is for sale.
Jay Sparrow, an agent with Allied Real Estate, said the asking price is $200,000 for the buildings and parking lot. Sparrow said owner Merle Clarke wearied of wrestling with the historic preservation regulations governing the property, so he put it on the market. “He wants some other person to jump through the hoops,” Sparrow said.
Potential buyers are already sniffing around, said Sparrow, including one he described as a “big outfit” interested in building a housing project there. Stay tuned.
— Patrick Banks
