The dump hunt began at 91 Holm Ave. in Portland, near the Westbrook border. The tipster, who lives on the street, said the property is owned by Betty A. Pomroy. The house “is in a great deal of disrepair,” the neighbor wrote. “It is the eyesore of the neighborhood.”
So I drove to outer Brighton Avenue and turned down Holm, a surprisingly quiet residential street bounded by strip malls, train tracks and Interstate 95. A small white rectangle taped to the front door confirmed that the house was not just vacant, but in bad shape. A code enforcement officer had posted the building against occupancy, meaning it’s not considered dangerous, just “unfit for human habitation.”
The little yellow cape looks OK from the front. A couple of unruly bushes rage in the tiny front yard, but otherwise the house is unremarkable. Take a walk around back and you can see what prompted the code officer’s decision: the roof has caved in, and a frayed blue tarp is stretched across the hole. The beams supporting the back porch are buckling and rotted, and the garage is filled with rusty bathtubs and sinks. (I know this because the garage doors were wide open.)
Neighbor Day Whitehead said the house hasn’t been occupied in at least two or three years, and that it wasn’t in very good shape even when people lived there. Although he’s never had problems with break-ins, a couple years back he got worried that neighborhood kids could wander inside the unsecured property, so he called inspections.
This past January, a code enforcement officer attempted to meet Pomroy at the property, but records indicate she stood him up. Pomroy’s phone number is unlisted, and no one I talked to knew how to get in touch with her. The city’s inspections division only has her address: a post office box in Westbrook. Whitehead said he’d had trouble getting in touch with her, too, but knew that she also owned a property on the peninsula. I looked her up on the tax roll and found that, in fact, she owns two additional properties — at 87 India St. and 268 Spring St. — and they’re both uninhabited.
No one has lived in the India Street property for 20 years, said a longtime Federal Street resident who asked not to be identified for fear Pomroy would “flip out” at him. He said he sees her bringing furniture into the vacant building every so often, but she does little else there. Employees at Cycle Mania next door have taken it upon themselves to scrub graffiti from the exterior and secure the front door to prevent break-ins. Despite these efforts, black trees have been spray-painted onto the plywood that covers the building’s ground-floor windows.
Pomroy’s Spring Street property is easy to walk by without a second thought. The building has none of the characteristics of most dumps: no boarded-up windows, graffiti, or junk littered in the yard. But behind the lacy curtains, it’s a different story. All sorts of unwanted objects — a teapot, a broom, old mail — are stranded in the front hallway. The back patio is strewn with old lawn chairs and overgrown with weeds.
One person. Three dumps. New record.
— Emily Guerin
