That’s My Dump! Five Year Reunion
by Patrick Banks
15 Washington Ave., Portland
When The Bollard first profiled this bright orange hexagon — a former gas station-turned-barbershop — in January 2009, owner Alec Altman, of Binga’s Wingas, intended to have it demolished to create parking for the East End outpost of the fried-poultry empire, which he and his partners planned to establish across the avenue, on a lot where a roofless, four-story building precariously stood.
Three years passed, and at a reader’s request we revisited this corner in March 2012. Following a protracted legal struggle with the city over the condition of the four-story structure — including whether it was subject to Portland’s costly housing-replacement ordinance — Binga’s scrapped plans for an East End location and the building at 6 Washington Ave. (which we’d profiled in June 2008) was razed. The address remains an empty, fenced-in patch of tar (albeit one with strips of blue plastic artfully woven through the chain link).
The hexagon was partially demolished before the city slapped a stop-work order on Altman as part of the larger dispute. We discovered that it had become a crash pad containing a hobo bed and littered with some of the “saddest detritus imaginable: an empty can of sweet peas, soggy Marlboro boxes, a bag of Funyuns.” Altman was in no hurry to sell the parcels. “I don’t need bottom-feeders calling me trying to take it off my hands for nothing,” he told us in early 2012. The sale price of both properties combined had topped $600,000 when the Binga’s boys bought in.
By the summer of 2013, inspection records indicate city officials were losing patience with Altman over the condition of 15 Washington and threatening another round of legal action. In November of that year, Altman got a demolition permit. Within weeks, the hexagon was hexa-gone. These days the parcel is just a patch of dirt next to Otto pizzeria’s delivery kitchen. “The Otto’s guys park there without official permission (and at their own risk), but I am friendly with the owners and leave their driver alone,” Altman wrote in an e-mail.
This could be the year something is finally built at this highly trafficked intersection, where Washington terminates at Congress. Altman told me the hexagon’s lot is currently under contract, but declined to provide details while the transaction is pending. “I plan on holding it until I get what I consider a fair price,” he wrote. “The same goes for the property across the street.”
Let’s hope the prospective buyer doesn’t “chicken out.”
257 Front St., South Portland
When I last spoke with Paul Leddy, a general contractor in South Portland, he was dreaming aloud about the potential redevelopment of Aspasia Marina, the decrepit waterfront complex off Front Street, in SoPo’s Ferry Village neighborhood. In addition to upgrades for the marina’s boat mooring and storage facilities, Leddy talked of a restaurant, a museum, and a hotel with two towers — each six or seven stories high, connected at the top by a glassed-in walkway beneath which boats could pass.
I asked Leddy, When might such a vision come true? “I can’t even begin to think about that,” he told me. “Maybe five years?”
Guess again. That was five years ago, and the sagging, rusty, crusty structures on the site have only gotten dumpier.
Granted, Leddy faced some big obstacles, not the least of which being the fact the marina’s owner, George Drivas, didn’t want to sell it. Drivas died in 2011, and apparently left the marina to its namesake — his daughter, Aspasia — and her husband, Ken Shappet, who live in Laguna Beach, California. When I reached Ken Shappet, he declined to shed much light on the property’s future. “Many of the boaters have been loyal customers and look forward to many more years of services the marina provides,” he told me.
Hopes for the boatyard’s rebirth were rekindled last spring. “It looks like there’s a party that’s quite interested in taking on what is a rather distressed property,” then-Mayor Jerry Jalbert told the South Portland Sentry in April. “We might have something pretty spectacular coming along fairly soon. Something could be inked as early as this summer.”
Or not. Another wall calendar has now become obsolete without a deal to put the marina’s rickety buildings out of their misery.
Some neighbors are, understandably, losing their patience. During a meeting of the Ferry Village Neighborhood Conservation Association last year, a resident raised the possibility of circulating a petition to compel the city to take action. Other neighbors, however, expressed concern such a step would only alienate the property’s owners, further delaying any progress. “It was actually a somewhat heated discussion,” the association’s president, Rebeccah Schaffner, told The Bollard.
It seems that negotiations among the neighborhood group, the city and the Shappets are as delicate and precarious as the structures on the site. The city has issued some citations for code violations in recent years, and some cleanup work and other improvements have been completed, but nothing significant enough to change the perception of the old boatyard — situated between Centerboard Yacht Club and Saltwater Grille — as a dangerous eyesore.
Perhaps South Portland just isn’t yuppie enough to set the wheels of gentrification in motion. “One of the ideas I did hear about is some kind of boutique restaurant,” Jalbert told the Sentry, “although I have no idea what a ‘boutique’ restaurant might be.”
254 Commercial St., Portland
Meanwhile, across the harbor, dilapidated waterfront property is being redeveloped with a vengeance. The Cumberland Self-Storage building, which dump hunter Cotton Estes wrote about in March 2009, was among the first to be reborn as the Great Recession began to thaw.
Built as a warehouse back in the days when the “working waterfront” didn’t need the adjective, this “brick behemoth,” as Estes called it, is five tall stories high and contains nearly 100,000 square feet of space. Its owner, New York-based Waterfront Maine, filled the empty floors with hundreds of identical metal storage units, creating a dimly lit grid that would have made a great set for one of the Matrix movies.
In May 2010, the large and prestigious law firm Pierce Atwood announced it wanted to leave its posh digs in Monument Square and move its 175 employees to Waterfront Maine’s waterfront building. The cost of renovating the raw storage space into offices fit for fat-cat lawyers was expected to cost $12 million. Pierce Atwood asked the Portland City Council to grant Waterfront Maine a $2.8 million tax break to sweeten the deal, and threatened to move to South Portland if Portland balked.
Though the law firm was obviously bluffing — there are no boutique restaurants in SoPo; where were they gonna have power lunches, Bugaboo Creek? — the councilors caved and agreed to essentially halve Waterfront Maine’s property tax bill for the next two decades. Last year, a classy pub called The King’s Head opened on the ground floor, providing powerful craft beers to the power brokers.
If you live in Portland, you can take some personal pride in the renovation of this former dump, since you’re helping to pay for it by paying more property tax or rent. Congratulations!
201-203 State St., Portland
Five years ago, we were stumped by the dump at 201-203 State St., and not just because we incorrectly listed its address as 251 State. This once elegant Parkside home, with its pair of double bay windows and flourishes of Italianate and Colonial Revival styles, had been allowed to slip into decrepitude — boarded-up windows, a month’s worth of mail yellowing in the dingy entryway.
Its owner, Louise Murphy, had commissioned local architect Christopher Delano to begin renovation work two years before we poked around the place. Delano and Murphy told us at the time that progress was being stymied by financial issues and the challenges of restoring the mid-nineteenth-century home to historic-preservation standards.
The pace didn’t quicken in the first few years that followed. Inspection records contain stop-work orders, complaints from neighbors, and indications the property was being occupied by squatters. Delano summed it up when he said, “It all comes down to money and time.” He added that Murphy owns other properties that also needed attention. (My repeated attempts to reach Murphy were frustrated by her full voicemail box.)
By April 2013, the code violations had all been addressed, and the renovation work is now complete. Originally home to one family, it now contains six condos. “The place has really turned around,” said neighbor Will Everitt. “It went from squatters starting fires in the basement to professionals having their first child while living in the building.”
33 Allen Ave., Portland
In the spring of 2009, when Cotton Estes ventured into the four-acre wasteland behind Bruno’s Restaurant & Tavern, there was still some hope this blighted tract at Morrill’s Corner would be revived. Massachusetts-based Packard Development had grand plans to transform the area with a mix of retail and residential uses, including a Super Stop & Shop supermarket and a new home for the Portland Boxing Club, which was operating in an old factory.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Bruno Napolitano, of Bruno’s, told Estes.
He was wise to be skeptical. Packard’s project was plagued by a host of complications, including the city’s refusal to sell it a key parcel due, in part, to concerns the development would make the hair-tearing traffic situation at this busy corner almost unbearable.
In July of that year, Packard’s permits expired, and Stop & Shop announced that fall that it was pulling up all its stakes in Maine. Carl Shaw of Allen Avenue Plaza and White Dove Properties, the limited-liability companies that own the property, said the land was leased to Hannaford shortly thereafter. A demolition permit was obtained in November 2009, a burnt-out warehouse and other scary structures were knocked down, and piles of illegally dumped trash were removed. Bruno’s and the boxing club are still there.
Hannaford spokesman Eric Blom said the supermarket chain only leased the land at Morrill’s Corner because that was part of a larger deal with Stop & Shop that also allowed Hannaford to take over its competitor’s Kennebunk location. Allen and Forest Avenue commuters can exhale now: Blom said Hannaford has no immediate plans to develop the Portland property.
5 Salem St., Portland
The story of 5 Salem St. is a sad one. Back in ’09, the Civil War-era brick home in the West End was filled with junk piles visible through the dusty, broken windows. The weed-choked yard was threatening a coup against the house. An unregistered car loitered in the driveway.
Neighbors complained of “transients” breaking into the vacant building, and one expressed concern that its owner, Carol Anne Clowes, was still living there — without heat, electricity or running water — stealthily entering and exiting through a basement door, which is just plain creepy.
Clowes apparently inherited the house from her mother, who’d passed away a dozen years prior, and she’d let it fall into a state of deep disrepair. Neighbors found the situation disturbing and perplexing. “I’m not sure what the real issue is,” neighbor Holly Kidder told Cotton Estes. “But if [Clowes] has some personal desire to see the house rot to the ground in order to heal something, then so be it.”
Half a decade later, the place is in even worse shape. The front doors and several windows around back are boarded up. A third-floor window facing the street is still wide open, revealing a hole in the roof. Vines and weeds have continued their slow assault on the structure. When I visited the property last month, a cat fight broke out.
After prolonged prodding by the neighborhood association, the city finally got the abandoned car towed away, and in recent years inspectors have stepped up efforts to compel Clowes to deal with the property’s problems. (Neighbors believe Clowes is living somewhere else in Portland and working in South Portland these days; the number listed for her in city records has been disconnected.)
The most recent item in the property’s file at City Hall notes that 5 Salem St. is now the subject of a “plan of action” that will lead to legal action if it’s not followed. The deadline for compliance expired last month, as this issue was going to press. “Legal action wouldn’t have started just yet,” city spokesperson Jessica Grondin said, “but it will be headed that way.”
Rigby Yard, South Portland
Granted, it’s not reasonable to expect a rail yard to be a tidy, attractive place. Piles of debris and rusty, ramshackle sheds just go with the territory. What caught our eye back in the summer of ’09 was the semi-circular roundhouse partially surrounding the giant railway turntable in Rigby Yard, just off Main Street in an industrial section of South Portland. The structure, a chaotic pastiche of wood, brick, sheet metal and glass block, was mostly empty of useful materials, though one end was sheltering equipment undergoing maintenance.
The 205-acre site is owned by Pan Am Railways (formerly Guilford), which bought the yard in 1981. South Portland Planning and Development Director Tex Haeuser told us at the time that the city wished Pan Am would do more with the property, which is well situated to be a hub for goods transported by rail, ship and truck. The post-apocalyptic appearance of the site was not a matter of particular concern.
We’re not sure exactly when the roundhouse was torn down (attempts to reach Pan Am execs last month were unsuccessful), but nothing remains of the structure today except piles of salmon-colored bricks. The aerial view provided by Google Maps shows the roundhouse’s concrete foundation partially encircling a round pond bordered with bricks, where the turntable used to spin. From this vantage point, the area vaguely resembles the dimple in the Death Star.
Haeuser said he doesn’t know of any new plans for the property. The trains just keep rollin’ in and rollin’ back out again.
645 Congress St., Portland
For our September 2009 issue, guest dump hunter John Bronson penned a remembrance of Portland Hall, the dumpy dormitory complex at 645 Congress St. owned by the University of Southern Maine. It’s well worth remembering that years before USM decided it needed to become a “metropolitan university,” it was, at least in one sense, a metropolitan university — that is, a school whose students lived and studied downtown, thereby becoming part of the “urban fabric,” to use a wonky college term.
The dorm complex was stitched together in the late 1980s from buildings constructed a century before — former rooming houses and motel rooms and government-subsidized dives. When Bronson moved in about a dozen years ago, “the place was really showing its age,” he wrote: “threadbare carpets, flickering fluorescent lights, stained ceiling tiles.” The broken pool table in the lounge was “an object lesson on ‘The Tragedy of the Commons.’”
As a landlord, USM flunked. “That facility never paid for itself,” a university official told Bronson, who’d paid less than $500 a month for his room — a fee that included heat, electricity, Internet, cable TV and a land line. The expense of providing all those amenities, compounded by the cost of maintaining the dorms (even to low standards), contributed to an annual loss of about $200,000. As the complex continued to crumble, that loss was expected to double. Bronson learned that the university had wanted to sell Portland Hall years before it arranged for him to move in.
Democratic State Senator (and real estate developer) Justin Alfond and fellow developer Greg Shinberg bought the property in late 2008 for $2.2 million, according to city tax records. They demolished the three wings at the rear of the complex and renovated the remaining building on Congress Street into 56 small apartments (ranging from about 300 to 750 square feet), with retail space on the ground floor and free parking for tenants out back. The units also include heat, hot water, air conditioning and wireless Internet, among other amenities. Rent starts at about $775 a month. The assessed value of the land and building is now almost $3.8 million.
USM took a loss on the sale of Portland Hall, the official told Bronson. Around the same period, it finished construction of new dorms on its rural campus in Gorham, as enrollment by “traditional” students (young adults just out of high school who need cheap housing) continued to decline.
But money isn’t all USM lost. As Bronson fondly recalled, the experience of living downtown in a dorm full of people with very diverse backgrounds was an invaluable education in and of itself.
“Over the years, I shared a room with, among others, a gay art student; exchange students from Ghana, Armenia, Laos, and Japan; and an SMCC student studying masonry,” Bronson wrote. “Politically radical transexuals lived down the hall from cud-chewing conservatives who once put signs reading, ‘Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,’ on their doors …. But we all managed to more-or-less get along.”
If that’s what a metropolitan-university education is, then maybe it is worth pursuing.
355 Pool St., Biddeford
Emily Guerin began her distinguished tenure as our dump hunter by picking a real doozey: the former Notre Dame hospital on Pool Street in Biddeford, which later became a nursing home called The Renaissance. Her description of the facility, vacant for four years at the time, is the stuff of horror stories: “Ragged plastic sheets billow in broken windows and shattered glass glints in the tangled grass below …. Rusted chains are looped over the handles to all the doors and across both driveways …. Wheelchairs, metal beds, and armchairs are stacked in haphazard piles inside the basement and in a small, unlocked outbuilding.”
The property is owned by First Atlantic Healthcare, which abandoned the place 10 years ago and relocated staff and patients to a new facility on Ferry Road, in Saco, across the river from The Renaissance. The old building wasn’t set up to meet modern standards for patient care, like private rooms and handicapped-accessible bathrooms, an administrator told Guerin.
Guerin discovered that First Atlantic had intended to demolish the building in 2006, but never followed through on those plans. Her calls to officials at the company’s headquarters were not returned, so she never figured out what mysterious force stopped the wrecking ball.
Turns out the answer is simple: money.
First Atlantic’s chief operating officer, Craig Coffin, told me the cost to demolish the old old folks’ home comes in between $400,000 and $450,000. There’s no reason to spend that much money just to remove an eyesore from a property the company no longer occupies.
The building itself isn’t worth much — it was assessed at about $132,000 five years ago, and has surely only lost value since. The eight acres of riverfront land around it were assessed at almost $1 million, but a developer would have to spend about half that sum to remove the old hospital. Coffin said First Atlantic, which operates 16 senior- and assisted-living facilities in Maine, has no plans to put the property on the market anytime soon.
Since Guerin’s visit, complaints that the building was unsecured and attracting riff-raff prompted the company to board up all the windows and erect a chain-link fence in front of the facility. I suspect that’s still not enough to keep the ghosts inside.
47 Revere St., Portland
Like the now proud property on State Street, the three-unit apartment house at 47 Revere St., in Portland’s Woodfords Corner neighborhood, is one of the few success stories of this year’s reunion. Then again, the cedar-shingled building with forest green trim was not the problem when Emily Guerin investigated five years ago. It was the tenants and, ultimately, the landlord who were to blame for the state of the place.
Police had been called to the address at least 43 times in the two and a half years preceding Guerin’s visit, for a variety of reasons: loud music, suspicious activity, terrorizing, domestic disputes. One neighbor suspected a tenant was dealing drugs. A tenant on the third floor committed suicide not long after cops were called to remove a guest who’d barricaded himself in the apartment.
In addition to the ruckus, there was the junk — “trash all over the place,” a neighbor said. Guerin noted furniture, appliances and general household garbage in the back and side yards.
Landlord Jeff Corbin, who bought the property in the early ’90s and previously lived there, acknowledged to Guerin that he’d been struggling with troublesome tenants and had been forced to evict them. At the time, all three units had been vacant for months, and Corbin said he intended to take the opportunity to renovate the apartments in hopes of attracting more civilized folk.
In the years following our initial visit, city inspectors cited the property numerous times, mostly for junk in the yard and mismanaged trash. But those problems seem to have abated since Corbin hired a property manager a couple years ago. During a chat at the apartment house last month, Corbin conceded that he’d had a hard time keeping an eye on the place before he hired help. But he also noted that city policy changes have not helped the situation — specifically, the discontinuation of “heavy-item pick-up day” and a program that provided renters with cards they could use every year to dispose of bulky items at the city dump.
Renovation work has been ongoing and appears to have had the desired effect — attracting responsible tenants. Corbin said he has also stopped accepting renters enrolled in the Section 8 housing-voucher program, many of whom caused problems in the past.
Corbin said that soon after he bought the property, he led an effort to petition the city to replace the sidewalks on Revere Street and plant new trees, which municipal workers did within a year or so. For the neighbors’ sake, let’s hope his renewed sense of civic duty lasts at least another five years.
43 Mill St., Brunswick
On the night before Halloween of 2009, police say a 17-year-old Brunswick boy torched an unoccupied house at 43 Mill St., also known as Route 1. The cops were able to ID the perp based on pictures of graffiti he’d posted on MySpace, proving that the now obsolete social-media site actually had at least some redeeming value.
The property’s owner, Lynn Dolan, had been living in Florida since July of that year, but planned to return for a visit to the home her family had lived in since 1974. Truth be told, the place had fallen into disrepair in recent years. The accused arsonist and his teenage friends, some of whom were also charged in connection with the fire, had made it their unofficial clubhouse while Dolan was away.
The house was in “decaying shape” before the fire, a code officer told Emily Guerin, and would now have to be demolished. The town gave Dolan “a couple months” to get the job done.
The Maine Department of Transportation had previously expressed interest in taking the property off Dolan’s hands. The department had been buying properties along Mill Street since the 1960s in an effort to ease the flow of traffic along Route 1 by reducing the number of driveways connected to the byway. Before the fire, the house’s value was assessed for tax purposes at $47,700, Guerin reported.
The MDOT sealed the deal in May of 2010 and demolished the house later that year. When I stopped by last month I found a weedy lot strewn with spent Sterno canisters and an old blanket. The traffic on Mill Street glided by unimpeded.
Bollard editor Chris Busby contributed reporting.
