For the most part, the twin villages of Gorham’s Little Falls and South Windham present postcard-perfect scenes of traditional New England life. Motorists on Route 202 pass tidy white-painted houses, a general store and a quaint little firehouse. The Windham Correctional Center is nearby, but it’s tucked away out of sight.
Too bad the same can’t be said of the hulking three-story dump at 9 Main St., on the South Windham side of the Pleasant River. The old multi-unit apartment building is burdened by a pee-yellow paint job. All its windows are either broken or boarded up. Windham officials have pasted “Notice to Quit” signs on just about every door, and there are a lot of doors. The parking lot around back is cracked, weedy, and blocked off from Depot Street with Jersey barriers. Litter is strewn around the rest of the property, and graffiti artists have made amateurish attempts to turn the building into a canvas.
The two files on the property, rubber-banded together at the Town of Windham’s Code Enforcement office, are thicker than a dictionary. Documents inside detail problems dating back to the early 1990s and continuing through last year.
A quarter-century ago, the property was home to Patsy’s, a neighborhood store, with four apartments above it. Owners William and Patricia Delios, of Portland, were struggling to keep the place up to code. In April of 1991, the town sent them a letter listing a dozen violations, including bare wires, a broken electrical outlet, a missing smoke detector, and a toilet that “will not shut off.” Complaints from tenants continued to pile up as the decade progressed and the property regressed. By 1999, there were so many problems that the town reluctantly got an order to demolish the historic structure, built in 1875.
The building was saved from the wrecking ball by Dowd Properties, a Portland firm that struck an agreement with the town in 2000 to get the building back up to code. The ground floor where Patsy’s had been was converted into two more apartments. In the fall of that year, after Dowd made improvements, the property was sold to Dwayne St. Ours, of Gorham, for $110,000.
And the same shit happened again.
Complaints from tenants and copies of code-violation letters sent to St. Ours by the town filled up another manila folder. For example, in 2008, Central Maine Power encouraged a tenant to contact the town after her monthly bill reached $400 — a sum other tenants had inadvertently racked up, as well. “When she turned her circuit breaker off her meter is still running,” the complaint form states. “[B]elieve wiring is crossed; unsafe.”
In March of 2014, code inspectors discovered “multiple extension cords in use to support two medical marijuana growing operations” that took up nearly all the space in two bedrooms of a third-floor apartment. It’s unclear whether a similar indoor grow-up caused the tenants’ bills to skyrocket six years ago, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
A document from June of last year includes a list of code violations four pages long, including “locked and obstructed” exits, exposed wiring, an improperly installed oil tank, and missing smoke detectors. Several fire-sprinkler heads had been painted over, rendering them “defective.” The inspector reported that a tenant had been doing electrical work in his unit in exchange for a break in rent. The renter had “ordered sprinkler heads from the internet” to replace the painted ones, and was informed that only licensed professionals can do that type of work.
The next month, the town took action to foreclose on the property. In addition to the building’s hazardous condition — the fire department deemed it “very unsafe for human occupancy” — it seems that “no tax payments have been made on this property since September 2010.”
Reached by phone, St. Ours declined to comment.
Windham Town Manager Tony Plante said officials are currently “working through issues” with the bank that held St. Ours’ mortgage. The town already has the title. Once those issues are resolved, Plante said the plan is to formally request proposals to demolish the building and build new housing on the site. A formerly dumpy property across the street, at 10 Main St., was recently reborn through a similar process. Plante said he and the rest of the town, especially the villagers of South Windham and Little Falls, look forward to the day this dump will be a “contributing member of society” again.
— Patrick Banks
