The Forest Avenue eyesore reborn as Ritual Hair Studio. photo/Kiki Garfield
See? That’s what we’re always sayin’: The Bollard’s investigative journalism gets results.
Look at the dump on inner Washington Ave. we just wrote about in July, the powder-blue one between the Amvets and the weed shop that neighbors long feared would go up in flames and take their property with it. Well, at first, not long after our July issue hit the streets, property owner David Harmon, an architect by trade, was seen tearing the teetering drug den apart himself, and eventually some workers showed up to speed the job along.
“There were three thousand needles in there,” one of the demo guys remarked to me late last month while Kiki snapped some photos from the sidewalk. Turns out squatters were using a toilet bowl as a fire pit, too, and there was “feces” (human and non-) everywhere, the worker said.
Apparently Harmon’s planning to construct a residential building there (maybe five units) within the next year or two. Given the pace of his redevelopment plans so far (he bought the place in 2015), neighbors aren’t holding their breath, but at least they won’t have to plug their nose while walking past this eyesore anymore.
Results! Yes, like a professional politician, The Bollard is working for you! Just wait, say, a decade and a half, as necessary.
Welcome back to the dump at the corner of Forest Avenue and Clifton Street in Portland’s Woodfords Corner neighborhood. Past dump hunter Emily Guerin looked into this tag-defaced, concrete-block attachment back in early 2010. A former hair salon that’d been vacant for years, “Its only purpose is for people to drunkenly piss behind it on their way home from the Great Lost Bear (guilty!),” a tipsy whistleblower confided to Guerin via e-mail.
At the time, property owner Nicholas Giusti III could not be reached for comment, his tenants in the adjoining apartment building were too scared to talk, and his dad warned Guerin, “He’ll go after you if you write about him.” So, naturally, we did, because The Bollard will always protect and defend this great nation!
Long story short, no one attacked America and we never heard a peep from Giusti III, but neither did he do diddly to fix up his dump. A really nice and responsible young man named Ethan Thorne bought the property five years ago for about $550,000. I ran into Thorne outside his building last month while a root-versus-pipe dispute was being resolved and he told me Giusti was kind of a “sour” guy at the closing who, sadly, passed away a few months after the sale.
Thorne fixed up the apartments and lived there with family for a time, using the dumpy attachment as an impromptu home bar during the plague years. Then into our state tromped one Dakota Grey, a barber and cosmetologist from the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the place became a salon once again.
“I know this building really well now,” Grey said last month inside Ritual, his stunning hair studio painted in subtle pastels and decorated to elicit Acadia. To create a space that would “feel and act like a piece of Maine,” he enlisted local contractors like Casco Bay Electric and Richard P. Waltz Plumbing and Heating for more specialized work, but did much of the demo and renovation himself. Peak Builders contributed some handsome cabinetry and Grey stalked Facebook Marketplace to score two antique Eastlake Vanities.
The exterior has been painted dark gray with bright teal accents and a sunny yellow door. Stencil illustrations of Maine wildlife will be painted there in the future, providing a nice distraction for passengers in the estimated 17,000 vehicles that pass the place daily, Grey said, citing traffic-study data he obtained in conjunction with the neighborhood association’s ongoing efforts to make this stretch of Forest more habitable for humans.
That’s 17,000 vehicles’ worth of passengers who are no longer being distressed by the sight of a rundown, vacant, cinder-block dump, thanks to our valiant reporting! In lieu of campaign donations or other bribes, just subscribe to our Substack at bollardhead.substack.com and send dump tips my way at editor@thebollard.com. Together, we can grift this city back to greatness!
