The Broadway Historic District in

Bangor, Maine Bangor ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Maine and the county seat of Penobscot County. The city proper has a population of 31,753, making it the state's 3rd-largest settlement, behind Portland (68,408) and Lewiston (37,121). Modern Bangor ...

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, bounded by Garland, Essex, State, Park, and Center Streets, is one of the residential neighborhoods most favored by the city's lumber barons and business elites in the early to late 19th century. A second and slightly later Bangor neighborhood of primarily elite houses, centered on West Broadway, is also listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

as the Whitney Park Historic District. Both historic districts are also protected under local ordinance. Broadway reflects Bangor's aspirations, in the 1820s-1830s, to become one of the chief port cities in New England, if not the East Coast. It was laid out roughly on the model of

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

's Beacon Hill, with a green strip running down the center for the first two blocks, planted with a double row of

elm Elms are deciduous and semi-deciduous trees comprising the flowering plant genus ''Ulmus'' in the plant family Ulmaceae. They are distributed over most of the Northern Hemisphere, inhabiting the temperate and tropical-montane regions of North ...

trees. A few blocks further on, the street bisects a large park (Broadway Park), which is the terminus of the historic district. The district also includes some immediate side streets of equal status, notably French Street, whose houses overlooked downtown Bangor from a bluff. The first residences built along the street's green strip in the 1820s-30s were large brick double-houses and single-houses, again conformed to the city-scape of Boston. Typical of these early houses are the Hinkley House, a brick duplex built in the 1820s, and Fred Dickey House, an elegant Federal style house built in 1807. Within the first decade, however, brick had given way to fully detached wooden mansions, though the size and stylistic ambitions of the owners didn't diminish. The district features houses built in every period and style from the 1820s through the early 20th century (e.g.

Greek Revival The Greek Revival was an architectural movement which began in the middle of the 18th century but which particularly flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, predominantly in northern Europe and the United States and Canada, but ...

Italianate The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style drew its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century Italian R ...

Second Empire Second Empire may refer to: * Second British Empire, used by some historians to describe the British Empire after 1783 * Second Bulgarian Empire (1185–1396) * Second French Empire (1852–1870) ** Second Empire architecture, an architectural styl ...

Colonial Revival The Colonial Revival architectural style seeks to revive elements of American colonial architecture. The beginnings of the Colonial Revival style are often attributed to the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, which reawakened Americans to the archi ...

, etc.). Part of the district was devastated by the Great Fire of 1911, and although most of the burned section was rebuilt, Broadway began to be abandoned as newer and more attractive elite neighborhoods began to open up (e.g. Little City and Fairmount Park). The construction of the large Catholic John Bapst High School in the center of the district in the 1920s, for which a number of mansions were demolished, was likely the tipping point in the neighborhood's conversion to mixed use.

References

{{National Register of Historic Places Second Empire architecture in Maine Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Maine Houses in Bangor, Maine Historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Maine National Register of Historic Places in Bangor, Maine Geography of Bangor, Maine

See also

References