Queen City Trailer Park | Bangor

Left - 1993. Right - 2004

Stillwater Avenue -- a wondrous topsy-turvy land where signs informing you which lanes are turning lanes are merely suggestions and the retail dreams of our Canadian friends always come true. What is now a thoroughfare where you can buy nearly whatever you want from from part time, variable schedule workers was once the site of 130 single family dwellings. The Queen City Trailer Park inhabited both sides of Stillwater Avenue for three and one half decades from 1965 to 2000. 

When this was a community, most of outer Stillwater was mostly farmland and Wal Mart had yet to do to the Mall what the Mall did to Downtown. According to one resident quoted in the Bangor Daily News in 1999 "people have landscaped, made their lawns look nice. They expected to stay here until they die." So, what happened? 

http://ue-bangor.tripod.com/trailerpark/trailer.html

The death knell for this community didn't sound until 2002. In the late 1990s Judson/Bud M Grant Jr (who also built the Fairmount Hotel, whose single rooms are now apartments) requested rezoning to allow commercial properties and apartment buildings. After which the city used Community Development Block Grant funds to help residents, who were "largely retirees in poor health", go into debt ("acquire financing") for relocation so that the land could be turned from a residential use property to a more profitable commercial use property. Whether voluntarily or forced. The Bangor Explorer's Guild managed to take some photos of the park before it was completely removed.

I know very little else other than that there was the occasional fire and that there was once a motorcycle and a fountain stolen in the 70s. Ricky, Bubbles and Julian these residents  most decidedly were not.