In this article, you will get detail regarding Bangor’s Irish immigrant community once thrived in neighborhoods across the city
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When ground was broken for a Shaw’s Supermarket on Main Street on Bangor’s west side in 1995, the new grocery store was to be built on land that was once the center of a large and thriving Irish immigrant community.
That area, around First and Second Streets and extending to Union Street, was known locally as “Paddy Hollow,” and was one of two places in Bangor where the first large wave of Irish immigrants to Maine settled in the city in the 1840s and 1850s.
The second neighborhood was located on Hancock Street on the west side of Bangor, along the Penobscot River.
Together, the two areas were among the first immigrant communities in Maine. Although it’s hard to see any physical trace of what was once there, many descendants of those first Irish families to arrive in the Queen City still live here – and helped shape Bangor as we know it today.
By the 1860s, the Irish Quarter on the east side had begun to fill up with solidly built middle-class homes. But it truly began to progress in 1873, when St. Mary’s church was built in Cedrova Street.
The church became the center of the community, with more people from Ireland moving into the area who then opened small businesses to serve those families.
The Irish worked in jobs that were an integral part of Bangor’s development as a city, from mining coal in the busy train yards, to making up many of the first generation of police officers in the police department.
They became priests, athletes, journalists, politicians — all part of a tight-knit working-class community centered on a common ethnic and religious identity.
Although they left Ireland to escape famine and persecution, the places in the United States where the Irish immigrated in the 19th century were not always welcoming, including Bangor.
This is nowhere better illustrated than in the story of Father John Bapst, a Catholic priest in Bangor who in 1854 was tarred and feathered from proponents of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic insurgent political party, Neznanje.
By 1900, that friction had largely disappeared. The eight-acre lot on which Shaw’s sits was the site of several major employers in the area, including the Bangor Gas Works, a metal foundry, a stone factory, a brickyard and a creamery that processed milk delivered daily to Bangor’s doorstep. All had an Irish-dominated workforce.
By the mid-20th century, many of the original Irish families had moved out of those neighborhoods, and especially on Hancock Street, the buildings were considered slums.
When an urban renewal program remodeled Bangor’s streets and demolished old buildings in the 1960s and early 1970s, a row of apartment buildings and old houses were demolished along Hancock Street. They have been replaced by things like the Terraces housing complex, lots of municipal and government buildings and commercial warehouses.
In 1978, the east side once known as Paddy Hollow was dealt a fatal blow by a bathtub St. Mary’s church burned down — arson in which a nearby residential building was also destroyed, and 23 people were left homeless.
A 14-year-old boy who lived in the neighborhood was arrested for the crime, and in 1982 St. Mary opened a new church on Ohio Street. The two remaining church buildings at Cedar and First streets now house community health and counseling services.
Beginning in the 1970s, many of the middle-class homes along First and Second Streets were renovated into apartments, many of which were dilapidated. By the time Shaw’s lot was cleared and the supermarket built in 1995, the area looked nothing like the thriving Irish neighborhood it once was.
Many other waves of immigrants arrived in the Queen City over the decades – from Italians in the second half of the 19th century, through Greeks, Lebanese and Eastern Europeans in the 1890s, to several decades of Russian Jewish immigration in the early 20th century.
Today we welcome new Bangors from around the world, including countries including Syria, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others.
When you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and the history of the Irish in Maine and the United States, you are truly celebrating the proud history of immigrants to this country from all over the world — seeking a better life and a new community in their adopted home.
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Bangor’s Irish immigrant community once thrived in neighborhoods across the city
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