VAN BUREN, Maine — Van Buren said goodbye to a piece of history, but will soon welcome something new on a familiar corner.
The long-vacant three-story Van Buren Yacht Club and Hotel Van Buren building, at the corner of Main and Bridge streets, was demolished Monday morning.
A fixture for more than a century, the building was the town’s original post office. There were no actual yachts, but the bar and restaurant was a popular gathering place in the 1960s and beyond, hosting music and dancing, meetings and social events. But in recent years, disuse left the deteriorating structure unsafe.
But in a sign of Van Buren’s ongoing revitalization, new plans are already underway at the site, Town Councilor Pete Madore said.
“The building has been a hazard and it had to go,” Madore said. “But it’s nice that we can replace the old with new.”
Once the rubble and asbestos are cleaned up, crews will level off the ground and move a town-owned building onto the corner, Madore said. York’s Kitchen, a local business that has appeared at farmer’s market events, will move into that building and open a bakery and coffee shop.
It’s one of several plans Van Buren officials are enthusiastic about, Madore said. For decades the town struggled with economic and other challenges, seeing its business and its spirit dwindle. But with a committed council and Town Manager Luke Dyer, the community is coming back, Madore said.
Several projects are underway, including renovations at the Gayety Theatre, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, and a collaboration with Drexel University to create a community hub and business incubator at the former municipal building on Main Street.
Madore and Fire Chief Brian Caron estimated the Yacht Club building was one of the town’s oldest buildings, likely built sometime in the late 1890s or early 1900s.
Excavators and asbestos abatement crews worked at the scene Monday as firefighters trained water on the pile of rubble to settle dust. The scene drew a crowd as people stopped to look.
Ralph Dumond watched from across the street in his pickup.
At one time, especially when Loring Air Force Base was active and there was a much larger local population, Van Buren was hopping, Dumond said. The Yacht Club was one of 14 bars in town, and bands played everywhere.
One band he remembers was Bill Chinnock’s. Singer, songwriter and guitarist Chinnock was born in New Jersey but later moved to Yarmouth, where he died in 2007.
“Oh, the memories there,” he said. “Downstairs was a bar, then later on they made a bar upstairs. It was still a bar downstairs where they had a disco. They had bands playing all the time, and rooms upstairs there. There were all kinds of people.”
Dumond had a brush with fame at the place once, he said. Robert Kennedy came to town when his brother Edward Kennedy was running for president, and they held a meeting at the Yacht Club. Dumond was there, and met both Robert and John F. Kennedy Jr. that day.
Dayton Grandmaison, who with his brother Jason Grandmaison owns and is restoring the Gayety Theatre, said no one knows an exact date when the structure was built, but it was before 1900.
The building was enlarged and a second floor was added in 1911. The post office moved out in 1920 and the site housed various businesses, including clothing and hat shops, law offices and an insurance agency, he said.
Neil Lapierre bought the building around 1947 and opened the Van Buren Hotel and Yacht Club, which operated for roughly 50 years, Grandmaison said.
“It was a very attractive building in its heyday,” he said. “In the 1970s, the building was light green and featured a pretty orange canopy across the first floor of the facade over large windows. There was an additional canopy over the central entrance doors that extended to the edge of the sidewalk, not unlike the hotel canopies often seen on TV shows and in movies.”
A later addition added a third floor to the building. The second and third stories combined offered about 20 guest rooms and a couple of apartments.
Grandmaison said in a social media post Sunday that the memories and memorabilia of the historic building will be kept alive in a new museum that is being created in the Gayety Theatre building, and he is also writing a book about Van Buren’s history.
Keeping the treasures of the past and looking toward the future is what Van Buren’s revitalization is all about, Councilor Madore said.
“We’re bringing the town back. The esprit is coming back,” he said. “We’re on a mission and we’re excited about the way the town is moving. And there’s more to come.”
