Last week, the weathervane atop of Biddeford City Hall was removed and will undergo repairs. Contributed / Biddeford city government
Last week, the 17-foot tall weathervane was pulled down from the top of the Biddeford City Hall dome for restoration. All four of the directionals on the weathervane are either missing or damaged, and there is a lot of wear and tear on the post, according city spokeswoman Danica Lamontagne. Heritage Co. of Waterboro has been hired to complete those repairs and also gild the ornament at the top with copper.
Not only the weathervane, but also the entire tower is being refurbished; work is estimated to be completed in October, Lamontagne said. The copper will be removed from the dome of the clock tower and it will be re-gilded. Wood surrounding the clock faces will be taken down and replaced with durable composite material so that its appearance can be maintained over time. New gutters and downspouts will also be installed.
Additionally, all windows in City Hall are in the process of being replaced with new historically-appropriate windows. The building’s previous windows were not functional or energy efficient, and the loss of heat in the winter and a gain of heat in the summer led to additional spending on heating and cooling costs, Lamontagne said. Inside City Hall, there will be fire suppression and alarm updates.
Biddeford City Hall’s weathervane is just one of the items to undergo repair on the building’s clock tower. Contributed / Biddeford city government
In total, the project cost is $4,053,485.92 and the work is being completed by Ducas Construction. $3,556,017 of that funding is coming from the building bond that was passed by Biddeford voters in 2020. $59,707.84 is coming from the Heart of Biddeford’s grant for clock tower restoration that they received in 2018. The remaining funding comes from a combination of building reserves and capital improvement allocations.
Repairs to the clock tower are long overdue. The condition of the clock tower on top of the 124-year-old City Hall building has been a concern of Biddeford city officials for years. City voters rejected referendums to fund restoration work in 2007, 2012 and 2015.
The E. Howard & Co. clock was first installed in the early 1900s as a weight-driven, pendulum-regulated and completely mechanical operating timepiece. Sometime in the 1960s a number of the clock’s mechanical components were removed and replaced with electronic parts.
Partial repairs to the clock tower were completed in October 2019 by the Balzar Family Clock Works Company of Freeport, which submitted a bid of $86,725 to restore the clock, which stopped working in 2015. Biddeford’s City Council approved the bid the previous spring and the clock was brought to Freeport for the repairs.
At that time, Balzar restored the clock back to a weight-driven, pendulum-regulated device. Those repairs were paid for by a $150,000 historic preservation grant awarded to the Heart of Biddeford by American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation through the “Partner in Preservation: Celebrating Diversity on Main Street” campaign. In 2018, Biddeford was one of 20 communities across the country chosen to compete for a share of the $1.6 million in grants.
Listed on the National Historic Register, Biddeford City Hall was designed by acclaimed Portland architect John Calvin Stevens. The brick and granite City Hall structure was built in 1894 to replace one originally destroyed by a fire. The clock tower was added in 2014 by Maine Preservation to its annual list of the state’s most endangered properties.
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