GARDINER — With no pomp and a little paperwork, the end came Monday for the New Mills Market.
The place to pick up a quart of milk on the way home from work or to grab a soda before heading out on Cobbossee Stream had struggled in recent years, and it closed at the end of January. At that time, the owner declined an interview but said the bank was selling the building.
On Monday, Richard Guerrette, of SLH Holdings in Winthrop, provided a copy of the quitclaim release deed and put his signature on a demolition permit, and the building started to come down.
By Tuesday, some debris remained on the site, but the building that had stood there for the better part of 75 years was gone.
Attempts to reach Guerrette on Tuesday were unsuccessful.
For Evan Firlotte, the New Mills Market is a landmark of his childhood.
When he was 8, the New Mills Market was the first place he was allowed to walk to by himself. When his parents split up, it was the midpoint between their homes.
“I’m shocked it happened,” said Firlotte, who is in his early 20s. “I’m shocked it was torn down.”
Former owners allowed skating out back at one time, and the market was often the place where his friends got their first jobs, although they didn’t always keep them for long, working either at the register or back in the kitchen.
“It used to be the first place you’d get to in town from the interstate,” he said. That changed when the service plaza was built in West Gardiner.
Evan is not the only Firlotte with an attachment to the market.
On Monday, Greg Firlotte, Evan’s first cousin once removed, saw Evan’s post on Facebook. Although he moved to Los Angeles 35 years ago, Greg had made a point of stopping at the market on his every-other-year visits to his hometown.
“My brothers live here, too,” he said. “We never got Gardiner out of our system.” The proof is in the pronunciation; he still pronounces Gardiner as a city native does, with the emphasis on the first syllable and very little indication of an R.
During visits, New Mills was considered a “must-go” stop for lobster rolls.
“We didn’t get them anywhere else,” he said.
When he was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, he said, before the era of big grocery store chains, the market was the place to pick up bread or milk on your way home from work.
“There was something about it, the nostalgia, the place and the setting,” he said. “You wouldn’t think of going by without getting something, like a slice of pizza or an Italian (sandwich).”
Greg Firlotte works in marketing and design and has a longstanding interest in architecture. He said there was no particular design to the building, but the market had a lot of what he called “folk interest.”
“It was the combination of the setting in a place that’s familiar to you,” he said.
Property records on file with the city of Gardiner show the building was built in 1940.
In addition to the store, the building also housed a hair salon and an apartment on the upper floor.
Jessica Lowell — 621-5632
Twitter: @JLowellKJ
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