The destruction of downtown Derry

On the morning of May 31st, 1985, as the Losers' Club fought and killed It in the tunnels beneath Derry, the town above began to tear itself apart. The destruction was not a single explosion but a cascade of failures that struck every part of the downtown simultaneously, as if the city's own body were convulsing in sympathy with the dying monster. The storm that had been building all night reached its peak: winds gusted to over eighty miles an hour, rain fell in sheets, and the Kenduskeag Stream, swollen beyond its banks, began to eat away at the Canal's concrete channel. The Canal, which had been the city's commercial spine since the lumber boom of the 1880s, had been weakened by decades of deferred maintenance and the unnatural pressure of It's presence beneath the streets. At 10:02 A.M., the supports of the Canal's underground section collapsed entirely. The street above—the three-way intersection of Main, Canal, and Kansas Streets—simply fell into the water. Buildings on both sides of Main Street leaned forward, their tops nearly touching, before crashing into the chasm. The Northeast Bank, The Shoeboat, Alvey's Smokes 'n Jokes, Bailley's Lunch, and Bandler's Record and Music Barn all sank or toppled. The marquee of the Aladdin Theater snapped its cables and crashed down. The Brian X Dowd Professional Building in Richard's Alley collapsed in an avalanche of yellow brick. The statue of Paul Bunyan in front of City Center exploded, its head rising straight into the air before its midsection blew out in a cloud of shrapnel. The destruction was not limited to the downtown core. At 10:00 A.M., the Standpipe, the white cylindrical water tower that had stood in Memorial Park since the 1890s, began to lean. Its internal cables snapped one by one, and then it fell, rolling down the hill and releasing one and three-quarters million gallons of water. The flood swept across Kansas Street, knocking a dozen houses off their foundations and carrying them into the Barrens. The water then rushed down Up-Mile Hill, adding to the pressure on the already collapsing Canal. The Derry Mall, built on the site of the old Kitchener Ironworks, was rocked by a series of explosions that destroyed Zale's Jewelry Store, Baskin-Robbins, and the Sears wing, sending cash and merchandise flying into the flooded parking lot. The Grace Baptist Church steeple, whose clock had not chimed the hour all morning, was struck by lightning and exploded, showering the street with whitewashed boards and Swiss clockwork. The glass corridor connecting the adult library to the Children's Library exploded at 10:30 A.M., never to be rebuilt. The destruction was not merely physical; it was also a rupture in the town's social fabric. The Derry News reported that sixty-seven people were killed and over three hundred and twenty injured. Among the dead were Chief Andrew Rademacher, killed when a four-hundred-pound iron tramp-chair fell from the attic of the police station onto his desk; Dr. Hale, decapitated by a flying manhole cover; and Calvin Clark, a fireman electrocuted by a live power line while responding to the fire at Tracker Brothers' Truck Depot. The storm and collapse also triggered a wave of bizarre accidents: toilets exploded on Merit Street, killing two women; beer taps at Wally's Spa ran with blood; and the Kissing Bridge was struck by lightning and torn apart. In the days and weeks that followed, the crater that had been downtown continued to grow. The Bangor Hydroelectric Company building collapsed into the hole three days after the storm; the Flying Doghouse, a popular hot-dog stand, fell in three days after that. The Derry Mall was declared a total loss. Raytheon, which had planned to build a plant in Derry, abruptly decided to locate in Waterville instead. Other investors and developers began to pull out. The city, which had thrived for over a century on the lumber trade and then on a kind of unnatural vitality, was dying. The destruction was not an accident of weather; it was the consequence of the death of It. For centuries, It had been a part of Derry, its presence woven into the town's infrastructure and its cycles of violence. When It died, the town's cohesion died with it. The flood and collapse were the physical manifestation of that death—a final, violent convulsion before the long forgetting began.