LEWISTON – Twenty people have stopped by the Empire Theater to put dibs on an unexpectedly popular little poplar growing out the side of the building, 40 feet up in the air.
Interest in the tree – more a sparse-looking, dangling shrub, really – has been so heavy, the contractor demolishing the Main Street building has joked about hanging out a sign:
“Highest bidder owns it.”
Roland Chabot is stumped at the outpouring.
One woman even called him at home to ask about it.
“I don’t know why, what it is,” he said. But something about it has landed the misfit tree a fan club.
Chabot said one woman on a motorcycle who stopped by to make a pitch for ownership told him she’d been watching it grow for seven years. That’s the best indication of its age.
Its thin branches spread about 2 feet across, covered with leaves. Roots run for several feet to one side, wrapping around bricks whose mortar has long since disappeared.
The tree doesn’t poke through the wall to the theater interior. From the sidewalk, what you see is what you get.
Chabot has a theory how it took root: pigeon power. A bird may have dropped the poplar seed in the crack of a brick.
After all, inside the dilapidated Empire, it’s “pigeon heaven. There’s more pigeons in there than I’ve ever seen,” Chabot said.
City Arborist Steve Murch believes Chabot’s theory is probably right.
All a seed needed to survive was water, a pocket of moist decayed material – even rotted leaves – and sunlight. Roots would have spread to seek out nutrients.
“It’s found its niche,” Murch said. “In nature, that’s what everything does.”
At some point in the future, it would have become too heavy for the roots to hold, and it would have fallen from the weight of ice or from a burst of wind, he added.
Perry Munroe, a Lewiston retiree, has looked over at the plucky poplar every time he stops at the intersection of Main and Canal.
“The tree just gives me courage when I go by it,” he said. “It just exemplifies the spirit that Lewiston-Auburn has shown.”
He also stopped by the site to talk with Chabot about its fate.
Chabot, the owner of Roland’s Demolition, said he’s decided to plant it in his own back yard. Two men will go up in a bucket truck this morning to retrieve it before knocking down the remaining brickwork.
“All the trees I’ve got around my house is stuff I’ve got from different jobs,” said Chabot, who lives on Minot Avenue in Auburn. “It’ll grow, I don’t have no doubt. Poplars are hard to kill.”
Munroe has asked to visit the tree once its planted to see how it’s doing. He’s already anticipated the tree’s reaction once its roots hit dirt: “God, this is a real luxury.”
But even unlikely trees are subject to the whims of popularity.
There’s a second tree growing from the Empire, straighter, just a few feet from the ground, but “nobody wants that one,” Chabot said. It’s the smaller, more daredevil-ish one that’s gotten the attention.
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