AUBURN — The first day John Lebel went to work inside the old Androscoggin County Jail, an officer told him to clean out a vent beneath one of the grill-covered windows. He stuck his hand inside and pulled out two knives and five hacksaw blades.

“Will I miss it?” Lebel mused. “No. But I do have memories.”

Demolition will begin Wednesday on the jail that housed the county’s crooks from 1969 to 1989. The brick, cinder block and steel structure will be torn down to make room for county vehicles. Eventually, the space could also be used for a new county dispatch center.

Derelict since 1989 when the county opened its current facility, the old jail has been collecting ghosts. Graffiti still decorates the ceilings in the old cells and tanks, where drunks sobered and abusers cooled.

Lebel began here in 1977 and has served as Androscoggin County’s jail administrator since 1985. He spent a few minutes Monday wandering the halls. Amid the peeling paint and rusty floor-to-ceiling iron bars, Lebel recalled some horrific times. There was the time a guy slashed his wrists and sprayed blood across a common cell. There were hangings and fires.

“They couldn’t burn the place down because it’s all bricks and mortar,” Lebel said.

Not all were frightening, though.

Before the place grew overcrowded, he remembered a man playing guitar for his fellow inmates as they walked the halls for exercise. He remembered a quiet Christmas when the two-story jail had only eight inmates.

And he recalled long hours, strolling the halls and tapping the bars with a rubber mallet.

“If it made a different noise, you’d know they were tampering,” he said.

By the late 1980s, the useful life of the 0building ended.

Originally designed for 27 inmates, it sometimes had as many as 60 or so people inside, Lebel said. Cells meant to hold two people sometimes packed in an extra seven or eight inmates, until there was barely room to walk.

In one two-week period, three inmates committed suicide.

“That was a bad time. That was a very bad time,” Lebel said. “That’s really what precipitated the construction of the new jail.”

Taxpayers built the new $8.9 million jail behind the county courthouse. Last Friday, leaders mailed the final payment of the 20-year bond.

The previous county commission funded the $44,000 demolition last fall. Since then, an impact study found few hazardous materials in the structure.

The demolition is expected to last for two weeks, County Clerk Patricia Fournier said.

[email protected]

A workman on a ladder prepares the old Androscoggin County Jail on Turner Street in Auburn for demolition on Monday. The old jail is located between the Androscoggin Superior Court building on the left and the YMCA on the right.