A dental office at 14 Highland Ave. was temporarily condemned and closed for repairs last week after a driver crashed into the red brick building at 3 p.m. Dec. 10.
Workers have been busy repairing the damaged structure at the South Berwick Dental office of Robert J. Orendorf, who opened his solo practice in this spot in 2007.
A voicemail at the office indicates the building, which Orendorf owns, is closed due to the accident. A message on the door of the building says, “We will need to have the building inspected before we can reopen.”
Demolition and renovation permits to stabilize the building have been approved by the town, according to Jeni McCabe, head of the town’s code enforcement department.
“The building is currently unsafe due to an accident when a car broke through 14 inches of brick,” McCabe said. Once the repairs are done, the condemned notice will come down, which could be early next week, but Orendorf will decide when to reopen, she said.
Calls to Orendorf’s office were not returned nor were calls to the police for more information. A local resident said an ambulance responded to the scene, and police dispatch in Sanford reported a woman driving the car hit the gas instead of the brakes.
The building is one of South Berwick’s historic treasures, rife with tales about its past, according to local historian Harland Goodwin.
“In 1880, Highland Avenue was built on what probably had been an old hillside farm road, and ran from Portland Street as far as Paul Street,” according to an entry about the site in the Old Berwick Historical Society book, “The Placenames of South Berwick.”
The building “is said to have been built for a roller skating rink by inventor Mark A. Libbey, who patented an automobile in 1891,” according to the book, which shows a photograph of a serious-looking Libbey with a stiff collar and a substantial mustache.
Libbey’s father, also named Mark Libbey, was town treasurer and “the local dealer for Rudge bicycles in the late 1880s, perhaps from this building,” the book says.
It also notes that in 1888 the younger Libbey “bought a crank organ for roller skating and may have built the Highland Avenue building about this time.”
The building summary notes, “In 1913 the Libbey Building contained the General Supply Company, manufacturing ‘picker stick leathers’ which were bumper assemblies used on fly shuttle looms in textile factories.”
For several years in the mid-1900s, the building housed Maurice F. Blouin Inc., a company that specialized in advertising materials for the banking and telephone industries.
