Forest Park Apartments

100 Forest Park

Beautifully situated on the corner of Baxter Boulevard and Dartmouth Street in the Deering/Woodfords area is a large apartment complex now called Princeton on Back Cove. Originally named Forest Park, the housing complex was built in 1945 to accommodate GI’s returning from World War II and their families.

Back in the 1920s, after construction cleared a wooded area here, locals had reported seeing the Ku Klux Klan conducting ceremonies at night. But once the new apartments were built, dozens of newly married Jewish couples moved here and started their families, attracted to Forest Park’s new construction, reasonable rent, and proximity to schools. In the mid-1950s, two synagogues were established a few blocks away: the new Conservative Temple Beth El on Deering Avenue (Stop W02), and the new home of Shaarey Tphiloh, the Orthodox shul, on Noyes Street (Stop W04), making it a convenient walk to attend services and Hebrew school. Children could also walk to the (now closed) Nathan Clifford School, the public elementary school on Falmouth Street, just off Deering.

In these postwar years, Forest Park functioned much like a Jewish Community Center to its Jewish residents, and many couples and their children formed strong relationships that persist to this day. In a 2012 interview, Shirley Golden reflected that “Leo Golodetz and Saul Chason built the Garden Apartments after World War II to accommodate the returning veterans and others. Our rent in 1956 was $67, including heat and free parking. We moved eleven years later because the rent was going up to $100 and so we bought our house in 1967 that we’re still living in. I remember it as a young bride that moved to Maine from New York city. The one thing that did remain [with me] was the smell at low tide, but then it wasn’t only the park, it was the city that got the smell. I remember the sulfur from S. D. Warren [the paper mill in Westbrook] that smelled like cabbage…My children were born there and they too went to the Oakdale Kindergarten and then on to Nathan Clifford until we moved to Longfellow Woods in 1967. The friends we made [at Forest Park] are now part of our extended family. No wonder it was called Little Jerusalem. It was a good starting point for many young families.”