The real city and the literary geography

How Bangor inspired Derry, Maine

Name: It
Author: Stephen King

The Derry of IT is fictional, but much of its urban character grew from Bangor. Stephen King has confirmed the connection, and parallels appear in the waterways, civic landmarks and texture of a small regional city. Derry, however, is not a scale copy of Bangor.

Open the map of Derry92 places, drawn from the novel

On this page · 7 sections

What Stephen King has said

In his account of the inspiration for IT, King recalls thinking about Bangor, its unusual canal, tunnels and sewers. An idea about a troll beneath a bridge gradually became an idea about a creature beneath an entire city. In a separate note for Fair Extension, he makes the relationship explicit by describing Derry as Bangor under another name.

That is strong evidence for treating Bangor as the principal model. King’s own account also shows that the city came from more than one source. The library as a passage between childhood and adulthood, for example, grew from his memory of a library in Stratford, Connecticut.

Derry vs Bangor: what matches and what does not

Feature	Bangor	Derry in IT	Limit of the comparison
Status	A real city in Maine.	A fictional city in King’s work.	Derry has no official coordinates or municipal boundary.
Water corridor	The Kenduskeag Stream passes through downtown and meets the Penobscot River.	The Kenduskeag, canal, Barrens and drains connect much of the book’s city.	The role of water is similar; the channels and street grids do not literally coincide.
Standpipe	The Thomas Hill Standpipe was built in 1897 and remains an active water-storage structure.	The Derry Standpipe is a prominent landmark with its own fictional history.	The real structure is a persuasive analogue, but its dimensions, setting and history differ.
Library	Bangor Public Library occupies a building opened in 1913 after the great fire of 1911.	Derry Public Library is a central civic place and a storehouse of the town’s memory.	A direct building match is unproven; King separately credited a Stratford library for one of the novel’s ideas.
Paul Bunyan	Bangor has a large Paul Bunyan statue that is a recognized city landmark.	A Paul Bunyan statue stands at the Derry Civic Center.	The parallel is visible, but the surrounding fictional district is not a copy of the real site.
Town plan	A real network of streets, parcels and municipal boundaries.	Relationships assembled from routes and descriptions in the text.	Bangor’s map cannot serve as Derry’s missing street plan.

The canal, the stream and the space beneath the city

The connection is clearest in the water geography. Bangor’s official materials show the Kenduskeag Stream running through downtown toward the Penobscot waterfront. King remembered the city’s canal while looking for a setting built around something hidden below. In IT, water links downtown, the Barrens and underground infrastructure into one system.

The literary function matters more than a topographic match. The book’s Kenduskeag, canal and drains have to serve the novel’s routes and themes. This atlas therefore does not import Bangor’s actual bends and streets to complete Derry.

Thomas Hill Standpipe and Derry’s tower

The Thomas Hill Standpipe is one of the clearest real analogues. Bangor Water District records that it was built in 1897 for water storage and pressure regulation; its iron tank sits inside a tall wooden shell with a promenade deck. Those features show how a standpipe can be an engineering work, a lookout and a powerful part of a city skyline at once.

Derry’s standpipe has its own dimensions, surroundings and history. Sharing a building type does not justify replacing the novel’s description with the Thomas Hill plans or coordinates.

The library, civic buildings and town memory

The real Bangor Public Library and the fictional Derry Public Library both work as durable civic anchors. Bangor’s library history includes the fire of 1911 and the opening of the present building in 1913. That history helps reveal Bangor’s depth as a city, but it does not prove that King copied the building or its parcel into the novel.

The same caution applies to the Paul Bunyan statue and other recognizable features. A parallel may matter without becoming a complete equivalence. “Echo” and “transformation” are more accurate terms than “duplicate.”

How this comparison informs the atlas

Bangor helps test the broad character of the landscape: a city shaped by water, wooded edges, civic landmarks and municipal infrastructure. It does not fill textual gaps with ready-made coordinates. When the novel establishes a street, neighbor or route, the map follows that evidence; when it does not, the placement remains an inference or proposal.

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