We celebrate Bangor this weekend with the National Folk Festival. But other riches lie beyond our city’s limits. We asked NEWS writers throughout the state to tell us why they live where they live. Below you’ll find their stories about Belfast’s gothic architecture, blueberry barrens in Washington County, good neighbors such as Earl Dean of Pittsfield and the easy, peaceful feeling of back roads in Penobscot. These are the lifestyles that add music to Maine during the rest of the year. Welcome to our towns.

– Alicia Anstead

Mike Hurley used to operate a gift shop on Main Street that sold, among other things, a coffee cup featuring the state’s unofficial motto on one side: “Maine … the way life should be.”

The punch line was on the other side: “Belfast … the way it is.”

Hurley is now Belfast’s mayor, and he and his wife own and operate the Colonial Theatre, an art deco movie house. No one is more of a Belfast booster than Hurley, but his customized coffee cup captures what we love about this little city on upper Penobscot Bay.

A tough little town, Belfast has its gentility and charm, too.

It’s a place where eccentricity and diversity are tolerated, yet not quite celebrated. Where starting a business downtown is fairly easy, but keeping it alive for more than a season can be a struggle. Where locals and transplants mix, but don’t necessarily blend. Where a political grudge is filed away, but never forgotten. Where people who arrive tooting their own horns are scorned, yet those who fall on their face are helped onto their feet.

The adjectives that travel writers trot out each time Belfast is featured in a magazine are, for the most part, on the money: quirky, gritty, artsy, authentic, funky, feisty.

I often joke that Belfast is the center of the universe – which is, of course, how everyone feels about their hometown. But Belfast is, in a way, a hub of Maine. Look at a map, and you’ll see it as a fulcrum on which the rest of the state balances. Yet for all its geographical centrality, this little burgh is also a bit out of the way.

In the early 1960s, a new U.S. Route 1 was built west of town, leaving the downtown high and dry from the waves of tourist traffic that swamp Camden and Ellsworth to the north. But the bypass also helped circumscribe and preserve the downtown. Main Street is lined with as fine a collection of late-19th century brick buildings as you’ll find in Maine. There’s just the right mix of the essential with the boutiques, galleries and restaurants.

One of the city’s watershed moments, architecturally speaking, came a few years ago when residents voted overwhelmingly against allowing so-called big box stores.

The main drag ends at the city-run harbor, where yachts owned by the likes of Johnny Carson and the late Malcolm Forbes have tied up. I don’t believe either walked up the hill into town, but had they done so, Belfasters would have greeted them cordially, though few would have fawned.

Like the tides, Belfast always seems to be rising and falling, but the city’s population remains steady – and has for the past 100 years – at about 6,300.

The most recent rising tide came in 1995 when credit-card lender MBNA expanded here, building a huge office complex just outside the bypass. The company purchased the dormant poultry processing plant on the waterfront, demolished it, landscaped the property into a park and gave it to the city.

Longtime Mainers often remark on the contrast with the industrial Belfast, where chicken processing plants once formed the local work force. I can’t count how many times people have told me about chicken feathers blowing down Main Street and chicken guts clogging the harbor. No sign of those days remains.

Driving through town on a summer morning, I’ll sometimes see a young couple of the bed and breakfast type strolling along the sidewalk on Church Street. I wonder: What does Belfast offer them? Certainly not the dramatic scenery of Acadia National Park to the north, or the woods and wilds of Moosehead Lake to the west, or the plethora of restaurants, shops and windjammers to the south.

Belfast’s tourist niche, I think, is also what makes it a wonderful place to live. As our mayor’s coffee cup suggests, it’s a real-deal small town – both Norman Rockwell and Peyton Place.