Rising Tide Searsport retail revival sees newcomers open, establishments grow

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It’s hard to say just when – or why – it happened. But few dispute that downtown Searsport, which a decade ago seemed to be under a “do not resuscitate” order, has come back to life.

Broach the subject of Searsport’s revival with Jim Murphy and he’ll tell you where it began.

“Right here,” he said, standing in the dark, cool and elegant Cronin & Murphy Fine Arts gallery, his accent betraying his Cherry Hill, N.J., roots. Murphy and his wife, who works at the nearby Penobscot Marine Museum, bought and renovated the building three years ago when neighboring storefronts were vacant.

“We were here when everything was empty,” Murphy said. “We sold 12 paintings last week.”

Indeed, the recent investment injection has come largely from newcomers who have opened:

. The Chocolate Grille, a glass-and-chrome restaurant and bar.

. A new outlet for the popular Grasshopper Shop clothing stores.

. A coffee shop that has become a community hub.

. The salonlike Left Bank Books.

Still, some veteran establishments have made prominent, and sometimes controversial, expansions, too:

. The Penobscot Marine Museum, dating from 1937, moved its gift shop in the late 1990s into buildings that front directly onto U.S. Route 1 and its tourist-heavy traffic.

. Tozier’s, the town’s only big grocery store, bucked the trend toward multidepartment supermarkets in hubs like nearby Belfast or Bangor and literally quadrupled its Searsport space in 2002.

The changes have come often

enough, and consistently enough, to convince a local businessman and former selectman that attitudes themselves have changed.

Ralph Harvey, 66, worked in Searsport in the late 1960s as a bank manager in the building now occupied by a new bookstore.

“No business seemed interested in coming” as recently as the mid-1990s, said Harvey, who is now chairman of the town’s economic development committee and a museum trustee.

For years, people grumbled about the tax-exempt museum in the heart of town. Now, “it’s very evident” that the museum is drawing people to town. “You see, they’ve got the museum stickers [on their shirts],” he said.

Any discussion of the revival invariably turns to the Penobscot Marine Museum.

It’s made up of more than a dozen buildings, most of which date from the 19th century. Clustered like a village on about 10 acres downtown, they house a collection of boats; the permanent “Working the Bay” exhibit, focusing on the history of Penobscot Bay’s water-related economy; marine art; a tribute to Searsport’s seafaring history; and an exhibit showing what life was like aboard a sailing vessel for Joanne and Lincoln Colcord as children as they joined their parents on a round-the-world voyage.

For years, it was a monument in a sleepy town to the 19th century, when Searsport looked to the sea for work. In the 20th century, a different kind of industry, such as a plant that manufactures chemicals for paper mills and a port that handles liquid cargo such as heating oil and gasoline, dominated the town’s economy.

Many of the old sea captains’ homes were converted to bed-and-breakfast inns in the 1980s as a tourism economy emerged. Today, the town is also a bedroom community for those who work in Belfast and Bangor.

In the late 1990s, the museum made some bold moves that observers say made Searsport a town worth visiting.

Clark Nichols, 90, a retired engineer who returned to his native Searsport in 1976, has worked to sustain and improve the museum his father and others founded in 1937.

Nichols was the force behind the museum linking its campus with U.S. Route 1, which is also Searsport’s Main Street.

In 1997, the museum removed two structures to create more on-site parking. Then it bought and demolished an old gas station that stood between the campus and Main Street, replacing it with a park.

It paid off.

“In 1998, we increased attendance by about 40 percent,” Nichols said recently, and membership rose by more than 25 percent.

Two years ago the museum also hired a new director who is interested in drawing families to the exhibits.

Mac Deford, 61, witnessed the Farnsworth Art Museum transforming Rockland into a tourist destination when he served on that museum’s board of directors. He thought the same thing could happen in Searsport.

In the summer of 2003, the museum mounted a “Pirates!” exhibit that tied in with the Farnsworth’s offerings. This past summer, it was “Lobstah – from bait to plate.”

“Pirates!” resulted in attendance that was up 80 percent over the previous year, Deford said, with nearly 16,000 visiting the museum. July and August 2003 saw attendance up 120 percent over the previous summer.

Surveys showed that about 25 percent of visitors stopped on impulse, perhaps spurred by the pleas of children in the back seat intrigued by the skull-and-crossbones flags along the highway leading into town.

“We’re purposely trying to create things that have an appeal beyond the strictly maritime,” Deford said.

Even though 2004 numbers are likely to be less dramatic than 2003’s, “it’s working,” he said,.

A page from the marine museum’s guest register tells the story. Recent visitors came from places as far away as California, Missouri, the Carolinas, Ohio, Virginia and Indiana.

More people are volunteering at the museum, he said, perhaps reflecting a spillover from nearby Belfast where many retirees have landed. “People began to realize the potential in Searsport,” Deford said.

Across the street from the museum, Al Putnam wears an apron with the “Lobstah” logo in his newly opened Coastal Coffee, a “where-everybody-knows-your-name” sandwich shop.

Putnam, 28, a Houlton native who lives in Winterport, left a career as an engineer and decided, with his wife, Abby, to go into business. He leaned on his engineering background, methodically conducting traffic counts before deciding on Searsport, opening the business in February.

“We opened then because we wanted to get to know the locals,” he said.

In addition to the traffic counts – as many as 30,000 a day in the summer – plans by the Grasshopper Shop to open a store in Searsport seemed like a strong endorsement, Putnam said.

“They’re an anchor,” he said.

During a recent workday, Putnam took time between making lobster rolls to give visitors from Brooklyn, N.Y., tips on hiking in the area. He also greeted his regular customers – from the town office, a real estate agency and a gallery – with easy banter and quick service. Before they could ask, Putnam had their coffee made, just right.

“He’s ‘cream with no sugar,'” he said of one regular customer.

While Putnam used his head to choose Searsport, Marcia Markwardt used her heart.

She could have bought a bed-and-breakfast inn anywhere from York to Calais, but Markwardt fell in love with Penobscot Bay and bought the Carriage House Inn a year ago.

The three-story Victorian, built in 1874, features three guest rooms.

Inns are expensive to acquire, with some, like the Carriage House, selling in the $500,000 range even a few years ago.

Markwardt, 50, complained that her first full year in business coincided with one of the worst tourism seasons in recent years but said she is committed to the inn and Searsport.

A former career counselor at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., she was drawn to the sea captain’s home, perhaps, she said, because she is the great-granddaughter of a Maine schooner captain.

“The location is prime,” she said of Searsport, situated between Mount Desert Island and Camden.

The town is also a selling point for her guests. “It’s just like a little diamond in the rough.”

Markwardt believes Searsport’s growth is inevitable, since it is just east of bustling Belfast.

In a way, Searsport residents were forced to choose a direction for their town this past winter and spring. News broke that inquiries had been made to the state about construction of a liquefied natural gas terminal on state-owned Sears Island just off downtown.

Activists from other Penobscot Bay towns, along with some Searsport business owners, mobilized to fight the proposal.

Despite the 30-year history of support for industrial development on Sears Island, residents voted in favor of an industrial moratorium by a 10-1 ratio at a special town meeting in April. The six-month moratorium, adopted at a special town meeting, blocks industrial development in the town’s maritime zone. In a nonbinding vote, residents also opposed an LNG terminal anywhere in town.

Many supporting the moratorium cited the town’s burgeoning tourist economy.

Though a newcomer, Markwardt waded into that debate, working against the LNG proposal.

“I’ve invested a tremendous amount of money into this house. This is my home. I want to be a part of this community,” she said. “Searsport’s going in the right direction.”

Rick and Laurie Schweikert relied on both their hearts and heads when they invested in Searsport. The couple, who run the Grasshopper Shop in Bangor, built a getaway house on Searsport’s waterfront and thought the town was ripening enough to support one of their stores. The new Grasshopper opened in the spring.

“We’ve been watching that little town,” said Rick Schweikert, 50. “It needed some help.”

The couple bought what had been a redemption center on Main Street – for a bargain price, he said – and renovated it.

Though Schweikert confesses to not doing a lot of research, Searsport “just seems like a natural” for a new store. “I think the Chocolate Grille was a factor when we made the move,” he said.

Located in a former Jordan’s Restaurant building on Route 1, the Chocolate Grille opened Memorial Day weekend in 2003. Owner George Gervais and his wife, Julene Gervais, also operate a grille in Old Town that is a prominent part of Old Town’s waterfront revival plans.

Tozier’s, a small grocery store owned by Searsport resident Dale Tozier, also finished an expansion recently.

Dale Tozier, 52, is a Bangor native who started his business in Brewer in 1986. He opened the store in Searsport in 1992, then expanded it from 3,000 square feet to 12,000 square feet, adding more products and enlarging departments.

Barbara Klausmeyer, Marsha Kaplan and Lindsay McGuire – Belfast women with ties to a bookstore there – knew they were taking a risk by opening their bookstore in Searsport.

But by August, when their Left Bank Books opened, the momentum in town was palpable, and instead of raising eyebrows back in Belfast, their investment seemed prescient and shrewd.

The decision came in part, Klausmeyer explained, because the women did not want to compete with The Fertile Mind in Belfast, where they had worked. It also seemed like a calculated risk.

“The community was a little bit of an unknown,” Kaplan admitted, “but the Grasshopper coming in was such a vote of confidence.”

The women believe they are drawing shoppers from Stockton Springs to Winterport, as well as those traveling to Bangor and Bar Harbor. Left Bank Books carries titles that range from the esoteric and academic to the popular and practical, but mostly books that women love.

Their research showed the population of Searsport was a little older than that of Belfast, which may reflect more retirees coming to town.

“I think there is a migration in,” Klausmeyer said. “Belfast is getting full.”

For decades, Searsport has boasted about being the antiques capital of Maine. These days, there are just a handful of antiques stores, but there are several curio shops, such as Capt. Tinkham’s Emporium, operated by Skip Brack, who also owns Liberty Tool and the Tool Barn in Hulls Cove, and in the warm months, a plethora of permanent flea market booths east of town.

But Searsport’s retail revival involves more than an expansion of businesses catering to Route 1 traffic. It touches on lifestyle as well.

Jim Murphy, the owner of Cronin & Murphy, ran art galleries in New Jersey, and when his wife, who was born in Belfast, wanted to return to Maine, the couple settled in Searsport.

Their gallery specializes in early 20th century American paintings and in pottery. The presence of the museum helps, Murphy said, but most of his customers are collectors who track him down.

Asked what the town can do to keep the momentum going, Murphy is blunt: “They can do what I did this morning – you sweep up,” he said, removing the cigarette butts from the sidewalk in front of the gallery. Murphy thinks the town should bite the bullet and pay for such amenities as granite-edged curbs instead of the asphalt versions that are being built.

“You have to invest,” he said.

He also argues that a downtown merchants group should form to communicate its needs to selectmen.

And several of the key players in the revival say they can identify a commercial synergy that now exists.

With the arrival of Coastal Coffee, visitors can grab lunch before or after a trip to the museum, then take time to browse for books at Left Bank, or for antiques and curios at the shops on both sides of downtown.

The numbers suggest growth is occurring in more than just downtown Searsport, with a total population of 2,800.

Town Assessor Bill Terry said construction began on 12 single-family homes last year, as well as seven mobile homes, six doublewides, three seasonal houses, and two multifamily buildings.

“I think that’s the biggest burst since I’ve been here,” he said.

There are also many residents fixing up older homes, Terry said, some of them retirees.

The growth has occurred on its own, Terry noted, without any major initiative – or interference – from the town.

Like Murphy, Ralph Harvey thinks a business association or chamber of commerce would support the momentum.

Harvey and others pointed to the failure last year of the town to mount its traditional Christmas decorations as something that could be accomplished by an association or chamber. No group stepped forward when no money was available to pay for mounting the Christmas decorations usually displayed downtown.

Like others, Harvey thinks the town should invest in granite-edged sidewalks and other improvements.

Too often, people have gotten involved only to serve their own group’s agenda, he said. “It’s a great place, in spite of itself,” and the influx of newcomers will only help, Harvey believes.