Another Eastport renovation is about to return more elegance to the city’s waterfront.

This time, the red-brick behemoth of a building that is being tackled is the old American Can Co. at 15 Sea Street. Built in 1908, containing 30,000 square feet of empty space over two floors, it represents the heyday of Eastport’s sardine-packing heritage.

By the summer of 2007 – its centennial year – the former factory will be transformed into a two-story hub of multiuse, community-oriented enterprises.

A dozen small businesses will fill the first floor, topped by a 30-room inn with big-window views of Passamaquoddy Bay and Campobello Island. Also, three condominiums constructed out of a slightly raised and roomy attic area will feature, no doubt, the very best views of the bay from the city.

The million-dollar plan to renovate the building has been a closely held dream of three women, all solidly committed to Eastport as both friends and business partners.

Each in their 50s, Meg McGarvey and Nancy Asante – who are sisters – and Linda Godfrey have taken on the ambitious project without hesitation.

“New ideas need old buildings” is their working mantra. They came away with that clarity after attending the 2004 Blaine House Conference on Maine’s Creative Economy in Augusta.

As social entrepreneurs they embrace such endeavors. As part of an eight-woman team in 2004, they turned the old Minctons Building at 51 Water St. into a high-end artisans’ gallery – now called The Commons – at the south end of Eastport’s developing downtown.

News of their acquisition of the Sea Street property over the summer has been greeted along Water Street – Eastport’s signature street – with a tide of anticipation and appreciation. Sea Street is a small detour off Water Street, even closer to the water.

These women haven’t waited to hear what David Flanagan – named in June as Gov. John Baldacci’s personal representative to Washington County – has recommended for how the county can prosper again with the help of state government. Rather, the trio has moved forward on their own to make changes in Eastport, starting at the street level.

The changes are easy on the eye, welcome and long overdue.

Even the Boston Globe showed disdain for the bayside city of 1,600, calling it a mothballed “port of poverty” as recently as the 1990s.

“They were pretty hard on us,” said Carl Young, Eastport’s building inspector the last five years. He keeps the Globe reference on his desk

Once finished, the 15 Sea Street project will resemble “a microcosm of all that is possible to offer visitors to Maine,” Godfrey described. “It will be done on a scale that is compatible within our community.”

Eastport actually brims with transitional building projects, making it a poster community for what Baldacci continues to call Maine’s “creative economy.”

Eastport represents a safe, welcoming environment for people who want to visit or live permanently deep Down East. Its position on the Passamaquoddy offers historical significance, vital learning experiences, artistic options and a chance to interact with nature.

The women’s plans for the building’s face-lift blend well with similar efforts by others up and down Water Street. The city’s dramatic downtown turnaround ripples with several storefronts changing hands and getting new facades, bringing in new foot traffic and renewed spending patterns.

Not counting the strolling tourists who stop to see all the scaffolding on building fronts, local restaurants are filling just with those at work along Water Street – carpenters, roofers, electricians and plumbers. These same workers are filling up their gas tanks on their way out of town, too.

“That’s just one of the big impacts of all the work going on,” Young said.

“We are seeing a real boom because of this. There are a lot of spinoff benefits just to the renovations. We are also seeing buildings’ values being raised within the local historic district just by being next to a better building.”

The women didn’t miss a beat in the summer of 2004 when a for sale sign went up at 15 Sea Street. McGarvey once before had let the building get away, when the former owner of Mearle Corp. said it could be hers if she wanted it – 20 years ago.

But without the vision or wherewithal to move forward, a Canadian aquaculture company moved in. This time around, McGarvey and the others were ready.

The owner who wanted out last year was Stolt Sea Farm of St. George, New Brunswick. The building had been used as a central point for Stolt’s four aquaculture farms in the area. Fish food came in and out, and nets were brought there for repair.

Naturally, an odor of fish still greets anyone who does a walk-through. It’s a cavern of a place, and two-thirds of it extends over the water at high tide. At low tide the pillars that hold it up provide a cathedral-like experience when you walk underneath.

Asante said of the possibilities at the time, “The only hesitation we had was to catch our breath.

“We realized that this [restoration] was the next logical thing that we could do. We were feeling quite in charge of the situation at The Commons at that point. We were at a not-uncomfortable place that freed us up psychologically to move on this.”

The actual acquisition of the building was not without its bumps.

Late in the negotiations with Stolt’s North American vice president, Shirley Roche Albert, the women learned that the company might change its mind about the sale, and instead fold the building into a plan involving Stolt’s international office in Amsterdam.

“We had a commitment with Stolt through our work with Shirley to that point,” Godfrey said. “She is a woman of great integrity, and she stood by where we were in the negotiations.

“They finished exactly as we had worked them out. It was a very strong ethic that we saw revealed.”

The three women had done their visioning and business planning in advance of the building’s acquisition. Now they are honing the design and financial details that back up the project.

They are preparing to invite others to join them as investors, although they say the more immediate task is preparing the building for winter.

The same local construction crews that handled the rebuilding of the Commons building, David Frost of Charlotte and Darren Clement of Pleasant Point, will return to handle the renovation workload at 15 Sea Street.

The architect has been Comeau MacKenzie Architecture of St. John, New Brunswick.

The historically precise restoration will honor Eastport’s industrial roots.

Eastport was where Julius Wolff in 1876 was credited as the first person to can sardines in metal. When the Franco-Prussian War of the early 1870s cut off the supply of sardines from Europe, the commission house of Wolff and Reising started the first successful American sardine cannery in Eastport in 1875.

Inventions in 1903 allowed machine-made and machine-sealed cans to replace three-piece soldered cans, previously a time-consuming process.

The American Can Co. was built in 1908, which was the time Eastport had its greatest population, numbering about 5,000.

Eventually Seacoast Canning Co. came to own the building, becoming the most substantial of the 18 sardine factories in Eastport and the foundation of the city’s industrial heritage.

Seacoast Canning even became the ultimate owner of the 17 other plants, the American Can Co. included. The work that took place at 15 Sea Street sent the name “Eastport” around the world.

The building’s saving grace through the years has been that the grand second-story windows were bricked over long ago, protected from the weather off the bay. Those windows will be uncovered and replaced.

The women will rebuild the building, but they won’t run any of the businesses that will fill it. They are leaving that to a mix of entrepreneurs who will share a common approach of green, nature-friendly ways of operating a business.

The building is a neighbor to other renovated landmarks – such as the Tides Institute museum, now in the previous bank building – that are bringing life back to the Water Street area. Call it cultural tourism, even ecotourism, both of which are found in abundance in Eastport.

The new owners are looking forward to working with other business owners in Eastport – particularly artisans, retailers and those with marine interests – who may want to relocate to 15 Sea Street when the renovation is complete.

“We have had some hints from other people,” Godfrey said, “who want to see their own business dreams come true in this building. They love Eastport and the bay as much as we do.”