In early 2022, after having lost family and friends during the COVID-19 pandemic, Arnaud Lessard realized his longtime dream: to run his own inn and restaurant.
He, his wife and their business partner bought the Homeport Inn and Tavern in Searsport, a grand but timeworn sea captain’s mansion a half mile north of downtown. After four months of nearly nonstop work and about a million dollars in renovations, they reopened the business — a nine room inn with a restaurant and beer garden.
Now, four years and a major Route 1 road reconstruction project later, Homeport Inn again is for sale, extending a wave of changes that have swept through the town’s central Route 1 corridor in the past half dozen years. While the end of the pandemic was credited with fueling a renaissance of downtown Searsport, the past three years has seen several businesses close and others struggle to recover from the road project’s impact.
“We haven’t had one clean year in three years.” Lessard said, referring to challenges local businesses faced from 2023 through 2025.
“The reality is that you had the downtown, Route 1, cannibalized for two years,” and then tourism dropped last summer, he added.
But despite all this, Homeport Inn has been successful, Lessard said, and it seems smart to sell it while it’s thriving. Plus, he and his business partners are in their fifties and looking realistically at the next chapter in their lives — which likely won’t be in food and lodging.
“This is not an old man’s game,” he said.
In the early 2020s, in addition to Homeport Inn, a brewery, two restaurants, a music venue, a gallery and several gift shops opened in town. Bar and restaurant Hey Sailor! and other businesses were opened by people who sensed the village was on an upswing and came to town, bringing their dreams and capital with them.
But now, even though the road project ended more than a year ago, the pendulum seems to have swung the other way.
Last summer, tourism numbers were down across the state, according to the Maine Office of Tourism, while consumer confidence nationwide has steadily declined since late 2024 to a 10-year low. At the same time, costs for restaurants like Hey Sailor! and Homeport are ballooning amid high food prices and rising insurance and electricity rates.
Hey Sailor! and its adjacent event space, The Starboard Lounge, are for sale. Gone are Tozier’s Family Market (later replaced by an Edwards Brothers Supermarket), falafel shop Ras Dal, and the Coastal Cafe, all of which folded during the Route 1 reconstruction. The Captain Nickels Inn, next to Homeport, was sold to new owners in January, and three downtown buildings have been sold in the last month.
Main Street project
Hey Sailor! owners Kirk Linder and Charlie Zorich got their start in the midcoast operating the Hichborn, an upscale restaurant in nearby Stockton Springs. They wanted to diversify and so bought the Hey Sailor! building in 2019.
They spent most of the pandemic gutting and rebuilding the space, opening it in 2022 and the adjacent Starboard Lounge the following year. Business started off strong, but when roadwork started, it went off a cliff.
“Right until they closed the road, it was working,” said Linder.
When road work began in spring 2023, Route 1 through downtown was reduced to a single lane, and southbound traffic was routed on a long detour that bypassed downtown entirely.
The plan had been to shut down the entire road during construction, but business owners insisted that officials keep one lane open. Still, there was a six-foot-tall fence in front of Hey Sailor! for months.
“If people were going to come here they had to find parking and hike through the mud,” Zorich said.
Linder and Zorich estimate they missed out on about a half a million dollars in revenue during the course of the construction project.
They, like other local business owners, fell behind on their property taxes and faced liens from the town. Linder and Zorich incurred $20,000 total in overdue tax bills from both Searsport and Stockton Springs, paying them off just this month. They poured tens of thousands of dollars into their business to keep their lights on and, more important, their employees paid.
“That was priority one for us,” Linder said. “It was important for us to keep our people.”
Hey Sailor! and the Starboard Lounge are still open. Even in the dead of winter, they are hosting multiple concerts and benefits. But last spring they closed The Hichborn and also put it up for sale.
“This isn’t the end of our story,” Zorich said. “I just don’t know what the next chapter is.”
Searsport Town Manager James Gillway acknowledged the Route 1 rebuild was difficult on local businesses.
“It was a difficult time,” he said. “There’s just no doubt about it.”
Asked whether it was worth it or not, he reframed the question through a different lens. The downtown was not accessible for people with mobility issues or pedestrians, he said.
“It was necessary and required,” Gillway said.
Laura Brown, owner of the gift store Trove, said reopening after the project was finished felt like going back to square one.
“It was like, basically, how do I start again,” she said.
At first she was discouraged. But she has since been buoyed by how business owners have been working together to recover from their road-project losses and by a beautification effort that has brought planters and public art to the town.
“Resilience. I think that is the story here,” she said. “We want to be here.”
Starting over
For Rob Martell, owner of Maineport Brewing, opening a bar and brewery downtown is his retirement.
Martell, a master electrician, ran his own contracting business in Los Angeles but made beer on the side. Now he brews a rotating mix of ales and lagers, using Maine-grown grains.
Martell and his wife bought the oldest brick building in the downtown strip in 2021 and took on a painstaking rebuild that involved tearing out most everything between the dirt floor basement and the rafters.
The remodel took longer than anticipated, but Martell now knows his timing was lucky. He opened just after the road construction ended, and knew business would pick up the next summer.
But Martell also is navigating another set of unknowns.
Just as the brewery was hitting its stride this summer, Martell was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
“When I told everyone they were like ‘what can we do?’ Everyone wants to do something,” he said, adding that the brewery has developed a regular local clientele. “And I’m like, ‘Keep coming in. Don’t let this place turn into a morgue.’”
Still, Martell is doing relatively well and comes in often, though he avoids the most crowded times since his immune system is compromised. With any luck, he says, he’ll be headed into surgery soon and will get help from brewer friends to helm the operation while he recovers.
He’s optimistic about Searsport’s future. The downtown is practically sparkling now that the road project is finally over. The grocery store has reopened under new owners and a new name. On the streetlights downtown, new copper weathervanes are both a throw-back to the town’s seafaring past and an investment in its future.
“I think things are turning upward,” said Gillway, the town manager, adding that there are plans to reopen a business in at least one shuttered storefront. “I’m hopeful that we get some good businesses and people start visiting downtown again.”
