What’s It’s Like in Bath, Maine

Well, that was confusing. I had a Three Stooges flashback, and thought Saturday was always bath day. But we went to Bath, Maine, on a whim on Sunday, and it was Bath Day all over again. It was lots of laughs, even without the eye-gouges.

It was plenty hot. Around 90F. But while Bath isn’t technically oceanfront, it’s on the Kennebec River, which wends its way down from where we live in Ogguster, and then continues on past Bath out to the Atlantic. So there was a nice almost-ocean breeze, and 90 felt downright pleasant, at least if you stayed on the shady side of the street. Like this:

The picture is somewhat deceiving. We had just walked up Center Street, and were banging a left onto Front Street. That was where the action was, primarily, but it looks sparsely thronged in the photo. But there were a lot of people out. Perhaps they got a good look at us, and kept their distance while I took the picture.

You get a good feel for the place in that picture. Bath is a paean to brick. Real bricks, too, not awful concrete simulacrums. The sidewalks and the buildings and even the alleys are all bricks. Maine towns had a habit of burning down from time to time, and eventually the locals got tired of it and built the whole town over again with bricks. Portland is like that, too. Sometimes it was Indians, and sometimes it was Canadians or Brits, and occasionally, it was just the Know Nothing Party burning Catholic churches. They got their comeuppance eventually. Besides barbecuing Catholic churches, I gather they were also big into women’s rights. As soon as women got the vote, they outlawed liquor. Imagine 200 shipyards and zero grogshops. Fate worse than death, that.

When we crossed the street to get our ration of un-awninged July solar radiation, which resembles Venus a bit, I took a snap that shows the brick-y facades of the shops to better effect. As you can espy in the next picture, the street has remained mostly unchanged during the last 100 years, except for the Great Awning Blight of 1937:

There are plenty of relatively monumental brick buildings mixed in with the wee shop-downstairs-a-few-floors-of-apartments-above. Like this gem:

Even the more modest bank buildings are pretty elegant:

Bath has a nice mixture of federal, Greek revival, and Italianate buildings. It’s got a hell of a city hall for a burg with fewer than 9,000 people in it:

The town has been known for shipbuilding since they chased the Abenaki Indians out. At one point, there were something like 200 companies making boats in Bath and environs. There’s still one big one, hulking over everything in the town: Bath Iron Works. They make destroyers for the navy:

Well, Prohibition is over, and Bath has numerous places with liquor licenses, and they even serve guys that went to Catholic school. We went in one, the Bath Brewing Company, and had some pale ale to go with their back deck river view:

Food was good, too. We watched over the railing as all the regular folks walked along the riverfront and got fried dough and fried skin in the afternoon sun as they sauntered on the road by the park, where a carnival had set up shop:

The park had one hell of a view of the mighty Kennebec, and the new Sagadahoc Bridge, which helps you continue on Route 1 without getting your feet wet. The old railroad bridge is behind it.

Bath was pretty normal, all in all, which is anything but normal these days. The park was filled with families, and a bandstand where yacht rock covers were served. The local wildmen was just mildly off-beat:

So we had a good time in Bath. I think I could live in Bath, and like it, although whether Bath would like me back is another story. I know it’s dangerous to judge a place on a single, out of the ordinary day, but all I needed to see was three good bookstores on two blocks of Front Street. Case closed.