What It’s Like in Hallowell, Maine

We’re weird. We get cabin fever in the fall. We’re supposed to wait until we’ve been mewed up in our mountain bolthole for four months under five feet of snow to get antsy and get to wandering. But once the lawn stops growing and there’s no point gardening, because a hard frost has already taken care of everything, we sometimes pick a destination and decide to annoy it properly. This weekend, we chose Hallowell.

Hallowell is a couple of counties over from us. Kennebec. The Kennebec River runs through it, and was the original reason for the town. The river runs  to the sea, and rivers were the original superhighways for commerce. Hallowell is a carbuncle on the southern portion of Ogguster, the state capital. Ogguster’s big by Maine’s small standards. Almost 20,000 people. Hallowell has about 2,500. And if you go downtown on a fine fall day and sit on a bench in front of the coffee shop, it appears all 2,500 are trying to drive past you at the same time. It’s like American Graffiti, with better gas mileage.

No matter how busy it gets, you can cross la strada with impunity, because this is Maine. People obey laws around here when anyone’s looking. Place a pinkie toe in the crosswalk, and drivers stand on the brakes for you. Oh, and by the way, the crosswalks are serious business, not a series of worn out painted stripes. They’re made of granite blocks:

Granite quarrying was a going concern around here for a long time, and the residue of it is still visible here and there.

You can roll down the hill on your bicycle or your unsteady legs, and enjoy the riverside. There is a very substantial pier with plastic Adirondacks to park your thinking parts on and watch the locals gather and the river meander by.

The chairs are made from recycled plastic, another word for garbage. In the high summer, they smell a bit like the dump. In the fall they’re fine. You can put your feet up on the concrete ledge and eat your bag lunch, and generally enjoy yourself. The serene river and the soporific sunshine lulls you into complacency, so much so that you lose the urge to walk back up the hill and murder whoever is playing a hurdy gurdy on the street corner. Perhaps “murder” sounds a tad harsh. I would have preferred to have given him some spare change from my pocket, is what I really meant. Of course instead of dropping it in his tip jar, I would have thrown it at him like Sandy Koufax, but the result would be the same, surely. We’d both be richer for the experience.

People ooh and ah over Hallowell’s strip because it’s old. People are weird about such topics. They can’t wait to turn their entire life into one big, featureless plastic stripmall snouthouse monstrosity, but they always tell you how much they like twee streets and little shops. You can find all sorts of vestiges of old downtowns in Maine, mostly abandoned. But Hallowell isn’t Potemkin. The shops and restaurants are open and appear to be making real money. They’re certainly charging real money.

We’ve eaten in at least four restaurants in Hallowell. I’m pretty sure we’ve eaten in a total of four restaurants in Maine in the last 15 years, so that’s a lot. That’s the Liberal Cup on Water Street. It has grub and a liquor license. It’s less expensive than a tax audit, and the food is almost as good as you can make at home. That’s my review. Oh, don’t eat there if you don’t want your feet to stick to the floor a bit.

We’ve also eaten at the Bistro Milliard. It’s an upscale eye-talian joint. It was our anniversary, so we decided to splurge. “Splurge” doesn’t cover it, though. Your mouth won’t water, but your eyes will when you get the check. We blew way over a hundred clams in the place, and went away hungry anyway.  To finish, we tried to spend even more and asked for espresso for afters, and got a blank look for our trouble.

We ate in Burano’s Wood-Fired Pizzeria on Sunday. We’d given up on the other spots. We sat outdoors on a patio overlooking the river. Nice. The waiter, who had enough facial hair for a creditable soul patch, had decided to ration it out into a beard, and even attempted some form of D’Artagnan effect with the moustache. This endeared him to us and made us want to adopt him. He seemed pleasant, and we have a mirror at our house he might find handy. We watched the pizza being prepared through the big glass windows, and being shoveled into the big glowing pizza oven, which was a kind of fun. How they managed to serve it to us lukewarm anyway is a dark and bloody mystery. We were ten steps away. Not bad, though. Just a missed opportunity to excel.

But we don’t travel the Maine map to take pictures of our food. We go to Hallowell for the rail trail. It starts in Ogguster and ends in Gardiner.

As you wend your way along, the river peeks at you through the trees pretty regularly, and you can peek back without worrying about cars running you over. It’s pretty sweet, and not crowded.

We started in Hallowell and ended in Ogguster. We went back and forth a couple of times. Ten miles on a mostly level trail seems like nothing to pedal. The trail begins in Ogguster behind this stately pile of granite:

My wife, and the Main Street Maine dot Org website, call this building (the Olde Federal Building) a Romanesque Revival style. It ain’t. It’s Chateauesque. The granite and the turrets give it away. My wife can prove I’m wrong by referring to the internet. I can prove I’m right by knowing things. You can decide which is the more reliable method.

Hallowell is sorta notable, architecture-wise. It has buildings on the Historical Architectural Building Survey (HABS). Here’s one from downtown. The Emporium:

Sometime around 1820, somebody built a brick commercial building here. In the 1870s, the owners gussied it up by putting a cast-iron facade on it, rendering it unusual and notable and hot to the touch in August. This image was taken in 1970 or so. Let’s see how things have changed in Hallowell in the intervening half-century:

Yeah, Maine has a bit of a fly-in-amber vibe to it. At least the good parts do. Everything new looks like someone from San Diego tried to make another Massachusetts, and failed.

So visit Hallowell. The river sparkles and the bike path beckons and drivers yield to pedestrians and there are more liquor licenses than drunks. Some day they’ll learn how to serve pizza hot, and it will be like paradise.