From Shore Path to back streets, a couple of quick strolls uncover the quieter rhythms that define the town beyond its busiest hours.
Aug 01, 2026
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Window Panes Home and Garden.
BAR HARBOR—The troubadour with his guitar case positions himself on the edge of the sidewalk by Sherman’s Book Store, hoping for tourists or new lovers with a dollar or two in cash. He’s giving out songs for free, really, as people meander by.
The sun is setting in Bar Harbor and in the half hour before dark, a family quick-walks on the small roads between the banks. The father and a boy that’s around ten or so are a few paces ahead of the rest of the troop.
“I hate tourists,” the boy grumbles.
“Buddy, we are tourists,” the dad says back without pause. It’s instant truth.
And quick as that they are gone, down the hill and lost to the shadows of the Bar Harbor Inn’s parking areas.
It’s well past the time of the large cruise ships, which have moved on to their next ports, and the congestion on the sidewalks in one place dissipates, moves to another, clusters around the ice cream shops.
Couples and families and locals with their dogs meander down the rebuilt Shore Path that runs along the coast of Frenchman Bay from Ells Pier to Wayman Lane. Some quick walk, sandals and running shoes and flip-flops displacing tiny bits of gravel. Some stop and stare at the schooner, the Margaret Todd coming in. Others spot an American Cruise Lines ship moored near the Bar Harbor Inn.
There are year round residents; tourists; people who were born here; people originally from away who live here too; people who come for the summer and live on a side of affluence many dream of; people who make the decisions; people who bemoan the decisions; people who serve; who struggle to find a home of their own, a place they don’t have to share rooms with strangers who end up having to become friends; people who run the restaurants and shops; people who frequent them; people who complain the town is too busy to visit, but still do.
If you move out of downtown proper and into the larger part of Bar Harbor, you find a Bar Harbor that a lot of visitors don’t see. Campgrounds spread along shores. Neighborhoods linger on curvy roads that stretch to the water. Labs host innovation and discovery. A basketball net has a permanent place on the edge of a roadway in front of a white house.
A College of the Atlantic student, here all summer, sings indie-folk from his stoop by the YMCA’s backlot where an RV has been parked for summer housing the last two years at least. The RV is gone because the Y was able to find a house to purchase in town for employee housing.
A couple inspects their flowers that they’ve planted along the borders of their lawn. Lobster traps stack up in a side yard, bringing their sea smells with them as the fog rolls in. Deer chomp on bushes and mingle with wild turkeys off the Cromwell Harbor Road, just at the edge of the national park.
At the town ball fields, the Acadians host the three-day Marty Lyons tourney. Dogs and kids frolic. A puppy gives another puppy side eye. A boy takes a spill on his scooter, flat for a moment in the asphalt parking lot. People surround him, offer a hand up.
“Are you okay?”
He’s okay.
At the College of the Atlantic, all week long, it has been the summer institute where thinkers, authors, journalists, politicians, entrepreneurs, podcast hosts, musicians, professors mingle and exchange ideas and hope and thoughts about democracy with locals and visitors in a free and beautiful interaction of conversation. Under the tent on COA’s lawn, people pause and listen and think.
Back in Bar Harbor proper, a woman talks to people about potentially walking her dog. Music happens at festivals, in churches, on sidewalks, bars, and at the Criterion Theatre.
Strangers give each other directions. A businessman sitting inside a local bar frantically, but also somehow confidently, whistles at a car driving down a road without its headlights, the car’s driver oblivious to the fact that she is traveling in darkness. Another man, listening to music, but not inside the building, finally gets the driver’s attention and she turns the lights on.
A wedding party crowds the space at William’s on the Green, giving late night toasts.
They speak of magic and hope and love. The next day, groomsmen in matching green blazers pose for a photo together on West Street, laughing, arms slung around each other’s shoulders. Behind them kayaks get ready for a tour group. The kayakers stride down the sidewalk across from the West Street hotel, personal floatation devices strapped across their chests.
Down Mount Desert Street, a couple heads to the Sweet Bite for a cookie.
When live music at the Annex ends, a man in a leather vest (despite the late July humidity) asks where he can go next.
“The Finback,” everyone says.
“The Finback it is,” he repeats and pauses. “Uh? Where is that?”
Soon he’s shuffling down the center of Rodick Street headed for Cottage, ignoring the sidewalks and choosing the darkest place to place his feet instead. One foot in front of another, he searches for music.
In one of Bar Harbor’s many restaurants that also supports a bar, one bartender explains his idea. There’s a Neil Gaiman book and there’s an underworld in it—a world that runs beneath the normal world, a world that nobody really sees—that’s what the Bar Harbor world of restaurant workers is like.
“Nobody sees us,” he says. For a moment, he is forlorn and serious and then shifts back into jovial bartender mode and teases, “We’re the underbelly.”
The hostess laughs.
At the Annex on Rodick Street, people stare through the open windows, listening to music. A family of three with two Great Pyrenees, giant, white, fluffy dogs, stop and talk for a while. A woman at a table reaches out to pet them. The space between the restaurant and the street is broken. People speak and touch over the threshold. The same thing happens at the Finback. The same thing happens at the Ivy Manor as people gather around fire pits and listen to music in the afternoons.
At the Finback, the front garage-style door is closed to lessen the noise. Musicians sit inside serenading the crowd. Outside the Thirsty Whale, a couple ponders whether or not to go in. They do. Down by the fountain, two girls pose for their own cellphone. A family sits on the grass, gazing toward the yellow umbrellas of the inn. At Paddy’s people’s laughter spills through the doorway. At the Ivy Manor Inn, people sprawl in bright red chairs relaxing.
Liminal spaces are thresholds. And sometimes towns like Bar Harbor are, too. Places waiting on decisions about cruise ships and water rates, waiting for a new school and massive infrastructure changes, shifting between the busy times of summer and winter, placed on the threshold between the small mountains of Acadia National Park and the ocean.
Liminal spaces are true spaces, places that authors like Gaiman explore in novels, but they are also transitions, thresholds, places or people who are going from one change to the next. And those changes? They can be hard and feel lonely.
But they also can be beautiful.
LaRochelle, the site of the Bar Harbor Historical Society on West Street, hosts a piazza that extends to rolling lawns down toward the water. A fairy garden waits to the side of the brick mansion.
At Bar Harbor’s town pier, a man and his son fish. The son is doing better than father is currently, reeling one in, bouncing a bit on his toes in joy. This one is big enough for supper.
They exist on the other side of wealth like that of the man who owns Carnival Cruise Lines, whose boat had been out in the harbor just last weekend.
Between the family fishing and the larger yachts in the town’s slips, tourists take selfies, locals walk swiftly getting in their steps, moving through that space at the end of the land, right before the precipice of water, confidently through the spaces.
All photos: Carrie Jones. Pieces of this story first appeared in 2023.
PLACES WE MENTIONED AND LINKS WE REFERENCED
Acadian Youth Sports/Marty Lyons Tournament.
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