The east coast is dotted with decrepit vestiges of its once-vast industrial base, including shuttered former seafood-processing plants.
Few visitors can expect cozy couches and spacious kitchens when they pick through the rubble of the industrial revolution.
But the experience at the Inn at the Wharf in Lubec is different, enough so that it’s good that owner Victor Trafford hasn’t completed the former factory’s renovation. Without seeing the unfinished spaces, it would be hard to believe a sardine factory once operated here.
On a spring day, Trafford unlatches a bungee cord that holds closed a door in the unfinished section of the building. It opens to a drained tank some 20 feet below.
“Here’s where we picture a dining room. This still needs some work,” he says, without a trace of irony.
Before he shows his guest to a bright and airy suite overlooking the ocean, he stops and chats with an employee about the supply of periwinkles down below.
The inn maintains working waterfront in the building’s lower level, with a full-service buying station for lobsters, crabs, urchins, periwinkles and scallops. The wharf also handles lobster bait. The holding tanks and conveyor belts are out of eyesight to all but the most curious tourist, but are accessible to the wharf adjoining the building.
As stakeholders mull over the future of the former Stinson sardine factory in Gouldsboro, they might want to look to the Inn at the Wharf in Lubec for a cue of how to revitalize a factory for post-industrial use. The inn combines ocean-view suites and gathering spaces with working waterfront that will remain so in perpetuity, through Maine’s Working Waterfront Access Pilot Program. Recently, it was listed in Yankee Magazine’s Annual “Best Of New England” feature as “Best Creative Reuse” lodging in Maine. Where the upper level of the factory once stood, there is now three apartments and six suites. Trafford hopes to build six more suites in the next year.
And Trafford is adamant that the building will remain open for area fishermen forever. The state has decided to purchase a permanent covenant on wharf from Trafford to keep it a working waterfront. About 38 lobster and scallop boats and 120 skiff fishermen sell their products to the wharf, according to the pilot program’s Web site.
The money has not yet come through from the state program, but Trafford plans to use the grant to continue with the building’s renovations and investing in working waterfront infrastructure. He says the working waterfront investment will take much more than the grant awards, in the end.
When he started the project, Trafford, an entrepreneur, admits he was an unlikely visionary for such a project.
He says he had no experience at innkeeping when he purchased the building.
“Not even close,” he said. “Nor had I been involved in seafood.”
A native of Aroostook County with American and Canadian citizenship, Trafford moved to Florida and enjoyed a career as a contractor and owner of a pressure-washing business. He and his wife, Judy, had come back to northern Maine for his mother’s birthday. Afterwards, they decided to spend five days in Bar Harbor, with a swing through Lubec.
“When we got this far, we stopped,” said Trafford. “At the end of five days, we signed a contract on a summer home.”
Around the time of his visit, the building that once housed a sardine factory went up for sale. The Lubec Sardine Company opened in 1910 and generations of Lubec residents grew up accustomed to the factory horn calling the next shift to work. Pictures of the factory throughout the decades hang on Trafford’s office walls, with handmade tags identifying locals who worked there. But the factory closed in 2001.
Trafford saw an undervalued property and purchased the factory in 2006. An engineer recommended the building be torn down, and Trafford envisioned building several seaside houses in its place. But the history of the building tugged at the preservationist in him.
“So many of the old factories have all gone into the sea,” he said, a statement that was as close as he would come to articulating why he undertook the Herculean task of saving the building.
It wasn’t easy. Some Lubec residents were concerned about his plans and there were two heated meetings over rezoning the property to allow for more population density. But the town manager and selectmen backed his plan, saying it would bring tax revenue and actually help the town’s wastewater infrastructure run more efficiently. The rezoning motion passed a town vote in 2007, but just barely.
Then there was the building itself. The upper level needed to be gutted, including the walls; the walls of the lower level were taken out and repaired. Many of the columns were crumbling and had to be propped up.
But the results speak for themselves. Suites and apartments look out at the ocean. The décor is fit for the Martha Stewart crowd, while small hooks on the ceiling speak to the building’s first use.
The Inn at the Wharf opened its doors in 2009 with no pre-reservations, but finished the season with 400 rentals. Already this season, Trafford has 500 reservations, half the inn’s total capacity. More rooms should come online this year in time to celebrate the building’s 100th birthday.
Also, Trafford plans to run a water taxi business this summer that will connect tourists to Eastport and a whale-watching tour. He says Lubec may be able to take advantage of the economic downturn, as tourists look for cheaper alternatives.
“Lubec is a lot less expensive than Bar Harbor,” he said.
He believes the Inn at the Wharf’s industrial and post-industrial uses not only can coexist, but thrive together.
Inn guests “would plan their whole days around the lobster catches,” he said. “Even with lobster bait, the workers would have tourists leaning over their shoulder to get a better look.”
Craig Idlebrook is a freelance writer based in Ellsworth.