BELFAST — A Waldo County weekly newspaper columnist once described Mike Hurley as a cross between the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia and boxing promoter Don King. That’s about right.
Hurley’s got the hippie resumé—attended the Woodstock festival, part of the back-to-the-land movement—and the flamboyant impresario skills that today are called guerrila marketing.
He’s run several businesses in town, including the Belfast Café, a window cleaning and awning installation company and a retail store. These days, he and his wife Therese Bagnardi operate the Colonial Theatre, a restored art deco movie house, and the Temple, a movie theater in Houlton. Hurley also runs BigScreenBiz.com, a resource for theater owners and Fiberglass Farm, which creates and sells life-sized Fiberglas replicas of animals. The latter came out of Hurley’s initiative in 2000 in which white Fiberglas bears were given to local artists to decorate and then installed around the downtown. All summer, and in subsequent summers, visitors toured and photographed family members with the bears.
Hurley served two terms as the city’s mayor, took a break, and now is in his second term as a city councilor. He’s opinionated, passionate, and sometimes confrontational. Political opponents try to label him as a big government liberal, but he has advocated strongly for small businesses, having run several.
No one questions his motivation. Hurley is head-over-heels in love with Belfast, and even after 35-plus years in town, that love has not waned. He works tirelessly to make the city a lively, fun, prosperous place.
Among the many ideas he’s launched in recent years are the Drum & Rabble Society, an ad hoc group that bangs on drums and other things during a march to the waterfront on New Year’s Eve; an annual Street Party during the non-tourist season; and a one-time “flash mob” event in which about 70 people of all ages boogied on a blocked-off Main Street (Google “Belfast Maine Harlem Shake” to see the YouTube video; Hurley’s the one in the Santa suit).
Against great odds—or maybe not, as Hurley sees it—Belfast is one of the coast’s success stories. Leaders in other Maine small towns have sought his advice for how to replicate that success.
WW: You’ve always been a real idea man. Is that something that’s come to you naturally?
Hurley: I think that’s called ADHD in the real world. If I’m driving from here to Houlton, I’ll have, literally, dozens of ideas popping into my head, “Do this! Do that!” It’s very distracting.
People who do one thing well? I envy those people.
WW: The creativity, I think, is certainly part of it.
Hurley: This expression, “guerilla marketing”—if you’re not rich here, and I’m not rich—if you’re going to make something happen, you’ve got to be creative about how you’re going to do it. The Harlem Shake—that was a lot of fun for not a lot of effort.
WW: You were using social media before it existed. You were using social networks.
Hurley: In the Belfast Café days, I was always promoting dances and parties. How do you get people to find out about stuff, and get excited about it and believe in it? I remember this thing called Tropical Bop, which was just a bull—- excuse to sell a lot of drinks to people dressed up in Hawaiian outfits in the middle of the winter. But you have to believe in it. Or people won’t go, all dressed up.
You have to have a bit of a vision. I saw the Fiberglas cows in Chicago [a public art installation in 1999 that was a hit with tourists], and I felt like I came back on a mission. All these years I’d been working on how to make a downtown stronger, and better, and get people down there, and make business better and give people something to do, 24/7 [for months].
WW: But there’s some things, like the Harlem Shake thing, which was a one-time, what, five-minute thing? You can’t monetize that and a downtown development director would not want to waste his or her time doing that, but that brings something. What does that bring to a town?
Hurley: There were some doctors and nurses from this area that went over to Romania or something. And so they’re being introduced at this reception and there’s a lot of people in the room and they introduce them all and they open the floor up to questions. And the first question is, “Were you in the Harlem Shake?” [Laughs] Because they had all gone and looked at it [online].
And so what it brings is, it shows that it’s a fun town, that people are having fun. And it sends other messages, like, “Oh, this would have had to be done in cooperation [with the police and other groups].”
It made young people happy to be there, and have fun, and to feel like this is their town, too. I often feel that we’re running the town for 80-year-old people.
WW: Or at least boomers like us.
Hurley: Yeah. So I’ve pushed back on that as much as I can.
WW: What’s your relationship with Belfast? How do you feel about it? You put on Facebook recently that you live and breathe Belfast. Tell me about that.
Hurley: I don’t know how many years ago my accountant said to me, “Well I hope you’re having fun, because you’ve wasted the best income-producing years of your life.”
I went to pre-school in Germany where I was born. Or France, I can’t really remember [as the child of a military family]. And then I went to kindergarten over there. And then I went to first grade over there, second grade in Putnam Lake, N.Y. And I went to third grade and fourth grade at a different school in Hackenack, N.J.
So, I was in six schools by the time I was in fourth grade. And I grew up in Teaneck, N.J. and left immediately upon graduation.
Belfast, to me, is really my home, in a really big way. I’ve got a gravestone waiting for me up at the Grove [Cemetery]. It’s very impatient, apparently [laughs].
I’m really grateful for that—to have a home. To feel really proud of that. Especially for a guy who moved around a lot when I was a kid.
I’ve really been here”¦ I’m not going to say my entire adult life, but I got here when I was 28. Thirty-five years.
When I showed up, Belfast was a serious, tough town and troubled in many, many ways. The chicken plants were still going, though just about to collapse. The shoe factories were going and just about to collapse. We were sewing pants [and processing] sardines, potatoes, chickens, windows”¦ Three-quarters of it was about to collapse. And it did. In short order.
I came out of the anti-war [movement], I was a hippie”¦ It was really interesting that my generation in 1980 had three guys under 30-years-old as Belfast city councilors. Today, the average age of the Belfast City Council is like 90 [laughs]. I don’t know what it is, that my generation wanted to take the wheel. And went for the wheel. And I was part of that. We just thought we could do it better or we could do it as good.
I was very quickly involved in Belfast vibrancy, doing things like digging up the sidewalk and putting in these little brick pavers because we thought that would turn the town around.
But bit by bit”¦
WW: It did!
Hurley: “¦ we did. I get calls all the time, “What did you do in Belfast?” Like, “If we can just do this in Dover-Foxcroft, we’re going to turn it around.” Long ago, I figured out: coast of Maine, Route 1, Route 3, Belfast-Moosehead Lake Railroad, and Bangor and Bar Harbor north of us. And I said, “Unless Maine Yankee [the now-closed nuclear power plant] melts down, it is inevitable that this area is going to grow and improve,” and it certainly did.
Back then [in the mid- to late-1970s], if you went from Boston [north], every waterfront town was all broken down, rough, tough places in need of a lot of love. And then people just woke up and said, “We’ve got this incredible resource of ocean.”
The inter-tidal zone has like 70 percent, 80 percent of all life on the planet. And guess what, it turns out that a couple of miles inland is included in that. So much as I would like to take credit—Damariscotta, Ellsworth, Rockland, Boothbay—every one of these towns is better today then they were 30 years ago and I had nothing to do with that.
WW: How do you define authenticity? Some downtowns just don’t feel like real towns. They feel like a movie set. Does Belfast have it and how do you keep it?
Hurley: You have gentrification, one house at a time, every time a house sells. So it tends not to be a young, working family. They just can’t afford it, in town.
You have towns that are much more exclusive. Well, if you’re really rich, you’re not comfortable in a town like Belfast. You’re more comfortable in Camden.
WW: But what about 25 years from now?
Hurley: You’ve got to fight it, point by point. There are people right now who want to tear down the Belfast Skate Park. To me, having a skate park in the middle of town is important for maintaining authenticity.
It’s not a town that’s been given over to old people who want peace and quiet and things sanitized. I fight it issue by issue.