If you have driven up the coast of Maine, chances are you have passed through a very pretty harbor town called Camden.
It’s where Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote poetry. It’s the homeport of famed three-masted schooners. It’s where, as the town slogan goes, “the mountains meet the sea.” In winter you can ski within sight of the bay; in summer you can sail in the lee of the hills.
And soon, to the horror of many locals, you will also be able to stroll into a clean, brightly lit, signature pink-and-orange Dunkin’ Donuts, right in the middle of Camden’s gilt-edged, salt-scented downtown.
“People don’t travel here, or move here to live, to suffer the likes of a donut/coffee franchise chain besmirching our storefronts,” wrote an irate citizen in an online debate this week, adding: “I am offended.”
“Besmirching our storefronts” unwittingly gets to the core of the problem. The recession has been gnawing at charming tourist towns like Camden almost as fiercely as it has at larger industrial cities, and it’s left alarming gaps in the smooth commercial face that the town has long presented.
Over the last year, one after another downtown store has failed: A fancy French fabric shop, an art gallery, an outdoorsy clothiers, and two stores that sold dresses and shoes.
Walking down Elm, Bayview, and Main Streets, the town’s principal roads, handsome shops are interspersed with empty storefronts. “For rent,” read plaintive, colorful, hand-lettered signs.
In boom times, there would be no chance of a fast-food joint gaining traction here.
Now, though, many local businesspeople are absorbing the news of Dunkin’ Donuts’ arrival with powerful regret for seemingly unrelated decisions that the town made years ago, when the economy was going gangbusters.
For instance, my old high school, right in town, was brimming with children. Rather than try to expand it, Camden decided to build a nice new facility– way out on one edge of town. Teenagers who had always walked or biked to school now had to take the bus, or be driven.
Meanwhile, by the standards of our then-apparently-bottomless national affluence, the YMCA that was for decades the hub of after-school activity began to seem cramped. How much better, it was thought, to move the Y to new spacious quarters – way out on the other edge of town.
The effect, almost overnight, was to cause hundreds of teenagers to vanish from Camden’s lovely town center. At first, people liked it: No more knots of idle youths, lurking around the harbor after school!
Too late, business owners realized the town had performed an awful Pied Piper’s trick upon themselves. Shifting the teenagers out of town also meant no more young people walking through the streets in the afternoons, stopping to spend their babysitting or lawn-mowing money at neighborhood shops and eateries.
It meant no parents walking home with their younger children. It caused local families to re-orient themselves so that they would make purchases on their new commute routes, away from the genteel shops of downtown.
“It’s been disastrous for foot traffic,” the owner of a once-sprawling clothing and novelties shop told me, as we stood in the empty precincts of what used to be his store. When the recession started to bite last fall, he cut his product lines dramatically and will reopen shortly in a smaller adjoining commercial space.
When I asked him about the Dunkin’ Donuts, he slapped the side of his head in an eloquent gesture of frustration.
“What’s next? Taco Bell? A Dollar Store? My biggest fear,” he went on, “is that we’ll become like Bar Harbor [a tourist town farther up the coast], doing business for nine weeks in the summer and being closed like a stage set the rest of the year.”
Down the road, I was chatting with the owner of a shop stocked with fragrances, nightgowns, and lingerie when an elderly woman came in. “It’s terrible to see all the empty store fronts,” she said, by way of greeting.
Yet it’s impossible to overlook the superfluous nature of the shops that have come to dominate the center of this lovely place, and that are now suffering so much.
Increasingly, Camden’s downtown businesses have come not just to rely on tourist dollars but also to reflect tourist whimsy.
And recessions, unfortunately, have a way of scrubbing away illusions, of waking people from the grip of what they thought were necessities – and making them crave comfort food. Doughnuts, for instance.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
