By Kathleen Fleury
 
People have been touting the “Rockland Renaissance” since the 1990s, but recently this small midcoast city has done the impossible and actually become the sophisticated little city it advertised itself to be. 

Just off the coast of Rockland, on the island of Vinalhaven, artist Robert Indiana lives and works at his personal residence, the Star of Hope Lodge. The Indiana native has been there since 1978. By the time he moved to Maine, Indiana was a prominent figure in the American art world, a contemporary of pop art icons such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and had become widely known for his artistic iterations of the word Love. In 1964, fourteen years before moving to Maine, Indiana received his first public commission, a piece for the New York World’s Fair. The sculpture, a flashing eighteen-foot-tall depiction of the word Eat,had to be taken down because it deceived so many people into thinking it signified a literal place to eat.

The sculpture’s newest home won’t have to worry about false advertising. This summer, Eat will reign over Rockland from June to October as part of the Farnsworth Art Museum’s major retrospective of this Maine artist. It is a fitting symbol for this seaside city that has, through an unlikely journey, come to epitomize the marriage of food and art.
Dubbed in this magazine and elsewhere the “Rockland Revival” or the “Rockland Renaissance,” the story of the city’s steady emergence from stench and stagnation, beginning in the 1990s, has been told so often that it has become a creation myth of sorts. But the story’s persistence attests to its inherent truth: Rockland has in fact been reincarnated as a hip, artistic midcoast mecca.
Artist Eric Hopkins, who attended Rockland High School in the 1960s and moved back to his native North Haven island in 1981, says the city has come a long way. He recalls Rockland’s smelly fish processing days, its sewage treatment plant problem, and a more utilitarian Main Street filled with hardware and grocery stores. “It was a real working town,” says Hopkins, who opened his own art gallery in Rockland in 2006. “Who would have thought twenty years ago, we’d have sushi and espresso bars here.”

The city has proven impressively resilient. Ever since the mid-1990s, when the Farnsworth greatly expanded its physical presence in town, there have been numerous opportunities for Rockland’s burgeoning identity to fall apart. With businesses coming and going, empty storefronts could have easily succumbed to their seedier pasts. “Rockland had to get creative,” says Hopkins, “to figure out what to do with those vacant buildings and make it work.”
So far, Rockland has done just that. When MBNA, the national credit card giant, invested a fortune in a waterfront headquarters in the southern part of town (including the creation of a spiffy public boardwalk), and then promptly vacated after selling itself to Bank of America, Rockland could have recoiled in despair. By this point, circa 2005, Rockland’s novelty had worn off — it was no longer just a cheap place for a startup business to get off the ground. Nonetheless new companies and creative ventures continued to flock here because somewhere along the path of trying to become the city it always wanted (and advertised itself) to be, it actually did.

Like all frontiers, Rockland had its pioneers who helped start the creative vibe that permeates the city today. Most important among them is the Farnsworth itself, which is not only an economic engine of the city drawing more than fifty thousand visitors a year and employing more than fifty people, but the creative epicenter as well. “It is important to realize that without the Farnsworth,” says Thomas O’Donovan, owner of the neighboring Harbor Square Gallery, “all of this becomes less possible. The museum is the foundation upon which all of this stands.” Since local heiress Lucy Farnsworth left the founding endowment, the Farnsworth, which opened in 1948, has greatly expanded its presence and prestige. In 1993, two galleries, the Nevelson-Berliawsky and the Crosman, were added and the new Museum Store was unveiled. Then in 1999, the Wyeth Center and Wyeth Study Center opened. Two years later, the Farnsworth expanded into the vacated J.J. Newberry department store space on Main Street. In total, the museum more than doubled its overall space since 1993 and now occupies an entire block of Main Street and beyond.
As the Farnsworth grew, so, too, did satellite shops and restaurants. “Kerry Altiero from Café Miranda was the pioneer as far as I’m concerned,” says Melissa Kelly, the James Beard Foundation award-winning chef at Primo, which opened its own doors here in 2000. “He really was the groundbreaker. Also Patrick [Reilley] and Susanne [Ward] with Second Read [now Rock City Coffee]. They brought that feeling of community, that California coffeeshop atmosphere, to Rockland.” There were other early players — restaurants such as Amalfi, boutiques including the Black Parrot, Caravans, and the eclectic Grasshopper Shop, and galleries like Caldbeck, Harbor Square, and the venerable Huston-Tuttle — that helped to infuse Rockland with its initial jolt of creative camaraderie and commercial viability.
Their success — despite some unwise city planning, specifically a sprawling development north of town that drew business away from Main Street (yes, T.J. Maxx, we mean you) — proved that there was a heart to Rockland. This heart in turn drew more businesses downtown including Atlantic Baking Company, the wine bar In Good Company, and Suzuki’s Sushi Bar. New galleries have moved in, including the luxuriant Dowling Walsh across from the Farnsworth. The renovation of the Strand Theatre also helped to make Rockland a day and night destination. What had been a two-screen, eighty-year-old dilapidated movie theater became a 350-seat venue featuring smart films, world-renowned musicians, and streamed performances such as the Metropolitan Opera (or even the Super Bowl, if you’re more sports inclined). In the words of Strand manager Abbie Knickelbein, the renovation took “small town Rockland and opened it up to the world.”
“Rockland has become a cultural center,” says O’Donovan of Harbor Square. “There’s all this going on in one place, and now it’s part of the midcoast experience, not just a government center but a cultural one. All because of the arts.”

John Root, the city code enforcement officer, has witnessed Rockland’s renaissance first-hand. He has been
coordinating city code compliance with businesses since 1995.“I won’t take the credit, but I’ve been fortunate to be a part of what’s probably been the greatest amount of improvements to existing buildings and construction of new ones in Rockland’s history.” Root likes to sit down and chat with prospective new businesses owners early on in the process. What he has noticed over his nearly fifteen-year stint is that the people coming to Rockland often posses two things: vision and the patience for renovation. “People with visions have made it all possible,” says Root, “and we’ve been very fortunate that we’ve had a number of businesses that have been willing to invest money in existing buildings: the Breakwater Marketplace, Camden National Bank, the Narragansett [condominiums], the MBNA buildings, and numerous buildings on Main Street.” The examples keep flowing. So do the new requests. “They’re still asking to come in,” remarks Root. “We’re going to have too many before you know it.”
The influx of businesses is a not-so-vicious cycle for the city: When a few succeed, more follow suit, and perceptions evolve. “Rockland has changed from a place that people used to drive through to a place that people drive to,” observes Beth Bowley, a fashion designer who splits her time between Manhattan and Maine. That change convinced Bowley to open her high-end women’s clothing boutique, Four Twelve, on Main Street in Rockland in 2007. A native of Brunswick, Bowley spent a month every summer testing out different communities across the state before ultimately purchasing and renovating in Rockland.
Just across the street from Four Twelve, Robert Krajewski, formerly the executive chef at Natalie’s in Camden, and his wife, Lynette Mosher, opened the French-inspired Lily Bistro last summer. For this culinary couple, Rockland had personality: “We don’t have a lot of tourist-attracting T-shirt shops,” explains Mosher. “There’s a lot more substance.” The Lily Bistro space was previously occupied by another restaurant, Amalfi, which itself upgraded to the spacious waterfront MBNA facility. Around the same time, the owners of Main Street’s Black Bull Tavern decided to pounce on another vacated MBNA property, turning the former bank’s boathouse into the Boathouse Restaurant and Raw Bar. Its view — unobstructed of the harbor, the breakwater, and Owl’s Head — is one of the best in the city, if not the state.

And that’s another exciting thing about Rockland: without compromising its identity as a fishing port and the Lobster Capital of the World, the city is now embracing its waterfront in a mixed-use manner that recalls the development of the Old Port and Commercial Street in Portland thirty years ago. A short stroll from the brick façades and glossy windows of Main Street toward the water will not yield oodles of high-end condominiums or hotels. Instead you’ll be in “warehouse and parking lot world,” says Hopkins, whose gallery straddles the border on Winter Street. So far Rockland has protected its working waterfront. It is not pretty. It is not gentrified. This mixture of grit and glam remains essential to Rockland’s intrinsic and evolving identity. “It’s very fragile,” warns Hopkins. “If the waterfront goes, it could change things drastically. Rockland is an experiment, and to survive we have to be flexible and adapt. It’s a work in progress.”

This summer, this gem of a small city, a place where fine art and fine food have proven that they can be economic engines — the creative economy made real — will get to show off just how far it has come. The occasion is the Farnsworth’s retrospective on Robert Indiana. “It’s a huge show of international nature,” stresses Hopkins. “Indiana is a big guy out in the rest of the world. [The show will] educate people that that world is here, that Rockland has been at the epicenter of that world for many decades.”

Farnsworth curator Michael Komanecky believes that the story behind the Eat sculpture illuminates the power of Indiana’s work as a whole. “Bob served in the Army Air Corp in the 1940s and was called back to his mother in Indiana because she was dying,” says Komanecky. “When he arrived he barely recognized his mother. She awoke to see him there and asked him if he had had anything to eat. Then she died. The words he uses are profoundly personal and profoundly universal at the same time. He has turned a word into both symbol and symbolic form.”

When Indiana’s piece of electric art shines across darkened Rockland Harbor, it might again be mistaken for an advertisement. But for the city hosting it, the sculpture will be something more. It will be a promise and a statement of purpose.