Tucked away as it is, a peninsula on the backstretch of Acadia National Park, embraced by tranquil Somes Sound, no one could deny that Northeast Harbor is a summer haven. But Erika Wibby Mitchell, Associate Broker at Swan Agency and a year-round Northeast resident for decades, makes even the long, cold island winters sound downright enviable.
“I’ve been here full-time since right after college,” she says, “but for a whole year before I moved, I visited every weekend, just to be sure. Anyone can love it in July, but January is a different story.” As it turned out, Erika’s fondness for the “off” season was a key selling point. “There’s a drawing close,” she says of the winters. “You get back to your core people. You’re looking out for each other.”
Northeast Harbor, in particular, is off the beaten path. It’s a village town. “This isn’t Bar Harbor,” says agency owner Kim Swan. Erika adds, “We have more long-term residents and hardly any transient tourists. Northeast Harbor is unto itself.”
This can make for acutely isolated winters, but Erika has no trouble listing an abundance of pros to outweigh the cons. “We do not take this place for granted,” she says. “I tell my kids, ‘People wait and save all year to come and see this view, and we get to enjoy it on the way to basketball practice.’”
Which is not to say she wouldn’t mind seeing the place get a touch more traffic in the colder months, if only for the sake of local business. In addition to real estate, Erika owns and operates Main Street Mercantile and the bookstore The Nook, both currently seasonal. “We struggle the same as all Maine coastal towns,” she says. “It’s expensive to live here, and it’s hard for a year-round population to survive without having a draw for businesses in the winter.”
Erika recently partnered with Mount Desert 365—a non-profit dedicated to the expansion of year-round sustainable communities in the Town of Mount Desert—to construct an ice rink in Northeast Harbor. The idea? Give the year-round kids something to do during the off-season. “And what’s special about Northeast Harbor,” says Kim, “is that much of the funding was raised through summer residents, people who aren’t even here in the winter to enjoy the rink but who nevertheless want the community to thrive year-round because they love it sincerely, not just for what they can get out of it in the summer.”
On opening day, the rink had 180 visitors (“I didn’t know we had 180 people in town,” Erika says), and the place was busy throughout the winter. An impromptu hockey tournament was organized. “We had the best ice for 50 miles,” Erika says. “It told me there’s a need for this. And if we can bring hundreds of people in during the six or seven months of the year when it’s very quiet, then that could be significant to the economic development of the town—and might even help make our community year-round, where businesses not only survive but flourish.”
Another mega-boon in this direction will be landing next summer. Northeast Harbor’s historic Asticou Inn is set to reopen under the much-anticipated new ownership and direction of Tim Harrington. “The place is an institution,” says Kim. “The grande dame, so to speak, of Northeast Harbor. As soon as it went public that Tim was taking over the Asticou, it was all anyone was talking about—what it’s going to be and what it’s going to bring to the community. We all saw what he did at The Claremont. And at the Asticou, the raw material is already so rich. We’ll miss it this summer, but the missing will be mixed with a delicious anticipation.”
Kim and Erika agree the reopening of the Asticou Inn will have one of the largest impacts on Northeast Harbor in decades. “As a shop-owner, I’m very excited,” Erika says. Her family also has personal ties to the hotel. “My father’s first summer job was as a waiter at the Asticou.”
With large-scale projects developing alongside smaller-scale ventures like the ice rink (Erika is now working on resurfacing the tennis courts as well as adding pickleball for next year), Northeast Harbor’s fate as a year-round community feels tantalizingly possible.
“Even though the community changes when so many people come, there’s a part of us that feels so lucky to live here that we want to share it,” Erika says. “When you have something beautiful, you don’t hide it away. You want others to enjoy it as well.”
It’s a nice sentiment and rare—worth keeping in mind this summer when the restaurants are crowded and parking gets tough downtown.
