On a recent Friday morning, bicyclists rolled past the general store, families spread out on the library lawn for story time, and a steady trickle of cars pulled in and out of the gravel lot by the water. It read like an ordinary summer scene in a town that has never had much patience for ordinary crowds. But look closer at who is actually running these places, and a different story starts to take shape. The people opening Brooklin's newest businesses already know each other. They worked the same kitchens, tended the same bars, and are now building on what the last one built.
That is the part of Brooklin's current wave of change that tends to get lost when each opening gets covered as its own headline. The new restaurant, the library expansion, the fight over what happens to the old Baptist church. Taken separately, they look like three unrelated updates. Taken together, they describe a town where growth happens because people already here decided to bet on each other, not because outside money moved in and picked winners.
The Domino Effect Behind Bay Road
Matthew Carter opened his restaurant, Astro, at 1 Bay Road this past June, naming it after his first car, a 1994 Chevy Astro Van, according to WABI. Before he had his own place, Carter worked at several of the town's established spots, including the Brooklin Inn, the Brooklin General Store, Aragosta, and the Roaring Lion, according to The Rising Tide. Those aren't random stops on a resume. They're the same businesses currently anchoring the village center's rebound, and Carter is friends with the people who own two of them.
According to reporting from the Bangor Daily News, Carter is friends with both Alissa Wagner, who bought and rebuilt the Brooklin General Store with Graham Macbeth, and John Lewandowski, who bought the Brooklin Inn with his wife Jenny and business partners Pi Piraeus and Peter Collier back in 2019. Each business created room for the next one. The Inn became a functioning restaurant and pub. The General Store went from a shop that was intermittently out of supplies to one with regular hours and community events. Astro filled the gap that was left when a longtime eatery in the same spot finally closed.
Here's how the current lineup traces back to a handful of people who kept showing up for each other:
| Business | Opened / Changed Hands | Who's Behind It |
|---|---|---|
| Astro | June 2026 | Matthew Carter |
| Brooklin General Store | Rebuilt and reopened | Alissa Wagner and Graham Macbeth |
| Brooklin Inn | Bought in 2019 | John and Jenny Lewandowski, Pi Piraeus, Peter Collier |
| Leaf & Anna | Opened 2017 | Anne Dentino |
| Brooklin Candy Company | Ongoing | Local ownership |
None of this happened through a developer's plan or a chain buying up storefronts. It happened because a small group of people who already knew each other from working local food service jobs kept finding ways to make room for the next opening.
What's Actually New to Eat
If you haven't been by Astro yet, it's open Thursday through Monday from noon to 7 p.m., with plans to run through mid-October, per The Rising Tide. The menu leans into summer basics done well: lobster rolls, Maine-made sausages, hand-cut curly fries, and a slow-churned ice cream made in-house with Maine eggs, milk, and cream. That ice cream isn't just a seasonal add-on either. Astro plans to keep selling pints of it year-round, so the shoulder-season stop for a scoop isn't going away when the picnic tables come in for the winter.
Speaking of those picnic tables, they sit under a canopy of trees with a direct view of Friend Memorial Library, which puts Astro in the middle of the same short stretch of village center that has anchored Brooklin's daily rhythm for decades. That proximity matters more than it might seem, because the library itself is in the middle of the biggest physical change the village has seen in a long time.
The Library Is About to Double in Size
Friend Memorial Library broke ground this spring on an expansion that will double its footprint, according to the Bangor Daily News. The new wing will house the Anne and Maynard Bray Maritime Research Center, funded through an ongoing four million dollar capital campaign. The center will include materials donated by Jon Wilson, founder of the WoodenBoat school and magazine, along with more than 155,000 photographs from maritime photographer Benjamin Mendlowitz. For a town built around wooden boat building, that collection is not a nice-to-have archive tucked in a back room. It's a working record of the craft that put Brooklin on the map, housed a short walk from the harbor where much of it still happens.
Construction is underway now, with the library expecting the new space to open in the next couple of years. In the meantime, the current building keeps doing what it has always done. On that same recent Friday, Jen Rosenthal led a story time that filled the room with families, while library director Catherine Nevin looked on and talked about a programming schedule built to offer something for everyone. A new wing rising across the road while the old one stays this full is a fairly literal picture of a town building its future without pausing its present.
The Question Every Town Meeting Keeps Coming Back To
The most unresolved piece of Brooklin's current moment sits just up the road from Astro: the town's large, white, long-empty Baptist church. Built in 1853, the First Baptist Church anchored the village almost since Brooklin's founding, hosting Sunday school classes, suppers, weddings, and funerals for generations. Membership dwindled to fewer than ten people, with an average age around 70, according to the Bangor Daily News. Mike Sherman, president of the church's board of trustees, described attending as a child in the 1960s and watching the congregation shrink over the decades that followed.
"It was a different world," Sherman said of that era.
Seeing where things were headed, the trustees offered to donate the church, the neighboring Bowden Hall, and the land under both to the town, along with $100,000 for upkeep. Brooklin voters took up the question at their April 3 referendum and approved the conveyance by a decisive 180 to 49, according to Penobscot Bay Press. Not everyone in town agreed on what should happen next, but the alternative helped settle the vote for a lot of residents. As Steve White of Brooklin Boat Yard put it in a letter supporting the acquisition, "imagine multiple businesses occupying the property," pointing to what other towns have done with similarly repurposed buildings, according to the Ellsworth American.
As of the early August update from the Bangor Daily News, the property transfer was set to close within days, though select board member Stacia Nevin cautioned that any changes to how the buildings get used are likely at least a year away. For now, Bowden Hall keeps doing what it has been doing: hosting a community food pantry and services led by Pastor Chris Eaton of Open Door Church. Nothing about daily use of the hall changes just because the deed changes hands. What changes is who gets to decide what comes next, and that decision now belongs to the town rather than a dissolving congregation.
What the Pattern Actually Tells You
Put these three threads side by side and the throughline gets easier to see. A restaurant owner who trained under his own future neighbors. A library board that spent years lining up donors before breaking ground. A congregation that spent months building consensus before handing over a 173-year-old building rather than selling it off. None of this is fast, and none of it is being run by anyone from outside Brooklin. It's the same handful of people, showing up again and again, making room for each other one decision at a time.
That's worth knowing if you already call Brooklin home, because it means the character of the village center isn't drifting. It's being shaped, deliberately, by the same people who have been shaping it for years.
Brooklin keeps rewarding the people who pay attention to it, whether that's knowing which Friday the ice cream case gets restocked or understanding how a 173-year-old church ends up back in a town's hands. Laura Farr has spent enough time on this stretch of coast to talk through what's actually changing here and what it means for the people who call it home. Let's Connect.
