In Maine: the Offspring of L.L. Bean

By Peter Anderson

Down on the Freeport town wharf, a fisherman maneuvers through the fog beside the fish dealer's pier, his boat heaped with mussels. Three men in camouflage and carrying shotguns get into an aluminum boat and head out in the rain to where the ducks are. But up on Main Street, a different scene unfolds. At L.L. Bean, a woman fusses over a $65 goose-down pillow, then says to her husband, "I spend half my life in bed, I might as well have a comfortable pillow." Across from Bean's, at Cole Haan, beautiful shoes are on sale for $89, marked down from $165. Uncountable thousands are in town on a rainy Saturday browsing and buying at Anne Klein, Ralph Lauren and Timberland. Americans work five days and on the sixth shop.

There is incongruity between the down-east Freeport of the mind's eye and what in the past several years has become what one critic calls "Maine Outletville." There are more shops than a nimble man or woman can shop in a day, more than the Merchants' Association president could count with certainty (about 70 is the best estimate).

Freeport (pop. 6,000) is a former shoe factory town 20 miles up the coast from Portland on old Route 1. Its factory outlets sprang from the success of Bean's, founded in Freeport in 1912. It now does $40 million in sales on Main Street and attracts more than 2 million shoppers a year, maybe 2 1/2 million. Edgar Leighton, president of the Merchants' Association, says businessmen looked at those figures and wondered, "How come I'm not getting some of that." So they came to Freeport.

John Rogers owns the Falcon Restaurant, just down the street from Bean's, and he says customers ask his waitresses where various stores are, but "they don't know. The stores are going in so fast." He says it's not one new store at a time but ten or 15. "My sister-in-law lives in Florida now and has been gone three years. When she got back, she just couldn't believe it."

Rogers used to sell maybe 20 lobsters a day and now serves 50 or 60. The tourist season has stretched from three months to six months, the crowds thinning somewhat in fall but not the cash flow. He diagrams his business with a salt shaker (Mastercard) and a pepper shaker (American Express). He switches the salt and pepper to represent the change after Labor Day. Family people in summer use Mastercard, older people in fall use American Express, "and they spend more, so I tend to believe people using American Express have more to spend." Rogers loves all the business but not the traffic, which tests the ingenuity and patience of natives as they try to circumnavigate Main Street.

"If you're going south," says Rogers, "and was at my restaurant, you could go down Bow Street, across Depot, across Oak, across West, go through the municipal parking lot, and that would put you out just before the railroad overpass on Route 1, and you'd be clear."

Last year 1,050,000 tourists from New York stopped in Maine. If the ratio of New Yorkers to other visitors holds true this rainy October day, 17% of the out-of-staters walking the streets of Freeport are from the Empire State, which partly accounts for the fact that not one of the men going into Bean's looks like a partridge shooter, though that is the recreation for many men of Maine in this season. What was once practical outdoor wear has become fashion clothing. A chamois shirt looks good on Saturday morning in Westport, Conn. The hunter from Millinocket probably gets his shirt at K mart.

If there are no deer hunters in Bean's, there are no fox trappers either, unless they are in disguise. The price of fox and muskrat will be down this year, but raccoon will be good, about $20 for a top skin. Trapping is occupation and sport in Maine, and last year 22,089 raccoon were taken. Bean's does not sell leg-hold traps but does sell shotguns, including a Fabio Zanotti twelve gauge for $2,150.

George Denney, president of Cole Haan shoes, has lived in Freeport for 42 years. What is so thoroughly obvious to everyone now--that people shopping at Bean's might cross the street to do some more shopping--became obvious to Denney in 1982, when he opened a factory outlet for his shoes in what had been a Western Auto store on Main Street. "You know, we put in brick walks, natural oak interiors and carpeting. We spent over $150,000 just doing the interior of the store. I acquired two adjoining buildings and rehabbed those and put in six retail stores." And how well are they doing? "Extremely well."

Cars used to line up in front of the Grange Hall on Thursdays, the day for unemployment sign-up. Now cars parked by the Grange Hall belong to people employed by the outlets. Workers from a dying industry (making shoes) have found jobs in a new one (selling shoes).

Main Street probably looks better than it ever did, except to those who remember it a long time ago before the elms died and the brick buildings got that worn-down look. Even the McDonald's is top of the line, located in an old house so tastefully redone that a critic of the fast development, John McGivaren, says of it, "If one has to have a McDonald's in one's neighborhood, this is probably the best one. They've done a magnificent job appearance-wise." His wife Barbara doesn't mind the look of the place either. However, the McDonald's is just down the hill from their old and handsome house, and she says, "When the wind is right, I can smell the grease."

John McGivaren is a retired Navy pilot who found Freeport a quiet village when he moved here in 1977. Two years ago, with the pace quickening, Barbara campaigned against pell-mell development and won a seat on the town council. "We experienced a shock," she says. "Where Hathaway (shirts) is was Downs' grocery. That went out of business. Bass (shoes) used to be Freeport Variety, the paper store, and that's where you met your neighbor." Freeport has been gentrified, she says, by stores too pricey for her constituents. Yet, she confesses, "I'll tell you what I do. I go in and case the stores and go back when they have sales." The McGivarens are backing two candidates in this month's council elections, hoping to slow development, but Barbara admits, "We've lost the battle in several neighborhoods, and ours is one of them."

While Barbara McGivaren talks of the bank she thinks is going up on her corner and the 52-unit motel going up across the street from that, the uncountable thousands are walking down Main Street in the rain. A young woman comes out of Bean's, pleasure in her face and a felt make-believe moose rack on her head. Inside an outlet shop, a slender matron explains to her friend, "So he bought me these shoes in Gucci's, and I said to him, 'Do me a favor. Don't buy me anything.' " Down in back of Main Street in the parking lots, there are men who deign not to participate with wives in this Disneyland of shops but, their mouths agape, sleep in their cars though it is not yet noon.

Up Main Street, Richard Wagner is cooking hot dogs and selling soda and cigarettes at his store, one of only two predating the boom. Wagner's great grandfather bought the small building in 1904, and the place is still prospering. "The more business, the more people are attracted and the more people, the more business. Only thing is we need some place to park. I talk about the old days--that's not so long ago (Wagner is only 44)--I knew everybody, the guy who ran the grocery store, the guy in the hardware store. I don't know anybody who owns these businesses. The people next door are from New Jersey. I don't know them. Some local people are doing well already. People just up the street sold their house for $200,000.

"There's no sense worrying about what you have no control over. I just hope it keeps getting bigger and bigger, like New York City. I'm a businessman, true, but I'm a native, so I can see things on both sides of the fence. If a local person doesn't like it, I can understand that, but money talks." A salesclerk for an outlet comes in for a soda, and Wagner asks her how's business. Oh, she says, "it's terribly busy," and Wagner says, "God bless America."