At dawn in the idyllic town of Bar Harbor, Maine, the ocean glows in shades of charred orange. The sun slips out from behind nearby islands, and seagulls call to one another over the lull of waves breaking against the rocky shore. It’s the Wednesday before Labor Day weekend, and the town is still asleep.
By daylight a thick, wet fog descends onto the whole of Mount Desert Island, home to both Bar Harbor and the picturesque Acadia National Park. Distant peaks disappear behind a veil of clouds, and a low, steady horn is the only sign of the arrival of the Norwegian Breakaway—a hulking cruise ship that is 200 feet longer than the Titanic was and holds almost 1,000 more passengers—for which Ocean Properties, Bar Harbor’s largest hotelier and the operator of the only dock in town that can disembark cruise passengers, has been waiting.
Buses have begun to line downtown Bar Harbor—where the year-round population is 5,276—prepared to take many of the cruise ship’s 4,000 passengers into Acadia. Ocean Properties workers, clad in navy raincoats and armed with walkie-talkies, scurry about the West Street pier, setting up crowd-control belts that will soon be used to herd passengers off the tenders and toward their activities, which range from whale-watching and hiking to shopping in town.
An Ocean Properties manager gathers his staff to brief them on the day ahead, and to issue a staunch warning: Lincoln Millstein, the town muckraker, has been spotted lurking around the premises.
Millstein, standing a mere five feet away, can’t help but smile. The 74-year-old Taiwanese immigrant with thick white hair and oversize spectacles doesn’t exactly blend in—nor is he trying to.
Since 2020, Millstein has written a Substack, the Quietside Journal, which documents, in his words, “the steady decline in quality of life wrought by unchecked tourism on Mount Desert Island.” He’s been especially busy in the lead-up to a town vote set to take place on November 5. On the docket—alongside the next president of the United States, of course—is an issue that’s become just as heated, divisive, and, at times, straight-up nasty: the fate of the cruise-ship industry in Bar Harbor.
Making Waves
Millstein, a retired journalist, saw his move to Mount Desert Island—he and his wife bought a house with a dock for diving into the bucolic lake at the edge of their backyard—as a way of savoring his golden years. He pictured morning coffees at the local Choco-Latté Cafe in Bar Harbor, afternoons spent fishing in his kayak on Grand Lake Stream and bird-watching in Acadia National Park, evenings playing his guitar at Biel’s Lobster Pier, and weekends putting at Kebo Valley Golf Club, where President William Taft used to play.
Maine’s oldest golf course (and America’s eighth-oldest) is a relic of a Gilded Age Bar Harbor, which once rivaled, if not exceeded, Newport’s swell status. Beginning in the 1880s, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Astors, Fords, and Pulitzers built “cottages” (WASP for “mansions”) on a strip of Desert Island land that would become known as Millionaires’ Row.
Yet while their houses were grand, America’s wealthiest families opposed overly developing or modernizing the island. They called themselves “rusticators”—city dwellers who sought out the peace and quiet of summers spent on Maine’s scenic, largely undeveloped coast. In 1919, John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated 11,000 acres of his own land to what would eventually become Acadia National Park.
The infamous fire of 1947 changed everything, tearing through Millionaires’ Row and destroying most of its cottages. Many of the island’s wealthiest summer residents decided against rebuilding, choosing less remote destinations such as Newport, Nantucket, and the North Shore of Long Island.
Fragments of the old Bar Harbor are now off-limits to the public, and the remaining relatives of these old families tend to keep to themselves, rarely leaving their properties. “I haven’t been to Bar since I was a little girl,” a descendant of one of Mount Desert Island’s most distinguished families tells me. She shared a story about how Martha Stewart earned the respect of the old-money families by deciding not to change a single piece of furniture when she bought Edsel Ford’s cottage in 1997.
Hidden in their estates on the cliffs of the island’s Northeast and Seal Harbors, these longtime summer inhabitants have been largely protected from what is now referred to by many as “the Disneyfication of Bar Harbor.” “The decision was … made because of the post–World War II rising affluence of the middle class to promote [Bar Harbor] as a tourist destination,” says the retired trauma–and–oncological surgeon Bill Horner, who served as president of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society for more than a decade. “So that’s what it has become.”
Horner, who was born in Bar Harbor in 1941, has watched the community change radically over the course of his life. The coastal town has seen most of its mom-and-pop boutiques replaced by interchangeable gift shops, lobster shacks, and ice-cream parlors. “When I grew up in the 50s and 60s,” Horner recalls, “there were three year-round automobile dealers, clothing stores, and a movie theater. All of that has gone away because the entire town is oriented for tourism.”
“I came here as a young, outdoorsy person who wanted to just enjoy Acadia and all it had to offer,” says Ellen Grover, who has lived on the edge of uptown Bar Harbor for 43 years. “We’ve lost our year-round housing, lost our year-round businesses. We’ve lost families who need to live in our town, go to our schools, support our economy.” Seconding Horner, she underscores that “the viability and sustainability of a year-round community has been ignored.”
“When I grew up in the 50s and 60s, there were three year-round automobile dealers, clothing stores, and a movie theater open all year long. All of that has gone away.”
Not only do the businesses that have survived in Bar Harbor cater to tourists, but increasingly they cater to the tourists who come by way of cruise ships, which slowly started visiting the island in the late 1980s.
“I remember flying people over the very first cruise ship that came to Bar Harbor,” says Charles Sidman, recalling his days as a local commercial pilot and aviation instructor. Sidman is now 74. A retired Jackson Laboratory scientist and co-owner of a local art gallery, he’s quickly become the face of Bar Harbor’s rising anti–cruise ship camp.
“It was amazing—this humongous boat with this little, teeny town next to it. We just thought it was the coolest thing in the world,” says Sidman, remembering that first ship. “But in the years since then, they just keep multiplying like bacteria. Do you want a McDonald’s in the Grand Canyon?”
Former town-council chair Paul Paradis said that in 2007 Bar Harbor started to actively recruit cruise ships during the “shoulder season,” before Memorial Day and after Labor Day, as a way of extending the tourism economy. (Paradis, who owns a hardware store in town, also admitted in federal court during a lawsuit over Bar Harbor’s cruise-ship restrictions this summer that he attended multiple cruise-ship conventions in Miami, San Francisco, “and maybe one or two others and many within the state,” paid for by the cruise-ship industry.)
Since then, the number of boats stopping in Bar Harbor has increased dramatically, going from 50 in 2001 to more than 100 in 2024. “You have what you think is just a little wave coming in from the distance on certain days that turns into a tsunami,” with visitors overflowing the sidewalks and spilling into the streets, says Horner.
“It was amazing—this humongous boat with this little, teeny town next to it. But in the years since then, they just keep multiplying like bacteria.”
In 2021, when the number of visits to Acadia National Park topped four million, the town government decided to conduct a residential survey about the cruise ships in Bar Harbor. Just over 50 percent responded saying that the cruise ships negatively impacted the town.
Those in favor of the cruise ships underscored the financial significance of the extra tourism, especially during the otherwise quiet shoulder seasons. In an early August town meeting, Heather Davis, who owns the local restaurant Geddy’s, said, “Cruise ships are our lifeline. My mom was a waitress in Bar Harbor. My life depended on her tips. We have a lot of moms that have children that are depending on the tips they are making with all these cruise ships that are coming in.”
Some opponents of the cruise ships are concerned about the environmental impact, while others fret about waste being dumped a mere three and a half miles from shore. And then there are those who raise concerns about the boats hitting North American right whales, especially as the boats continue up into Canada. But most of all it’s the crowds.
“The cruise ships exacerbate the underlying problem that we have here in the summertime: we’re overcrowded, overpopulated,” says Horner. “I have not been uptown more than five times this summer,” adds Grover. “I don’t go to restaurants. Our friends don’t come anymore in the summer.”
Sidman argues that the influx of cruise-ship tourists, to the tune of roughly 300,000 visitors per year, diminishes the experience “for the people who come and stay for a week or a month in a hotel room or a rented house—or, heaven forbid, the people who live here.”
Sidman has in recent years become the single greatest obstacle to the cruise-ship industry in Bar Harbor and the corporation with the monopoly on all things cruise ship, Ocean Properties, which Sidman’s lawyer, Bobby Papazian, calls “the biggest bad guy in this whole thing.”
“You have what you think is just a little wave coming in from the distance on certain days that turns into a tsunami.”
Ocean Properties is one of the U.S.’s largest family-owned hospitality companies, with more than 100 resorts up and down the East Coast, including some Holiday Inns, Hiltons, and Marriotts. Founded by Bangor native Thomas Walsh in 1969, it’s now run by his son Mark.
The elder Walsh bought his first property in Bar Harbor in the 80s, and, in the early 90s, he set his eyes on the town’s prized West Street, which borders the harbor.
He started with the Bar Harbor Club (that once counted Morgenthaus, Vanderbilts, and Morgans as its members), which he bought in 1993. Then, in the early aughts, Walsh discovered an additional way to turn a profit in Bar Harbor: monopolizing the cruise-ship industry.
He bought 55 West Street, on the harbor, in 2000, followed by 1 West Street, in 2004, and several tenders. After 9/11, when maritime-security laws tightened, Ocean Properties was able to secure its permit to disembark passengers before the town did. And when some town officials tried to get back into the tendering business in 2009, Walsh put up a fight, successfully arguing that it was inappropriate for the town to compete with a local business.
In 2011, when the town council voted in Walsh’s favor, it essentially handed Ocean Properties a complete monopoly on the tendering business. Today, Sidman says that Ocean Properties receives about $3 million a year from the $10-to-$15-per-person fees (plus tendering fees) they charge visitors getting off in Bar Harbor, while Eben Salvatore, a ninth-generation Maine resident and the manager of Ocean Properties’ cruise business, claims that the per-person fees are around $5, though he declined to disclose the exact figures.
“Most of what Charlie does isn’t really meant to be accurate. It’s meant to be exciting,” says Salvatore, who adds that the tendering business is so expensive that Ocean Properties actually ends up with a net loss.
The Walsh family’s ties with the cruise industry aren’t limited to Bar Harbor. In Key West, Ocean Properties has built a mega-pier where passengers can walk right off the boat and into the town. After the Key West community implemented a 1,500 cap on daily passengers in 2020, the Walsh family made a nearly $1 million donation to Governor Ron DeSantis, and he swiftly vetoed the local ordinance.
The Walsh family “throw their weight around,” says town council vice-chair Gary Friedmann. “In their pursuit of profit, they will go to no limit to get their way.” Ocean Properties did not respond to air mail’s requests for comment.
“I don’t go to restaurants. Our friends don’t come anymore in the summer.”
In 2017, frustrated by what was by then a 250 percent increase in passenger traffic—coupled with a very pro-business town council—Sidman decided to get involved in local politics. This was around the time that the town of Bar Harbor was considering creating a mega-wharf, like the one in Key West, at Walsh’s urging.
His first citizen initiative was a land-use ordinance, in 2019, which blocked the building of that pier; his second, that same year, aimed to clean up the town’s cruise-ship committee, which was stacked with beneficiaries of the industry. (Though the initiative passed with over 75 percent of the residential vote, the town council ultimately ignored it.)
Then, in 2022, Sidman proposed a new voter referendum: to amend the local land-use code to cap the number of cruise-ship passengers allowed in Bar Harbor per day to 1,000. (The largest cruise ships that visit the town hold 5,000 people.)
In November of that year, the ordinance passed in a vote of 58 to 42 percent, even after a massive campaign by Ocean Properties to convince the community that this “ban” would decimate not only cruise-ship traffic, but tourism to Bar Harbor in general. The following month, the Association to Preserve + Protect Local Livelihoods (APPLL), whose lead plaintiff is Ocean Properties, sued the town in the district of Maine’s federal court. When asked about the APPLL lawsuit, the vice-chair of the town council declined to comment.
“Sidman called us to ask if we could try to intervene in this lawsuit because he didn’t have faith that the town council was going to defend this thing right,” recalls Papazian. “I think his suspicions were born out to be correct,” he adds, saying that he believes the council would have otherwise folded to the demands of the cruise-ship industry.
The judge assigned to the case, Lance Walker, wrote, “Indeed, there is a strong showing in the record so far adduced that the Town has long given over to one or more agents of the Walsh family enterprises … what appears (upon first impression) to be carte blanche in matters of Bar Harbor’s informal and voluntary cruise ship policy.”
Walker added that the town’s “history of boosterism for the cruise ship industry” made him question whether it was adequately able to represent its citizens’ wishes. As a result, Sidman was allowed to enter the lawsuit as a co-defendant.
Ultimately, Sidman and the town won the trial, which took place over three days in July of this summer, but the battle over the cruise ships is far from over.
APPLL plaintiffs appealed in the First Circuit, and the town council, in an apparent effort to appease Ocean Properties, immediately announced that it would not enforce the ordinance they fought for in court for the remainder of the 2024 season, leading Sidman to now sue the town.
“We’re getting sued by Charlie [Sidman] on the left, and we’re getting sued by the pier owner and other downtown businesses on the right,” says Friedmann.
On Tuesday, Bar Harbor will vote on whether the ordinance should be repealed altogether and replaced with Chapter 50, a 30-page document that takes restrictions on cruise ships out of the voter-approved land-use ordinance and puts it back in the hands of the town council—a move described by former town Warrant Committee member Donna Karlson as “a power play directly disenfranchising the voters’ will” and “anti-democratic.”
“The strategy to legally remove the Bar Harbor voters’ voice … is shocking: this means a simple majority of the town council could raise the passenger cap to 6,000 per day if they so voted,” says Karlson. Friedmann, meanwhile, claims that the objective of repealing the land-use ordinance and replacing it with Chapter 50 is because of how logistically difficult enforcement was.
“Do you want a McDonald’s in the Grand Canyon?”
Both sides of the conflict have pulled out all the stops in the lead-up to the fateful November 5 vote. Stickers of Sidman’s face with an X through them, and others that say F**k Charles Sidman, litter the town, pasted on trash cans, mailboxes, and even toilet seats. At Choco-Latté, Sidman turns his computer screen toward me, scrolling through photos of some of the bizarre mail he’s been sent: gay-cruise brochures, sex-offender-list notices, chocolate penises.
Just last week, Mark Leonardi, who runs the pro-cruise-ship Facebook group Citizens Unedited for a Better Bar Harbor, posted a photo of a toilet full of his urine and a sticker of Sidman’s face. Under it, there’s a comment from Susan Basta Stanley, the owner of the local Sagegrass gallery, that reads, “Is that a Douche in there?” To which Patrick Kilbride, a local latex salesman, responded, “Looks like a dick with ears!” Leonardi ended the comment thread with: “That’s an insult to dicks.”
Meanwhile, on the anti-cruise-ship Facebook group Citizens for a Better Bar Harbor, residents post links to Sidman’s recent interviews, invites to the upcoming fall festival, sunset photos, and links to stories about other towns around the world battling the cruise-ship industry. One woman posts a photo of Bar Harbor from 1910. “Back when we had neighborhoods filled with kids,” Rhonda Pillsbury Farnsworth comments. “Back when we had Sachsmans, Adlers, Willey’s. A shoe store.”
“It’s social class warfare,” says Salvatore. “It’s not [about] congestion, and it’s not [about] capacity, it’s not [about] safety. It’s just [about] those dirty little cruise ship passengers in my town.”
At a late-summer garden party hosted by Elizabeth Mills and her son Sargent McCormick, a descendant of the inventor of the McCormick reaper and a prominent Chicago newspaper family, men in linen suits and women in cashmere shawls admire the work of 19th-century landscape architect Beatrix Farrand. As the jazz tunes die down, the guests gather around Sidman, the guest of honor. So far, he has raised more than $300,000 on his GoFundMe page, which helps to cover his ever growing legal fees.
The group clinks glasses of white wine, toasting to his heroic work. Lincoln Millstein can be seen drifting around the garden, before slipping off into the night.
Clara Molot is Investigations Editor at AIR MAIL
