Belfast, ME Shirts

Count the lives Belfast has lived. Shipbuilding first, in the age when schooners carried hay and ice out of Penobscot Bay. Then poultry: for decades the waterfront ran wall to wall with processing plants, and the city cheerfully billed itself the broiler capital of the world. When Route 1 was rerouted around downtown in 1962, plenty of people read it as a death sentence; instead it preserved the brick Main Street whole, and in the 1980s the artists found it. Today the galleries share the water with a working shipyard built where the old town dump used to be, and a harbor walk ties the whole waterfront together. Scrappy is the word people keep reaching for, and Belfast keeps earning it. Our Belfast design holds the mix in one image: a workboat and a paintbrush trading space above the harbor line, masts and rooflines behind them. Belfast businesses take their place on this page as each one signs on with ShirtMap.