Bar Harbor
Bar Harbor, a fabled oceanfront town on Coastal Maine, is the host community to the 40,000-acre National Park on Mount Desert Island.
Bar Harbor, along with Newport, RI, was the most socially significant resort in the nation during the Gilded Age following the Civil War and leading up to World War I, as the surviving Victorian mansions and other shingle-style architectural masterpieces still attest.
But Bar Harbor and all of Mt. Desert Island were first a gift of natural wonder manifested in the majestically beautiful Cadilac range- mountains descending, sometimes virtually straight down, to the oceanfront town's charmed pieces of interest:
-- venerable, and marvelously preserved 19th century oceanfront homes.
-- elegant and historic shops like the Willis Rock Shop patronized and made famous by the wife of a US president and by fashion plate celebrities among cruise ship passengers of the 20th century who wore Mr. Willis’ unique gold bracelets made from gemstones he found the Island’s beaches; and like the marvelous emporium that is Sherman’s Bookstore with its creaking floors and tin ceilings, which still thrives after more than a century.
-- the venerable and architectural period piece Jesup Library which Bostonians founded and nationally known philanthropists lavishly endowed for over 100 years, with another $5,000,000 added just this year (2022) by a neighbor whose home is directly across Hulls Cove from the Oceansedge property.
-- diverse restaurants, perhaps a hundred such restaurants offering cuisines from almost every culture and continent.
-- the bustling waterfront, including a flotilla of excursion crafts of almost every sort (whale watching, deep sea fishing, lobster fishing, sailing).
-- the Shore Path promenade where the greatest of the American tycoons came to build residential temples to conspicuous consumption, and to rub elbows only with their peers during the summers of the late 1800s; and where the public was allowed to pass by in order to gaze on America’s imperial Great White Fleet at anchor offshore.
-- superlative hotels like:
(a) the historic oceanfront Bar Harbor Motor Inn which has been around since cars were a new idea;
(b) the modern oceanfront Regency Hotel down the shoreline from the subject Oceansedge property; and
(c) the Harborside Hotel that is part of a single holding reaching almost the whole length of the waterfront's historic West Street and including the former non-pareil oceanfront Bar Harbor Club which had been until World War II what is still the social basition Everglades Club in Palm Beach.
-- and innumerable other places of interest and perhaps inspiration.
Together, these tangible souls comprise the most engaging resort community anywhere in New England.
Acadia National Park
After more than 100 years, Acadia shows itself to be the best combined handiwok of: a Divine provider; the greatest of the American philanthropists, the Rockefellers; and Harvard visionaries.
There is nothing quite like Acadia’s approachable but still stunning natural escarpments above the ocean. Its Carriage Trails that are dozens of miles of bicycling and jogging and hiking routes where buildings and vehicles are never seen amidst forests and lakes and meadows. And its mountain top views of the earliest sunrise in America and the most glorious moonrises over the North Atlantic as well.
