Bangor Waterfront

The Bangor Waterfront has been redeveloped into a pleasant riverside park along the Penobscot River, with a walking trail, public sculpture, and the Maine Savings Amphitheater — a summer concert venue that attracts national acts in pop, rock, and country. The waterfront is most alive on summer evenings when concerts are on, but it's worth visiting any time of year for the river views and a sense of the site's history.

The trail connects through to Cascade Park and the Orono Bog Boardwalk, a 4,200-foot wooden walkway that allows visitors to walk through a peatland ecosystem that would otherwise be inaccessible. The bog is particularly striking in autumn when the blueberry and leatherleaf shrubs turn color. It's about a 10-minute drive from downtown.

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A story
In its 19th-century heyday, the Bangor waterfront was the busiest timber port on the Atlantic coast. Millions of board-feet of white pine, cut from the forests of the Penobscot watershed, floated downriver to the sawmills here and were loaded onto ships bound for Boston, New York, and Britain. The lumber trade had largely collapsed by the 1880s as the forests gave out.

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