The Cape Porpoise Pier Is Two Feet Higher Now. Here's Why That Matters.
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
Mary Beth Gilbert slid an oversized pair of ceremonial scissors into the ribbon on the morning of June 24 and called out to the crowd gathered on Pier Road: "Everyone say, 'Cape Porpoise Pier!'" They did. She cut. And after nearly two years of orange fencing, detour signs, and a contractor's trailer parked at the top of the hill, Kennebunkport's working waterfront was officially back in business.
If you live near Cape Porpoise, you already know the fencing came down. What you may not know is why the new pier sits two feet higher than the one it replaced, or why that single detail is the actual story behind everything else that changed on that half-acre this year, including which restaurants are open and which chef just decided he was ready to take his kitchen an hour up the highway to Westbrook.
The Cape Porpoise Pier Rehabilitation Project cost about $8.6 million, funded through a combination the town didn't have sitting in a drawer. The U.S. Economic Development Administration put in $4.6 million. The Maine Department of Transportation's Small Harbor Improvement Program added $500,000. A separate Working Waterfront Resiliency Grant contributed roughly $2 million. Kennebunkport covered the remaining $1.4 million out of its Pier Reserve fund. Designs came from GEI Consultants, and Prock Marine Company handled construction, which began in the fall of 2024 and ran for close to two years.
What that money bought: a rebuilt bait shed, a new harbormaster office, replaced fuel tanks and fuel systems, an expanded commercial dock, and a new float system for recreational boats with a pump-out station attached. As of this summer, the contractor was still finishing the north pilings, which needed to be embedded in rock, along with the fuel stations and the last piece of the job, solar panel installation.
The pier has been town property since 1983, and it's been a working fixture in Cape Porpoise for more than a century. It supports roughly 50 commercial fishing vessels and, in a typical year, moves about two million pounds of catch through the harbor. That's not a footnote. That's the reason this project got federal money in the first place.
Here's the detail that turns a routine infrastructure story into something worth understanding if you live here: the new docks were built two feet higher than the old ones. That number isn't decorative. It's a direct response to what happened during a one-two punch of winter storms in January 2024, when high water repeatedly closed Pier Road and exposed how much the old pier and the causeway leading to it had deteriorated.
Pier Road is the only route on and off Bickford Island, which carries roughly 1,000 vehicles a day and is home to the loading docks for commercial fishermen, a handful of homes, and three restaurants. When the causeway flooded, it didn't just inconvenience a morning commute. It cut off working fishermen from their boats and diners from the harbor. The state had already raised the causeway itself by about four and a half feet as a separate climate resiliency project, and the pier rebuild picked up where that left off, engineering the docks themselves to sit above the kind of surge that had already proven it could shut the road down.
Allen Daggett has watched this stretch of waterfront longer than almost anyone. He's a Kennebunkport selectman, a lobsterman who has bought and sold catch on this pier for 51 years, and the owner of Cape Pier Chowder House at 79 Pier Road, right on the pier itself. His verdict on the finished project:
"I'm gonna tell you, it's a state-of-the-art pier. It's probably one of the best piers, one of the best locations to have up here in the state of Maine."
Town Manager Laurie Smith framed it the same way, from the resiliency side. The point of the project, she said, was never about size. It was about making sure the pier could survive the storms that are only getting more frequent, and keep serving fishermen and the public for decades.
While the town was hardening the infrastructure under Bickford Island, one chef had already been quietly building a second identity for that same corner of Kennebunkport.
Germán Lucarelli came to town in 2015 and opened Ports of Italy. In 2018 he opened The Lost Fire, a Patagonian wood-fired steakhouse half a mile inland on Mills Road, which has since been named among Maine's most-booked restaurants. In December 2022, he bought the shuttered property at 77 Pier Road, the old Pier 77 and The Ramp buildings, both of which had also taken storm damage. He gutted and rebuilt them, opening Casa Seventy Seven in the lower level that April and Ultramar, a seafood grill and raw bar, in the main space that May. In 2024 he added Dos Elenas Gelato, a food truck named for his two grandmothers, parked right there on the property.
That means two of Lucarelli's four restaurants, plus Daggett's chowder house, sit on the exact stretch of causeway the town just spent $8.6 million making less vulnerable to flooding. What's actually on that corner now:
Lucarelli's business grew enough on this footprint that he's now taking the concept somewhere entirely new. In October 2024, he leased space at Rock Row in Westbrook to open Asador Grill, a sister restaurant built around traditional open-flame Patagonian cooking. It's his first venture outside the Kennebunks. Construction was expected to start in 2025, and as of a Mainebiz report in November 2025, an opening date still hadn't been set. Whenever it opens, it will be a version of the same fire-cooking concept he built on Cape Porpoise Pier, exported to a 26-acre development an hour up the highway.
None of this means Cape Porpoise looks finished in a literal sense. Construction equipment was still on site as of this summer's reporting, and the contractor has final work left on the north pilings and solar panels. But the fencing that defined Pier Road for almost two years is down, the docks are open, and the businesses that depend on that half-acre, both the ones hauling lobster and the ones plating it, are operating without a construction schedule dictating their access.
If you've eaten at Ultramar or grabbed a chowder from Daggett's window this summer, you were standing on ground that's now built to handle the kind of storm surge that used to close the road under it. If you've watched Lucarelli's name show up on a fifth restaurant an hour away, you were watching a business that got confident enough to expand precisely because the corner it started on finally stopped flooding.
That's the part that doesn't show up if you only notice the food or only notice the fencing. The two stories on Pier Road were never separate. One made the other possible.
If you're curious how changes like this ripple into property values and buyer interest along the Kennebunkport waterfront, Adrienne Robinson and Elaine Prendergast track these shifts closely from their Kennebunk office. Request a complimentary market consultation to talk through what a rebuilt harbor and a growing restaurant scene mean for property in Cape Porpoise and the surrounding villages.
Get assistance in determining current property value, crafting a competitive offer, writing and negotiating a contract, and much more. Contact us today.