For most of the past three years, walking to the far end of Maine Street in Brunswick meant walking toward orange cones. The Frank J. Wood Bridge project sat at that end like an unfinished sentence: temporary trestles in the river, a northbound lane closed for 89 days last fall, detour signs routing Topsham-bound traffic through the bypass. Locals learned to route around it. The stretch by Fort Andross Mill, where Maine Street runs out and the Androscoggin River takes over, stopped being a place people walked to and became a place they avoided until it was done.
It's done now, or close enough. The new bridge took its final striping on December 12, 2025, and has carried traffic, sidewalks, and bike lanes since. What's more interesting than the bridge itself is what happened on either side of it while the construction dust was still settling. Two restaurants placed real bets on that exact corridor during the years it was hardest to get to, and both bets paid off right as the detour signs came down. That's not background noise. That's a signal about what people who actually run businesses in downtown Brunswick believed about its future, months before the infrastructure caught up to match it.
Three Years of Cones, One Quiet December Reopening
The numbers on the bridge project are worth having in hand, because they explain how long that end of Maine Street felt closed for business even when it technically wasn't. Reed & Reed of Woolwich held the $49.9 million contract to replace the old span, a project that stretched back to 2023 and outlasted a federal lawsuit from historic preservation groups who wanted the original 1932 bridge rehabilitated rather than torn down. The new structure sits on a curved upstream alignment, a few dozen feet from where the old one stood, engineered to last a century.
What residents actually felt was the traffic pattern. The old bridge went to southbound-only starting last September, with northbound drivers detoured through the Topsham Bypass and Route 196 for 89 straight days. The new bridge briefly opened over Thanksgiving weekend, then closed again for final grading and paving before its full reopening in December. According to MaineDOT's project page, some finishing work carries into 2026, and a ribbon-cutting ceremony is still pending. The Design Advisory Committee that shaped the design has also proposed a new name for the crossing: the Pejepscot Falls Bridge, after the Abenaki word for the stretch of river it spans, a name change working through town channels this year.
The upgrades are the kind you notice on foot more than behind a wheel. Sidewalks now run the full length on both sides, with pedestrian viewing bump-outs built specifically so someone can stop mid-crossing and look at Pejepscot Falls instead of just driving past it. Parks are planned for both ends. Brunswick Public Art is working on a sculpture made from salvaged steel off the old bridge, to stand at the new one's entrance. None of that existed as a reason to walk down there in 2023. All of it exists now.
The Restaurant That Waited for the Bridge
Fort Andross Mill sits right at that end of Maine Street, a four-story brick complex converted from a 19th-century textile mill into a mixed-use building that Waterfront Maine has managed and filled out over decades, everything from Cabot Mill Antiques to architecture firms to artist studios. It's been there a long time. What's new is what opened inside it this year.
Paolo's took over the old Frontier and Nomad space at 14 Maine Street this past summer, and the story of why it took so long to open is itself worth knowing. Owners Jeremy and Marina Kratzer, who also run the wood-fired bagel shop Dutchman's, originally expected to open the restaurant in early 2025. Kratzer told the Portland Press Herald the delay was deliberate: they wanted to get the guest experience right rather than rush it. That meant Paolo's construction timeline ran almost exactly parallel to the bridge's, both projects grinding through 2025 while the corridor outside sat half-finished.
Paolo's takes its name from co-owner Jeremy Kratzer's late grandfather, Paul Macher, and it inherited the wood-fired oven from the space's previous tenant. The menu leans into a New Jersey-style take on Italian-American cooking: three 12-inch Neapolitan-style pizzas including a margherita, a carbonara, and a thinner Roman-style Jersey clam pie, plus a daily house-made pasta, chicken Parmesan with a choice of vodka or house marinara, a dry-aged bone-in New York strip, and sides like charred broccolini with whipped ricotta. It's open for dinner Thursday through Sunday, 5 to 9 p.m., with a bar hour from 4 to 5 for small bites before the kitchen opens fully.
A restaurant this deliberate about its build-out, sitting at the literal end of the street where the bridge project was most disruptive, is not the kind of business that opens by accident. It's the kind that opens because the people running it read the same MaineDOT timeline everyone else did and planned around it.
Breakfast Got There First
Closer to the middle of Maine Street, the morning crowd already has its own answer. Baked on Maine opened at 42 Maine Street on January 2, 2026, after a soft launch on December 29, in the space The Great Impasta vacated when it relocated to 11 Pleasant Street. It's owned by Ned Horton, who also owns Mae's Cafe & Bakery in Bath and Wildflours Gluten-Free Bakery in Brunswick, and it runs as a genuinely family operation: general manager Ryan Ballard working the kitchen alongside his son Kristopher, with daughter Jordan managing the front counter.
The menu draws on both sister bakeries, so the breakfast plates and sandwiches come with a gluten-free option built in rather than bolted on. The chicken biscuit with sausage gravy and the loaded Big Smoked Breakfast, with brisket, pulled pork, and smoked sausage, have become the dishes regulars mention first. Baked on Maine is currently open Friday through Monday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., which makes it a weekend and Monday habit more than a daily one.
Here's the practical version of a day that didn't exist eighteen months ago on this stretch of Maine Street:
- Breakfast or brunch at Baked on Maine, Friday through Monday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
- A walk down Maine Street toward the river, past the shops and offices that have always anchored the block
- A stop on the new bridge's pedestrian bump-out to actually look at Pejepscot Falls instead of driving past it
- Dinner at Paolo's inside Fort Andross, Thursday through Sunday starting at 5 p.m., with a 4 p.m. bar hour if you want a drink first
That loop only works now. A year ago, the far end of it was construction fencing.
What the Timing Actually Tells You
The easy version of this story is "two restaurants opened in Brunswick." The version that actually tells you something about the neighborhood is that both of them opened during the years the corridor was hardest to reach, not after. Businesses read foot traffic and visibility before they sign a lease. Horton's team took over a storefront on Maine Street's main run while the bridge closures were still active. The Kratzers spent over a year building out a full-service restaurant at the exact spot where MaineDOT's detour signs pointed traffic away.
That's not a coincidence of scheduling. It's a bet on what the corridor would look like once the infrastructure matched the ambition, and the bridge's own published timeline gave them a date to build toward. The reopening in December landed close enough to both openings that the timing reads less like luck and more like operators who did the same math residents are only now catching up to: once the detours clear and the falls are visible from a sidewalk built for stopping, the end of Maine Street stops being something you route around.
If you've been putting off that walk because the last time you tried, there was a flagger waving you back to Pleasant Street, the bridge is done and the tables are full. Go see what the far end of Maine Street actually looks like now.
For Brunswick residents thinking further down the road, whether that's a move within town, a search for a coastal second home nearby, or a question about how a stretch like this one shapes long-term value, Ana T.L. Dierkhising knows this corridor and the towns around it well. Let's Connect.
