"In a region known for quaint downtowns, a community without one builds from scratch."
That line ran in the Portland Press Herald this July, describing a town that has spent two decades watching its neighbors keep their old Main Streets while its own planning committees argued over what to do with 577 acres of a shuttered horse track. It's a fair way to describe Scarborough, which has never had a historic downtown the way Yarmouth or Freeport does, and has instead been building one from a blank commercial lot off Payne Road.
This year, two of the town's longest-running promises both crossed real finish lines within about ten weeks of each other. On July 23, the Eastern Trail Alliance and the Town of Scarborough held a ribbon cutting for a stretch of trail that had been an open gap for years, finally making the ride from South Portland's Bug Light through Scarborough Marsh into Saco continuous for the first time. Eight days earlier, developers of the Town Center at The Downs stood up at a public event and named the next three businesses committing to Scarborough's would-be downtown. Neither project is finished. Both are, for the first time, real enough to use.
The Ride That Used to Dead-End
For years, anyone trying to bike or walk from South Portland into Scarborough Marsh hit a break in the trail near Pleasant Hill Road, a gap that forced riders onto surface streets to connect two finished sections. The Eastern Trail Alliance, working with the Town of Scarborough and the City of South Portland, closed that gap this summer, and finished the 1.6-mile connector roughly fifteen months ahead of the original schedule.
What that gap closing actually does is link the South Portland Greenbelt Trail directly to Scarborough's own trail sections, including the marsh, without a street detour in between. It's part of the larger Eastern Trail, a 62-mile multi-use greenway connecting Bug Light in Casco Bay to Kittery, and it's one more finished piece of the 3,000-mile East Coast Greenway that will eventually run from Calais to Key West.
Ride the new section today and you cross Eastern Road, a quiet 25 mph stretch with bike lanes in both directions, before the trail runs another two miles along the edge of Scarborough Marsh. Along the way, two specific stops have already become part of the route. The Honeycomb Cafe sits just off the intersection, sharing a parking lot with the golf range, serving coffee and smoothies alongside breakfast and lunch. A little further on, past Pleasant Hill, Al's of Scarborough has been slinging pizza and a well-regarded lobster roll since 1982, run the whole time by the Fasulo family.
The trail is getting used, not just admired. The Eastern Trail Alliance's annual fall fundraiser ride last weekend drew close to 800 riders through the marsh on a clear September day. The organization has also just brought on Eliza Alexander as its new interim executive director this summer, a sign the group is gearing up rather than coasting on the ribbon cutting. Eight hundred riders on a Saturday is not a crowd that shows up for a photo opportunity. That's people who came because the route is actually worth riding now.
The Downtown Scarborough Never Had
The town's comprehensive plan has called for an actual town center since 2006. The site chosen for it was Scarborough Downs, a harness racing track that ran continuously from 1950 until it closed for good in November 2020. M&R Development, a Scarborough-based partnership, bought the 577-acre property in 2018 and has been building it out in phases ever since: first housing, then a commercial district anchored by Maine's first Costco in 2023, and now, finally, something resembling a downtown.
As of this July, more than 240,000 square feet of commercial space was under construction in the Town Center, with 70 percent of it already leased or purchased. The broader Downs property now includes 700 homes with roughly 1,000 residents and more than 50 businesses employing 1,500 people, all built up around a site that was a betting parlor five years ago.
It's worth separating what's actually open right now from what's still on the way, because the two get blended together in a lot of the coverage:
- Already open: Allagash Bungalow, a tasting room and restaurant from Allagash Brewing Company, serving the brewery's beer alongside lobster rolls from Bite Into Maine. Costco has been running on the north side of the property since 2023, and a study cited by the Press Herald found it now draws almost 2 million shoppers a year to the surrounding businesses.
- Opening this fall: Market Basket, an 80,000-square-foot store carrying more than 50,000 products at the corner of Market Street and Scarborough Downs Road. It's the chain's fourth Maine location after Biddeford, Westbrook, and Topsham, expected to employ 300 people, and it becomes the town's third major grocery store. Café Luna is set to open in a building called The Breakaway, the first structure in the Town Center designed specifically for smaller, local restaurants and retailers.
- Signed, no opening date yet: Verizon, a Maine Community Bank branch, NBT Bank, and a sixth Greater Portland location for InterMed.
The Breakaway building's name and design are a deliberate nod to the site's racing history, a horse breaking away from the pack, and it will carry a building-sized mural from a local artist on its south-facing wall. The Town Center's main street is being built as a woonerf, a European street design where cars, cyclists, and pedestrians share the same paved space at low speed, with room built in for outdoor dining, seasonal markets, and live music rather than just parking.
Two Long Waits, One Season
Neither of these projects moved fast. The trail gap sat unfinished for years while both ends of it were long since built. The town center sat as a line item in a planning document for most of two decades while the racetrack it would replace kept running, then closed, then sat empty for years more. What changed this year wasn't the ambition behind either project. It's that both of them produced something a resident can actually use, in the same stretch of summer, for the first time.
That's a specific kind of shift for anyone who already lives here. A continuous trail means you can point your bike toward South Portland and actually get there without detouring onto a state road, something that wasn't true in June. A town center with an open tasting room, a grocery store weeks from opening, and a named restaurant coming to a building shaped like a horse race is still mostly scaffolding and signage, but it's scaffolding you can walk through now, not a rendering on a website.
Scarborough spent a long time being the town between other towns, the commute you drove through on Route 1 to get somewhere with an actual center. This fall, for the first time, some of that is starting to resolve into something you can ride to or walk into, even if most of it is still being built one storefront at a time.
If you're already riding that new stretch of trail or watching the Town Center fill in from the sidewalk, Beautiful Maine Home keeps an eye on what's actually changing in Scarborough and the towns around it, one season at a time.
