Sunapee Harbor Keeps Changing Signs. It Hasn't Changed Owners Since 1991.

"A beloved landmark, long regarded as a symbol of the community," is how state architectural historian James Garvin once described one of the harbor's oldest buildings.

Walk Main Street in Sunapee this September and you'll count at least three new signs since last year. The Blue Canoe sits where the Anchorage used to be, its blue canopy visible from the docks. Hoptimystic Brewing has a permanent taproom now, a few hundred feet from where it started as a summer pop-up. Sunapee Cellar & Pantry is doing brisk business in cheese and wine across from Fenton's Landing. If you're the kind of resident who notices these things, the harbor can start to feel like a place where nothing stays put.

It's the opposite. The harbor's storefronts change hands more often than its buildings do, and once you know who actually owns Main Street, the churn stops looking like instability and starts looking like something closer to a long-running succession plan.

The Landlord You've Never Met

Most of the commercial buildings ringing Sunapee Harbor belong to one entity: Sunapee Harbor Riverway Corporation. It was formed in the early 1990s after a wave of foreclosures put much of the harbor's commercial property at risk. Four local residents, Richard Webb, Jolyon Johnson, Paul Grevstad, and John Rauh, raised the money to buy the buildings back and keep the waterfront intact rather than let it get parceled off piece by piece.

More than three decades later, the Riverway still holds the core of the harbor: the building that now houses the Blue Canoe, the Wild Goose Country Store, Sargents Marina, Harborside Trading, the Sweet Shop and Deli, Quack Shack Ice Cream, and Pete's Shed, which in turn houses Jenkins Dance and Gymnastics, Slavin's Haven Preschool, and Sine-Wave Technologies. That's not a landlord chasing the highest bidder every lease cycle. That's one organization, largely unchanged in mission since 1991, deciding who gets to operate out of a small number of buildings it has no plans to sell.

One Address, Five Chapters

The building at 71 Main Street makes the case better than any list can. It started in 1901 as Perley Graves's Temperance Café, a small lakeside spot renting land from Lucy Knowlton for twenty dollars a year. It became the Anchorage in 1951 under new owners who added booths and a soda fountain. Over the next forty years the restaurant changed hands repeatedly, and by the early 1990s it was one of the properties the Riverway stepped in to save.

For the next three decades, the building stayed the Anchorage, and locals still point it out as the spot where Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and Joe Perry are said to have first met. In 2019 the Riverway began a renovation meant to modernize the building for year-round use. A fire broke out during construction, and the project stalled. The doors reopened in 2020, but the bigger reinvention was still ahead. In November 2024, local business owner Richard Stockwell signed a new lease on the space, and after another round of renovation, the Blue Canoe opened for dinner service on August 8, 2025.

A Union Leader review from that first autumn described the deck's view of "the Sunapee Harbor docks and the fall foliage" and gave the new restaurant strong marks across the board. What reads, from a distance, like just another restaurant swap is actually the fifth chapter of a single address that has never once left the Riverway's hands. The tenant changed. The landlord's plan for the building did not.

The Livery Runs the Same Playbook

If 71 Main Street is the clearest example, the Livery on the other side of the harbor is the second data point that turns a pattern into a rule. Built in the 1890s as a horse stable for the old Harbor House Hotel, the building spent decades as Sunapee's fire station and then its town hall before falling into disrepair in the 1990s. By 2006 it housed little more than a thrift shop, and there was real debate about tearing it down.

Instead, a town committee got it listed on the New Hampshire State Register of Historic Places, and in 2015 the town sold the building to the Riverway with conditions attached: preserve the clock tower, the horse ramp, the original livery doors, and keep it open for public use. The Riverway leased it to a new nonprofit, the Sunapee Heritage Alliance, which bought the building outright in 2020 and has run it since as a venue for performances, art shows, and community events. The Alliance is currently raising money through a campaign it calls Raise the Roof to keep the building's next chapter funded.

Same pattern as the Anchorage building: a structure that could have been sold off or knocked down instead stayed under continuous local stewardship, first through the town, then through the Riverway, then through a mission-driven nonprofit built specifically to carry it forward.

The Exception That Confirms the Rule

Not every business at the harbor fits this ownership story, and the exception is worth naming because it tells you something different and equally useful. Hoptimystic Brewing isn't one of the Riverway's tenants. It started as an independent pop-up in the harbor, got popular enough to justify a permanent tasting room about 450 feet from its original spot, and has since opened a second location with a third reportedly in the works.

That's not succession planning. That's a small business outgrowing its own footprint on the strength of foot traffic alone. Put next to the Anchorage-to-Blue Canoe story, it draws a useful line: some of what looks like harbor turnover is a patient landlord finally finishing a decade-long project, and some of it is simply a good product finding a bigger audience. Both are signs of a harbor that's working. Neither is a sign of one that's unraveling.

What Actually Runs Every Week

None of this ownership history changes what a week at the harbor actually looks like, and that's sort of the point. Project Sunapee is running its farmers market for a sixth season this year, still built around vendors selling only what they grow, raise, bake, or make within 75 miles of the harbor. The Landing's free concert series brought acts like Conniption Fits and Gully Boys to the water all summer, and the season isn't done yet: a Summer Shakedown show is already booked at the Landing for September 26.

The signage above the storefronts is the most visible thing about the harbor, so it's the thing people track. But the market keeps setting up in the same spot every week. The Landing keeps booking bands. The buildings keep answering to the same handful of owners they've answered to for years. What changes is who's serving the food and pouring the beer, not who decides whether the harbor gets to keep functioning at all.

Next time you notice a new sign on Main Street, it's worth asking who actually owns the building underneath it. Around here, the answer is usually the same as it was in 1991, and that continuity is a big part of why the harbor still feels like itself no matter how many times the storefronts change hands.

If watching the harbor evolve has you curious about what your own piece of Sunapee might be worth in today's market, VTNH Realty offers a free home valuation and knows this waterfront as well as anyone writing about it.