Sunapee Harbor Said Goodbye To The Anchorage. Its Saturday Morning Didn't Move An Inch.

For most of the last three decades, if you wanted to describe Sunapee Harbor to someone who had never been, you pointed at 71 Main Street. That was The Anchorage: the deck over the water, the New England platters, the bar where Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and Joe Perry are said to have first crossed paths. It closed. A new restaurant with a different name, a different menu, and a different owner now occupies that same footprint. The brewery that briefly filled the gap in between packed up and moved down the road.

None of that is the interesting part. The interesting part is what didn't move at all.

One Address, Four Names Since 1901

The building at 71 Main Street has never really belonged to one business for long, even if it felt that way to anyone who grew up ordering fried clams there. Its story starts in 1901, when a man named Perley Graves rented the lakefront lot from its original owner, Lucy Knowlton, for twenty dollars a year and built a small red-and-white café with his brother-in-law, Hiram G. Stockwell. They called it the Temperance Café.

By the early 1990s, much of the harbor's commercial waterfront, including that building, had fallen into foreclosure. Four residents, Richard Webb, Jolyon Johnson, Paul Grevstad, and John Rauh, formed a nonprofit called Sunapee Harbor Riverway to keep the property open and maintained rather than see it sold off piecemeal. The Riverway has owned the building ever since. A 2019 renovation meant to modernize it for year-round use was interrupted by a fire during construction. It reopened by 2020 anyway.

In November 2024, local business owner Richard Stockwell signed the lease for a new chapter at 71 Main Street. After another round of renovation, the space reopened on August 8, 2025 as The Blue Canoe, a lakeside seafood restaurant with a nautical theme and a farm-to-table menu. A restaurant review in the New Hampshire Union Leader that October praised the deck atmosphere and called out dishes like sesame-seared yellowfin tuna and a butternut squash bisque sweetened with apple cider, giving the new place a strong opening notice. Whether the last name Stockwell on that 2024 lease has any connection to Hiram G. Stockwell from 1901 is not something the record settles, but it is a detail worth noticing for anyone who has watched this address change hands.

That's four distinct identities on one lot in 124 years: café, Anchorage, brewery pop-up, Blue Canoe. The building has never been the constant. It has always been the variable.

The Brewery That Moved Around The Corner

Before Blue Canoe signed its lease, Hoptimystic Brewing had been running a pop-up tasting room inside that same Anchorage building, drawing boaters who tied up right outside. Once the space turned over, Hoptimystic didn't leave Sunapee. It relocated to a permanent home about 450 feet away, according to Google Maps, on the first floor of the Prospect Hill Antiques and Home building at 31 River Road, with a porch that runs along the Sugar River instead of the lake.

The brewery itself has its own turnover story. It was started in 2020 by Mike Boucher and Bill Waddell, closed in November 2022, and was purchased in July 2023 by Dan and Kelly Thomas, who kept Waddell on as lead brewer to preserve the beer's consistency. In 2026, the Lake Sunapee Region Chamber of Commerce named Hoptimystic its Rookie Business of the Year, a fast turnaround for a business that had shut down and restarted within the same five years.

So the harbor's most photographed lakefront address changed owners, and the brewery that briefly lived inside it found its own address a short walk away on the river. Two businesses moved. The map of the harbor itself did not change.

What Never Actually Rerouted

Ask a Sunapee resident what their week in the harbor actually looks like and the answer rarely starts with a restaurant name. It starts with a place: Ben Mere Park.

• Every Saturday morning from May 23 through September 5, 2026, the Sunapee Farmers Market sets up at Ben Mere Park, with vendors selling only what's grown, raised, baked, or made within 75 miles of town, sponsored by the nonprofit Project Sunapee.
• Thursday evenings in August brought Movie Nights at the Ben Mere Bandstand, held at dusk, rain or shine, on August 6, 13, 20, and 27.
• Down at The Landing, 72 Main Street, free live music has run through the summer, with acts like JD & The Stone Masons and 90 Proof, alongside a Thursday happy hour from 4 to 6 p.m. that pairs with trivia night and food from Fenton's Landing.

None of that scaffolding depended on who owned 71 Main Street. The bandstand doesn't care whether the building across the water is called the Anchorage or the Blue Canoe. The farmers market vendors set up in the same spot whether the brewery two doors down is a pop-up or a permanent tasting room on River Road. A harbor week in Sunapee is organized around the park and the bandstand, not around any single storefront, and that held true through the biggest ownership change the harbor has seen in years.

For contrast, it's worth noting that not every kitchen in town has turned over at all. Suna Restaurant on Brook Road, known for its Kobe burger and one of the region's larger bourbon selections, has been operating since 2016 without the kind of upheaval that hit 71 Main Street. Some addresses in Sunapee are the variable. Others simply aren't.

The Season Is Already Turning

By the time this posts, the summer's biggest fixed events have already wrapped or are about to. The League of NH Craftsmen Fair, now in its 93rd year, ran its usual early-August stretch at Mount Sunapee Resort in nearby Newbury, one of the longest-running craft fairs in the country. The free concert lineup at The Landing ran its course through late August. The Farmers Market has one Saturday left before its September 5 closing date, the traditional Labor Day weekend cutoff that's marked its calendar for years.

What comes next in Sunapee isn't a mystery to anyone who has lived through a few of these turns. The harbor quiets down from its peak boat traffic, the deck seating at places like Blue Canoe becomes a foliage-season draw rather than a boater's lunch stop, and the town settles into the slower rhythm that runs from Labor Day through the first frost. The businesses along Main Street will keep adjusting their hours. Ben Mere Park will sit a little emptier on Saturday mornings until next May.

What This Means If You Already Live Here

The lesson from the last eighteen months in Sunapee Harbor isn't that a landmark restaurant closed. Restaurants close everywhere, even good ones, even ones with sixty years of local memory attached to them. The lesson is narrower and more useful: the thing that actually organizes a Sunapee week has never been a restaurant at all. It's a public park with a bandstand and a Saturday morning market that has run in the same spot since long before The Blue Canoe existed and will likely still be running long after.

If you're new to town and trying to figure out where the social center of gravity actually sits, don't anchor yourself to whichever building has the newest sign. Anchor yourself to Ben Mere Park. The buildings around it will keep changing names. The park won't.

Sunapee's harbor has always been a place that rewards people who pay attention to it over years, not just a single season. If you're thinking about what it might mean to actually own a piece of that rhythm, from a place on the water to a home a short walk from Main Street, Dolan Real Estate knows this harbor's turns as well as anyone. Request a personalized consultation and let's talk about what's actually for sale behind the storefronts.