BELFAST, Maine — It was a longtime elementary school, then a short-lived music school before serving a stint as a medical-marijuana growhouse.
And that’s all before the Peirce School on Church Street became the subject of a hot-tempered debate that for a time divided the city over whether it should be renovated into rental housing.
But now the venerable brick building has new owners — a Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based couple who say they intend to grow much of their own food in on-site gardens as well as raise chickens and keep bees on the property.
And they have no desire to rile anybody as they finalize their vision for the property.
“We have no shortage of ideas for the building, but we want to see what the community wants and needs before we make a plan,” Josh Lanahan said.
Until recently, he and his wife, Michelle Lozuaway, owned two Portsmouth restaurants, Street and Street’za. They sold the restaurants in April, freeing them up to make a change.
“We’re looking to reinvent our lives in a creative way,” Lozuaway said. “We’ve always been creative. We’ve sort of rescued old farmhouses. We flipped houses, and we did restaurants. Now we’re taking a year or two off to reevaluate and explore some creative options.”
Belfast first came onto their radar more than a year ago, when they were listening to public radio in New Hampshire and heard the Leaky Boot Jug Band’s song “Belfast, Maine,” a tune that became something of an instant anthem for the city in 2017.
“It was a funky folk song, an ode to Belfast,” Lozuaway said. “I thought, it sounds like a great community.”
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Still, Belfast seemed too far away from Portsmouth to be practical. But they thought about it this summer when they were staying with a friend in Bar Harbor, and decided to take a day to explore the midcoast city.
“We really liked what we saw,” Lozuaway said.
For them, highlights of the town include the United Farmer’s Market on Spring Street and the city’s focus on local food. As well, the quirkiness of the community reminds them of Portsmouth 30 years ago, in a good way. And when a realtor showed them the Peirce School, there was an instant click.
This week, the 1915 building, complete with huge original windows, about 7,000 square feet of above-ground space, high ceilings and plenty of old-fashioned charm, became their next project. Although it was not immediately clear how much the couple paid for the building, the listing price dropped last month to $289,000.
“For the time being, it will just be our residence, which is ridiculous,” Lozuaway said. “It’s a new-old McMansion.”
Their plans include adding some interior windows to bring light to the old cloakrooms and other spaces, replacing some of the asphalt around the building with green space and, hopefully, connecting with Window Dressers, a Rockland-based nonprofit organization that builds insulating window inserts. Lozuaway said they heard it might be as much as $50,000 to replace the school’s windows with modern, energy-efficient ones.
“And that’s not in the budget at this time,” she said.
Down the road, if things work out, they could imagine creating something of a family compound in the school, so their sons could live there, too.
They are looking forward to settling in, planting their garden, raising their own food and enjoying such local amenities as being able to walk to the three-screen Colonial Theatre downtown, something they cannot do at previous, more rural, places they have lived.
“The vision and the intention and the hope is that the Peirce School will be our home and Belfast will be our community,” Lozuaway said. “If we find that it’s not to our liking, or too far away, we’ll do something else, but I think it’s safe to say we’ll never do a bunch of apartments.”