Every evening around 5, the leash traffic on the Eastern Promenade Trail picks up. Dog owners head down from the top of Munjoy Hill, past Fort Allen Park, past the spot where the Loring Memorial catches the last light over Back Cove, down to East End Beach, where the sand stays open to pets once the sun starts to drop. It's a ritual most people on the Hill could describe with their eyes closed. What most of them couldn't tell you is that this same stretch of pavement is now the funded, on-paper southern end of a trail system that's supposed to run 72 miles to Brunswick and Auburn.
That's not a hypothetical. It's a project with a name, a board, a signed state law, and a line item in this year's Maine Department of Transportation work plan. The Eastern Prom you already know is quietly becoming the anchor of something much bigger, and 2026 is the year that started to show up in paperwork instead of just in planning meetings.
The 2.1 Miles Everyone Already Knows
The trail itself is unglamorous in the best way. It's a 2.1-mile paved path that never loses sight of the water, threading through the 73-acre Eastern Promenade park that the Olmsted Brothers firm laid out in the early 20th century, the same firm behind Central Park. The park has been hosting Portlanders since the 1830s, back when the neighborhood was still known as Mount Joy before reverting to Munjoy.
Walk it end to end and you pass the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad Co. and Museum, whose two-foot gauge steam and diesel trains still run tourist rides along the same shoreline, right next to the walkers and cyclists. At the northern tip, the Loring Memorial marks the spot where, on a clear evening, you can pick out Mount Washington roughly 70 miles away in New Hampshire. At the southern end, Fort Allen Park gives you the full sweep of Portland Harbor. In between, East End Beach handles kayak launches by day and dog walkers by early evening, doubling as the place the city still uses to ferry equipment out to its islands.
None of this is new information if you live here. What's new is what it connects to.
Where It Actually Goes When You Keep Walking
The Eastern Prom Trail has always been part of the East Coast Greenway, the planned off-road route that will eventually link Calais, Maine, all the way to Key West, Florida. That's been true for years and most residents treat it as a nice piece of trivia, not something with local weight.
The part that changed in 2025 and 2026 is a separate, more immediate project called the Casco Bay Trail, and it uses the same ground. The first 1.5 miles of the proposed 72-mile loop connecting Portland, Lewiston-Auburn, Brunswick, and Freeport runs directly through the Eastern Promenade park, meaning the trail residents already walk every day is the literal starting segment of a regional network that, until recently, existed mostly as a concept on a nonprofit's website.
Here's what moved it from concept to something with a budget:
- In 2025, Governor Mills signed LD 30 into law, authorizing an interim trail on a 25-mile corridor running from Portland to Danville Junction in Auburn, following the old St. Lawrence and Atlantic rail line.
- In June 2026, Falmouth and New Gloucester both approved the Casco Bay Trail Board of Supervisors Interlocal Agreement, bringing the total to six municipalities in the regional planning group: Auburn, New Gloucester, North Yarmouth, Yarmouth, Falmouth, and Portland.
- Portland itself backed a resolution to contribute a $12,000 local match to MaineDOT for an engineering study covering the Portland-to-Yarmouth stretch.
- MaineDOT's 2026 work plan set aside roughly $600,000 specifically to help coordinate the project across all six towns.
None of that means construction crews are showing up on the Prom next spring. Interlocal agreements and engineering studies are early-stage, unglamorous steps. But six towns agreeing to sit at the same planning table, plus a state agency putting real money behind coordination, is a different level of seriousness than a trail alliance simply hoping for support. The dog walk you do without thinking twice is currently the most finished, most funded piece of a project that used to be mostly aspiration.
Washington Avenue Is Doing Its Own Quiet Work
Come back down off the Prom and the neighborhood's other center of gravity is Washington Avenue, which runs along the edge of Munjoy Hill toward downtown. It's not trying to be the Old Port. It has its own texture.
Root Wild Kombucha, at 135 Washington Avenue, is a good example of how that texture got built. Owner Reid Emmerich spent eight years making kombucha at the well-known Urban Farm Fermentory before striking out on his own in 2018. The origin story is almost incidental to the neighborhood itself: Emmerich moved to Portland in 2008 mostly because he'd met someone who lived on Munjoy Hill, and once they'd settled into an apartment together, he started experimenting with fermentation on the side. A decade later, that side project is a dog-friendly taproom serving rotating seasonal flavors, from beach rose to raspberry with sumac, alongside a lineup of tea-infused beers made in partnership with East Bayside's Lone Pine brewery.
A few doors down the same stretch, Washington Baths runs a public sauna and cold plunge setup with a snack and beverage cafe attached, the kind of business that only makes sense in a neighborhood dense enough to support it on foot traffic alone. Fridays there are kept quiet by house custom, no idle chatter, which tells you something about who's coming and why.
Neither business is trying to be a destination for the rest of the city. They're built for people who already live within walking distance, which is most of what defines Washington Avenue right now.
The Organization Making Sure the Hill Stays the Hill
None of this happens in a vacuum. The Munjoy Hill Neighborhood Organization, based out of an office at 92 Congress Street, has spent years positioning itself as the voice for one of Portland's most historic and most changed neighborhoods. Its stated goal is straightforward: protect the walkable character of the Hill from development that doesn't fit, while keeping the community dialogue active enough that residents actually have a say.
That tension is baked into the neighborhood's own history. Munjoy Hill was built up by and for 19th-century workers, largely Irish and Italian American families, on streets narrow enough that the peninsula's shape has kept the area cut off from major commuter routes ever since. Congress Street, downtown Portland's main artery, simply ends at the Eastern Promenade rather than continuing through. That isolation is part of why the neighborhood still reads as residential and self-contained even as the rest of downtown grows up around it.
The Neighborhood Organization's board meets the first Monday of every month, with an open annual meeting each June, and its work is explicitly framed around managing change rather than blocking it outright. That's a useful frame for understanding everything else in this piece. The same qualities that make the Eastern Prom worth connecting to a 72-mile regional trail, and that make a kombuchery on Washington Avenue viable as a neighborhood fixture rather than a tourist stop, are the qualities a local organization is actively working to keep intact as more attention turns toward the Hill.
What This Actually Means If You're Already Here
Nothing on this list requires you to do anything differently tomorrow. The trail is still the same 2.1-mile walk it was last month. Root Wild is still open daily. The sauna is still quiet on Fridays. But the context around all of it shifted this year in ways worth knowing, even if you never read a MaineDOT work plan or sat in on a Neighborhood Organization meeting.
The Hill isn't being discovered for the first time. It's being connected, on paper and in state budgets, to a much larger regional idea, while a homegrown organization works to make sure that connection doesn't cost the neighborhood the things that made it worth connecting to in the first place.
If you're watching what's happening in this part of Portland, whether from a porch on Congress Street or a kayak launched off East End Beach, that push and pull between regional ambition and neighborhood-scale character is the story to follow this fall.
For homeowners on the Hill curious what any of this means for their own property down the line, Adam Parent and the LUX Group track these neighborhood-level shifts as part of their ongoing work across Portland's East End. Reach out anytime you want a local read on where things stand.
