Michael Martone, of Damariscotta, stands on Main Street in the downtown on Thursday, June 19. Martone, who works as the town planner for Damariscotta and Newcastle, is deeply interested in community development and town planning and spends much of his downtime reading about topics that pertain to his profession. (Johnathan Riley photo)
A town’s story exists beyond the pages of history; it’s evident in the roads, the businesses, and the overall infrastructure of the community.
For Michael Martone, who works as the town planner in Damariscotta and Newcastle, that’s the kind of story he’s spent much of his life studying and listening to from the infrastructure of urban and rural towns around the world.
Martone, of Damariscotta, was born in New Jersey and grew up in Montclair, N.J., a dense railroad suburb of New York, N.Y. and Newark, N.J.
“(Growing up there) was pretty great,” he said. “Looking back, there were a lot of idyllic aspects: I could walk to friends’ houses, to school, I could walk to the train that’d take me into New York City.”
Martone’s parents brought him and his siblings to New York City to see performances, shows, and “whatever was going on.” He said.
“I don’t think my dad loved it,” Martone said, smiling. “Because he would always be driving and I would always want to go through Times Square because the bright lights and ‘This is amazing,’ having no idea what that would mean in terms of, like, actually driving through traffic.”
After graduating high school, Martone attended Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., because he wanted to be somewhere warm, geographically flat, and with the option of matriculating into general design programs.
“I didn’t want to be somewhere it snowed too much,” he said. “Obviously I was making important life decisions on really important factors.”
While Martone enjoyed his time in school, there were some aspects he didn’t care much for, such as the sprawling suburban landscape and large student population.
“I didn’t really like the school. It was too big. I didn’t like Tempe … it had some nice aspects to it, but the whole Phoenix area is just superblock after superblock and wide roads,” he said. “It was like all the bad aspects of suburbia mixed with a lot of the bad aspects of cities.”
However, in those frustrations, Martone found he was called to urban planning, a field of study that aims to guide communities wisely in the use of land and resources.
“I didn’t really know why I was so frustrated living there,” he said. “And while I was there, I discovered urban planning.”
Martone had been bouncing around programs including architecture, art history, and industrial design before taking a planning and urban planning 101 class.
“That’s when I realized it was even a thing,” he said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ this is perfect. This is exactly what I want to do: this is some architecture, some political science stuff, sociology, which I did minor in sociology.”
At that point in Martone’s life, he had traveled in road trips across America with his family and visited places in Europe. Each of those places looked different, and that piqued his curiosity.
“I had been to Italy, I had been to London, I had been to Portugal at that point … and also around the country, to a certain extent, I had seen Phoenix now, and all these places were different,” he said. “I’m sitting in this class, and now I have a teacher who’s showing us pictures of Tokyo and Mexico City and Egypt and all of these different places, and you’re saying, ‘So why do these places look different?’ and I think that’s what I’m still trying to figure out.”
After graduating in 2009, Martone went back to New Jersey to be near family and worked in construction with TLC Restoration, a company specializing in disaster restoration, bringing properties back to original conditions after being damaged by a natural or human-made disaster.
“It was a lot of … demo and replacement, but within a year, I ended up starting to do accounting, accounts receivable,” he said. “Calling people and asking for money isn’t fun, but turns out, I am halfway decent with numbers and knew my way around a spreadsheet.”
About five years into working with the same company and becoming the accounts manager, Martone found himself overseeing more paperwork and creating administrative processes, which he found that he was good at, even though the job may not have been his life’s calling.
“I’m pretty big on process and systems, so being an accountant was pretty good,” he said. “And most of the reason I was successful wasn’t that I was good at numbers or computers, but I was pretty good at lining things up and understanding why when this person did this and the next person had to do that, the next person had to do that, and creating a process that we could kind of all follow and that could be consistently followed.”
Seeking a bit more connection with work that inspired him, Martone returned to school to earn his master’s degree in city and regional planning from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. in 2013.
After graduating, he got a job as a consultant with the urban planning firm Topology, in Newark, N.J., that largely worked with developers and municipalities.
“Most of what I did was consulting with municipalities,” he said. “I learned a lot.”
Martone was there from 2017 until the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in 2020, at which time he left his position and moved to Maine to be closer to family members who had moved to Round Pond. As the pandemic started waning, Martone realized he liked being in the area.
“As the dust started to settle, it was becoming more and more apparent that A, I liked it here, and B, that this was working out,” he said.
Martone was doing remote work as a consultant in Boston, Mass. and for the Midcoast Council of Governments, a municipally driven community and urban development nonprofit in Damariscotta.
In July 2023, Martone further cemented himself in the community and started working as the town planner for Damariscotta and Newcastle.
“I always assumed that I would end up in like, New York or Chicago, Boston or Portland,” he said. “But now I’m in Damariscotta and I’m very content.”
Martone moved to downtown Damariscotta last fall and has been enjoying an urban-adjacent lifestyle, being within walking distance of work and other businesses.
“It’s probably more like a traditional lifestyle, probably not that different than if I was here 100 years ago,” he said. “I can walk to work, run into people on the street, I’m not spending an hour commuting (in a car) each way, and I try to do things relatively locally.”
When Martone isn’t working on local planning, he’s reading up on history or deepening his body of knowledge about topics that can generally lead back to planning and town design.
“All the books that I have are like planning books, so when I like to read, I like to read about planning, even when it’s not specifically applicable to my work,” he said.
He also enjoys traveling, hiking, seeing his family, being outdoors, sailing, and skiing.
“I think some of the best advice that my brother gave me was that if you’re going to live in Maine, the winters aren’t so much worse than being in New Jersey, but they’re longer and just a little bit more consistent,” he said. “And that difference means you have to have something to look forward to in the winter, like skiing.”
Martone also enjoys socializing at and patronizing local businesses and restaurants, which has helped him deepen his own connection to the community in ways that are important to his ethos as the town planner and fulfillment as a person.
Engaging those third spaces – a social theory emphasizing the importance of having a place outside of work and home – helps build community overall.
“I like to socialize,” he said. “But community and just engaging third places, and that’s something that I like to do. I recognize I need it, possibly as an extrovert or just like as a human, but also if people aren’t socializing, community is not healthy. Then nothing I want to do as like a planner, personally, professionally, or like philosophically, doesn’t work if there’s not that community engagement and socializing.”
Moving to the Midcoast, Martone has learned a lot about Mainers and admires them for their practicality and underlying kindness. Landing in Damariscotta has also taught him a little bit about himself and accepting some of the unpredictability inherent in life.
“I don’t really like change. I like predictability, which is why I think I’m good at being process oriented and doing that stuff,” he said. “But I would not have guessed that I would have ended up (going to school in) Arizona. It was kind of a happy accident, or maybe it was inevitable that I was going to find planning. It was certainly a happy accident that I ended up in Midcoast Maine during the pandemic and put down roots here … I couldn’t have planned it this way, but it worked out and is working out well, so I feel like that’s a life lesson I keep learning.”
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