9 Small Towns in New England with the Best Downtowns

The difference between a downtown and a mere row of storefronts is whether anyone has a reason to be there after five o’clock. A brass band on Exeter’s bandstand gives visitors a reason to linger on summer evenings. Pittsfield’s arts walk brings live music down the middle of town. In Brunswick, the draw is a German restaurant that throws an Oktoberfest and a tea room that takes reservations for scones. Craft beer and pinball await a few blocks from the river in Dover. The downtowns below all pass that test.

Pittsfield, Massachusetts

A librarian found the 1791 bylaw in a vault at the Berkshire Athenaeum, and officials in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, have cited it against Cooperstown, New York, ever since. The rule banned baseball within 80 yards of the new meeting house, which officials call the earliest written mention of the game in America. The Athenaeum is still a busy place, with toddler music mornings, a fiber arts group called Darn-Yarns, and a 3D printer available to borrow.

The Common, a block of park with a gazebo and a performance pavilion, is where vendors set up the Saturday farmers market and where local groups stage the Common Ground Festival each summer. On summer First Fridays, people walk North Street for an arts walk with live music, and galleries like NUarts are open late. In winter there is the Holiday Shindy, an indoor artisan fair. Bousquet Mountain is under 10 minutes from the center of town, and Pittsfield State Forest has 30 miles of trail for hikers, mountain bikers, and horses.

Essex, Connecticut

During the War of 1812, a British raiding party slipped up the Connecticut River and burned 27 ships at the docks in Essex, Connecticut. The Connecticut River Museum tells that story alongside the river's natural history and the indigenous people who lived along it, unveils a model train layout every fall, and runs cruises on the Onrust, a re-creation of a 1614 wooden sailing vessel.

Main Street runs the length of a spit of land with water on both sides, so boat slips line the banks and the Essex Corinthian Yacht Club has four boats members can take out. Anyone with their own hull can use the public ramp at the end of the street.

White picket fences and American flags line Main Street, and the shops behind them are small. Pencil & Wool stocks stationery and yarn and runs drawing classes. Essex Mercantile sells kitchen tools and Stonewall Kitchen pantry goods. Nora Murphy's the Little Shop carries model ships for anyone who wants to keep the nautical theme going at home.

Westerly, Rhode Island

The granite in downtown Westerly, Rhode Island, is the same stone as The American Soldier, the colossal Civil War monument at Antietam National Cemetery in Maryland. It is visible in the Industrial Trust Building and Christ Episcopal Church, and in the Granite Theatre, an 1843 Greek Revival church where a resident company now stages plays and runs a children's summer camp.

Wilcox Park sits in the middle of it all, an arboretum of 159 tree cultivars with paths across the lawn, a Christopher Columbus monument, a Runaway Bunny statue, and a summer schedule that includes the Summer Pops series and the Next Up Music Festival.

Trains have stopped in Westerly since 1837. Amtrak still uses one side of the 1912 station, and the rest of the building is the Artists' Cooperative Gallery, where members hang a new show every month and teach painting classes.

Falmouth, Massachusetts

Cedar shingles cover most of downtown Falmouth, on Cape Cod, and the storefronts under them are independent. Eight Cousins Books stocks toys and puzzles alongside the books and brings authors in to talk, sometimes at the store and sometimes out at Nobska Light. Ben & Bill's Chocolate Emporium handles dessert.

The middle of downtown is the lawn of Mullen-Hall Elementary School, which has a nautical wooden playground and, better, the Carousel of Light, a working carousel whose horses artist Lance Shinkle carved by hand and set on vintage machinery. It is open daily in summer. On Sundays, vendors set up the farmers market beside it through November, and local nonprofits staff tables.

The Falmouth Art Center started in 1966 as a few painters holding classes and now has three galleries, a pottery studio, and standing groups for fiber arts, figure drawing, and painting.

Exeter, New Hampshire

The Declaration of Independence was printed as a broadside in Exeter, New Hampshire, in July 1776, and about 11 copies of that printing survive. One surfaced in 2026 among Royal Navy papers at the National Archives in Britain, where it will stay. People in Exeter read a copy aloud anyway, every July, at the American Independence Festival, while actors in period dress work colonial trades and the American Independence Museum opens its galleries.

The museum also owns Folsom Tavern, an 18th-century building George Washington is said to have visited, and runs a Beer for History series there. The beer is local. The history is short. The Exeter Bandstand stands where Front and Water Streets meet, and the Exeter Brass Band plays there on summer evenings. In December, the Festival of Trees is held in the Town Hall across the plaza, and each decorated tree is auctioned for the Community Children's Fund.

Dover, New Hampshire

Dover is a few miles north, on the Maine line. The Cocheco River splits the downtown and once powered the Cocheco Mills, which are apartments now, with Otto, an upscale pizzeria, on the ground floor. The Children's Museum of New Hampshire is across Washington Street, built for toddlers and preschoolers, with sensory stations, a STEM lab, and pretend-play sets shaped like a post office, a market, and a pizzeria. Toddlerfest and NH Maker Fest happen there too.

The Dover Community Trail runs along the Cocheco and the Bellamy, and a scale model of the solar system, the Voyage Mark II, is installed along it. The sun is at the trailhead. The planets are spaced to scale down the path. Back on earth, the Thirsty Moose Taphouse has a long list of local drafts and oversized Bavarian pretzels, and Czar's Brewery, a few blocks from the river, has pinball.

Brunswick, Maine

Maine Street in Brunswick, Maine, is 198 feet across, and residents claim it is the widest in the state. The Brunswick Town Mall fills the middle, a long green where farmers market vendors sell produce, bread, plants, and seafood through November.

The restaurants along it include the Broadway Delicatessen, a classic diner; Richard's, which serves spätzle and currywurst and puts on an Oktoberfest; and Elevenses, where afternoon tea with scones and cucumber sandwiches is by reservation only. Bowdoin College sits at the south end of downtown, and the Maine State Music Theatre is on its grounds, with a summer season of musicals like My Fair Lady and family shows like Frog and Toad. The college opens many of its Studzinski Hall concerts to the public.

Augusta, Maine

Sometime in the 19th century, the E.C. Allen Publishing Company, a direct-mail advertiser that had outgrown its offices on Water Street in Augusta, Maine, took the building across the street and dug a tunnel to connect the two. The annex came down in the 1980s. The original building is now Otto's On The River, a New American bistro with escargot, Maine scallops, and roasted duck on the menu.

Cushnoc Brewing Co., down the street, does pizza and house beer, and Capital Bar & Grille does craft cocktails, pork belly, and a sandwich called the Gabbagool stuffed with Italian meats. Old Fort Western, across the Kennebec River, is a reconstruction of a French and Indian War outpost. The garrison house dates to 1754, the blockhouses to a 1920 rebuild, and the complex is open for tours and for the Victorian Christmas each winter.

Burlington, Vermont

Much of the waterfront in Burlington, Vermont, is marina slips on Lake Champlain. The Whistling Man Schooner Company runs three sloops and two powerboats out of it for tours, lessons, and charters, and the Island Line Trail runs along the shore through downtown and out to the Lake Champlain Causeway. The Champlain Valley Dinner Train leaves from the downtown station for a three-hour, three-course run inland to Middlebury and back. Afterward, the Vermont Comedy Club does stand-up, improv, and sketch, and the Flynn, two blocks up, stages more than 200 shows a year.

Where Community Comes Alive

What sets these nine downtowns apart from the towns around them is not size but design. In each, the shared spaces sit at the center, whether that is the Common in Pittsfield, the granite-lined green of Wilcox Park in Westerly, the wide town mall in Brunswick, or the bandstand at the Exeter crossroads. The shops, theaters, and markets vary by town, but the pattern is the same. A New England downtown is at its best when the people who live there have a reason to gather in one place at the same time.