Brunswick fire station becomes brewery with five affordable apartments
Brunswick’s 1919 fire station reopened as Moderation Brewing with five studio apartments, including units for households earning up to $46,560.
Downtown Brunswick’s former Central Fire Station has been converted into a brewery and five affordable studio apartments, giving a 1919 civic building a second life in the middle of two of the region’s biggest pressures: too few homes and the need for more active downtown space. The redevelopment at 21 Town Hall Place was marked Friday with a public ribbon cutting for Moderation Brewing and the new apartments.
The apartments are aimed at households earning up to 60% of area median income. Under this year’s rules in Cumberland County, that means a single-person household can qualify at up to $46,560 in income. Rent starts at $918 a month, with hot water included. The building also has heat pumps, laundry, an elevator, parking for each unit and one ADA-accessible apartment, details that make the project more than a symbolic reuse of old brick and mortar.
The former fire station had been occupied continuously by Brunswick’s fire department since 1919, when the building designed by Maine architect Edward Leander Higgins opened. After the department moved to a new station on Pleasant Street in 2023, the town sold the property to Developers Collaborative in late 2023 for $200,000. Construction began in spring 2025, turning a long-serving municipal building into a mixed-use project that combines housing with a commercial anchor on the ground floor.
Moderation Brewing, founded in March 2018 in downtown Brunswick by Brunswick natives Mattie Daughtry and Philip Welsh, will expand production in the new space and enter the wholesale market. The brewery’s plans for the site include a taproom, indoor-outdoor seating and a beer garden, giving the block a steady draw beyond office hours and lunch breaks. For a downtown that can lose energy once municipal workers and shoppers head home, that kind of foot traffic matters.
The financing also shows how small-scale housing can be assembled in a historic setting. The redevelopment drew support from MaineHousing, Genesis Community Loan Fund, Bangor Savings Bank and Coastal Enterprises, Inc., a mix of public and private capital that helped make the project work. With Maine needing an estimated 76,400 to 84,300 more homes by 2030, and Cumberland County projected to need as many as 8,600 additional units, Brunswick’s old fire station now stands as a concrete example of how Sagadahoc and Midcoast communities could turn underused public buildings into homes and jobs instead of leaving them idle.
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