By Kathryn Miles
Photos by Dave Waddell
From our November 2024 issue
Swing through Belfast and you’ll likely spot a few bumper stickers emblazoned with the moniker Moonbat Kingdom — a proud nod to the city’s left-leaning politics and artsy vibe. When avid sailors Sam and Mickey Green first tacked their way into Belfast Harbor a decade ago, they took in the street art, the former Moonbat City Baking breakfast spot, and the buskers playing flute in Heritage Park and were smitten. “I like the weirdness,” Sam says. “We’re not like Camden.”
In 2015, the Greens, having scaled back their careers as Emmy Award–nominated film editors, relocated from a Washington, DC, apartment to a two-story home in Belfast. With time and space on his hands, Sam resurrected an old model-train-building hobby in the couple’s basement. He wanted to create an homage to his beloved adopted city and, over the years, it’s morphed into something of a master plan for keeping Belfast weird.
Parts of the model city are recognizable to anyone familiar with Belfast: the downtown brick storefronts, including the 1832 Colburn Shoe Store, the nation’s oldest, Rollie’s bar, Chase’s Daily vegetarian restaurant, and Local Color art gallery, as well as the antique Colonial Theatre, with its famous rooftop elephant. There’s a bustling waterfront with a boat on a lift next to the forest-green Front Street Shipyard, tiny diners at picnic tables outside the Must Be Nice Lobster cart, and an oversize yellow duck — a reference to the giant inflatable ones that have mysteriously appeared in the harbor in the last few years. From a pair of control panels, Sam can flick on shop, street, and car lights and cue the sounds of crying seagulls, a clanging bell buoy, and an employee at Young’s Lobster Pound announcing a customer’s order. A remote controller propels the nine trains that harken to bygone days when the Maine Central Railroad stopped in the city.
But other elements are pure fantasy. Atop a petite Penobscot McCrum, a tribute to the local potato-processing plant that succumbed to a fire in 2022, is a large spinning potato chip inspired by Boston’s iconic Citgo sign, which is also visible in Sam’s Belfast. A massive wind turbine powers the miniature city and the train passes through a pair of rounded plaster mountains, one of which hosts rock climbers, kite flyers, and Bigfoot. “I enjoy playing with reality,” Sam says.
A couple years ago, Sam added a strip club called the “Boobie Hatch,” a pinup girl smiling coyly on its sidewall, to the village and inadvertently started a new theme. His adult son followed up with a Christmas gift of a female figurine flashing her breasts, which Sam positioned facing the train tracks. Subsequent gifts from his kids and their partners have included a trio of nudes in a hot tub, which now hangs out behind the flasher, and a naked man chasing a boar. “They have a great time trying to shock him,” Mickey says. “The more risqué, the better.” For his part, Sam said he wouldn’t mind if the real Belfast was a bit more irreverent. Whether it’s a group of hot-tubbers in the buff or a grand homage to the potato chip, “there’s a lot of appeal in the crazy and the offbeat.”
