Rye Harbor's Working Waterfront Runs on Leases, Not Tradition

"You don't own my building. I do."

That's what Adam Baker, who runs Vintage Fish Company out of one of the shacks at Rye Harbor, told the state's harbor director during a public dispute over who actually controls the row of weathered buildings along the dock. Baker owns his structure outright. He pays property taxes on it to the town of Rye. What he doesn't own is the ground it sits on, because that ground belongs to the State of New Hampshire, and every business at the harbor operates there on a lease that can be renegotiated, tightened, or not renewed at all.

Most people who eat lunch at the picnic tables by the Rye Harborside snack bar, watch the lobster boats come and go, or book a whale watch out of the marina assume the harbor works the way it looks: fixed, unchanging, the same handful of shacks that have always been there. A judge's ruling handed down last week says otherwise. The working character of Rye Harbor, the thing that makes it feel different from every sandy, recreation-only stretch of New Hampshire's coast, is maintained through an active and sometimes adversarial arrangement between small operators and a state authority. It is not a permanent feature of the town. It is a negotiation that happens to still be going the harbor's way, for now.

A Harbor Owned By Nobody Who Works There

Rye Harbor is managed by the Pease Development Authority, the same state agency that runs Portsmouth International Airport at Pease and the Pease Tradeport, through its Division of Ports and Harbors. Every business on the dock, from the charter fishing boats to the lobster shacks to Granite State Whale Watch, operates under an agreement called a Right of Entry rather than a conventional commercial lease. These are annual arrangements, renewed or not at the state's discretion, and they are the entire legal basis for a business staying put from one season to the next.

That structure explains why a harbor most residents think of as a fixed piece of Rye's identity has been the subject of a running legal fight for the better part of five years.

The Fight That's Been Building Since 2021

The dispute traces back to early 2021, when the Pease board told the Rye Harbor Lobster Pound it could no longer serve prepared foods, including its chowder and lobster rolls, under the terms of its existing lease. That escalated far enough that then-Governor Chris Sununu stepped in directly and signed a waiver allowing the restaurant to keep operating through the crowded summer season.

The peace didn't hold. In 2023, the lobster pound's lease came with a new 10 percent "concessions fee" on sales, a charge the business's owners, Nathan Hanscom and his daughter, argued in a lawsuit filed in January 2025 was applied illegally and unevenly. The suit went further, alleging that the Pease Development Authority and then-ports director Geno Marconi retaliated against the restaurant by eliminating short-term free parking spots in front of the shack and encouraging local lobstermen not to sell their catch to the business. The lawsuit also claimed Marconi had a personal stake in the outcome, since his family operates its own long-running lobster restaurant up the coast in Portsmouth.

State Representative Peggy Balboni, whose district includes Rye, put the practical stakes plainly during a public hearing about the harbor's lease uncertainty: "you have a lease that is expiring in April, and that just doesn't work" for a whale watch operation that books school field trips months in advance.

The Timeline, Compressed

What the Judge Actually Decided, and What's Still Open

Last week's ruling narrowed the case to a single surviving claim, related to emotional distress the father and daughter allege they suffered during the dispute. Everything else, including the challenge to the concessions fee and the retaliation allegations, was dismissed.

The case has a second, stranger thread running through it. Marconi, who had served as the state's ports director since 2002, was separately indicted on charges of improperly sharing confidential motor vehicle and boat records belonging to Neil Levesque, a Pease board member who had publicly defended the lobster pound during board meetings. Marconi pleaded guilty to that charge and resigned. Because the criminal case ran alongside the civil lawsuit, the Attorney General's office declined to cover his legal costs for defending himself in the lobster pound suit, even though he was sued in his capacity as a state official. Marconi has since filed his own lawsuit demanding that Governor Kelly Ayotte bring his request for legal fees to the Executive Council for a vote, something she has so far declined to do.

None of that resolves this month. It just means the harbor's legal drama has outlived the man at the center of it.

The Harbor Study Nobody Outside the Marina Has Read

While the lawsuit played out in court, the Pease Development Authority quietly commissioned a formal review of the entire harbor. The engineering firm Tighe & Bond delivered its assessment and recommendations for improvements in October 2025, part of a process the agency calls the Rye Harbor Study. The public board materials on this go back to a motion in January 2025, meaning the state has been actively studying what to do with the harbor's layout, leases, and business mix for as long as the lobster pound has been in court.

That is the part of this story that matters more than the verdict. A lawsuit produces a ruling and then it's over. A harbor study produces recommendations that a state board can choose to act on for years. Whatever the Pease Development Authority decides to do with parking, lease terms, or the footprint of the shack row sits ahead of residents, not behind them.

Why the Boats Still Come In Every Morning

None of this changes what makes the harbor worth walking down to on a weekday morning. Rye Harbor is still the only working commercial fishing port on New Hampshire's stretch of Atlantic coastline. Every other mile of it is given over to swimming beaches, state parks, or private shorefront. Here, lobster boats and six-pack charter operators like South End Charters and Black Dog Charters share a narrow harbor with kayakers and the twice-daily Isles of Shoals ferry, and the granite jetty at the harbor mouth, built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the early twentieth century, is still what makes the anchorage safe enough for a working fleet to operate out of year-round.

September tends to be one of the better months to notice it. Striped bass fishing picks up as the season turns, and the charter boats running out of the harbor stay busy well past Labor Day, even as the summer parking lines at the sandy beaches thin out. The lobster boats keep the same rhythm they've kept for generations, out at dawn, back by afternoon, regardless of what's happening in a courtroom in Concord.

That rhythm survives because people fight to keep it, not because the state has guaranteed it. Adam Baker still owns his building. The land underneath it is still someone else's to lease, study, and eventually decide about.

If you already know Rye Harbor well enough to have a favorite picnic table, you probably didn't know how much of what makes it feel that way is still being argued over. That's the kind of detail that shapes a town more than any listing ever could. Caren Logan Luxury Homes works and lives in this part of the Seacoast, and we're always glad to talk about what's changing here, on the water or off it. Let's Connect.