Ways of
Looking at Gloucester
Excerpt from “An Heroic City”
[written in 1892 as part of the celebrations
for the 250th anniversary of Gloucester’s
incorporation as a town]
This is to be a
gala week in Gloucester; indeed, all Cape Ann
will join in celebrating the quarter millennial of its metropolis. This gray
old city by the sea has an individuality as rugged and picturesque as the
granite cliffs which hedge its outer harbor. Its existence has been a perpetual
struggle in which the courage and the cunning of the man have been pitted
against the mighty power of the elements. The town is strong and prosperous
now. It is a seat of wealth and culture. But the stranger sailing in from the
ocean and catching his first glimpse of the long line of wharves and warehouses,
with the trees and roofs and steeples rising behind them, somehow cannot get it
out of his fancy that Gloucester is clinging to its rocky hillsides as her sailors
cling to their reeling decks.
Gloucester, we have said, has a strong individuality.
There are many small towns, but no other large city like it on our Atlantic
coast. It lives by and from the sea. Its chief industries are such as to
nurture manliness. For generations it has been drawing to it bold spirits from
all over the world. It is by no chance of blind fortune that Gloucester has added to its fleets and wealth, while the fleets
of its competitors have dwindled. Its safe and capacious harbor is one factor
in its prosperity; its nearness to great markets another. But something more than
that was needed, and it was found in the skill and indomitable perseverance,
pluck, and energy of its citizens.
These are what have
given Gloucester its supremacy in one of the most arduous and
hazardous callings in which men are anywhere engaged.
The old town does
well to give up nearly the whole week to its commemoration. Life in Gloucester always wears enough of its serious phases, and it
needs the occasional relief of innocent gayety. In entering upon these days of
rejoicing, which mark its anniversary, Gloucester has the hearty well wishes of its older and younger
sister cities of the Commonwealth. —Press.
Excerpt from “Growing Up Gloucester” by Rachel Baker, Boston Magazine, October 21, 2008
Stuff was different
before. It used to be that on summer Fridays, K. would push the limits of the
“No Loitering” sign in the McDonald’s parking lot near Gloucester High. Or
she’d catch a ride, head down Main
Street and past the pier to the Dunkin’ Donuts at
the Stop & Shop where her cousin works and where K. can score discounted
Milky Way hot chocolates, the most delicious drink in the whole world. K. lives
for summer. She sunbathes with friends at Good
Harbor Beach
and watches the sunset from the old cannons at Stage Fort Park. At night she and her friends will
sometimes go hang out in Rockport at Steel Derrick Quarry, which is deep enough
into the woods that the cops can’t break up whatever boozing or fighting is
going on.
…
On the Saturday
after Time dropped the P-word, K. and
A. made sure they were prepared for what was coming. They set out for an
afternoon on the town dressed so that if they met a photographer, they’d look
camera-ready. K. pulled on a denim skirt and a glittery, cream-colored tube top
that left her white bra straps exposed. Her hair was almost completely
straight, the product of a lengthy session with the flat iron, and she swung a
very real-looking faux Chanel bag. A., with her hair perfectly slicked back,
wore Bermuda-length jean shorts and a low-cut scoop-neck shirt. Right off the
Boulevard, down near Main Street,
K. caught sight of a small carnival in a parking lot. “Oh my gosh,” A. said
breathily. “I want to do the slide so bad! I looooove slides.” It was an
inflatable number, the kind that makes elementary schoolers lose their minds. She
dug up some loose change from X’s carriage, and the girls each took a turn.
…
Excerpt from “From Gloucester Out” by Peter
Anastas
When I opened the Spring 1959 Evergreen
Review to find "The Company of Men," [by Charles Olson] dedicated
to the San Francisco
poet Philip Whalen, I was both puzzled and intrigued. It was decidedly a Gloucester poem:
Or my dragger
who goes home with
arete: when his wife
complains he smells like
his Aunt who works
for the De-Hy
he whips out
his pay
and says, how does this
smell?
who goes home with
arete: when his wife
complains he smells like
his Aunt who works
for the De-Hy
he whips out
his pay
and says, how does this
smell?
It spoke of the Gloucester I knew from having worked on fish
during the very summer the poem had been composed. Yet Olson's weaving in and
out of history, his comparison in the first section of the poem between
"the company of men/one in front of my eyes, bringing in red fish, the
other/the far-flung East India Company of poets who I do not/even know"
was challenging. I had learned to handle such juxtapositions in Pound. They
would generally involve classical allusions, or I'd recognize some lines or a
simile from the Commedia, or maybe a quotation from John Adams or Thomas
Jefferson that would make sense. Nevertheless, Olson was using the details of
daily life in Gloucester
in a way I'd never seen them used before. What was familiar to me, or what
ought to have been familiar-the "De-Hy," which is what everyone in
town called the State Fish Pier plant that turned fish waste, or gurry, into
by-products like fertilizer or mink food-seemed suddenly unfamiliar because it
appeared not in the Gloucester Times' daily record of fish landings, or in
conversations one had along Main Street or the waterfront, but in a poem. In
fact, I almost resented Olson's utilization of local slang in his poetry. I
wondered if he wasn't trying to show off, to let his readers know he was an
insider when I knew, or thought I knew, that he really wasn't. (Olson was born
in Worcester, Mass., in 1910, first summering on Stage Fort Avenue in
Gloucester with his family, until he and his mother moved here permanently in
the mid-1930s.)
What began to dawn on me, however, was
that Olson, who had been a letter carrier here, knew Gloucester very well. He knew the city better
than I did. And he employed his intimate knowledge of Gloucester's houses, streets, neighborhoods and
folkways better than I had begun to do in my tentative first stories about the
place, stories I had hoped to collect for an English honors project in college
but had ultimately abandoned because I didn't know how to tell them.
Excerpt from “REVIEW OF THE LAST FISH TALE BY MARK KURLANSKY”
By Richard W. Amero
Do
people in Gloucester run around saying, “That’s Gloucester” whenever something
the least bit provocative or odd happens as Mark Kurlanksy says they do in his
moving and rambling The Last Fish Tale to which he adds the sub-title
“The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival of Gloucester, America’s Oldest Fishing
Port and Most Original Town.” Maybe so, but I doubt it…. Kurlansky’s book
cannot, however, be dismissed lightly for while some of his statements are
exaggerated or veer toward the ridiculous, they are also provocative because
they challenge readers, particularly readers who have lived in Gloucester, to
weigh them carefully, in which case there is enough substance in them to
provide nourishment of an ample, digestive character….
During
the Depression years when I grew up at the very edge of a damp, foul and smelly
Gloucester
inner-harbor before the Fish Pier, built in 1938, obliterated Five-
Pound Island,
I was aware of a “Gloucester
spirit.” Part of this had to do with the fact that within my own family and
within the families of all of my neighbors there were direct ties to the sea
and to fishing and to the knowledge that came from experiencing the loss of
people who had drowned while wresting for theirs and their families livelihoods
from the tumultuous and, treacherous sea. But death is a fact of life, whether
on land or sea, in the ocean, in the mines, in bed, or in the trenches.
As
in so many towns in the United States,
the “Gloucester
spirit” had a lot to do
with the feats of local
high school football, baseball, and basketball players. (In the
1940’s it was mainly
football) It was these players who were, for a season at least, the
city’s heroes. But
regardless of whatever was first in public conversation or in
newspapers, the fickle and
haunting presence of the sea was always in peoples’ minds,
shaping their thoughts and
fears and hopes. More than Lord Byron and Walt Whitman,
who were fascinated by the
sea’s tidal ebbs and flows, the poet and novelist Rudyard
Kipling, in his book Captains
Courageous, sensed the challenge and the response the sea
evoked. Kipling’s
tribute to manliness and egalitarianism was in the “Gloucester Spirit.”
In as much, as people need
art to understand themselves, Kipling gave them what they
needed. Other artists also
expressed the “Gloucester
sprit,” most notably the sculptor
Leonard Craske who gave Gloucester its most
well-known icon, the Man at the Wheel
who looks steadfastly out
to the ocean and steers his and mankind’s ship into the
unknown and infinitesimal
beyond. In recent years, poets Charles Olson, in an obtuse (he would say
“archaeological”) fashion, and Vincent Ferrini in a more down-to-the-water
manner have kept the “Gloucester
spirit” alive.
The
painter Fitz Hugh [Henry] Lane was a native son of Gloucester who acquired fame outside the
city. His paintings are best seen on walls rather than in books as they do not reproduce
well. The settings tend to be placid and, carefully composed, though there are exceptions
in which brigs, schooners and yachts appear to be responding to wind and wave.
Unlike Fitz Hugh Lane,
artist Winslow Homer was not a native son; yet he sensed the drama of the ocean
and of fishing in a more intense manner than Fitz Hugh Lane. (Somewhere Charles Olson,
Gloucester’s
best-known if not best poet, takes an opposite point of view.) Ironically,
Homer’s dynamic paintings of waves crashing against rocks were not painted in
Bass Rocks, Gloucester, but in his family’s
compound at Prout’s Neck, Maine.
But summer people in Gloucester,
like Winslow Homer and the young poet T. S. Eliot, were, in the main,
interlopers. A few were so insulated by their money and taste that they
contacted local people only when they were buying goods at local stores. The
exceptions were beachgoers, in Good Harbor and Niles Beaches in Gloucester, where
interchanges took place between young summer people—principally girls—and local
Lotharios.
Summer
was an exciting time in Gloucester
for families, who, having been
isolated by cold and
inhospitable winters, found an exhilarating opportunity for social
interaction. A similar
person-to-person interchange occurred in public schools where the
mingling of so many ethnic
groups fostered assimilation even while parents of the
students—immigrants from Portugal, Italy,
Greece, Finland, the Ukraine,
Nova Scotia
and elsewhere—fought
against it.
All
generalizations are wrong, but, at the risk of being wrong, I maintain
Portuguese who lived on
“Portagee Hill” were the first twentieth-century ethnic group to assimilate.
After the third generation, many descendants could not speak Portuguese.
Finns, Sicilians and Jews
maintained their insularity for longer periods. Here again in
third and subsequent
generations divisions had softened but had not altogether
disappeared. It is
comforting to know that Gloucester
people, from whatever stock they
came, have adhered to and
perpetuated their heritages.
Sunday
has always been an important day in Gloucester
for it meant a respite
from the toils of other
days, and, as with the beaches and summer, an opportunity to meet others, even
if worship of God was the ostensible reason for the getting-together. Insular and
provincial as local people may have been, there was a sense of pride in being
part of a community. Even while this community had its minorities, these
divisions were often complementary and inter-dependent.
When
Kurlansky is not giving recipes of dishes which people in Gloucester made
from scratch with whatever
was available—mostly fish—he recites a harrowing tale of
the dangers of fishing.
Much of what he has to say is well-known due to similar recounting by Sebastian
Junger in The Perfect Storm and accounts in the media of
disappearing fish, It’s a
distressing story, but , whether or not shocking, depends on how it affects
one’s family and one’s people financially.
To
say that Gloucester
is changing does not make it special, nor does it make it
“America’s
Most Original Town.”
This is Kurlansky’s greatest solipsism [solecism?]. Nevertheless Gloucester exerts an appeal on residents and visitors that
is only partially shared by other coastal communities like Boothbay Harbor,
Boston, New Bedford,
Nantucket, Monterey and San Diego. Kurlansky devotes his next-to-last
chapter to trying to place the microcosm Gloucester
within a greater macrocosm. He makes comparisons and connections with
conditions and metropolises in Canada
and Europe. He found the Cornish fishing village of Newlyn
to be the most like Gloucester,
not only in its “picturesque” blue-collar character, but in its coping with
problems caused by overfishing and the institution of governmental quotas. In
recent years Newlyn has become a major supply source for fish and shell species
for the rest of Europe and, to date has held the
encroachments of tourism and non-fish related industries at bay.
This
placing of Gloucester’s
concerns in a larger context provides a helpful
service for Gloucester is an island in
only a metaphorical sense. The fish it ships—once
caught in large and now in
small quantities—went out to markets all over the world. Even poet Charles
Olson, the alien tenant in Gloucester’s
cheap-rent Sicilian-American Fort district, knew that Gloucester included the mainland. The “polis”
he admired had both local and archetypal dimensions.
To
Olson the fourteen self-reliant fishermen on Cape Ann
in 1623 embodied
“polis” while intruders
acting on behalf of the Plymouth Company, represented “all
sliding statism, ownership,
getting into the community, as Chamber of Commerce, or
theocracy, or City Manager”
(Maximus, 105). In more concise terms, authoritarianism
threatened the vitality and
dignity of free people. Gloucester
had to wait until 1642, about seventeen years after the valiant fourteen
fishermen had dispersed, for the Massachusetts Bay Colony to give it its name. …
In a sense, Gloucester is today, as it has been
in the past, a community of hard-working, civic-minded people — as is also many
towns in the United States
that have not forgotten their pioneer beginnings and have not become suburbs of
sprawling megalopolises.
More
people leave Gloucester
than stay. Each high school class produces a crop
of expatriates. Some of
these wipe the soil of Gloucester
from their feet and the spray
from their skins. A few
look back disdainfully at the squalor and dirt of their grubbing
pinch-penny town. These
escapees come from the poorer classes who did the menial and
backbreaking work on the
wharves and in the canneries that kept the collars of so many
better-paid and educated
people clean….
In
the 1930’s and 40’s fishing Captain Ben Pine and financier Roger Babson were
Gloucester’s most famous citizens.
Its all-time hero was, however, Howard Blackburn, a
doryman from Nova Scotia, who
in 1883, while lost in a fog rowed his dory one-hundred miles from the Burego
Bank to the shores of Newfoundland,
his fingers, which he lost, being frozen to the oars. A living legend, in 1901
Blackburn, his arms changed to stumps, sailed in a specially designed sloop
from Gloucester to Lisbon in thirty-nine record days. As time is
not static others names are now or will be added to the list of luminaries. Among
all of Gloucester’s
re-settled and re-located people, there is something about roots. As Sicilians
at the Fort remember Sicily, as the Portuguese on the “Hill” remember the
Azores, as Jews remember the Ukraine, so ex- Gloucesterites look back on their
native city as a collage of scenes—from Stage Fort Park, from Bass Rocks, from Rocky
Neck, from Eastern Point, from Dogtown, from Annisquam, from Riverdale, from Rockport,
etc.—Gloucester is a place its distant children return to in memory, if not in fact
– a city of contrasts and conflicts, of meager resources and occasional
animosities, but also a city that has grown from its soil and waters, from its
rocks and trees and shrubs, from its local animal and close-by aquatic life and
has so ramified that it has become a beacon of courage and love. It is these
positive attributes that Kurlansky found in his interviews with Jews, Italians,
Portuguese, Finns and Wasps and, as in my case, French Canadians. I heartily
recommend The Last Fish Tale as a primer that presents most of the facts
one needs to know to begin to understand the reason why Gloucester has maintained a steady and now
tottering place in the imagination of the American people and why it has become
the source of so much poetic and pictorial description and praise.
“Sight Lines” by Ernest Morin
”Sight Lines” is a slide show of the Fort section of the Gloucester waterfront, an area that was predominately inhabited by Sicilian fisherman in the 1920s and retains its Mediterranean feel. It is a mixture of Fisheries related business and fishing boats and a real neighborhood with a beach front. It is also perhaps the most original and unique neighborhood in America.
Clarence Birdseye set up his frozen food factory there in 1916 and it is now slated to become a Marriott Hotel. The area is facing a major rezoning and inevitable changes. Changes that will forever alter the social fabric of this working-class neighborhood, as the Marriott stated to the Gloucester Times they want their "Sight lines cleared" because "when their guest arrive, they expect to arrive ‘somewhere’"... so why are they interested? Million dollar ocean views 45 minutes north of Boston.
I felt it was important to take the proverbial snapshot of the area before the Marriott moves in, their gentrification takes place. I thought the town should understand what is there right now has a real value and will be forever lost.
Change is not always progress, the world doesn't need another Newport, Rhode Island, or seasonal resort in the middle of a fishing port. The problem with such developments is they drive out the very character of a Place.
This work is about the nature and value of Place, something that has never been highly valued in America. We do not need to look like one huge shopping mall from sea to shinning sea... a veritable wasteland of dunkin donuts and Abercrombie and Fitch and Car dealerships as far as the eye can see.
I'm just trying to document what I see as a vanishing race, the American working class, or now, the working poor. The Fort is a microcosm of Gloucester and Gloucester is America.
Ernest Morin
”Sight Lines” is a slide show of the Fort section of the Gloucester waterfront, an area that was predominately inhabited by Sicilian fisherman in the 1920s and retains its Mediterranean feel. It is a mixture of Fisheries related business and fishing boats and a real neighborhood with a beach front. It is also perhaps the most original and unique neighborhood in America.
Clarence Birdseye set up his frozen food factory there in 1916 and it is now slated to become a Marriott Hotel. The area is facing a major rezoning and inevitable changes. Changes that will forever alter the social fabric of this working-class neighborhood, as the Marriott stated to the Gloucester Times they want their "Sight lines cleared" because "when their guest arrive, they expect to arrive ‘somewhere’"... so why are they interested? Million dollar ocean views 45 minutes north of Boston.
I felt it was important to take the proverbial snapshot of the area before the Marriott moves in, their gentrification takes place. I thought the town should understand what is there right now has a real value and will be forever lost.
Change is not always progress, the world doesn't need another Newport, Rhode Island, or seasonal resort in the middle of a fishing port. The problem with such developments is they drive out the very character of a Place.
This work is about the nature and value of Place, something that has never been highly valued in America. We do not need to look like one huge shopping mall from sea to shinning sea... a veritable wasteland of dunkin donuts and Abercrombie and Fitch and Car dealerships as far as the eye can see.
I'm just trying to document what I see as a vanishing race, the American working class, or now, the working poor. The Fort is a microcosm of Gloucester and Gloucester is America.
Ernest Morin
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Excerpt from “Citizens Financial
Group and Royal Bank of Scotland Historical Research Report: Predecessor
Research Report Regarding Slavery and the Slave Trade” (Pub. 5 May 06, updated
29 may 09)
Trade in Goods
Produced by Slaves
There is no
record that any of the predecessors directly traded in slave-produced goods,
such as cotton, tobacco, or sugar.
There is some indication that one Citizens predecessor—Gloucester Bank (1796)—had
ties to the molasses trade during the early 1800s. Much of the port's business
during this period was connected to the ‘Surinam Trade,’ in which dried fish
caught by local fishermen were exchanged for molasses produced by the Dutch
slave colony on the northern coast of South America.
The molasses was brought back to Gloucester,
where it was made into rum. Many of the bank's founders and directors were local
merchants involved in this trade, including William Pearce, who was the bank's
president between 1816 and 1818 and owner of Gloucester's largest distillery [located
where Palazola’s now occupies the old Sears building]. The Gloucester Bank was
the town's only bank until the mid-1800s.