Ways of Looking at Gloucester

Ways of Looking at Gloucester

Excerpt from “An Heroic City”

[written in 1892 as part of the celebrations for the 250^th 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?

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
 

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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.