In Haverhill, an identity crisis
Battered city struggles to find a sense of community
By Larry Tye
Globe Staff
2/20/2001
HAVERHILL - It was bad enough when the Queen Slipper City lost
her slippers, and with them her crown.
But when the heavy glass doors of Mitchell's department store swung shut
for the last time in 1985 after 113 years, it was as though the city itself took
a deep breath. The rest went quickly. Barrett's menswear, Hudson's
Apparel, Lady Grace, and other anchors of the old downtown were
supplanted by a string of toenail shops, hairdressers, and home-finance
firms.
Even the banks, the pecuniary pillars of this proud city, soon bore the
placards of the new fast-food financial framework, with Haverhill National
now called Fleet, and Haverhill Savings morphing into First Massachusetts.
Haverhill Electric and Haverhill Gas went, too, along with Haverhill
Hardware and Haverhill Rubber. The once independent Haverhill Gazette
in 1998 became a once-a-week supplement of the Lawrence
Eagle-Tribune. And Bradford College's majestic red brick buildings sit
vacant, with a sign the sole reminder of the campus life that flourished for
nearly two centuries until, in 1999, stacks of postponed payments forced
the trustees to pull the shutters forever.
Now, Hale Hospital, one of the last vestiges of the community spirit
enshrined in the poetry of first son John Greenleaf Whittier, is up for sale.
Bids will be opened today and expectations are that the full-service health
care complex will be cannibalized, leaving behind only an emergency room.
With all the old landmarks gone, and the city's familiar face scarred by an
unrealized urban renewal, what really is left? When does a self-confident,
self-contained city like this lose so many binding institutions that it becomes
little more than a bedroom suburb on the order of Brookline or Belmont?
What, these days, makes Haverhill Haverhill?
Those are questions that resonate in old cities and towns across the United
States, and especially in blue-collar burgs like Everett and Malden that, like
Haverhill, are facing the failure of community hospitals that are as central to
their identities as City Hall and the local library. To find answers it helps to
look to this riverfront city of 60,000 just below New Hampshire that has
lost more than most and, at the very moment when its economy is more
ascendant than ever, is struggling to figure out when a community ceases to
be a true community.
''The whole community has just imploded,'' says Gregory Laing, curator of
special collections at Haverhill Public Library and the city's ad hoc
historian. ''When urban renewal tore down the city physically it did
something to the city's psyche. It's like a battered child.
''The Hale Hospital is like the last thing to go.''
Mayor James Rurak watched the same process of erosion while growing
up here. ''Downtown was a critical mass of concrete and commerce. You
could build a house and buy a truck to transport the lumber and get
everything in between in the center of the city. And they still were making
shoes then, people were coming downtown to work,'' the four-term,
52-year-old mayor recalls.
But Rurak is too busy building the new Haverhill to mourn the old. ''It will
take some time for society to define those areas and institutions where new
centers of conversation will develop,'' he explains. ''I don't think we're there
yet but I don't think we should turn back.''
Turning back really hasn't been an option since the wrecking balls started
swinging in 1966. The federal government called it urban renewal but in
retrospect it looks more like urban removal. The bulldozers did a brilliant
job tearing down most remnants of the past, from the old library to historic
City Hall. But the second half of the job - rebuilding - never really got
going. It was partly lack of money. More important, there was no
appreciation how the past was the firmest foundation upon which to build
the future in a city whose roots go back to 1640, and that has at least as
rich a history as nearby Lowell.
Other forces beyond its control also were working against Haverhill.
Massachusetts passed a 3 percent sales tax in 1966 that encouraged
shoppers to drive an extra mile to New Hampshire for everything from
cigarettes to whiskey, and many stores followed them across the border.
The shoe manufacturers who employed more than 10,000 workers were
on the move, too - drawn by cheaper labor and energy costs to the
southern United States, then to Asia and other far-off lands.
The erosion of the city's hub, and heart, continued into the 1980s and '90s.
Sometimes the losses were beyond its control, such as when outside
owners decided to sell the Gazette. Other times it was questionable
judgment by locals, who voted to move the high school out of the city
center in the early 1960s rather than renovate it as the centerpiece of a
revitalized downtown.
Whatever the reason, the result was that Haverhill has been losing the glue
that bound it together.
The unravelling is apparent walking through the city. Richey's Drug is gone
along with Roche's Pharmacy and nearly all the other independents,
replaced by chains such as CVS, whose pharmacists are more likely to hail
from Boston than Bradford and unlikely to recognize their customers. The
Hale, which has been serving the city since 1884 and doing it from a
state-of-the-art building since 1984, is abuzz with talk of the threatened
closure. And while you have to go to Plaistow or Salem to buy a suit, the
mayor jokes that Haverhill now has ''more Dunkin' Donuts than any city in
the world.''
It's not just familiar buildings and names that are going, but the local
leadership that accompanied them, says King Davis, a local real estate
broker whose firm also has taken on a national flavor as Coldwell Banker
Hunneman King Davis. ''With the new faces at the banks today you hardly
know where the leadership is coming from,'' says Davis. ''In the old days
you could see Lawrence Ewing at Haverhill Savings and George
McGregor at Haverhill National. They'd be on 15 different committees and
their names would continually appear on leadership rolls.''
Diana Haga, who was born at the Hale in 1939 and was back recently with
emphysema, has a more basic worry: having to travel to Lawrence or
Newburyport for medical care. ''Just make sure,'' she implores, ''that they
know we need this hospital.''
There's something else missing today: the unstated but unwavering sense of
Haverhill as an identity as well as a place to sleep. Just half of today's
''Hillies'' are home-grown, compared with 90 percent a generation ago.
More and more dine out in Newburyport, watch movies in Lawrence, and
work in Boston or along the Route 128 corridor. Fewer go to the polls
these days or know who represents them in City Hall or the State House.
''People used to know each other, and when you know someone you have
a whole different outlook on life and how you treat people,'' says George
McGregor Jr., an insurance executive and community leader who has spent
most of his 69 years in Haverhill. ''If you went into a grocery store and
snitched a loaf of bread, someone might know you, so you didn't do it.
Today people don't know each other.
''Haverhill is now a place to go through. It used to be a place where people
stayed.''
Not all the changes are bad, of course.
The local economy is booming with a cyber district and a mix of
e-commerce, manufacturing, chemical, and electronics firms. The
population is at an all-time high of about 60,000, housing construction is
pacing the state, real estate prices are climbing but still more affordable
than in boutique neighbors like Boxford, and Money Magazine voted the
Haverhill metro area the most liveable in the Northeast in 1995 - a huge
jump from a decade earlier, when Rand-McNally dubbed
Haverhill-Lawrence the worst place to live in the United States.
There are lots of things that make Haverhill attractive today - its first-class
library, neighborhood schools and community college, along with lakes,
parks, a ski slope and four 18-hole golf courses. Its 34 square miles make
it more than four times as big as Lawrence. And it is stitching a quilt of
footpaths to reconnect the city to the magnificent Merrimack River that
flows through it, hopefully luring people back downtown to eat, exercise,
and just enjoy.
Is that enough to make a community?
Probably, says Joel Rosen, a 48-year-old lawyer who grew up here,
moved away, then was drawn back. He calls the loss of institutions like
Bradford College ''devastating,'' bemoans the sacrifice of open space, and
tried for nearly a decade to rescue the hardware store his grandfather and
father had built into a bedrock of the community. But he refuses to be
dragged down by nostalgia, and says his two teenagers identify every bit as
strongly with Haverhill as he did.
He can even rationalize the loss of the Hale, if that were to happen: ''My
father died at the Hale, I've been sick there, and my wife was treated there
after her car accident. It's great to have a local hospital,'' he says. ''It would
be an awful thing if the Hale closed, basically you miss institutions you are
familiar with. But if it closes there are three other hospitals within 15 or 20
miles.''
James Vanderpol is less philosophical - and less willing to cut ties with a
past that produced such personalities as department store magnate
Rowland Hussey Macy, movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, and Archie Comic
Strip creator Bob Montana. He thinks Haverhill can find its sense of itself
today by tapping its history as a pioneer of the industrial revolution the way
Lowell has, and opening its waterfront to tourists the way Newburyport
and Burlington did.
''If this was a town that didn't have a foundation to build on I'd say we have
to build a Disneyland, a dreamland, but with Haverhill I keep saying we
have all the prerequisites to do it,'' says Vanderpool, 76, the president of
the United Way of Merrimack Valley. ''Haverhill still is Haverhill and we
have great things to offer.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 2/20/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
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