Gloucester Harbor

On Gloucester Harbor, by Thomas Welch

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2b317-jimmy2bdory

On Gloucester Harbor

The Dory seems to nod with glee

as I stride down the dock with my oars

She, like me, knows she soon will be free

of the lines that bind to the shores

Captain Gus shouts a sharp morning greeting

from the “Captain Dominic’s” deck

In the cool, green shade under Fisherman’s Wharf

a Snow Egret cranes her neck

My awareness expands with every stroke of the oar

out of Harbor Cove I row

to be at Sea, away from the shore,

is a joy only Mariners know

The feel, taste and smell of the crisp salt air

The Wind has the Ocean seething

Me and the boat and the Sea all share

The waves rise and fall, Nature’s breathing

The whole harbor now has come alive

A breathtaking, un-scripted show

Chortling Eiders gather close, the Cormorants dive

Chasing Minnows and Mackerel below

Peter’s sons by the thousands, the finest kind,

have called this Harbor port home

All possessing the genuine character you’ll find

in a Homer painting or an Olson poem.

Set my course for the shore, another day ends

In my wake sunset’s captured in foam

Though I’m blessed on land with fine family and friends

My heart knows this Harbor’s my home.

d7c70-dorywharvey

Spearing Flounder. circa.1890 George Wainwright Harvey (1855-1930

 

Gloucester on National Public Radio

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Did you hear this Gloucester story
 on National Public Radio? 

This story was heard across the country, via Boston radio station WGBH,  on  Feb 17, 2015

What do you think? Please add your comment below.

Note: The print version you see  here and the audio version of the story are not the same.

Click on the LISTEN button to hear the audio version, with the voices of former mayor Carolyn Kirk, Sheree Zizik, Valerie Nelson, and Mayor Sefatia Romeo-Theken.

Why Is The State Paying Millions To Subsidize A Gloucester Beach-Front Hotel?

By 
The Birdseye plant, birthplace of the flash-freeze process, stood on a barrier beach in the center of “the Fort,” a historic neighborhood packed with marine industry in Gloucester, Mass. The new Beauport Hotel is rising – with the aid of state subsidies –
The Birdseye plant, birthplace of the flash-freeze process, stood on a barrier beach in the center of “the Fort,” a historic neighborhood packed with marine industry in Gloucester, Mass. The new Beauport Hotel is rising – with the aid of state subsidies – in its place, despite the fact that it’s likely to be under water sea levels rise as predicted.
Credit Lauren Owens / NECIR
On one of the grittiest stretches of the historic waterfront here, the peaks of the Beauport Hotel will soon rise above the truck noise and smell of fish. Yet when the last drop of water fills the rooftop swimming pool, the luxury hotel will be more than incongruous with the neighborhood theme. It will also stand as a challenge to even mild climate change predictions.
For the past century, storms during high tide have flooded this neighborhood. In the next century, a two-foot rise in sea level, projected by an international consortium of scientists, would put the hotel’s property line underwater.
Despite Massachusetts’ very public stance against development on beaches like this one, the state is providing $3 million for roadway and other improvements around the controversial Gloucester hotel development, an examination by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
The issue is starkly illustrated in Gloucester, but it is a story up and down U.S. seaboards: Regulators are pinched between development pressure and the desire to keep people and property safe from the steady rising of the sea.
“That has pushed regulators to be a little more lenient, particularly when you have a big money developer,” says Jessica Grannis, adaptation program manager for the Georgetown Climate Center, in Washington, D.C.
The $25 million, 96-room hotel is financed by Jim Davis, the billionaire chairman of New Balance, and is touted by proponents as a necessary addition to its gritty working waterfront in order to survive the economic fallout of drastic fishing limits.
The hope is to save the city’s ice plant and fish auction house by generating awareness and tax revenue from tourism.
Yet vocal opponents say given what is known about climate change, it is not prudent to build a grand hotel on a low-lying, flood-prone beach – and importantly, taxpayers should not be helping ensure it gets built.
The first line of defense
Between a metal fence and the concrete of the old Birdseye plant, sand dunes with native plants naturally rebuilt. The Beauport Hotel is being constructed on a specific type of barrier beach – one with an active dune system – that would make any building
Between a metal fence and the concrete of the old Birdseye plant, sand dunes with native plants naturally rebuilt. The Beauport Hotel is being constructed on a specific type of barrier beach – one with an active dune system – that would make any building a non-starter, based on Massachusetts law. But hotel construction is underway.
Credit Lauren Owens / NECIR
In Massachusetts, coastal municipalities largely control the zoning that directs development, and they have broad power to enforce the state’s environmental regulations.
But this dynamic is inherently a conflict of interest. A study from the University of Rhode Island found municipalities might not share a state’s environmental goals, while the University of Vermont concluded coastal tax revenue is enticing to local governments because property owners and federal taxpayers subsidize flood losses.
Gloucester has a track record of exercising questionable zoning authority. In 1996, the state overturned a city decision to allow a shopping mall in an area federally designated as a port. In 2008, a lawsuit brought by residents caused a developer to back out of a proposal to convert an old paint factory into condos—a project the city had approved within the city’s marine industrial zone.
Still, over the past decade, political momentum grew supporting gentrification of the abandoned Birdseye plant – the birthplace of flash freezing. It stood in the middle of “the Fort,” a historic neighborhood packed with marine industry and middle class homes, and bordered by a sandy public beach– a big draw for developers.
After Davis purchased Birdseye in 2011, says Valerie Nelson, a working-waterfront activist and former city councilor, “There was never a serious discussion about whether this was a good place for a hotel.”
Gloucester’s Mayor Carolyn Kirk disagrees, saying most of the city’s residents want the hotel to shore up the city’s property tax base.
“The hotel is the cake, the frosting and the ice cream,” Kirk says. “It’s the property tax, the meals tax, and the lodging tax.”
Nelson says local opposition to rezoning the Birdseye property – including a petition signed by more than 200 residents – was shut down by the City Council in 2012 when it voted to rezone before a full hearing of objections took place.
The missing sea rocket
Paul Godfrey, a retired University of Massachusetts Amherst professor and barrier beach expert, did a pro-bono study for opponents on the hotel’s environmental impact. He found that the waves during high tides and hurricanes hit dead center of the buildin
Paul Godfrey, a retired University of Massachusetts Amherst professor and barrier beach expert, did a pro-bono study for opponents on the hotel’s environmental impact. He found that the waves during high tides and hurricanes hit dead center of the building and contributed to beach erosion.
Credit Lauren Owens / NECIR
As the city and the state reviewed appeals to the hotel’s permits, Paul Godfrey, a retired professor from UMass Amherst and renowned barrier beach expert who has been a consultant to the US Department of the Interior, did a pro-bono study for opponents on the hotel’s environmental impact.
He found the unique shape of the harbor would focus a hurricane’s energy “dead center of the Birdseye building.” He also found that storm waves crashing into Birdseye and deflecting back had significantly eroded the beach.
Godfrey says climate predictions show these patterns will only worsen in time, and that the Beauport Hotel will likely be the first building on this street to be underwater. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sea levels worldwide are expected to rise between 1.7 to over 3 feet by 2100 as the oceans absorb most of the temperature rise from the release of heat-trapping gas from factories, cars and power plants.
“These things have been ignored,” says Godfrey. He was more blunt in a letter to the City Council in 2013: “Have the impacts of Hurricane Sandy had no effect on decisions made in Gloucester?”
The hotel’s development team contested Godfrey’s report, noting a planned new seawall protecting the building will be 20 feet farther from the ocean than the Birdseye building. They also said that the first floor will be raised above a parking area, higher than the federal government’s required height for coastal building.
Les Smith, the hotel’s coastal geologist, says there has been virtually no erosion on this beach for the past 100 years.
“You have to work with what you have and develop good designs based on good engineering,” says Smith.
Godfrey and opponents have claimed the hotel is being built on a specific type of barrier beach – one with an active dune system – that would make any building a non-starter, based on state law. But succulent, thick-leaved plants known as sea rockets – that only grow on barrier dunes – disappeared from the beach in front of the Birdseye site soon after Godfrey identified them in his 2013 report. Some hotel opponents considered it destruction of evidence.
Taxpayers on the hook?
The Birdseye plant in Gloucester, was torn down in the fall of 2014 to make way for a luxury hotel. The site has been inundated repeatedly by storms.
The Birdseye plant in Gloucester, was torn down in the fall of 2014 to make way for a luxury hotel. The site has been inundated repeatedly by storms.
Credit Lauren Owens / NECIR
In November 2013, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection decided the Birdseye property and much of the Fort was once a barrier beach, but no longer.
“The dune form no longer changes in response to wind and waves because it is ‘locked-up’ beneath pavement and buildings,” the agency concluded. In other words, a developed barrier beach should not be regulated as a pristine barrier beach would be.
That determination conflicts with best-practice recommendations from the 1994 state Barrier Beach Task Force, which stated, developed or not, a barrier beach is a barrier beach: “This is an important point that should [not be] overlooked by barrier beach managers.”
As far back as 1980, the state recognized barrier beaches were risky investments. An executive order passed by then-Gov. Ed King – and which the Patrick Administration advised expanding – says the state should not funnel taxpayer money to encourage development on hazard-prone barrier beaches.
Yet that is what is happening in the case of the Beauport Hotel.
Businesses in the Fort say plumbing, drainage, and roads along this developed barrier beach are inadequate for commercial needs.
When the hotel proposal came through, Gloucester fast-tracked an infrastructure upgrade for the Fort, and secured a $3 million grant through the MassWorks Infrastructure Program to do it. MassWorks supported the grant because the hotel was considered a job creator and spur to economic development.
Yet even the city’s director of public works says the new infrastructure – particularly new drainage pipes – won’t prevent flooding, because the Fort’s elevation is simply too low to fix.
Walking a fine line
Despite Massachusetts’ stance against development on barrier beaches like the one where this Birdseye plant stood for a century, the state is providing $3 million for roads and other improvements around the controversial hotel being built there.
Public officials – both elected and appointed – are in an awkward position on climate change.
“We essentially live on a different planet than the planet where these laws and regulatory systems were put in place,” says Seth Kaplan, vice president for climate policy at the Conservation Law Foundation.
Martin Suuberg, state undersecretary for energy and the environment, points to numerous actions Massachusetts is taking to meet the challenge of climate change. For example, the state is giving Gloucester $50,000 to identify its most vulnerable low-lying areas.
Suuberg said replacing the dilapidated Birdseye plant with the Beauport Hotel will be an environmental win-win. “In this particular case, this was a site with a lot of problems that [the Beauport Hotel], frankly, addresses,” says Suuberg.
Suuberg refused to answer questions about the $3 million state grant, which seems to be in violation of King’s executive order.
Yet a 2011 report from Suuberg’s office advises enforcing and expanding that executive order, known as 181. It also says existing rules do not go far enough to protect the coasts: “New construction and redevelopment are likely occurring in areas that will erode and flood within the lifespan of these projects.”
The New England Center for Investigative Reporting — an independent, nonprofit newsroom based out of Boston University and WGBH News.





What’s Your Opinion?

Enduring Gloucester 14 Comments

What are you doing Monday, Jan 26,  6 pm?

The public comment meeting taking place at the Maritime Center that night  might be your only chance to comment* on this proposal:

for the Solomon Jacobs Park at Harbor Loop :

 
A $30,000 expenditure related to this proposal will be on the agenda for the City Council meeting the following night. 


In early December, then-Mayor Kirk asked the City Council to recommend spending $30,000 in support of a gift of a sculpture……. 

 

(as long as a private fundraising effort provides at least that amount,)

….because the Gloucester Committee for the Arts recommended that the City accept the gift:

“…subject to
1- private fundraising to provide for all projected costs, as outlined above (fabrication, site work, maintenance fund for the future.)
2- the opportunity for public comment * on the proposal ………”

Lobstering by Dory

Enduring Gloucester 1 Comment
The Day After Christmas
By Tom Welch
On the day after Christmas, before the Sun rises, while most of us haven’t even woken up and begun our day of nursing yesterday’s overindulgences  or heading to the Mall to exchange things we don’t need for other things we don’t need, Tom Jarvis is down at Santapaolo’s wharf in East Gloucester. He’s a true Gloucesterman, so the routine of checking his dory and gear for hauling lobster traps is more like breathing than a difficult thought process.

 

He lets go of the lines, rows out of Smith’s Cove and arrives at the Gloucester Maritime dock with the first rays of morning sunlight. His first order of business is to take care of his favorite girl, the only one he’s ever been able to commit to. She’s the “Resolute”, a Burnham-built Friendship Sloop with such beautiful lines you can’t gaze upon her without a double-take or a lasting, long look. The Burnham family courted Tom to buy the “Resolute” for years, knowing he’d take good care of her, they finally let him have her for a song- the cost of the new engine they put in, as Tom says, “I bought an engine with a beautiful boat around it!” He starts the engine to charge her battery and pump what little water might be in the bilge, lingering long enough for a few sips of coffee, his hand on her boom, listening to her purr.

 

 

Now it’s back in the dory, rowing out past Harbor Cove and the Fort, the back of his neck tells him the forecast for Southwest wind was accurate and dictates that he’ll row toward Stage Fort Park, using the lee of the Magnolia shore to get to his first traps set over by Norman’s Woe, the infamous rocks causing the “Wreck of the Hesperus”.
Most of the Inshore Lobstermen are putting their traps ashore for winter because the lobster have migrated to safer, deeper water and winter storms can cost thousands of dollars in damage to a lobsterman’s gear. One passing close by, starboard to starboard, with a deckload of traps, steaming in, shouts “Jarvis!” and Tom acknowledges the greeting with a respectful raising of the chin. The hands, arms, back and legs are too busy sweeping the oars and driving the dory the 3 miles windward to the first traps. This simple greeting holds countless fathoms of mutual respect, each knowing they share the many secrets that only come with Sea time.

 

Once on his gear he quickly secures the first buoy to the dory, using it as a mooring line to hold the boat in place just long enough for him to don his boots and oilskins.  As he hauls his traps he is totally present, senses heightened by the pitch of the Sea, the squeal of the gurney and the cold salt spray spinning off of it. The Southwest wind freshens. The waves grow larger with white caps and deep troughs between. Now Mother Nature requires total awareness or she’ll take a toll. Tom embraces what she has taught him, raising his sails, she takes him ENE to Black Bess, the rocks off Joe Garland’s house on Eastern Point, where he hauls another couple of strings.

Again the sails are raised, this time the port rail to the wind as he steers NW to his gear south of Ten Pound Island. A Harbor Seal recognizes the dory and swims nearby, hoping another tasty herring will make its way into the water instead of the bait bag. And so it goes. Hauling. Setting. Trimming. Steering. Rowing. Every motion a lesson in efficiency taught by years of experience. When all is said and done he is back at his truck before noon.
The haul for the day?
Six keepers.
What???
 Six Lobsters, that’s it???
There are those that would say, “What a fool! All that work in the freezing cold for six lobsters? It’s not worth it!”
It’s not about the lobsters for Tom Jarvis, Hell, these’ll most likely end up either in his Mom’s kitchen or in a pot on the woodstove of Gino Mondello’s “Dory Shop”, feeding his fellow Gloucestermen on a Saturday afternoon.
It’s about the connections…. with the Waves, the Seal, the Lobsterman, the Sun and the Wind. 
It’s what he does.
It’s who he is.
A true Gloucesterman.
Before most people even get out of bed the day after Christmas.

 

Lobstering by Dory- the Day After Christmas

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The Day After Christmas

By Tom Welch

On the day after Christmas, before the Sun rises, while most of us haven’t even woken up and begun our day of nursing yesterday’s overindulgences  or heading to the Mall to exchange things we don’t need for other things we don’t need, Tom Jarvis is down at Santapaolo’s wharf in East Gloucester. He’s a true Gloucesterman, so the routine of checking his dory and gear for hauling lobster traps is more like breathing than a difficult thought process.

He lets go of the lines, rows out of Smith’s Cove and arrives at the Gloucester Maritime dock with the first rays of morning sunlight. His first order of business is to take care of his favorite girl, the only one he’s ever been able to commit to. She’s the “Resolute”, a Burnham-built Friendship Sloop with such beautiful lines you can’t gaze upon her without a double-take or a lasting, long look. The Burnham family courted Tom to buy the “Resolute” for years, knowing he’d take good care of her, they finally let him have her for a song- the cost of the new engine they put in, as Tom says, “I bought an engine with a beautiful boat around it!” He starts the engine to charge her battery and pump what little water might be in the bilge, lingering long enough for a few sips of coffee, his hand on her boom, listening to her purr.

 

Now it’s back in the dory, rowing out past Harbor Cove and the Fort, the back of his neck tells him the forecast for Southwest wind was accurate and dictates that he’ll row toward Stage Fort Park, using the lee of the Magnolia shore to get to his first traps set over by Norman’s Woe, the infamous rocks causing the “Wreck of the Hesperus”.

Most of the Inshore Lobstermen are putting their traps ashore for winter because the lobster have migrated to safer, deeper water and winter storms can cost thousands of dollars in damage to a lobsterman’s gear. One passing close by, starboard to starboard, with a deckload of traps, steaming in, shouts “Jarvis!” and Tom acknowledges the greeting with a respectful raising of the chin. The hands, arms, back and legs are too busy sweeping the oars and driving the dory the 3 miles windward to the first traps. This simple greeting holds countless fathoms of mutual respect, each knowing they share the many secrets that only come with Sea time.

 

Once on his gear he quickly secures the first buoy to the dory, using it as a mooring line to hold the boat in place just long enough for him to don his boots and oilskins.  As he hauls his traps he is totally present, senses heightened by the pitch of the Sea, the squeal of the gurney and the cold salt spray spinning off of it. The Southwest wind freshens. The waves grow larger with white caps and deep troughs between. Now Mother Nature requires total awareness or she’ll take a toll. Tom embraces what she has taught him, raising his sails, she takes him ENE to Black Bess, the rocks off Joe Garland’s house on Eastern Point, where he hauls another couple of strings.

 

 

 

Again the sails are raised, this time the port rail to the wind as he steers NW to his gear south of Ten Pound Island. A Harbor Seal recognizes the dory and swims nearby, hoping another tasty herring will make its way into the water instead of the bait bag. And so it goes. Hauling. Setting. Trimming. Steering. Rowing. Every motion a lesson in efficiency taught by years of experience. When all is said and done he is back at his truck before noon.

The haul for the day?

Six keepers.

What???

Six Lobsters, that’s it???

There are those that would say, “What a fool! All that work in the freezing cold for six lobsters? It’s not worth it!”

It’s not about the lobsters for Tom Jarvis, Hell, these’ll most likely end up either in his Mom’s kitchen or in a pot on the woodstove of Gino Mondello’s “Dory Shop”, feeding his fellow Gloucestermen on a Saturday afternoon.

It’s about the connections…. with the Waves, the Seal, the Lobsterman, the Sun and the Wind.

It’s what he does.

It’s who he is.

A true Gloucesterman.

Before most people even get out of bed the day after Christmas.

Gloucester Makes Headlines in the Wall Street Journal

Enduring Gloucester 3 Comments

Gloucester Makes Headlines in the Wall Street Journal….and some of the contributors to Enduring Gloucester  weigh in on the story. 

(Please add your comments below!) 

Factory on a Beach painting by Gloucester artist Jeff Weaver 2012
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Wall Street Journal

December 9, 2014
Gloucester Fights Over Its Identity

by Peter Grant
A development group including athletic shoe tycoon Jim Davis has broken ground on a waterfront hotel in Gloucester, Mass. The project has been the focus of an acrimonious debate between residents who want to expand the city’s tourism sector and others who want to preserve its fishing and seafood industry.
The group led by developer Sheree Zizik–and including Mr. Davis, the chairman of Boston-based New Balance Athletic Shoe Inc.–has been planning the 96-room Beauport Hotel Gloucester for more than six years. The project, to be built on the site of a historic Birds Eye food factory, is valued at more than $25 million and has support from the mayor and City Council, which believe Gloucester’s first full-service hotel is important for job creation and economic development.
“I hope to make it a destination for a lot of visitors,” Ms. Zizik said, who owns a restaurant and catering hall in Gloucester.

But other Gloucester residents fought to block the hotel, arguing that the city’s waterfront should be preserved for seafood processing and other industrial uses. Opponents have said that unless the city protects Gloucester’s working waterfront, factories and the hundreds of people that they employ will be driven out by developers of condominiums, hotels and shopping malls.
Opponents also want to preserve the city’s gritty ambience, made popular by the book and movie “The Perfect Storm.” Gloucester was the home port of the doomed boat in the true story, the Andrea Gale.
The battle over development has torn the community apart, said Valerie Nelson, a former City Council member who opposes the hotel and has lived in the area for about 30 years.
The fight in this historic Cape Ann city about 30 miles northeast of Boston resembles similar battles that have erupted in communities throughout the country over the use of waterfront real estate. Increasingly, traditional industrial users of waterfront property are being displaced by developers who are willing to pay up for prime real estate.
“In the last 20 years, waterfronts have become the hot places to develop in cities,” said Tom Murphy, a former mayor of Pittsburgh who is now a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute.
When communities are targeted for gentrification, restaurants and bars have typically been among the first to show up, followed by upscale stores, apartments, hotels, condominiums and numerous services that appeal to the new residents and workers. Waterfront development often is supported by city governments eager for the additional property and sales-tax revenue that it can produce. Industrial users can’t compete with the rents and prices that other users can afford to pay.
“Once you start this process, you’re not going to be able to contain it, ” said Ms. Nelson. She said Gloucester residents who opposed the hotel are already girding themselves for battles at other sites.
First settled in 1623, Gloucester bills itself as the East Coast’s oldest shipping port. In recent decades, some of its food processing plants have closed, like the Birds Eye factory where Clarence Birdseye pioneered innovations in the frozen food industry. The fishing industry also has been hurt by such actions as the recent cod fishing ban in the Gulf of Maine by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
But many of its seafood businesses have stayed strong. Businesses near the waterfront include Gorton’s Inc., a subsidiary of Japanese seafood conglomerate Nippon Suisan Kaisha Ltd., which employs close to 600 people and produces fish sticks and other frozen seafood for the U.S. market. Next door to the new hotel site is Mortillaro’s Lobster Co., which annually ships close to five million pounds of live lobsters throughout the world.
Indeed, the hotel’s opponents have questioned whether it would be popular with guests who have to listen to big trucks in the morning and smell the sometimes-pungent odors of the nearby seafood businesses.
Supporters of preserving the Gloucester waterfront for industrial uses have blocked some developments in the past. In the late 1980s, they prevented a proposed shopping center on an urban renewal site that has remained vacant. Across the harbor, they stopped residential development at the site of an old paint factory, which today is the headquarters of Ocean Alliance, a nonprofit research group.
The site of the old Birds Eye plant falls in an area that used to be zoned for marine industrial and other commercial uses but excluded hotels. The Gloucester City Council in 2012 approved an exemption that allowed the Beauport Hotel to proceed.
“If I could boil down the objection, it comes down to fear: fear of change, fear of loss of identity of our economic seaport,” said Carolyn Kirk, Gloucester’s mayor. “We had to work hard to build trust with the community.”
The Beauport Hotel will include a large conference facility, a beachside restaurant and rooftop pool. It will also display some artifacts donated by the Birdseye family, including photos and Clarence Birdseye’s microscope and snowshoes that he used when he studied the science of freezing food.
Mr. Davis, who owns a vacation home in the Gloucester area, declined to comment through a New Balance spokeswoman.
Write to Peter Grant at peter.grant@wsj.com
Melissa Cummings:
 
I was under the impression that waterfront property is to be used for marine purposes.  By law.  They want to build the building but will they fill it?  Perhaps they just want the money from the construction, could care less whether their edifice falls into disuse. Surely Pavillion Beach is too rugged for tourism, nevermind damage from the occasional storm.  Do they have a plan for taming nature?
 
 
 
 
Bing McGilvray:
 
I found Mr. Grant’s piece to be a surprisingly balanced (not New Balanced) assessment of Gloucester’s creeping ’boutiquing’, especially coming from Rupert Murdoch’s (FOX News) Wall Street Journal. There is much to read between the lines here. It’s hard to argue that those who would put an upscale hotel in this location don’t have further designs on The Fort.
Hilary Frye:
 
Not “fear of change” Ms Mayor, but dread of the monotonous homogeneity that has befallen other(former) seaports.We should look to the model set for us by Portland ,Maine.There, they have promoted and invigorated marine industry ,validating their maritime heritage.
 
 
Patti Page:
 
“If I could boil down the objection, it comes down to fear: fear of change, fear of loss of identity of our economic seaport,” said Carolyn Kirk, Gloucester’s mayor. “We had to work hard to build trust with the community.”
 
We do not fear change.  Gloucester’s successful waterfront businesses and fishermen have a strong history of changing, adapting and diversifying in the most innovative of ways to very sudden and extreme market fluctuations .  It is the very nature of waterfront industry.  If you stay the same, you die.   
It boils down to the type of change that is being imposed.  The known fear is the needless and careless loss of identity of the port.
The objectives of adequately serving the visitor economy, providing employment, supporting existing retail establishments and adding to the city tax revenue  were completely attainable at several, more appropriate locations for a business conference hotel.
No longer will mariners make approach into Gloucester harbor and be first greeted by the quaint lighthouse on Ten Pound Island, back dropped by the Tarr & Wonson Paint Factory with the white Birdseye tower to port.
How will the destination marketing folks convince visitors Gloucester remains an historic fishing port when a waterfront boutique wedding hotel is the most prominent structure in the harbor followed by a over-sized, white show boat docked at a catering hall?   And look no further than to the waterside Solomon Jacob’s Park which will be the future location of an abstract steel sculpture. 
 
Laurel Tarantino:
I’d like to address the mayor’s statement, and it had nothing to do with “fear,” and everything to do with “doing the right thing.”  Had our elected officials worked as hard for the fishermen and marine industry, as they did bending over backwards to push this hotel through, we probably wouldn’t see the community so divided.  Remember, we’d been trying to save the MI for six plus years from hotel development, not just these past couple years.  Saying, “We had to work hard to buildy. trust with the community,” is laughable.  I don’t think there will be any “trust,” bestowed anytime soon, to the mayor, or those who sat on the city council the day the re-zoning got voted through, not from me anyway and I have a feeling, there are a lot of folks out there that feel the same way.
 
Lois McNulty:
 ​
I was told by a Gloucester friend, 35 years ago, to get out of Newburyport, where I was living, and come to Gloucester, because Newburyport was losing its soul. I stayed in Newburyport, though, and witnessed  first-hand the gradual loss of the city’s identity as a beautiful city with an open public waterfront along the Merrimack River with a view to the ocean, a place where artists could live and work, where historic buildings were respected.
One man, Stephen Karp, a mall developer who made Nantucket into what it is today, has over the years acquired a substantial amount of downtown real estate in Newburyport as well as most of the marinas along the river. Karp is now being courted by city government as the developer of a large new hotel on Newburyport’s waterfront.  Stores downtown which once supplied us with groceries, hardware, stationery, clothing, and tools are long gone,  priced out by expensive restaurants and shops selling imported jewelry, mass-produced works of “art,” and gourmet food items. Many shopkeepers had to move to Amesbury or Salisbury or go out of business; local kids can’t afford the rents and real estate prices in town, so they’ve moved away.  Wealthy new residents are tearing down historic homes without impunity and replacing them with large pretentious “investment properties.” Shiny new condo developments, (some gated! ) have been crammed into open spaces and ballparks in the neighborhoods. The waterfront, once home to a small fishing fleet and seafood co-op, where people could always get jobs, has turned its moorings over to luxury yachts.
The city has become known as a playground for well-heeled tourists. And guess what? The schools are still laying off teachers and cutting programs, the sidewalks are crumbling, and the city never seems to have enough money to take care of its water and sewer lines or its library. Is it any mystery where all those glittering tourist dollars are going?
Peter Anastas:
“The Beauport Hotel will include a large conference facility, a beachside restaurant and rooftop pool. It will also display some artifacts donated by the Birdseye family, including photos and Clarence Birdseye’s microscope and snowshoes that he used when he studied the science of freezing food.”
So reads the Wall Street Journal’s sharp-eyed report on efforts to undermine Gloucester’s maritime heritage.  A beachside restaurant and rooftop pool for affluent guests; not speak of the promised bridal suite…and for Gloucester workers?  Jane Danikas said it all in her recent letter to the editor of the Gloucester Times: “As for creating new jobs with the Birdseye Hotel, who will most of them be for — chamber maids?  Yeah, that’s a great paying job.”
But the kicker for me is the display of “some artifacts donated by the Birdseye family, including photos and Clarence Birdseye’s microscope and snowshoes that he used when he studied the science of freezing food.”  That’s all that remains to memorialize a visionary scientist (my mother was his secretary after she graduated from Gloucester High School in 1928), and an industry that drove the city’s economy, in an iconic building that could have been adaptively reused to house an R&D complex, including fish processing and fish by-product development and production, along with marine and bio-tech research and education.  Now those would have been great paying jobs!  And they would have helped to provide a viable future for our children.
All that was needed was the vision, which is not lacking in Gloucester, a city full of boundless energy and imagination that our elected officials make little attempt to acknowledge or reach out to.  In fact, those who attempt to share the work of their imaginations, or to object to the lack of it in the kinds of development we have been subjected to, are shoved aside as “obstructionists.”   
 
Mayor Kirk has now uttered the ultimate wisdom:
“If I could boil down the objection, it comes down to fear: fear of change, fear of loss of identity of our economic seaport,” said Carolyn Kirk, Gloucester’s mayor. “We had to work hard to build trust with the community.” 
I believe our mayor is being disingenuous.  What kind of trust is she alluding to?  Trust in specious change or trust in those, as Charles Olson wrote, “who take away but do not have as good to offer?”   As for the fear, one does well to fear the loss, the very real fear of being driven out by the big money coming in to take possession of the city (Newell Stadium renamed New Balance), while remaking Gloucester in its own image—those rooftop pools!  As Jane Danikas writes: “We don’t care what our houses are worth, we don’t want to sell — we want to live here where we were born and raised.”
It is very real to have these fears of loss and displacement.  Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, has written that, “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country.  If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.”  Furthermore, Albrecht stresses that “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault relates to a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’”  No wonder we resist certain changes—they are life threatening.
            Assault is the issue, and it is not too strong a word for what the citizens of Gloucester, who love and care for their community, have experienced.  It is bad enough to have your neighborhood rezoned out from under you, as the residents of the Fort discovered.  But when the mayor, who is elected to represent the entire city, not merely the rich and powerful, and to care for its culture and preserve our heritage, dismisses your concern as “fear of change,” (as if we did not understand the agenda underway to transform this storied seaport into a tourist haven), that could be taken as the ultimate assault, especially from an administration that has shown very little respect for the city’s identity.  For example, just think of those atrociously colored anddesigned crosswalks that came at a cost of $30,000 and were glaringly dissonant when set against the traditional redbrick of Gloucester’s downtown.  Not to speak of saddling the taxpayers with $30+M in debt for a new school in West Gloucester when a rehabilitated Fuller School would have been perfectly appropriate, and far less expensive. Oh, and the rent for St. Ann’s, plus repair and maintenance costs!  And the assisted living facility that was promised but never built at Gloucester Crossing (talk about boondoggles).  One could go on…
Like many natives and non-natives, who have come here and fallen in love with the city as they find it, I’m haunted by the loss that bears down on us at every point of our lives here.  I don’t fear substantive change, change that comes from sound economic, architectural and urban planning, little of which has happened because our Master Plan is out of date by 14 years.  What I do fear is development by default, which leads to change, driven not by what the people of Gloucester desire in terms of sustainable growth, but by what developers in collusion with our leaders force on the community, which then gets sold to us as the only possible way to go.  Woe to those who oppose it!
The Beauport Hotel is precisely that form of imposed not evolutionary change.  There was wide consensus that the city needed a downtown hotel, but not in the heart of a marine industrial zone, in a building that did not have to be demolished to create a rooftop pool for affluent guests, who would be waited on by natives, who deserved not be employed as a servant class, but to be offered permanent jobs with solid pay and comprehensive benefits.  The people of Gloucester deserved better than this, and I doubt that the hotel’s development has truly been engendered or driven by the trust the mayor so cavalierly claims she has built.
  

Gloucester Fights for Its Identity at Pavilion Beach

Enduring Gloucester Leave a comment

Gloucester Makes Headlines in the Wall Street Journal….and some of the contributors to Enduring Gloucester  weigh in on the story. 

(Please add your comments below!) 

Factory on a Beach painting by Gloucester artist Jeff Weaver 2012

Wall Street Journal

December 9, 2014

Gloucester Fights Over Its Identity

by Peter Grant

A development group including athletic shoe tycoon Jim Davis has broken ground on a waterfront hotel in Gloucester, Mass. The project has been the focus of an acrimonious debate between residents who want to expand the city’s tourism sector and others who want to preserve its fishing and seafood industry.

The group led by developer Sheree Zizik–and including Mr. Davis, the chairman of Boston-based New Balance Athletic Shoe Inc.–has been planning the 96-room Beauport Hotel Gloucester for more than six years. The project, to be built on the site of a historic Birds Eye food factory, is valued at more than $25 million and has support from the mayor and City Council, which believe Gloucester’s first full-service hotel is important for job creation and economic development.

“I hope to make it a destination for a lot of visitors,” Ms. Zizik said, who owns a restaurant and catering hall in Gloucester.

But other Gloucester residents fought to block the hotel, arguing that the city’s waterfront should be preserved for seafood processing and other industrial uses. Opponents have said that unless the city protects Gloucester’s working waterfront, factories and the hundreds of people that they employ will be driven out by developers of condominiums, hotels and shopping malls.

Opponents also want to preserve the city’s gritty ambience, made popular by the book and movie “The Perfect Storm.” Gloucester was the home port of the doomed boat in the true story, the Andrea Gale.

The battle over development has torn the community apart, said Valerie Nelson, a former City Council member who opposes the hotel and has lived in the area for about 30 years.

The fight in this historic Cape Ann city about 30 miles northeast of Boston resembles similar battles that have erupted in communities throughout the country over the use of waterfront real estate. Increasingly, traditional industrial users of waterfront property are being displaced by developers who are willing to pay up for prime real estate.

“In the last 20 years, waterfronts have become the hot places to develop in cities,” said Tom Murphy, a former mayor of Pittsburgh who is now a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute.

When communities are targeted for gentrification, restaurants and bars have typically been among the first to show up, followed by upscale stores, apartments, hotels, condominiums and numerous services that appeal to the new residents and workers. Waterfront development often is supported by city governments eager for the additional property and sales-tax revenue that it can produce. Industrial users can’t compete with the rents and prices that other users can afford to pay.

“Once you start this process, you’re not going to be able to contain it, ” said Ms. Nelson. She said Gloucester residents who opposed the hotel are already girding themselves for battles at other sites.

First settled in 1623, Gloucester bills itself as the East Coast’s oldest shipping port. In recent decades, some of its food processing plants have closed, like the Birds Eye factory where Clarence Birdseye pioneered innovations in the frozen food industry. The fishing industry also has been hurt by such actions as the recent cod fishing ban in the Gulf of Maine by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But many of its seafood businesses have stayed strong. Businesses near the waterfront include Gorton’s Inc., a subsidiary of Japanese seafood conglomerate Nippon Suisan Kaisha Ltd., which employs close to 600 people and produces fish sticks and other frozen seafood for the U.S. market. Next door to the new hotel site is Mortillaro’s Lobster Co., which annually ships close to five million pounds of live lobsters throughout the world.

Indeed, the hotel’s opponents have questioned whether it would be popular with guests who have to listen to big trucks in the morning and smell the sometimes-pungent odors of the nearby seafood businesses.

Supporters of preserving the Gloucester waterfront for industrial uses have blocked some developments in the past. In the late 1980s, they prevented a proposed shopping center on an urban renewal site that has remained vacant. Across the harbor, they stopped residential development at the site of an old paint factory, which today is the headquarters of Ocean Alliance, a nonprofit research group.

The site of the old Birds Eye plant falls in an area that used to be zoned for marine industrial and other commercial uses but excluded hotels. The Gloucester City Council in 2012 approved an exemption that allowed the Beauport Hotel to proceed.

“If I could boil down the objection, it comes down to fear: fear of change, fear of loss of identity of our economic seaport,” said Carolyn Kirk, Gloucester’s mayor. “We had to work hard to build trust with the community.”

The Beauport Hotel will include a large conference facility, a beachside restaurant and rooftop pool. It will also display some artifacts donated by the Birdseye family, including photos and Clarence Birdseye’s microscope and snowshoes that he used when he studied the science of freezing food.

Mr. Davis, who owns a vacation home in the Gloucester area, declined to comment through a New Balance spokeswoman.

Write to Peter Grant at peter.grant@wsj.com

Melissa Cummings:

I was under the impression that waterfront property is to be used for marine purposes.  By law.  They want to build the building but will they fill it?  Perhaps they just want the money from the construction, could care less whether their edifice falls into disuse. Surely Pavillion Beach is too rugged for tourism, nevermind damage from the occasional storm.  Do they have a plan for taming nature?

Bing McGilvray:

I found Mr. Grant’s piece to be a surprisingly balanced (not New Balanced) assessment of Gloucester’s creeping ’boutiquing’, especially coming from Rupert Murdoch’s (FOX News) Wall Street Journal. There is much to read between the lines here. It’s hard to argue that those who would put an upscale hotel in this location don’t have further designs on The Fort.

Hilary Frye:

Not “fear of change” Ms Mayor, but dread of the monotonous homogeneity that has befallen other(former) seaports.We should look to the model set for us by Portland ,Maine.There, they have promoted and invigorated marine industry ,validating their maritime heritage.

Patti Page:

“If I could boil down the objection, it comes down to fear: fear of change, fear of loss of identity of our economic seaport,” said Carolyn Kirk, Gloucester’s mayor. “We had to work hard to build trust with the community.”

We do not fear change.  Gloucester’s successful waterfront businesses and fishermen have a strong history of changing, adapting and diversifying in the most innovative of ways to very sudden and extreme market fluctuations .  It is the very nature of waterfront industry.  If you stay the same, you die.

It boils down to the type of change that is being imposed.  The known fear is the needless and careless loss of identity of the port.

The objectives of adequately serving the visitor economy, providing employment, supporting existing retail establishments and adding to the city tax revenue  were completely attainable at several, more appropriate locations for a business conference hotel.

No longer will mariners make approach into Gloucester harbor and be first greeted by the quaint lighthouse on Ten Pound Island, back dropped by the Tarr & Wonson Paint Factory with the white Birdseye tower to port.

How will the destination marketing folks convince visitors Gloucester remains an historic fishing port when a waterfront boutique wedding hotel is the most prominent structure in the harbor followed by a over-sized, white show boat docked at a catering hall?   And look no further than to the waterside Solomon Jacob’s Park which will be the future location of an abstract steel sculpture.

Laurel Tarantino:

I’d like to address the mayor’s statement, and it had nothing to do with “fear,” and everything to do with “doing the right thing.”  Had our elected officials worked as hard for the fishermen and marine industry, as they did bending over backwards to push this hotel through, we probably wouldn’t see the community so divided.  Remember, we’d been trying to save the MI for six plus years from hotel development, not just these past couple years.  Saying, “We had to work hard to buildy. trust with the community,” is laughable.  I don’t think there will be any “trust,” bestowed anytime soon, to the mayor, or those who sat on the city council the day the re-zoning got voted through, not from me anyway and I have a feeling, there are a lot of folks out there that feel the same way.

Lois McNulty:

​

I was told by a Gloucester friend, 35 years ago, to get out of Newburyport, where I was living, and come to Gloucester, because Newburyport was losing its soul. I stayed in Newburyport, though, and witnessed  first-hand the gradual loss of the city’s identity as a beautiful city with an open public waterfront along the Merrimack River with a view to the ocean, a place where artists could live and work, where historic buildings were respected.

One man, Stephen Karp, a mall developer who made Nantucket into what it is today, has over the years acquired a substantial amount of downtown real estate in Newburyport as well as most of the marinas along the river. Karp is now being courted by city government as the developer of a large new hotel on Newburyport’s waterfront.  Stores downtown which once supplied us with groceries, hardware, stationery, clothing, and tools are long gone,  priced out by expensive restaurants and shops selling imported jewelry, mass-produced works of “art,” and gourmet food items. Many shopkeepers had to move to Amesbury or Salisbury or go out of business; local kids can’t afford the rents and real estate prices in town, so they’ve moved away.  Wealthy new residents are tearing down historic homes without impunity and replacing them with large pretentious “investment properties.” Shiny new condo developments, (some gated! ) have been crammed into open spaces and ballparks in the neighborhoods. The waterfront, once home to a small fishing fleet and seafood co-op, where people could always get jobs, has turned its moorings over to luxury yachts.

The city has become known as a playground for well-heeled tourists. And guess what? The schools are still laying off teachers and cutting programs, the sidewalks are crumbling, and the city never seems to have enough money to take care of its water and sewer lines or its library. Is it any mystery where all those glittering tourist dollars are going?

Peter Anastas:

“The Beauport Hotel will include a large conference facility, a beachside restaurant and rooftop pool. It will also display some artifacts donated by the Birdseye family, including photos and Clarence Birdseye’s microscope and snowshoes that he used when he studied the science of freezing food.”

So reads the Wall Street Journal’s sharp-eyed report on efforts to undermine Gloucester’s maritime heritage.  A beachside restaurant and rooftop pool for affluent guests; not speak of the promised bridal suite…and for Gloucester workers?  Jane Danikas said it all in her recent letter to the editor of the Gloucester Times: “As for creating new jobs with the Birdseye Hotel, who will most of them be for — chamber maids?  Yeah, that’s a great paying job.”

But the kicker for me is the display of “some artifacts donated by the Birdseye family, including photos and Clarence Birdseye’s microscope and snowshoes that he used when he studied the science of freezing food.”  That’s all that remains to memorialize a visionary scientist (my mother was his secretary after she graduated from Gloucester High School in 1928), and an industry that drove the city’s economy, in an iconic building that could have been adaptively reused to house an R&D complex, including fish processing and fish by-product development and production, along with marine and bio-tech research and education.  Now those would have been great paying jobs!  And they would have helped to provide a viable future for our children.

All that was needed was the vision, which is not lacking in Gloucester, a city full of boundless energy and imagination that our elected officials make little attempt to acknowledge or reach out to.  In fact, those who attempt to share the work of their imaginations, or to object to the lack of it in the kinds of development we have been subjected to, are shoved aside as “obstructionists.”

Mayor Kirk has now uttered the ultimate wisdom:

“If I could boil down the objection, it comes down to fear: fear of change, fear of loss of identity of our economic seaport,” said Carolyn Kirk, Gloucester’s mayor. “We had to work hard to build trust with the community.”

I believe our mayor is being disingenuous.  What kind of trust is she alluding to?  Trust in specious change or trust in those, as Charles Olson wrote, “who take away but do not have as good to offer?”   As for the fear, one does well to fear the loss, the very real fear of being driven out by the big money coming in to take possession of the city (Newell Stadium renamed New Balance), while remaking Gloucester in its own image—those rooftop pools!  As Jane Danikas writes: “We don’t care what our houses are worth, we don’t want to sell — we want to live here where we were born and raised.”

It is very real to have these fears of loss and displacement.  Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, has written that, “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country.  If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.”  Furthermore, Albrecht stresses that “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault relates to a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’”  No wonder we resist certain changes—they are life threatening.

Assault is the issue, and it is not too strong a word for what the citizens of Gloucester, who love and care for their community, have experienced.  It is bad enough to have your neighborhood rezoned out from under you, as the residents of the Fort discovered.  But when the mayor, who is elected to represent the entire city, not merely the rich and powerful, and to care for its culture and preserve our heritage, dismisses your concern as “fear of change,” (as if we did not understand the agenda underway to transform this storied seaport into a tourist haven), that could be taken as the ultimate assault, especially from an administration that has shown very little respect for the city’s identity.  For example, just think of those atrociously colored anddesigned crosswalks that came at a cost of $30,000 and were glaringly dissonant when set against the traditional redbrick of Gloucester’s downtown.  Not to speak of saddling the taxpayers with $30+M in debt for a new school in West Gloucester when a rehabilitated Fuller School would have been perfectly appropriate, and far less expensive. Oh, and the rent for St. Ann’s, plus repair and maintenance costs!  And the assisted living facility that was promised but never built at Gloucester Crossing (talk about boondoggles).  One could go on…

Like many natives and non-natives, who have come here and fallen in love with the city as they find it, I’m haunted by the loss that bears down on us at every point of our lives here.  I don’t fear substantive change, change that comes from sound economic, architectural and urban planning, little of which has happened because our Master Plan is out of date by 14 years.  What I do fear is development by default, which leads to change, driven not by what the people of Gloucester desire in terms of sustainable growth, but by what developers in collusion with our leaders force on the community, which then gets sold to us as the only possible way to go.  Woe to those who oppose it!

The Beauport Hotel is precisely that form of imposed not evolutionary change.  There was wide consensus that the city needed a downtown hotel, but not in the heart of a marine industrial zone, in a building that did not have to be demolished to create a rooftop pool for affluent guests, who would be waited on by natives, who deserved not be employed as a servant class, but to be offered permanent jobs with solid pay and comprehensive benefits.  The people of Gloucester deserved better than this, and I doubt that the hotel’s development has truly been engendered or driven by the trust the mayor so cavalierly claims she has built.

 

Sail GHS

Enduring Gloucester 1 Comment
Sail GHS Enlivens the Harbor
by Hilary Frye, with Patti Page
                                                                                                                                                            photos by Hilary Frye

…the sky, a besmudged cauldron, leaking sudden shafts of sunlight; the water, tossing quicksilver. Like crisp white cat’s ears, the sails pop up, and the near-empty harbor dances to life.

This was the scene on Gloucester Harbor on October 30, the last day of sailing for 2014. Sail GHS will be back on the water in the middle of March.

In 2008, Patti Page introduced scholastic sailing to our city. With a harbor as beautiful as ours, she envisioned a high school sailing team as a shining asset for this historic port.
With three donated C420 sailboats, and the quiet authority and guidance of Dr. Damon Cummings, she began to build a racing team
Page engaged Guy Fiero, a canny, creative instructor, with many years of experience, as the coach. Scouring the environs of Cape Ann, she banded together a crew of intrepid high school -aged sailors who took their place as the new sailing team, Sail GHS, in the Mass Bay League racing organization.
The competitive season for scholastic sailing is early spring, when conditions are cold,  stormy and unpredictable.  Sailing is arduous at best. Page spent many an afternoon with icy winds, stinging rains, and waves breaking over the bow of her 13 foot whaler, tending her skittering flock.
By diligent fund-raising, chasing grants and soliciting donations, she equipped her team with life vests, dry suits, chase boats, insurance, league fees, and a coach, with no cost to its young members.


The Dusky foundation, ever- generous with its community enrichment efforts, endorsed the conspicuous success of the program by donating, (in conjunction with Brown’s Yacht Yard,) six brand new C420s and a fully equipped chase boat.
In 2012,  Page motivated the city to appropriate funds to replace its derelict floats at the head of the harbor with a new state-of-the-art system. The  Sail GHS racing fleet now shares the floats with the Cape Ann YMCA summer program.
With persistent nurture, Patti Page’s one-time wish was emerging as a winged reality.
Page considers Sail GHS to be the foot in the door that keeps the gate from being slammed shut on public access to our harbor. She believes that the harbor is a resource to be enjoyed by all.
Many coastal cities and towns around the country are vigorously embracing Community Boating Centers as prosperous enterprises that invigorate their waterfronts. Patti is an active proponent for just such a center, here in Gloucester.
In light of what she has accomplished with discarded or donated gear, imagine what she could make happen given actual support from the city. Give her a chance, and she just might find a way for the city to enhance the existing harbormaster’s building as a public shore-side facility. Ward Councilors would like to hear your thoughts about programs such as Sail GHS.
 Sail GHS is a competitive high school sailing program which is open to the youth of Cape Ann and beyond. Contact info: sailghs@yahoo.com  Look for Sail GHS  on facebook.

Sail GHS Enlivens Gloucester Harbor

Enduring Gloucester Leave a comment

Sail GHS Enlivens the Harbor

by Hilary Frye, with Patti Page

photos by Hilary Frye

…the sky, a besmudged cauldron, leaking sudden shafts of sunlight; the water, tossing quicksilver. Like crisp white cat’s ears, the sails pop up, and the near-empty harbor dances to life.

 

This was the scene on Gloucester Harbor on October 30, the last day of sailing for 2014. Sail GHS will be back on the water in the middle of March.

In 2008, Patti Page introduced scholastic sailing to our city. With a harbor as beautiful as ours, she envisioned a high school sailing team as a shining asset for this historic port.

With three donated C420 sailboats, and the quiet authority and guidance of Dr. Damon Cummings, she began to build a racing team.

Page engaged Guy Fiero, a canny, creative instructor, with many years of experience, as the coach. Scouring the environs of Cape Ann, she banded together a crew of intrepid high school -aged sailors who took their place as the new sailing team, Sail GHS, in the Mass Bay League racing organization.

 

The competitive season for scholastic sailing is early spring, when conditions are cold,  stormy and unpredictable.  Sailing is arduous at best. Page spent many an afternoon with icy winds, stinging rains, and waves breaking over the bow of her 13 foot whaler, tending her skittering flock.

By diligent fund-raising, chasing grants and soliciting donations, she equipped her team with life vests, dry suits, chase boats, insurance, league fees, and a coach, with no cost to its young members.

 



The Dusky foundation, ever- generous with its community enrichment efforts, endorsed the conspicuous success of the program by donating, (in conjunction with Brown’s Yacht Yard,) six brand new C420s and a fully equipped chase boat.

 

In 2012,  Page motivated the city to appropriate funds to replace its derelict floats at the head of the harbor with a new state-of-the-art system. The  Sail GHS racing fleet now shares the floats with the Cape Ann YMCA summer program.

With persistent nurture, Patti Page’s one-time wish was emerging as a winged reality.

 

Page considers Sail GHS to be the foot in the door that keeps the gate from being slammed shut on public access to our harbor. She believes that the harbor is a resource to be enjoyed by all.

 

Many coastal cities and towns around the country are vigorously embracing Community Boating Centers as prosperous enterprises that invigorate their waterfronts. Patti is an active proponent for just such a center, here in Gloucester.

In light of what she has accomplished with discarded or donated gear, imagine what she could make happen given actual support from the city. Give her a chance, and she just might find a way for the city to enhance the existing harbormaster’s building as a public shore-side facility. Ward Councilors would like to hear your thoughts about programs such as Sail GHS.

Sail GHS is a competitive high school sailing program which is open to the youth of Cape Ann and beyond. Contact info: sailghs@yahoo.com  Look for Sail GHS  on facebook.