During the 1960s, Gloucester's celebrated poet laureate, Charles Olson, wrote regularly to the Gloucester Daily Times decrying the destruction of local landmarks to urban renewal and appealing to the city to guard its precious heritage.
Olson's words seem especially poignant now when his Fort neighborhood, an enclave of modest wood frame houses surrounded by fish processing plants, faces a 21st-century form of urban renewal: gentrification.
If approved, Mayor Carolyn Kirk's controversial Fort rezoning plan, allowing for a hotel on the old Birds Eye site, will destroy the Fort's thriving and growing seafood industry, driving out groundfish, lobster, shrimp, ice, fertilizer, auction, fuel oil, and cold storage businesses that are the lifeblood of America's oldest fishing port.
Moreover, the top-floor apartment where Olson pounded out impassioned letters and poems on an old Royal typewriter will become a distant memory as the houses in his neighborhood, now owned mostly by Sicilian-American fishing families, give way to boutiques and luxury condominiums.
The son of a mail carrier, Olson himself worked for a time delivering mail in Gloucester. His poetry is not easily accessible, but it is well worthwhile, especially his Gloucester epic, The Maximus Poems, which reveals his profound wisdom and vision. Henry Ferrini's eloquent film "Polis is This" helps one to better understand Olson as do the poet's letters to the Gloucester Times.
These letters, collected with a fine introduction by Peter Anastas, sounded a warning during Olson's lifetime that seems increasingly urgent today.
Gloucester must protect its extraordinary maritime heritage, Olson insisted. He plumbed local archives, reading original documents to better understand Gloucester, which he viewed as a modern-day Athens, a polis formed by a rare history and geography. Yet even as he celebrated Gloucester, he deplored its excesses: "O city of mediocrity and cheap ambition," he wrote to the Times, "stop this renewing without reviewing / loss loss loss no gains oh not moan stop stop stop this."
Olson called the above a "scream," and that it was; yet it bears consideration today as a battle rages over the future of the Fort and the city itself.
The poet lived in the Fort among the fishermen and plant workers whom he celebrated in his poems and whom he saw as the soul of our seafaring city. The Fort, named for a Revolutionary War installation that once stood on this spit of land, has long housed immigrant fishing families, most recently Sicilians.
In Olson's day, this place was gritty, noisy, and odiferous. It still is. Fishermen start up their diesel engines before dawn; 18-wheelers rumble down a narrow road, day and night, and the odors of fish and gurry waft through the neighborhood.
This is not a suitable location for a hotel, luxury condominiums, or boutiques. Yet the old Birds Eye plant would be an ideal site for biotechnology, marine research, and education. The New England Aquarium and the University of New Hampshire's large pelagics research program, among others, have expressed interest in establishing satellite facilities in Gloucester because of its working waterfront. Why not point them to the Birds Eye site?
Mayor Kirk must withdraw her Fort rezoning plan and work actively with the citizens group seeking to bring to Gloucester marine research and biotechnology, enterprises that will complement the city's maritime heritage. She also needs to meet with the new Fort neighborhood association, whose formation she encouraged to discuss the rezoning proposal that they are developing, which protects the existing seafood industry and multi-family residences in the Fort, while allowing for compatible future growth.
The easy way out is gentrification. That may yield quick cash, but in the long run, it will neither benefit nor honor our City. Forty years ago, as our city faced another such crisis, Olson wrote to the Times: Is there no sense in the city that her beauty by nature and the support of man, is not to be slashed and gone forever simply to accommodate business men, who are no matter how progressive and that virtue, also profit-makers and so immediately or eventually greedy. And devouring. I BEG AGAIN for action.
The action for which Olson was begging was restraint: that the city recognize its beauty, a beauty extraordinary in all its grittiness, rather than destroying it.
As Gloucester's stewards, we cannot afford to grasp at easy answers, at urban renewal through gentrification. Nor can we turn away from our unique history and heritage.
Susan Pollack is an award-winning journalist and author of "The Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Cookbook: Stories and Recipes."
