The Heart of the Commonwealth

I spent the first weekend in February in lovely Worcester, Massachusetts, a.k.a. The Heart of the Commonwealth, the city where I grew up.

Now, one might ask why anyone would want to spend the a February weekend in Worcester, Massachusetts, but we had our reasons.

"We" are the Banshees, my sister-cousin posse.

Every winter, we head off for a getaway weekend somewhere - generally to someplace a bit more touristy than Worcester, but we've been talking about "doing" Worcester for a while, and this year we did.

It is, after all, where all but one of us grew up - and, peculiarly, that one - my cousin Barbara - recently retired to suburban Worcester after spending her life in suburban Boston. (Go figure.)

At this point, pretty much all of my remaining Worcester connections - other than Barbara - are in the cemetery. (And, yes, we did pay a rolling visit: too much snow on the ground to get out for a close-up visit, but we'll assume everyone's right where we left them.)

Worcester is one of the many old industrial cities you find in New England, but Worcester was always larger than most of them. (I'm not sure where it stands now, population/rank-wise, but when I was growing up, the city had over 200,000 people, and was, among New England cities, second only to Boston. (Springfield, Providence, and Hartford were, I recall, pretty close in size.)

Needless to say, Worcester has changed quite a bit in the decades since I grew up there.

As with so many other industrial cities, the manufacturing base has eroded. Gone are the factories that made wire, M-16 rifles, combat boots, space suits (not a high volume operation, to be sure), plastic toys, pocketbooks, boilers, and bras. The big industrial manufacturers - Wyman Gordon and Norton - still have trace elements remaining.

But Worcester is by no means a bombed out, blighted husk of a city. For one thing, they have a growing bio-tech industry Worcester also does alright in the fin-serv department, with banking and (especially) insurance.

And Worcester was always something of a college town, with Holy Cross, Clark, and WPI - among others - as campuses in the city. (While it's true that Worcester has a lot of colleges, I was amused to see a few signs positioning Worcester as "the intellectual capital of Central Massachusetts.")

I don't remember this being the case - but we didn't eat out when I was a kid - but Worcester has some great restaurants. And if our weekend stops were any indication, the city's economy can't be hurting all that much.

We ate at a trendy new Italian place, Via, that's in the old Worcester public schools maintenance building. Dinner was wonderful, and taking in the sophisticated ambience, one or the other of us kept saying, 'pinch me, I'm in Worcester.'

On Saturday, we dined at the Sole Proprietor, an old standby where I'd taken my mother many times. Good thing we had reservations, as the wait without them was 2 hours. ('Pinch me, I'm in Worcester.')

Worcester, and especially it's eastern suburbs, have become something of a bedroom community for Boston. Prices have shot up over the years, but you can still buy a fair amount of house in Worcester and environs for half of what you'd pay in near-Boston. (The idea of commuting to a job in Boston would have been unimaginable when I was a kid, just as living in Worcester is unimaginable to me as an adult.)

All in all, I'd say that Worcester is more fortunate than many other large Northeast industrial cities.

What it doesn't have is much of a downtown by way of shopping. There have been many attempts to restore downtown to its resplendent glory over the years, but they all seem to have failed. Of course, Worcester in all its resplendent glory was never all that glorious. (As my sister Kathleen pointed out as we drove around Worcester in the Banshee-mobile, downtown always dropped off pretty rapidly into wasteland in most directions.) But Worcester in my memory did have a vibrant downtown shopping area, with nice department stores and speciality shops, as well as movie theaters.

As far as I can tell, if you don't have a car to get to a suburban mall, you're pretty much sunk if you want to buy something or catch a movie.

It's hard to believe Worcester doesn't have better shopping, because there are still some very nice residential neighborhoods. If you have an image of Worcester at all, it's probably of steep hill after steep hill crowded with triple deckers. There are plenty of those around still. But there are also some areas that are quite nice.

(And then there's the area I grew up in... We buzzed by my grandmother's house, where I lived until second grade. It's more or less kept up, but the white paint doesn't do it for me, and the owner winterized the porch on the second floor, where we once sat with my mother stringing macaroni necklaces, and where our clothes line hung off of. The first floor porch, a.k.a., "the piazza", where my grandmother held court in an ancient glider, surrounded by ancient pots of geraniums and sansaverius, and where her clothes line hung off of, has not been walled in. (I'm closing my eyes, but I can't remember whether the big old creepy fir tree is still there, or the lilac, or the bridal wreath bush.)

(When we moved, we went just a block away, but to a stand-alone house, rather than a three family. Our street was pretty much all modest, cookie-cutter "ranch" houses painted in pastels. We were one of the few houses on the street with a serious color: charcoal gray. However modest, crackerbox, and pokey those houses were, the folks who lived in them - mostly first generation in terms of single family home ownership - kept their houses and lawns up.

(Alas, the street, which was running down the last few years my mother lived there, has run even further down. "Our house" has two grills, a couch, and some plastic lawn furniture in the front yard - the front yard my father nurtured and babied, and where my mother planted annuals every year. The front yard! Don't grils go in the back yard?

(There was also an old, low-riding Caddie with no plates, parked half in the driveway, half on the lawn. The house needed a paint job and, if you looked closely, there's a palimpsest effect, and you can see where someone spray painted a pentagram on the front of the house.

(Are the people who bought our house devil worshippers? If she weren't dead already, my mother would die. As for my father, well, if he'd been with us, he'd likely have hopped out of the Banshee-mobile, knocked on the door, and given these new owners, whoever they are, a piece of his mind about how Dogpatch the place looked. Of course, in order to go knock on the door, one would have to ignore the "No Trespassing" sign posted on a tree in the front yard.

("No Trespassing"? Not to worry. I really don't need to take a closer look at that rusting old Caddie or the pentagram.)

You can't go home again, and sometimes you just don't want to.