Next stop, Fitchburg?

Worcester County, Massachusetts, was/is full of old industrial towns and cities. Clinton. Uxbridge. Whitinsville. Gardner. Leominster. Fitchburg.

Other than a trip, maybe ten years ago, to visit the Russian icon museum in Clinton, I haven't been to or through most of these places in years. Make that decades. (And don't ask me why there's a Russian icon museum in Clinton, Mass, a town that was so Irish-dominated that its high school mascot is the Galloping Gael, a centaur with the human half a leather-helmeted football player and a shamrock tattooed on its equine haunch. Predictably, on my visit to Clinton with my cousins Barbara and MB, we had lunch in an Irish pub.)

Anyway, my memories of all of these mill towns/mill cities are Rust Belt-y: houses once occupied by mill-owning grandees now all turned into funeral parlors or tenements; abandoned store fronts along the main drag; a general dispirited sense - the word malaise might as well be embossed on the town's crest. 

I know that the lack of housing affordability in Greater Boston and housing price increases in Worcester have given some of these places a boost, with younger folks moving there, especially in those locations fortunate enough to be on the Boston train commuter line. As in Fitchburg, a city of 42,000 about 50 miles from Boston and 30 miles from Worcester. (And the home of a state college: Fitchburg State University.)

Growing up, I never spent much time in Fitchburg. My father liked to take us all out for rides on weekends, but Fitchburg was a bit off our beaten track. When I was in high school, I went to a couple of events in Fitchburg - gatherings of parochial school student councils, basketball games, whatever. I seem to remember a Latin festival at some Fitchburg Catholic school or another, where we dressed up in blue togas and recited Cicero.

Anyway, I don't spend much energy thinking about Clinton, or Leominster, or Fitchburg. But when it's Worcester County- related, a story will always pique my interest. So I was naturally drawn to a recent article about a couple of bookstores, the brainchildren of poet/activist/publisher/entrepreneur Zachary Bos, that will be opening soon on Fitchburg's Main Street. 

Bos’s two upcoming stores — Bonfire Bookshop, which will sell used books, and Goldfinch Mercantile, which will sell new books — are slated to become Fitchburg’s first independent bookstores since the last one shuttered over a decade ago. The old mill city has long battled a shaky economy and business closures. Now, city officials say, it is undergoing its largest makeover yet in the hopes of becoming a destination. (Source: Boston Globe)

OK, Bonfire strikes me as a strange name for a bookstore.  Images of Nazi brownshirts hurling the works of Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann onto towering book infernos...But I'm all for new old and new new bookstores. And I love that Fitchburg is trying to revitalize itself as something of a cultural mecca:

The local public library is undergoing a $40 million renovation and expansion project. Last year, the city completed a $45 million project transforming a former school into affordable housing aimed at artists.

And why not? Stranger things have happened. 

E.g., my husband's hometown of Bellows Falls, VT - as unlovely a place as you're going to find anywhere in New England - has kinda-sorta remade itself as a multi-culti place to live. Bellows Falls isn't even a town; it's a village that's part of the town of Rockingham, and over the years the word that's crossed my mind at the mention of BF has always been downtrodden. But a dozen years ago, when I brought a spoonful of my husband's ashes there to put on his parents' graves, I found it was vibrant little spot in a number of ways. For one thing, it has a very nice indie bookstore. For another, it has a very nice Italian restaurant. 

The town also has an annual roots music festival, and even has an outpost of the Vermont Country Store, a great little emporium if you're in the market for Teaberry chewing gum, Evening in Paris dusting powder, and muumuus. (I've only been to the original VCS in Weston, VT, which is an utter trip. And I find myself regularly ordering oddments for them - a wooden clothes drying rack, reusable bowl covers, licorice All Sorts - so I can keep getting their ultra-fabulous catalog.)

So why NOT Fitchburg?

Affordable housing. Funky old buildings. Train to the Big City. 

Bookstoring is a tough business.

I'm fortunate to have the Trident Bookstore a short walk away. (There's an Instragram-able bookstore a lot closer, and I have gotten a couple of books there during a book emergency, but it's mostly a tourist trap. Everything is cutsily curated, and it feels like the sort of place some city-fleeing career gal in a Hallmark special would open in her home town - and end up meeting the cutest man in the world, who happens to be rich but rich with a heart - as in he runs an orphanage for three-legged dogs - and who wants to make her home town his home town.) 

But I digress. 

Bookstoring is a tough, low margin buiness.

And yet, bookstores have found vitality post-COVID, despite the rise of online booksellers including Amazon. Many bookshops now offer community events, gift shopping, and what Harvard Business School professor Ryan Raffaelli described as a “third space” — a location where people can gather besides their homes or workplaces.

“A bookstore helps create social capital,” Raffaelli said. “It also sits at the core fabric of most cities or communities, so it’s hard to imagine not having one.”

A third space is what Zachary Bos is trying to build in Fitchburg, and I'm rooting for him.

I also just looked up the train schedule to Fitchburg 

I'm going to make sure the bookstores are open, but I love crummy old milltowns. And I love bookstores. So I do see a trek to Fitchburg in my future.

All aboard!

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