From a 2000 interview with Carl Robare:
I have a picture of
a home my grandparents lived in over near the Braytonville Mill. It was a bunch of little hovels built on a slope going down
to the mill. My grandparents had their first two or three children there. Can you imagine them looking back many years later
and saying, "Gee, we used to live there. That was nice. We were just kids then, and we had a couple of children. We lived
in a hovel in poverty and worked our heads off eighty hours a week in the mill. Wasn’t that wonderful?"
You can remember the past, but you can’t recreate it. And what
one person remembers as being great, another remembers as being terrible. Did you ever go back years later to someplace you
thought was really nice when you were a kid and ask yourself, "Why did I think that was nice?"
Some people can look back and say, "Things are not the same." Of course they’re
not the same. If you look at the old utility maps of North Adams in the late 1800s, you can see that the sewers came up the
streets, and there were three or four places where they all just dumped into the river. Looking at the improvements in the
river and the air and the other things in town, I would say that North Adams is a thousand percent better than it was then.
From a 2000 interview with artist
Eric Rudd:
The idea of alternative spaces for
art started in the late sixties and early seventies. Alternative spaces were starting up, because museums were locking out
contemporary artists. Alternative spaces have dried up now. They’ve either become the establishment, or traditional
museums have started getting more adventuresome. I think North Adams is a natural testing ground for new kinds of art. Young
artists will need space that’s not expensive. That kind of space still exists in North Adams. Here, there is an opportunity
to have a worldwide audience and a worldwide critical audience. In New York, somebody going to the Museum of Modern Art might
not go twenty blocks to see something else. In North Adams, you have sort of a captive audience, so it makes a very interesting
testing ground for things to happen.
I came up to North
Adams in a sense to do projects I couldn’t find space for in Washington, and they were multi-media projects. In those
days, MASS MoCA was going to be a Minimalist art museum, bigger than anywhere else, but traditionally the same. It was only
several years ago that it developed into this multi-media complex. What’s happening here is a marriage of art and technology.
This is the most exciting place in the world right now. I think people here are finally beginning to understand that.
From a 1999 interview with Fran,
Tony, and Mary Ann Abuisi:
Fran: If they hadn’t had the urban renewal, Sprague would have left anyway,
so 4,000 people would not be working. Inevitably, the 4,000 people that were going to hit the streets at lunchtime wouldn’t
be hitting the streets anymore. There would be just a lot of old empty buildings with plywood in the windows.
Tony: Not having those people from Sprague Electric cashing their checks, shopping,
having lunch, going to buy a newspaper; we would have been looking at an obituary of North Adams, if it hadn’t been
for urban renewal. Seeing what we had just laying there vacant would have been worse. We know what we’ve got to live
with, but nobody can take away the memories of the way it was. It’s hard to describe urban renewal to our grandchildren
and people who visit. One of Mary Ann’s friends from Arizona comes to visit every year. She was her classmate at Houghton
School. She’s always trying to find the things that were here when she was a little girl.
Fran: I
really think that the next century will be incredible for North Adams, because of what’s going to happen with MASS MoCA.
We have the new information generation coming here. Now it’s going to be an art community. It’ll be for creating
with the mind, not just the hands.
Mary
Ann: I hope that MASS MoCA will light the flame again.
From Listening to the River, an essay by
the author: I attended the MASS MoCA reception and tour of the buildings that have been renovated for
the grand opening on Memorial Day weekend. Members were invited to stroll unsupervised through the old brick mills. It was
a melancholy and emotional journey. The spaces were quiet, empty, and full of the silent voices of the thousands who spent
a good part of their lives there.
Sunlight beamed through
the row of big windows in Buildings Four and Five and projected rectangular images on the floor. I stopped at each window
facing River Street and listened to the river. The old houses and tenements, many built by Arnold Print Works, lined the street
all the way down. A well-dressed lady standing next to me predicted, "Guess they’re all gonna be B & B’s
by next year."
In Building Four, the interior brick
wall resembled a mural of many shades of earthy red, gray and green. The tour guide talked about the art that was going to
fill the large room. Someone pointed out, "What’s on those walls now is art, natural art." The guide replied,
"Yes, it’s so beautiful, we’re afraid it may distract visitors from the exhibits."
I kept wandering back to Building Five. Tony Talarico, who had his first full-time job for
Arnold Print Works in the ‘30s, pointed and said, "I think I sat right there." I imagined what it must have
been like to work there and see North Adams through those windows. I wondered how it must have felt for workers to know that
their ancestors had worked there, and that their children would probably work there, too.
I
watched the water rush into the river from underneath River Street. In my mind, I followed it up the hills on the north side,
up to Houghton Street and Liberty Street and Brooklyn Street, and then to the mountains behind. Many times, I have climbed
up to the sand bank on River Street and looked down at the clock tower. Today, it was a different view, and I almost felt
like I must have been here in another life a long time ago.
Over
the last two and a half years, I have followed the progress of this ambitious and wonderfully crazy idea called MASS MoCA.
I remember my first hard-hat tour, when these buildings were just dirty concrete floors and metal posts and broken windows.
In a way, it’s sad that the anticipation is almost over. I will never see these empty spaces again. Before I left, I
watched the river once again. It rushed by as it has for perhaps a thousand years, with never a thought to the changing scene
that it passes.
Steep Roads, a poem by the author
Life is all struggle and triumph,
triumph and struggle.
That
is why I love to walk
the steep roads of
North Adams:
Prospect up to Franklin
Meadow up to East Quincy,
East Quincy up to Kemp,
Hathaway up to North,
Cliff up to Charlene.
When I walk up these
streets,
pumping my arms,
stopping for a breath,
exhilarated at reaching the summit,
turning
around to the wonder below,
I walk with the thousands
who have walked before me.
With each step,
I feel their struggles;
With each final ascent,
I feel their triumphs.
