Go Worcester!

For the five years preceding our triumphant (I hope) return to Newburyport, we spent five years living in the Greater Worcester area.

I like Worcester. I'm a sucker for a gritty city with character and Worcester has both in spades. Add in some good restaurants, some nice coffee, and minor league baseball and you've got a winning recipe.

What it lacked, however, was a real downtown. For those familiar with the area, Worcester's core is dominated by a massive, hulking mess of a defunct shopping mall. Even in it's early days in the 1970s, the former Worcester Center Galleria couldn't have been much more than an eyesore.

I'm sure people saw hope in the traffic the stores drew, but such a thing didn't belong in a city.

Essentially, Worcester did what Newburyport did not. It ripped up streets of dilapidated buildings and replaced them with a modern, car friendly shopping center.


The idea worked for a time, but eventually the people with cars had even more modern and more car friendly shopping centers to patronize. New England Development (heard of them?) stepped in with a plan to revitalize the shops by creating the Worcester Common Outlets, but that idea never took hold.

So the downtown Worcester Galleria withered and died. It was near-death when I moved to the area a few years ago.

By the time I left plans were already underway to reclaim the downtown. A group bought the outlet and surrounding properties with the intention to recreate a real downtown with apartments, small store fronts and offices to attract and to keep people downtown. Here's the Web site.

Essentially, Worcester is trying to undo what Newburyport didn't do 40 years ago.

Here's a good take on the rebirth that starts today in the Worcester Telegram Gazette.