Fishtown Has Faith in Tomorrow, Even if Cod Is Dead
Fishtown is running out of fish. Once the busiest fishing port in the world, Gloucester, Massachusetts, is stuck in its worst crisis ever.
A recent study showed cod stock down 77 percent from 2011, and the federal government is enforcing a catch limit. Come May 1, according to the Gloucester Times, scores of fishing boats will be grounded.
The city long known as Fishtown is facing a fish-less future, and that’s not the port’s only woe.
Drug addiction is a big problem in the blue-collar downtown community. Generations have been affected by the fishing industry’s never-ending downsizing, and Essex County leads the state in opiate-related emergency-room visits. One big news story in recent weeks was about a pit bull that had been disemboweled by its 27-year-old owner after he caught his dog eating his last bag of heroin. (Weird things happen here: This is also the same town that caught national attention in 2008 when 17 Gloucester High School coeds got pregnant at once.)
But Gloucester made its name on cod: It was once the world’s leading exporter of the fish. The city of 30,000 is the capital of Cape Ann, ironic given that the other cape in Massachusetts is named Cod.
Having grown up nearby, I drove into town along a coastal road last week to see how the city is coping with a long winter of storms and bad news.
“Change isn’t just coming to Gloucester; it’s already here. We all know that we must adapt to survive. But for Gloucester, survival isn’t good enough. We want to thrive. And to thrive, we need to honor our past and embrace our future.”
Another day, another blizzard: So goes life this winter in New England. Heavy flakes blurred a frothy gray-and-white Atlantic. At the respected surf breaks, black dots bobbed on white boards in ten-foot swells barreling 100 yards out. Because of the storm, every boat from the fleet was in port; hundreds of fishing vessels, some as big as 100 feet, crowded all piers.
At the House of Mitch, a no-frills bar across from the fishing docks downtown, foreign laborers yelled in Spanish at aging daytime boozers in old Red Sox gear. The elders paid no bother and complained about mail. The whole bar paused from bitching about mail to cheer a Bruins hockey brawl—“Kick his ass, McQuaid!”
On the walls, sports paraphernalia hung next to pictures of boats and various memorials to some of the 3,000 or so Gloucestermen who have died at sea in the past 300 years.
Pessimism is a Massachusetts specialty, but the mood at Mitch’s was extra grim. Peter Van Ness being the exception. Van Ness, a local concert promoter and web designer, had just left a meeting with the city’s tourism officials.
“This moment is a moment for positive change,” he said.
Van Ness, in his 50s, is a happy warrior, and a true believer that Gloucester’s best days are not in the past. In his vision, the working waterfront, as the inner harbor is called, is finally being forced to adapt.
Van Ness’s optimism is out of step with the Mitch’s crowd, but he isn’t the only Gloucester resident who considers the fishery’s closing as a surmountable hitch. In most business owners’ opinions, Cape Ann’s attitude that all “outsidahs suck” is silly.
“Culture and nature are our strongest assets after the fishing industry, and they are the best routes toward increasing the local economy,” Van Ness says. He also wants to help lure tech jobs. “Everybody who’s seriously working on attracting marine science to Gloucester knows we need more than a port. We also need a thriving cultural economy to attract the workers that power marine science. Most of these workers are young, single PhDs who work very long hours and want to go out after work—and on weekends—for food, drink and music. They want to feel surrounded by culture. These people think they want to live in Cambridge. What they may not know is that Gloucester has a burgeoning cultural economy.”
Gloucester may not boast the name recognition and cachet of coastal New England towns like Newport, Rhode Island, home to the Eastern Seaboard’s premier enclave of high-WASP style mansions, or Camden, Maine, where CIA spooks build summer spy dens, or Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the gay crowd summers. But Gloucester has as much “cultural currency” as any of them.
First colonized in 1623, Gloucester is America’s oldest seaport, dubbed Le Beauport when discovered by Samuel Champlain. The jagged island was literally cut: The last quarter-mile of the tidal Annisquam River is called the Cut, and was dredged centuries ago so ships could enter the port from the north, effectively making Gloucester an island.
Seventy miles of coastline ring the glacially carved island, creating dozens of fine sand beaches, pristine coves, stretches of post card-ready rocky coast and a scattering of small islands.
Most Americans do not know Gloucester by name, but the city is prominent in American culture. It’s where Rudyard Kipling wrote and set Captains Courageous. Gloucester–born painter Fitz Hugh Lane’s seascapes hang at the Met and Boston Museum of Fine Art. Winslow Homer lived all alone on a small outer harbor island, where he painted some of his best-known work. Modernists Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis and John French Sloan all summered in town, many on Rocky Neck, the oldest artist colony in America. You can see their work at the Cape Ann Museum downtown.
In 1923, 40-year-old Gloucester summer resident Edward Hopper sold his first painting for $100 to the Brooklyn Museum. Even abstract expressionist master Mark Rothko came to bless the town’s famed light.
Not to be outdone by the painters, in 1950, Gloucester poet Charles Olson coined a little phrase “post-modern” that has since defined an entire aesthetic. Olson later mentored the beatniks and wrote a 1,000-page epic about Fishtown called The Maximus Poems. Countless authors have lived in the area, including John Updike (Rabbit, Run), Tim O’Brien (The Things They Carried) and Mark Kurlansky (Salt, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World).
Not just high culture washes ashore in Gloucester. The city was the setting for the book and movie The Perfect Storm, a true story of a doomed trawler that sank in 1992. These days the National Geographic Channel films its show Tuna Wars from the port. Larry David shot his upcoming feature, Clear History, on Eastern Point and was spotted noshing around town, kvetching and musing over meals straight out of a Curb episode.
Gloucester-booster Van Ness says David was tapping into the town’s intrinsic food culture: “With an emphasis on fresh, day-boat seafood and farm-to-table menus, people come to Gloucester for a unique culinary experience.”
St Peter’s Fiesta might best represent the city’s traditional insularity, and its path forward.
Held every summer, the Fiesta is a mega party to bless the fishing fleet. The weirdest sport ever—greasy pole walking—is a central attraction. That’s correct. Drunk, crazed fishermen try to walk a giant greasy pole out into the harbor to grab a flag. Tens of thousands attend this event. Elements of tourism, culture and the fishing industry collide in a celebration suitable for all ages and audiences. Rather than market the Fiesta nationally, Gloucester barely puts out a press release.
Van Ness wishes the rest of the world knew about the wonderful fiesta that is Gloucester: “Change isn’t just coming to Gloucester; it’s already here. We all know that we must adapt to survive. But for Gloucester, survival isn’t good enough. We want to thrive. And to thrive, we need to honor our past and embrace our future.”
Does your community need a reboot? Say why and how in COMMENTS.
Related Stories on TakePart:
• U.S. Fisheries Service Counts At-Risk Fish by Telephone and ... Postcard
• Faced With a Dying Heritage, Fishermen Left With Few Options After the Spill
• A Fin Frenzy: Fishermen Empty Entire Mali Lake of Fish in Minutes
Ray LeMoine was born in Boston and lives in New York. He’s done humanitarian work in Iraq and Pakistan and has written for various media outlets, including The New York Times, New York magazine and The Awl.
