Industrial development in Fitchburg has slowly ground down, and taken residents’ hopes with it.
Folks at the City Hall Cafe on Fitchburg’s Main Street are bracing for trouble.
Waitress Mona Roberts starts a second job as a home health care worker this weekend. Proprietor John Karanasios is debating whether he could unscrew some of the light bulbs in the diner to reduce his $1,800-a-month utilities bill. Roger Nascimento, owner of a small house-painting business who has dropped in to grab a quick breakfast, may close off the second floor of his home and move his family downstairs this winter to save on heating costs.
“People are getting laid off because businesses are closing down, and I’ve got two friends who are losing their houses,” Roberts says between refilling coffee cups and offering hugs to the regulars. The town has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the state. Even tips are down as locals count their pennies. “The banks are nervous, and people are scared.”
In this city and across the country, economic angst is shaping the political landscape for the election Nov. 4. More than two in three Americans in the latest Gallup Poll cited an economic concern — energy prices, health care coverage or the economy in general — as the central issue in determining their vote for president.
Political Punch
“It’s like a multiple-car accident on the highway — just a collision of things,” says Robert Forrant, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell who studies the economies of small New England cities. “There’s disappearing jobs over a long period of time, then the home foreclosure crisis and obviously high energy costs. All of that has made people feel a great deal of economic anxiety.”
The economy has trumped everything else, including the Iraq war, which loomed as a defining issue a year ago. Thirteen percent of those surveyed Sept. 5-7 named the war as their top concern.
Worry about the economic future already has shaken up one election in this leafy mill town of 40,000 on the Nashua River.
In the mayor’s race last November, a 28-year-old Chinese American woman who promised a new path routed a longtime member of the City Council by 3-1, shaking the power structure. Lisa Wong, now 29, ran on a platform of reforming city finances and revitalizing the downtown. She wants to attract art galleries and restaurants, see historic buildings converted to urban condos and even build a whitewater kayaking course.
In the presidential election this November, both campaigns see Democrat Barack Obama as all but certain to carry the Bay State and its 12 electoral votes. Among the most reliably Democratic states in the nation, Massachusetts hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan. A statewide Rasmussen poll last month of 500 likely voters gave Obama a double-digit lead, 51 percent-36 percent, over Republican John McCain.
Even so, the economy has created the sort of political crosscurrents here that are apparent in more competitive battlegrounds. From Pennsylvania to New Hampshire and across the Rust Belt, communities like Fitchburg have searched for financial footing after the loss of manufacturing jobs to Southern states and foreign competitors. The economic slowdown has made those efforts harder.
Colors Of The River
Nascimento, 46, a father of four, has never voted for a Republican for president but leans toward McCain. Obama’s message “is all about hope, nothing about experience,” he says. “McCain has a little bit more experience.” That’s key to getting things done, he says.
Roberta Hardy, 52, who sits at the cafe’s counter for a morning cup of coffee and conversation, argues that Obama is ready for the job, though she preferred Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primary. “We need to get rid of the old and get in with the new,” she says.
When the mills were in their heyday a century ago, locals say the river would run yellow one day, red the next — whatever color paper was being produced.
Fitchburg was a thriving industrial center that featured a mile-long Main Street spotted with grand Victorian-style churches, three of them decorated with stained-glass windows from Tiffany’s. Steep terrain rose on either side of the river, and residents boasted that they lived in the hilliest city outside San Francisco.
The river has returned to its natural color, which is a positive development environmentally but a troublesome one economically. Most of the big mills are empty. Crime, especially drug-related crime, is a major concern, says Jeff McMenemy, editor of the local newspaper, the Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise.
When a newspaper photographer stopped to take a picture of an urban landscape, a Massachusetts state trooper in an unmarked car confronted him and demanded to know what he was doing. The trooper noted persistent problems with gunfire in a nearby neighborhood.
Some residents have remained committed to the city through its ups and downs. Carol and Ray Davin are third-generation proprietors of DeBonis & Davin Florist, established in 1939 and a fixture on Main Street for four decades. Their shop is in the town’s original city hall, built in 1790. They live and reared their two children above the store.
“Fitchburg is really beautiful, with the hills and the bird sanctuary” a few blocks away, says Carol Devin, 54. There are miles of trails to hike and walk their dog in a setting so wild they carry “bear bells” to alert larger creatures that they’re on their way.
They watched with concern through times of economic deterioration.
“At the end of the ’80s, things started going down, and in the ’90s, there was a big decline,” Ray Davin, 56, recalls. “The rest of the country was coming back, but Fitchburg was losing jobs and people were moving out.” The city tried to diversify its economy, targeting the sort of high-tech companies fueling growth in Boston and along Route 128.
Gannett
