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| New Beffuh |
Sure, Bee Bay is part of Barnstable County. Yes, I know that we have clam shacks, summer rentals, Cape traffic, and that life gets Mighty Different after Columbus Day.
It doesn't matter, though. Buzzards Bay is the extreme eastern end of the South Coast. I wouldn't admit it if I weren't so sure it was true.
I wanted to lead off with this because we're going to rough up the South Coast a bit today, and I wanted everyone reading this to know it was being done with Love. I believe in the South Coast enough to move here. When I say things like "the armpit of Massachusetts," know that it's just one South Coast brother kidding another one.
The Real Cape just produced a scathing analysis of certain trends in their article "Wareham Coming In Hot As The 11th Worst Place To Live In Massachusetts." They use the wiggle room all Gateway area writers use to work ?ham into a Cape Cod article. I used to do it all the time on Cape Cod 2Day. "It's the Gateway," as a Celtics cheerleader from Wareham once told me.
I'm not doubting Wareham's spot in the top 11, which is headed by New Bedford and also includes Fall River, Gardner, North Adams, Fitchburg, Ware, Brockton, Southbridge, Taunton and Athol. They crunched a bunch of numbers like crime rate, school quality, things to do, transportation, culture, etc.... and then they done disparaged dat ol' South Coast!!
Here are my quick thoughts on each non-South Coast town.
Gardener... part of the FAG corridor down Route 2 (with Athol and Fitchburg), this is an industrial mill town in the post-mill era. Yes, I know it's "Gardner," I just like to tweak noses now and then. Gardner is the home of the World's Largest Chair, in case you're arguing about that at the bar as you read this.
North Adams... Nor'Addy is the smallest city in Massachusetts. Following a theme you'll see repeatedly in this list, North Adams used to be great when the mills were working. The mills aren't working now, however...
Fitchburg... Even though it's a rotten mill town in decline, I'd keep Son Of A Fitch off the list because A) they make UTZ potato chips there, B) it figures prominently in both the Harry Potter canon and Return To Peyton Place, and C) there is no third reason. Worst "picture of downtown (insert town here)" picture on all of Wikipedia, too. Kowloon, China is second. The Walled City ranked first before the city was demolished.
Ware... With 9800 souls in the middle of nowhere, they must have had to work hard to not call it "Where?" Care to guess if the 1850s mills are still prosperous? There are several maps of the region that depict the town name merely as a question mark (?).
Brockton... Club Homeboy should be higher on the list. You could put on a money shirt and walk through Ware unmolested. Just wearing a shirt is offensive in some parts of Brockton. It is very funny that only 15 miles stand between Bee Rock City and tony Duxbury (which it used to be a part of, Myles Standish essentially founded Brockton), but that's about how it works. Brockton is the only representative of the South Shore on the list, but it is less South Shore and more an entity unto itself. Currently ranks 41st among American cities in violent crime, which isn't bad for a town that is historically West Duxbury.
Taunton... Some discussion went down before we removed Brockton from the group of South Coast towns we'll discuss in length later in the article, even though Brockton isn't South Coast. Taunton is also off Wikipedia's list, even though it's just a Berkley away from Fall River.
Southbridge... Just across the state line from Woodstock,CT.... known as "Honest Town," The former Eye Of Massachusetts and her optical factories faded into insignificance when the Mexicans or Chinese started making glasses cheaper. Worry you not, they still have a sizable population of displaced Puerto Rican and Laotian factory workers hanging around town.
Athol.... I drove through this town on my way towards visiting girls at Franklin Pierce College in NH. It looks like the kind of place you'd see a Yeti. Athol may not deserve her spot on The Real Cape's list, as the material they are working with gives Athol over 50,000 people when, in fact, the town holds 16,000. My favorite thing about Athol was a WBCN/Billy West skit about Peter Falk visiting various New England towns. It made no sense at all at first when he went to Athol... "Wow, look at the firehouse... Hey, they have a post office!" The joke was in the last line of the skit... "This week... Falk, In Athol."
Say it aloud a few times, lisp if you have to....
The fun part here is that the South Coast has a pretty good grasp on some of the top spots, outpacing numerous North Cambridges and Lowells. Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin... didn't/couldn't get past the Sketchy Sketchy South Coast.
Does the South Coast really merit a 1-2 punch on the top spot, and a few other towns wedged into the Top 11? How did it come to this?
Fall River, Wareham, Brockton, Taunton and New Bedford have a coastal version of the problems that Gardner and Fitchburg have. They were built to support industries that are no longer profitable in the manner they were run back in the proverbial Day.
Fall River was all about textiles, especially whatever Print Cloth is. When the states who grow the cotton realized they could build the textile machines in their own states and cut out the middleman, Fall River went into decline. There's also the small problem of the town's most famous resident being America's only axe murderer with an eponymous nursery rhyme.
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| Fall River |
Fall River also got a cut out of the New York City garment trade, but that fell victim to globalization and Kathy Lee Gifford having skirts stitched together in Asian sweat shops... which is the same thing, but I digress...
Brockton has a similar story, but the industry was shoemaking. New Bedford was, at various times, whaling or textiles. Taunton was iron and silver. Wareham, to my knowledge, was Tourism.
In each case, a dominant industry failed, and the town went into economic decline. With that, you get the crime, the shoddy schools, the crumbling infrastructure, mass (Mass?) unemployment and, in the end, Exodus.
There's not much race to it. Blacks, Hispanics, white folk... they all trend towards poverty when the factory closes. Economic decline is color-blind, although she does like to keep a nice mix.
Depending on if you include Brockton in the mix (and it is very much like New Bedford, and very much not like her neighboring towns of the Bridgewaters, Avon, Whitman and so forth), the South Coast holds 5 of the top 11 spots, including the two 2 spots.
Wareham is a unique case here, although her story is just a different take on the same Mill Town concept.
Wareham, and Buzzards Bay (town), used to be the hosts of the only road that led to the Bourne Bridge. They lined that road with gas stations, clam shacks, mini golf, ice cream, antique shops, restaurants, package stores and anything else that could suck money out of a tourist. The towns fattened on this trade, and Tourism is primarily why mainland Wareham and Buzzards Bay are often considered to be part of Cape Cod.
Then, they extended Route 25 to the Bourne Bridge in 1987. There was no need for someone going to Cape Cod to have to slog through Wareham and Buzzards Bay. The tourist dollars flowed onto Cape Cod without the Gateway getting their cut. Even the road itself killed jobs (and, more importantly, industry), as the highway rambled through the state's best Cranberry growing region.
Once the clam shacks closed, the waitresses had no money to spend at the supermarket, which also closed. The supermarket clerks had no money to spend on mini-golf, so the mini-golf folded. A plaza with a Wal-Mart and a Staples stemmed the bleeding for a while, but they both moved into more prosperous West Wareham as soon as the land was zoned.
Pretty soon, all that was left of the Tourism trade was the traffic gridlock as people drove around Wareham and Buzzards Bay. As the villages spiraled into decline, anyone with money left moved away. Businesses closed, and no new ones moved in.
Soon enough, only a hard-working criminal element kept them in the news at all, and Wareham slipped towards ?ham.
Enough of the South Coast abuse. Let's all kick back and learn something, shall we?
South Coast Trivia
Wikipedia scores the South Coast as:
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| Fall River |
- Acushnet, Massachusetts
- Dartmouth, Massachusetts
- Fairhaven, Massachusetts
- Fall River, Massachusetts
- Freetown, Massachusetts
- Little Compton, Rhode Island*
- Marion, Massachusetts
- Mattapoisett, Massachusetts
- New Bedford, Massachusetts
- Rochester, Massachusetts
- Tiverton, Rhode Island*
- Wareham, Massachusetts
- Westport, Massachusetts
- While I may be stretching it to include Buzzards Bay (village) in the South Coast, other people feel that the Rhode Island towns of Tiverton and Little (Straight Outta) Compton are sort of honorary members of the South Coast.
- Taunton gets left out. No love for the Triple S of Swansea, Seekonk and Somerset, either. I assume they are grouped with more northern towns like Attleboro and, uhm, whatever is next to Attleboro.
- The term "South Coast" has been traced to weatherman Todd Gross, who came up with the term to differentiate between Southern Plymouth/Bristol County and the South Shore. Why the South Shore, which faces East, is called the South Shore is beyond me. Either way, we have a South Shore and a South Coast now. People in the region actually got angry when the New Bedford Standard-Times began to use the term.
- The adoption of the South Coast moniker sort of displaced the formerly-used Greater New Bedford designation. A media blitz accompanied the adoption of the term, pointing out that the Sow Co had "the Cape's climate, better infrastructure, and cheaper land prices."
- "South Coast" and "Metro West" are relatively recent terms, invented by local media. "MetroWest" displaced "Middlesex" among the locals, again with some difficulty. It was invented by the guy who used to own the former Middlesex Daily News.
- I'd guess (and might be wrong) that "Cape Cod" and "Plymouth County" are the two longest-standing regional names.
- The South Coast is an odd mix of larger and smaller towns. You can light a smoke in downtown New Bedford, the worst place in the state, and pitch it out your car window 8 minutes later in rural, bucolic, backwater Acushnet.
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| Mattapoisett |
- Massachusetts leads America with a Portagee population of 392,000. MetroBoston has 192K of that number, and the South Coast has a lesser-but-major share of the remainder. Massachusetts is 6.2 Portuguese, while Rhode Island leads America at 9.7%.
- Fall River is 37% Portuguese, and 8% Cape Verdean.
- New Bedford is over 33% Portuguese, 10% Puerto Rican, and almost 9% Cape Verdean.
- Wareham is 87% white, with an unknown number of Portagee. I did see a figure of 9.29% somewhere. They represent hard enough to host the Cape Verdean Festival every year.
- The source that coughed up 9.29% for Wareham ascribed Fall River over 43%, and New Bedford over 36%.
- Taunton isn't really South Coast (it lays a bit North of the area proper, and is the seat of Bristol County), but we consider it to be a fringe SC area, with a stronger grip than Brockton. If you consider it South Coast, I'm cool with that. If you think it stands distinct, I can see your side, too.
- The northern South Coast touches upon the southern base of the Bridgewater Triangle.
- New Bedford, trying hard to take the crime title away from Fall River, has no criminal to match Lizzie Borden (who, I might add, was not convicted). They compete by volume. The New Bedford area had her own serial killer in the late 1980s. You couldn't get out of your car to take a whizz on Routes 195 or 140 without stumbling onto some prostitute that he had killed and dumped there. He was never caught. New Bedford is also where Big Dan's Tavern was.
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| Hey, she's tough... she's a harbor chick |
Fall River: Lizzie Borden, no contest
Wareham: Geena Davis, also winning in a rout. #2 is Pebbles from JAM-N 94.5.
Westport: Pixies singer Frank Black edges out abolitionist Paul Cuffee, ESPN girl Wendy Nix and Hillary from the The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Westport has a disproportionate talent-per-population ratio for a small-town backwater, although Marion reigns the roost in that regard, as you will see in a moment.
Rochester: Joseph Bates (founded Seventh Day Adventist Church)
New Bedford: Frederick Douglass
Mattapoisett: Oliver Wendell Holmes lived there is some capacity
Marion: Claiming 4000 souls, this town has been a temporary home to FDR, Grover Cleveland, Admiral Byrd, Dom DiMaggio and Geraldo Rivera. It is also the port of Benjamin Briggs, last Master of the doomed ship Mary Celeste. I'm leaving out several other semi-famous people.
Freetown: Former Miss Massachusetts and current NECN newsie Jackie Bruno.
Fairhaven: A good three way race between Gil Santos, Joshua Slocum and Christopher Reeve (had a sailboat moored in Fairhaven).
Dartmouth: Choose between died-there General Phillip Sheridan and summer person Tea Leoni.
Acushnet: Doesn't have a notable resident list on Wikipedia, but Herman Melville once sailed on a whaler named Acushnet. That's close enough.
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