Introduction
Due to its active waterfront’s multiple employment opportunities, the city experienced rapid population growth and diversification, increasing from 3,947 in 18202 to 18,000 in 18533. At whaling’s peak in the early 1850s, over three hundred ships departed from the harbor each year.1 This once small village of white, Quaker families quickly came in with a diversity of culture. The entire city depended on this industry.
In The Fugitive’s Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts, historian Kathryn Grover remarks on local historian Samuel Rodman’s date view that there were “two New Bedfords” spatially and socially: that of the whaling merchants and captains, and the squalid sections of the workers upon whom the city’s industry depended. Rodman described the first as a “fair and dignified village on the hilltop, where patrician mansions, with opulent gardens,” while the other housed “sailors and those who preyed upon them, the saloons, where delirium and death were sold, the boarding houses, the dance halls, and the houses where female harpies reigned and vice and violence were rampant.”4 The juxtaposition of the captains’ and shipowners’ prosperity beside the seedy realities of whalers’ experiences created an undercurrent of tension in New Bedford.
This project depicts the growth and development of these two New Bedfords, and the ways in which different citizens viewed the waterfront district. Exploring contemporary perceptions of the waterfront, we can start to see how that tension played out on the streetscapes and in the community.
1 Kathryn Grover, The Fugitive’s Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001): 24.
2 Ibid., 24.
3 Ibid., 56.
4 Pease, ed. Diary of Samuel Rodman, 37.
