Bryce Maloney ‘26
Senior Advisor to the Editors-in-Chief
A few months ago, I wrote an article calling on Holy Cross students to take more of an active role in reassessing attitudes and perceptions of the city of Worcester. While the article initially represented my critique of the campus’s culture in relation to the city, I also hoped to utilize that opportunity to provoke wider conversations about the social and economic transformation of my home town.
Worcester is the second-largest city in both Massachusetts and the entire region of the country. However, it doesn’t always feel that way. Not unlike the article I wrote in September, I think much of the reasoning behind that comes from a problem with the way we talk about Worcester. Until recently, Worcester did everything it could to highlight the closeness between the city and Boston. The idea that the city was just ‘45 Minutes outside’ of our state’s capital might be true, but it doesn’t quite encapsulate the all-too-hard to define mood of life in the city of seven hills.
After all, our identity can be quite elusive to onlookers. We are an industrial hub, with no industry. We claim to be a college town, but we certainly don’t look like one. From our leaders, we are constantly told that we are ‘a big city, with small town values.’ We play host to more than 35,000 university students, but have raised an entire generation of children whose chief desire is to leave, and find better opportunities elsewhere. We are close enough to Boston to be tied to it socially and economically, but far enough away to have our own independent identity and culture. For the untrained eye, defining what Worcester’s future holds might present unique challenges. We are what Winston Churchill once called “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”
In that article, I also mentioned the moniker that many Holy Cross students use when describing the city of Worcester, namely, the “Dirty Woo,” and its residents, the less-than affectionately nicknamed “Woo Rats.” However, anyone who has spent any real time getting a sense of the city of Worcester will know it better by the city’s much beloved unofficial motto “Paris of the Eighties.”
To the best of my knowledge, nobody really understands where the phrase “Paris of the Eighties” even comes from. Some suggest it derives itself from an old movie theatre, while others suggest that the name started as a bit of irony pointed towards the uncertainty tied to the end of Worcester’s industrial era in the late 1970s. Regardless of its origins, it is an entirely very Worcester way of poking fun at the city, whilst embracing its distinct culture: and it stuck. Since then, “Paris of the Eighties” merchandise can be found across the city, ranging in anything from t-shirts to IPAs.
But why did it become so popular? In my opinion, it represents a small piece of satire that speaks to a wider identity crisis within the city. In doing so, it also calls attention to an overarching concern by many Worcesterites who have watched this transitional time in our city’s history with a growing amount of skepticism.
For all of us Worcesterites, it has become clear that our home is about to undergo its next great change. As we look forward to that next great unknown, I think it is also important to assess the ways in which our current model of growth can remain viable, and how we need to change in order to future-proof our city.
Firstly, one major issue with Worcester’s outlook is its lack of economic diversity. Our city has become far too reliant on the economic pull of our colleges and universities, and has spent little time discussing other major sources of income. And, while it is largely true that the Colleges have been a great blessing for the city, federal funding cuts and a changing workforce mean that those sources of revenue won’t last forever. When that time comes, we will be seriously lacking in enticing growth in the other industries we need to sustain our current levels of economic development. Likewise, a lackluster large business presence also presents an issue for retaining the thousands of new college graduates our city produces each year. In short, while our first-class higher education institutions bring innovation and academic excellence from around the world, our absence of other industry means that we seldom have the capacity to keep them here. Similarly, it should also be mentioned that there is a palpable feeling of exhaustion among Worcesterites with our city’s overreliance on the colleges, especially amid what many consider to be a marginal return on investment. Last November, Worcester voters went to the polls to vote in local elections. Included on the ballot this year was a question on the imposition of a tax on 0.5% of the endowment of the city’s private universities. While non-binding, its goal was to send a clear message to private higher education institutions across the city about the community’s frustration with the colleges. When all was said and done, it accomplished just that: about 75% of the city’s voters approved the ballot measure.
Worcester’s housing market has seen a boom in activity recently. However, the growth it has affected has not always been the most far-sighted. At times, it feels as though new housing has been built without proper recognition of the fact that many of these new units are constructed without the necessary infrastructure needed to retain buyers and renters once the market fluctuates in the other direction. A lot of the time, they lack the most basic amenities such as walkable access to businesses, parks, and other attractions that make medium-sized cities like Worcester desirable places to live.
Another concern is Worcester’s public transportation disconnectivity. There are about a dozen more daily rail connections between Providence and Boston than there are between Worcester and Boston, despite the fact that Worcester has just under 20,000 more people than Providence, is in the same state, and is closer to Boston. If Worcester wants to retain its levels of growth, we have to work with public transit stakeholders such as the MBTA, Amtrak, and Massport in order to strengthen connectivity with Boston, while also not being beholden to it as a singular regional hub. Instead, Worcester needs to work to establish its own hub: connecting and integrating parts of central New England that have long operated far from major centers of commerce. All too often, it feels as though Worcester has fallen deeply into the “Periphery City” mindset, or that we have become so focused on being a satellite of Boston that we have forgotten about our own orbit.
In my opinion, the solution to Worcester’s public transportation connectivity issues already exists, albeit just below the roads we use today. For decades, Worcester had the largest tram systems in Massachusetts. In fact, many of the city’s old tram lines still lie just below the surface of our modern roads. At its peak, Worcester’s tram system had more than 69 million annual passengers, with lines stretching as far as the borders with Connecticut and Rhode Island, as west as Brimfield, and as north as Fitchburg. Eventually, the streetcars were sold to companies abroad. Many of them could be found in use in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil well into the 1970s, with two still existent as museum props in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre to this day.
Another key issue is the way in which our executive functions. As our city continues to grow and expand, we need an executive system that effectively represents those values. In short, being Mayor of Worcester shouldn’t be a part-time job. Our mayor should be a real executive tasked with the day-to-day administration of the city, while being held directly accountable by the voters at the ballot box. Our current city manager system adds to the bureaucracy, and most importantly, takes away the ability for Worcesterites to directly elect the people who enact policy in their name.
If the last ten years have proved nothing else, it is that Worcester’s issue lies not in its capacity to grow and accept change, but rather in its willingness to take the necessary steps to sustain that change. If we are going to survive the economic, social, and political upheavals to come, we have to learn how to grow sustainably. While Worcester may not have been the Paris of the 80s, the motto paints a telling picture of this place and the spirit of its people: quirky, undefined, quietly ambitious, and most importantly, refreshingly real. Last week, I was out with my friends at Vincent’s, a classic Worcester dive bar that had recently been ranked by USA Today as one of the 50 best in the country. Praised as a legendary institution embedded into our local culture, the article’s description of what makes Vincent’s beloved by Worcesterites could be read as a description of the city itself. “Tucked away across from a row of mostly abandoned warehouses,” Worcester’s unique identity might not be “immediately obvious to the casual driver-by.” However, like the sign that luminescently hangs in one of the windows at Vincent’s, Worcester ultimately “very much is it”
Featured image courtesy of Wikipedia
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