Northshore Magazine

April 2014 nshoremag.com 31 photographs by robert boyd haverhill is a city of contradictions. A stranger passing through its outskirts might assume that Haverhill is largely rural, with family farms still growing fruits and vegetables and raising livestock, and huge swaths of conservation land rolling along its lakes, ponds, and namesake hills. Haverhill's downtown, though, tells a different story. Here, the mighty Mer- rimack River courses through the heart of the city, behind 19th-century factory buildings that recall a time when the river powered an industrial leather tanning and shoemaking powerhouse that earned Haverhill nicknames like "The Shoe City" and "The Queen Slipper City." Imagining the industriousness of those days makes it easy to see how Haverhill churned out business moguls in the early years of the 20th century. Among them was filmmaker Louis B. Mayer, who, according to Janice Williams, curator of the Haverhill Histori- cal Society at Buttonwoods Museum, ran his first movie theaters there; and Rowland H. Macy, whose dry goods store on Mer- rimack Street was the forerunner to his Macy's department stores, and who held the first of his now-iconic Thanksgiving Day parades in Haverhill's downtown. Like so many of New England's former factory cities, Haverhill's glory days seemed over by the late 1980s, when most of its shoe factories had succumbed to cheaper foreign goods and closed. For a time, it appeared that Haverhill's destination Hale Haverhill The small city on the Merrimack River has come a long way since its industrious settlers set its engines in motion. By Alexandra Pecci downtown might have done nothing but crumble into disrepair as the inner city crept up around it. But the past decade has seen downtown Haverhill come alive once again, with money, resources, and re-zoning—transforming its boarded-up and abandoned factory buildings from skeletons of a once-mighty past to monu- ments of a bright and burgeoning future. "We've had a dramatic revitalization of our downtown," says Haverhill Mayor James Fiorentini. "We call it the Haverhill Renaissance." Fiorentini says that over the past several years, roughly $150 million has been in vested into Haverhill's downtown, creating a bustling restaurant district, lively arts community, new housing developments, and the beginnings of a recreational wa- terfront with public access area along the KJ Apr14 Haverhill.indd 31 2/20/14 5:45 PM

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