Architecture: Monuments Just Don't Pay

"This is where the America we know began," said Professor William Pierson of Williams College. "You could write the whole history of industrial architecture and technology of the 19th century right here." Professor Pierson was referring to one of the U.S.'s most imposing and historic industrial landmarks, the Amoskeag millyard, whose 139 red brick buildings line the banks of the Merrimack River for more than a mile in Manchester, N.H. This month the Amoskeag will begin to fall to the wrecker's ball. Ninety of the complex's buildings will be replaced with parking lots, and the moss-hung, mirror-clear canals that still splash over wooden spillways will be filled in to make way for a sewage system.

To most Americans, mills spell work, dirt and drudgery. Eager to preserve the charming houses and churches of colonial times, they have seemed downright anxious to destroy their industrial heritage. "Unfortunately, the industrialist who was made by the mills is the guy who cares the least about them now," says Pierson, who was active in efforts to preserve the mill. "All he's worried about is how to make a profit. And the biggest obstacles to preservation are the elected town officers, from the mayor on down. They are tough, pragmatic and just don't care about conserving the past."

Manchester's Urban Renewal Director Gary P. Davis puts it more bluntly: "Monuments just don't pay." Davis insists that parking facilities are essential for the 80 businesses that today occupy space in the mill's buildings. He is backed up almost 100% by Manchesterites, who are still bitter about the abrupt liquidation of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Co. in 1936, which threw some 11,000 of the town's millhands out of work.

Cohesive Design. The story of Amoskeag begins in the early 1800s, when Samuel Blodgett, a Massachusetts businessman, was looking for a farm to buy near the small village of Derryfield on the Merrimack River. Just back from England, and impressed with the opportunities in the textile industry, he instead put his fortune into building a canal linking the Merrimack with Boston. He boasted: "Here, at my canal, will be a manufacturing town that shall be the Manchester of America." The small cotton mill he started did indeed grow to house the largest textile mill in the world, and after his death Derryfield was renamed Manchester.

The fledgling company employed a 19-year-old engineer named Ezekiel Straw, who would later become Governor of New Hampshire, to lay out a brand-new town. Straw produced one of the most cohesive urban designs in the country. With the millyard as the heart of town, he provided for a commercial district, corporation tenements, housing lots, a cemetery, public buildings and six public commons. The company donated land for schools and churches. The first building—which is among those to be wrecked—went up in 1838, the last in 1915. Over the century of Amoskeag's existence, the architectural integrity of the original plan was preserved. When new buildings rose to make room for the cotton gins, spinning machines and semiautomatic looms that were among the first mass-production machinery developed, they echoed the plain, geometric brick facades, capped by prim towers, of the original. So it remained until urban renewal plans were formulated in 1965.