Talk:Lawrence, Massachusetts

oops

Oops -- Robert Frost was not born in Lawrence, Mass. He may be associated with New England, but he was born in San Francisco. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.80.224.146 (talk) 19:10, 8 September 2003 (UTC)

Interesting things about Lawrence

Some intersting things about Lawrence that I believe are true:

1. Lawrence was a planned industrial city built by a corporation set up for the production of woolen cloth, the Essex Company. It was meant to be a copy of the profitable cotton town of Lowell, Massachusetts some ten-odd miles up the Merrimack River.

2. Many of the investors in the Essex Company were typical of textile investors across New England at the time: members of relatively prominent shipping families looking to diversify their wealth after the highly profitable far east spice trade dried up.

3. Little capital investment was given toward making the mills more productive, e.g. so they could diversify into more profitable items like multi-colored cloths, etc. The failure to make capital investments was partially due to the desire of investors to pay themselves high dividends. Thus the mills competed in terms of price rather than superior quality/value, meaning they had to hold wages down in order to survive.

4. This led to the hiring first of single farm girls and then of even cheaper immigrant labor, including children down to the age of 10 or so.

5. Even with these cost saving measures, competition drove most New England woolen mills into bankruptcy in the 1890s. The American Woolen Company was set up to merge them all together and make them more efficient and to end competition, at least regionally. In other words, it was the classic monopolistic trust of the late 19th century that the Sherman anti-trust act set out to eliminate.

6. However, all the creation of the American Woolen Company did was to stretch out the twilight of low value woolen manufacturing for another 50 years. The savior for the Lawrence woolen industry was government orders for blankets in World War I and II. There was very little other demand for their goods at the prices they had to charge.

7. Lawrence has always struggled financially, not just recently. In earlier years this was because the textile mills were exempt from real estate taxes. Most of the rest of the real estate was tenement houses, mill housing (also exempt) and shops.

8. One silver lining: because its enormous mills were water powered, there is relatively little environmental contamination compared to its historical manufacturing significance.

Bibliography includes

• Dengler, Khalife and Skulski, "Lawrence Massachusetts" (Immigrant City Archives 1995)
• Roddy, "Mills, mansions, and mergers : the life of William M. Wood (1982)

Cbmccarthy 17:27, 25 March 2006 (UTC)cbmccarthy

Regarding this silver lining, the Bolta factory on Canal Street was one of the nastiest superfund sites in the country. So, they got the environmental contamination topic covered. EraserGirl (talk) 21:33, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Neighborhoods?

As someone from Lowell, I'm interested in the parts of Lawrence. I know where Downtown Lawrence is, I know South Lawrence is a recognized neighborhood, and when I was little, we had friends in Tower Hill (but I can't tell you exactly where it is). I know Lawrence is a physically much smaller city, but maybe something like the neighborhoods information from the Lowell page would go nice here? Thanks, CSZero 14:35, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

I lived in Lawrence at the bottom of Tower Hill. Went to St. Augustine grammar school and St Mary’s High School. I might not have the precise streets for Tower Hill, but, I believe it started around the intersection of Margin St and Essex Streets and continued up the hill of Essex Street to at least Ames Street. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 1947baby (talk • contribs) 16:33, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Lawrence, MA Seal.gif

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BetacommandBot 05:56, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Mill City??

Can someone please provide support that the nickname of Lawrence is "Mill City"? I lived there for my first 18 years and never heard that expression. Cbmccarthy 14:36, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Well, I went ahead and did it. I changed the nickname to the one I have always heard: Immigrant City. 01:29, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Actually when you live IN the city you don't use a nickname. It's only people who are trying to think up quaint nicknames who use one. EraserGirl (talk) 17:20, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Mill City is the nickname for Lowell, MA, not Lawrence, MA. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2603:3005:1302:C900:C965:D0:4791:D55C (talk) 15:10, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

recent fires?

What pray tell does that section have to do with the article? Every 5 or 10 years there is a massive fire in Lawrence, this last one is no more important than any of the previous ones, and by far smaller than the fires in the 80s. EraserGirl (talk) 17:20, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree, but it's a general condition of Wikipedia that what is a major local event (this fire made national news) becomes a section on a Wikipedia page. As time goes on, editors will need to have these discussions and remove things that never became generally important. The way I look at it, Wikipedia is not paper ( WP:PAPER ), and therefore, around the time of the fire and for months afterwards, it would be a common thing for people to come to the Lawrence page to read about. As it fizzles in notability in the grand scheme of Lawrence burning down, we can remove it. As you said, a city made of wood (or at least having wood floors soaked in oil) tends to have fires. Maybe it hurts the neutral point of view to highlight this one after it is no longer on everyone's mind. Or maybe we remove it because it takes up precious screen real-estate. CSZero (talk) 20:38, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps next time someone does a major addition, it should be removed. I don't feel strongly enough about it to do it today. EraserGirl (talk) 21:29, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

I totally agree. This section is out of place and should be deleted, for the reasons you cite. Cbmccarthy (talk) 16:28, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

References

Unlike other area towns and cities, there are a lot of reference sources for Lawrence, and nearly none appear in the notes. Large portions of this article, though well written and most likely accurate have no notes or citations at all. It should be very simple to obtain a few books and cite the information in the article.

• Watson, Bruce. Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream
• Cole, Donald. Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921
• Desantis, Ronald. Lawrence Police Department (Images of America)
• Dorgan, Maurice. Lawrence yesterday and today: (1845-1918) a concise history of Lawrence Massachusetts - her industries and institutions; municipal statistics and a variety of information concerning the city
• n.a. Life and Times in Immigrant City: Memories of a Textile Town
• Schinto, Jeanne. Huddle Fever: Living in the Immigrant City
• Baker, Julie. The Bread and Roses Strike of 1912
• Cahn, William. Lawrence 1912 The Bread and Roses Strike
• Immigrant Archives. Lawrence, Massachusetts vol 1 (Images of America)
• Skulski, Ken. Lawrence, Massachusetts vol 2 (Images of America)
• Sandberg, Louise Brady. Lawrence in the Gilded Age (MA) (Images of America)

If you are near Lawrence, the Lawrence History Center/Immigrant City Archives and Museum at 6 Essex St. will have all of these, the Lawrence Public Library will have some of them, though they are probably not circulation items. EraserGirl (talk) 14:13, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Adding citations is a very good start, however Eartha and Ken's picture book isn't the best original source material, I am sure in the back there is a bibliography of THEIR source material, now THAT's the stuff we need. Thanks for the update, if you need further clarification about citation format beyond WP:CITE just holler. EraserGirl (talk) 16:05, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Immigrant City?

I would like to see a concrete reference for the origin of this term. I haven't seen a reference that predates the 1963 Dorgan book. Did HE make it up? certainly no one living IN the city, would refer to it that way, only when historians refer to it do I see it called that. EraserGirl (talk) 16:25, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it's kind of presumptuous to say what people living there do or don't say if you don't live there.

Anyway, doesn't the fact that the city's own archive is called "Immigrant City Archives" lend enough support that a nickname for Lawrence is the immigrant city? Plus all the books that use this title? I thought the point with Wikipedia is that you cite real books by real authors, rather than personal experience. These are real books. As for experience of residents, I can say for certain that when I learned about the history of Lawrence as a public school student there in the 1970s, we learned that its nickname is the immigrant city. Not in day to day usage necessarily, but certainly as a reference. I think there is enough support for immigrant city to move off the issue and focus on other things in the article.

By the way, thanks for referencing all the books that cover Lawrence. Cbmccarthy (talk) 16:20, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

When I was in school in the 60's, the term was not in general usage, and most of the books with the word in the title post date that period. But I will grant that the city NOW has the appellation. I corresponded with the director of the archives about having someone there improve this article. I think that may eventually happen, I will forward my question about the term's genesis, perhaps it is one that was popular in Lawrence's heydey, 1845-1950 and then fell out of favor until the rise of interest in its heritage in the 80s. That happens. EraserGirl (talk) 22:14, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

You folks are way behind the times. The immigrant groups you mention assimilated and moved on decades ago. The mills stand dead and abandoned or are occupied by small business owners, except possibly for the one owned by that wonderful man who continued to pay his employees after being burned out. Currently Lawrence is only nominally an English city. Spanish is mainly spoken there but of course a large proportion of the Spanish speakers speak English as a second language. It is a city of bilinguals. The businesses are Spanish, except on the fringes. Their employees are ancouraged to learn some Spanish. All the old ethnic neighborhoods stand just as their former occupants left them, but now the new occupants speak Spanish at home. No doubt they too will all assimilate but not this decade. Public services all have a staff of bilinguals on hand. In the streets individuals with extensive tatoos dominate except in cases of direct confrontation with police. There is no mention of any of these developments in the article. You folks are living in the past through its literature. I had the good fortune to work in downtown Lawrence. I loved it. It is nothing like the Lawrence you write about here, however. I doubt if these changes were wrought by legal immigration, but that is not my business. By the way I will be making changes to this article. I don't view it as either a good one or one that exemplifies WP policy and formatting. Dave (talk) 02:12, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at. Note I just added a short sentence about the financial issues to bring light to the fact that Lawrence is not all sunshine: not by a long shot. However, the article DOES mention that the Dominicans have been moving in in large numbers, etc (in the context of a long line of different groups). It DOES mention that the mills are largely closed. The only large difference between what it says and what you seem to want it to say is to point out the word Spanish and English over and over and over. Or maybe I'm misreading and you want to write about William Lantigua's scandals, etc. Because that certainly belongs in here. CSZero (talk) 02:57, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I have reopened the discussion on nicknames for Lawrence. See City of Merrimack as a Nickname discussion below. Cbmccarthy (talk) 21:20, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Improving this article

Because I live in New York and do not have access to specific books about Lawrence (except the ones I cited), I can't really improve on this article further. (I would add, however, that it has way more footnote citations already than a typical Wikipedia article).

I thought by adding an organizational framework around immigrant communities, I could inspire others to fill it in. I am sure a lot of people whose ancestors passed through Lawrence will also be interested to know where various immigrant communities were located. That is why I focused on churches, which often formed the geographic core of each community.

Can anyone build on the information that is already there? Cbmccarthy (talk) 16:26, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

I can see your point about generating interest, anything is helpful, and until better, fuller information comes along, it will due as placeholders. However I strongly disagree with your assumption that this article has "has way more footnote citations already than a typical Wikipedia article" It has about as many as any "start class" article, but even so considering the the quality of the footnotes is less than desirable. I think in time it will grow, what we need is someone passionate with access to the proper sources. EraserGirl (talk) 22:19, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Possible Ad

I call the highlighted section that reads “sustainable luxury apartments” http://www.monarchlofts.com/ as a possible ad, anyone agree? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.61.172.186 (talk) 00:50, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Private Colleges

Please do not vandalize my edits. Merrimack College has a division at 94 Bradford St. Mass School of Law does not. ONLY schools with a presence inside the city limits should be listed. EraserGirl (talk) 04:11, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Vandalize is a strong term for when someone reverts your edit because they disagree with you. That said, I think you are correct about not listing schools outside of the city, so I removed those. Much like there is a Greater Lowell article, you might want to make a Greater Lawrence article to deal with campuses that are nearly-Lawrence.

As for Merrimack College, I removed it from the list because I couldn't find a citation that it has a Lawrence campus. The address you provided is for a small Catholic school. I don't know Lawrence super well, so if I'm wrong, feel free to re-add it.

Thanks, CSZero (talk) 05:08, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Notable persons

Che Arrajj was recently added as a notable person. Seems like he is a local artist and has not recieved notable status. Any objections if I delete? Wkharrisjr (talk) 13:19, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Jonathan Leavitt was recently added as a notable person. Seems like he is a local activist and has not recieved notable status. Any objections if I delete? Wkharrisjr (talk) 13:21, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

None to either whatsoever. Please be WP:BOLD and just go ahead and do this sort of thing - no need to ask as Wikipedia:NOTE is very clear on this. This - people adding non-encyclopedic people for either vandalism or promotion reasons - is a constant issue on locality pages (which I watch quite a few of) and it gets extremely frustrating. Thanks and happy editing, CSZero (talk) 14:26, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Done and doneWkharrisjr (talk) 14:49, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

History of formation not really accurate

The Boston Associates did not invest in or build any mills in Lawrence. Rather, they formed the Essex Company (which, oddly, is mentioned nowhere in the article) to build the Great Stone Dam, the canals and other basic waterworks, which in turn would provide power to mills. They also built some housing. The mills themselves were built by other groups of investors, who bought the rights to water power from the Essex Company. Abbott Lawrence was a member of the Boston Associates. The Boston Associates, who had been in the textile business for nearly 30 years when Lawrence was founded, knew to insulate themselves from being dirctly in the mill business by this time, as profit margins were rapidly declining compared to the vast profits that had been available when they founded Lowell -- in fact, a number of Lawrence mills failed in the first 20 years of the city's existence, or had to be completely recapitalized. I have a nice history of the Arlington Mills that tells the story of the Essex Company and the various mill corporations such as the Arlington, the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Pemberton, etc, and will fill in this section properly one of these days.

As for the American Woolen Company, it was a much later creation. By the 1890s, the various little textile companies all over New England were largely unprofitable, thanks in part to the insistence of paying large dividends to shareholders instead of reinvesting to keep up with technology and new, better kinds of cloth. Many were in bankruptcy. The American Woolen Company was founded on the model of the great "trusts" of the era -- the idea being that if all the corporations in one industry were rolled up, economies of scale plus the ability to fix prices would drive up profits. It took the form of a modern corporation, raising capital in the stock market from thousands of anonymous investors, as well as from the issuance of bonds. William Wood, its President, was not so much a "mill owner" as a CEO, of the kind you would find in a modern corporation. His father-in-law, Frederick Ayer, who helped financially back the creation of the AWC, was akin to a sponsoring private equity firm that took charge of consolidating the mills and raising capital to fund the acquistions. The fact that the AWC paid Wood very lavishly seems no different than the lavish multi-million dollar pay given to successful CEOs in the current era.

I can also fill this in properly in due course. Cbmccarthy (talk) 22:42, 4 April 2010 (UTC)

"City of the Merrimack" as purported nickname

I deleted this. What is the source or cite? There are at least 30 towns and cities on the Merrimack River in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Any one of them could be "The City of the Merrimack." In fact, there is a Town of Merrimack, but it's not Lawrence. Cbmccarthy (talk) 21:20, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

Also, I added "Immigrant City" back as a nickname for Lawrence. Instead of making up nicknames for Lawrence, people should use ones that are in fact supported by valid written sources. Back in 2008 when I last inserted the Immigrant City nickname, I provided citations to the use of this nickname (e.g. the book by Cole; the existence of an "Immigrant City Archives" in Lawrence). EraserGirl nevertheless decided to override my citations, to proclaim basically that "Only Historians use that term" or something to that effect. See Talk above. She did not provide cites for this assertion, and instead admits that it is based on her own personal opinion/experience based on being an actual resident of Lawrence. She also said I was "presumptuous" to think I could know about a place where I didn't live (!). See above again.

I could reply that my parents and extended family all still live in Lawrence and that I visit regularly (including this weekend), so therefore I know as much as she does. But this kind of argument would be absurd (two people citing their own personal opinion to determine who knows more) and goes against the principles of Wikipedia, which is to cite *third party* sources. At that time, I didn't even bother to argue with her, and just moved on. However, now that a completely unfounded nickname has appeared, I can't help but revisit the old discussion about Immigrant City. It is supported by citations to authority. Whether EraserGirl uses it in day-to-day conversation when she's living in Lawrence should be irrelvant. Also, the fact that the earliest citation is 1963 (48 years ago) should also be irrelvant. The "Lawtown" nickname is much younger than 48 years old, and nobody has challenged that.

Also, EraserGirl please don't refer to me as "Sweetie" in posts on my talk page. It's condescending and offensive. Cbmccarthy (talk) 21:20, 23 December 2011 (UTC)

/* The French Canadians */

Deleted the part: Quebec..."where the soil had been depleted for lack of knowledge that crops needed to be rotated after a time".

The old parishes were overpopulated: some people moved up north (Abitibi and Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean), while others moved in industrial towns to find work. ( Montreal, Quebec; but also in Ontario and United-States). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.37.197.75 (talk) 17:07, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

History

I realize there is a period between 1853 and 1912 that is left out. I will try to put together a thumbnail version, which will draw on the 1880 Wadsworth history and the writings of Robt. Tewksbury. I just don't have the time today. EraserGirl (talk) 23:57, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

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"Jews": inconsistensy

Where it lists the immigrant groups, "The Jews" is inconsistent with the other list items. The others are all adjectives such as "Lebanese", "English", etc. but "Jews" is a noun. Ideally, it should say "The Jewish", or else they should all be demonyms. Should we change it? Mechanic1c (talk) 02:01, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

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Lebanese

I added St Joseph's Melkite Greek-Catholic, corrected St George's name to Antiochian Orthodox, and removed the claim that St George's is the oldest Greek-rite Orthodox church in the US - that being Holy Trinity in New Orleans, founded 40 years before St George's. Additionally, while the majority of the Arab immigrant population of Lawrence at the turn of the 20th century came from what is now Lebanon, they were technically Syrians at time of immigration, since Lebanon as a nation had not yet come into being, and would not until 1943. Irish Melkite (talk)

Split proposed

The notable people section is too large and unwieldy. As noted at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Cities/US_Guideline#Notable_people, when the list becomes unwieldy, it is recommended to split it off into its own list article, per WP:SUMMARY. If there are no objections, I will do that at some point. --Jayron32 16:39, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

• Support - That's a long list. Magnolia677 (talk) 20:58, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
• It's been almost 2 months and no objections. I've performed the split. --Jayron32 14:23, 17 December 2021 (UTC)