My wife and I recently spent two nights in North Adams, an old industrial city in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts, at a lodging place called Tourists. What was once an unprepossessing, small motel across from the Stop & Shop on Route 2 reopened last summer as a 48-room “hotel and riverside retreat,” still across from the Stop & Shop but now oriented toward the Hoosic River behind it.
The lead investor is a Boston developer who oversaw the mostly minimalist design, with as minority partners the co-founder of a local brewery; the founder of Brooklyn Magazine; Wilco’s bassist, who created the playlist for the in-house radio station; and a James Beard Award-winning chef from San Francisco who will be opening a restaurant across the river (accessible by a new and charmingly wobbly pedestrian bridge) and has already devised a menu for the hotel lodge that includes fish stew, braised chicken thighs and infused-spirit-based drinks.
You may find all this appealing or you may find it barf-inducing. I think we can all come to agree, though, that Tourists wouldn’t exist and marketing firms wouldn’t be holding offsites there in early December but for a strange thing that happened three decades ago, when Massachusetts lawmakers voted to pump $35 million into converting the gigantic, abandoned factory complex at the heart of North Adams into what has become the 530,000-square-foot (including outdoor spaces) Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
The idea that museums might stimulate economic growth was I guess not totally unheard of in 1988 – Massachusetts did approve that $35 million bond issue, after all – but it was pretty controversial.
Most of the buildings that now constitute Mass MoCA were constructed in the 1870s by a company that produced printed textiles; in 1942 they were taken over by Sprague Electric Co., a maker of electronic components that in 1966 employed 4,200 people in a city of just over 19,000. Two decades later, battered by overseas competition, Sprague abandoned North Adams. Is Mass MoCA as big an economic engine as Sprague was? Nowhere near. But it is a lot better than nothing.
Young people … and longtime locals … have been fitfully creating a new economy.
The unemployment rate in North Adams, which hit 16.6 percent in January 1991, was 4.3 percent in October. That’s partly because people have been leaving town; as of 2017, the population was down to an estimated 12,700. But they were leaving already (the city’s population peaked at 24,200 in 1900), and there has been a perceptible positive Mass MoCA effect – one that Stephen Sheppard, an economist at nearby Williams College, has been measuring for more than a decade. An update last year from the Center for Creative Community Development that Sheppard heads estimated that the museum and its 245,000 visitors in 2017 were responsible for almost $51 million in economic activity and 586 jobs.
Not every declining American industrial city has a nationally renowned college in the town next door (Williams), as well as a small state school of its own, the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. It also doesn’t hurt to be located in the Berkshires, a scenic region that has been attracting summer visitors since the 1800s.
Still, it was manufacturing, not tourism, that drove the Berkshire County economy until pretty recently.
There are still lots of locals who don’t think the museum has done nearly enough to revitalize the community around it, but this means it hasn’t really forced people out through gentrification, either. Property values in the blocks right around Mass MoCA have risen sharply since the museum opened, but hardly anyone lived on those blocks to begin with.
There is now a great swath of semi-rural territory stretching from New York’s northern exurbs to Boston’s western ones, and encompassing most of Vermont, where affluent urbanites with second homes, young people with creative aspirations and longtime locals with pickups have been fitfully creating a new economy built around experiences, as Sheppard says, and also the small-scale production of things. (The region even includes at least one other gigantic-factory-turned-contemporary-art-museum, Dia:Beacon in New York’s Hudson River Valley.) It’s not a fast-growing economy, it’s heavily dependent on wealth created elsewhere, and it may not all hold together in the end. But it seems worth a try.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
