“The American holly is quite common here,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. “I heard a lark sing, sweet and strong, and heard robins.” Thoreau, a naturalist and philosopher and author of Walden, was describing the rural North End estate of his friend Daniel Ricketson, which eventually became Brooklawn Park. Born in 1813 to Quaker parents, Ricketson was seriously injured in two accidents involving horses, leading to lifelong hip pain and severe headaches. Although he practiced as a lawyer, he dedicated himself to the study of nature and literature. Ricketson purchased the estate in 1851 as a retreat from his main residence, Woodlee, about a mile south on Acushnet Avenue. He named his refuge Brooklawn and surrounded himself with apple orchards, gardens, and grazing cows, and eventually built a farmhouse with wide porches for his family. Ricketson’s first building at Brooklawn was a rustic 12 x 14 foot shack with gingerbread trim, exposed beams on the inside and a small stove for heat. Ricketson called it the “Shanty.” He covered two interior walls with slips of paper on which he wrote ideas and sentences from his favorite authors, some of them his friends, like Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Ellery Channing, who all visited him at the Shanty. Two years prior to Ricketson’s death in 1896, the city of New Bedford acquired Brooklawn intending to use it as a public park. In 1892, the landscape design firm of Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliott had submitted a plan to construct a chain of public parks in the city linked by a promenade and wide parkway, reasoning that “nothing is so refreshing to the tired townspeople as pure rural landscape.” The parkway would loop around Rodney French Boulevard to Rockdale Avenue, Hathaway Road, and Ashley Boulevard (then called Bowditch Street), ending at Brooklawn. The plan received approval but stalled due to changes in political leadership and a national depression. The city eventually built some of the parks independent of the proposal, including Hazelwood Park, Buttonwood Park, and Brooklawn Park. The city’s mill workers enjoyed Brooklawn Park’s duck pond, sledding hill, and ice skating rink with a warming house designed by New Bedford architect Louis E. Destremps. In 1958, Storyland opened at the park, featuring climbable nursery rhyme scenes, a spouting Moby Dick, and a real F-94 Starfighter jet plane. The city tore down Ricketson’s farmhouse in 1971, and ten years later, it declared the Shanty, which had fallen into disrepair, a nuisance and dismantled it. Persistent rumors claim the Shanty was stored at the city yard, but it has yet to be rediscovered.

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New Bedford was a city of smokestacks. The coal-fired boilers that powered the textile mills left a layer of gritty soot that seemed to cover everything. This legacy of industrialization is still visible on the darkened redstone exterior of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, which has served the North End’s French Canadian and immigrant populations since 1912. By 1900, first- and second-generation immigrants made up 70% of New Bedford’s population, and 33% of the city’s foreign-born residents were French Canadian. In 1912 alone, more than 12,241 French Canadian immigrants moved to New Bedford, helping to swell the city’s population to more than 96,000 people. In the late 19th century, most French-speaking Catholics attended Sacred Heart Church, a considerable distance from the North End where many French Canadians worked in textile mills and lived in three-decker tenements. In 1895, the newly-formed parish of St. Anthony of Padua met in North Union Hall, a block away from the current location of the church. The following year, the parish built a new wood-frame church, a three-story brick rectory, and a grammar school, followed two years later by a convent to house the school’s ordained teachers. Simultaneously, the parish began to raise funds for a substantial stone cathedral, and construction began in 1903. On the afternoon of September 20, 1904, a loud rumble and cloud of dust filled the air at the building site.  A fifty-foot high masonry wall had collapsed, killing two workers, Gilbert Tremblay and Joseph Rondeau, and injuring five others. The architect, Joseph Venne of Montreal, arrived two days later to inspect the damage, but was unable to determine a cause of the failure. Construction continued under the supervision of Fall River architect and French Canadian immigrant Louis G. Destremps, and the church was dedicated in November 1912. When parishioners passed through the massive front doors, they left behind the soot of the city and entered a sanctuary of divine beauty. 5,500 electric light bulbs—still a novelty in 1912—illuminated a 65-foot high vaulted ceiling. The rows of pews could accommodate 1,840 worshippers, watched over by thirty-two sculpted angels by Italian artist Giovanni Castagnoli. The Great Vision of Saint Anthony, a grouping of sculptures by Castagnoli, soars sixty feet behind the main altar, and 117 stained glass windows surround worshippers, including a triptych window of 370 square feet. Outside, the main steeple rises 256 feet and is visible from most parts of the city. Reflecting the demographics of its parishioners, St. Anthony’s first three pastors were born in Quebec, and the first six were of French Canadian descent. Today, St. Anthony’s offers a weekly mass in Spanish, serving its parishioners from Central America, the most recent group of immigrants seeking a better life in New Bedford.

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