Before discount department stores became popular, New Bedford had Mars Bargainland. In the 1960s and 70s, the enormous high-ceilinged space contained a treasure trove of cut-price clothes, toys, and household items. A bit further inside the massive building shoppers found Food Mart, where workers boxed their groceries and slid them down rollers to be collected outside at street level. For many New Bedford residents, the memory of Mars Bargainland is still vivid, but few people remember this building’s original purpose. Designed by architects Charles Makepeace of Providence and Benjamin Smith of New Bedford and built between 1896 and 1917, Whitman Mills contained the highest density of looms in the region. The endless floors were relieved by tall windows, and spire-like chimney stacks exhausted plumes of smoke from the coal-fired boilers that powered the mills’ steam engines. The complex included an engine house, pipe house, pump house, machine shed, and office building, visually unified by Romanesque Revival details. Behind the mills loading docks extended into the Acushnet River, and across Riverside Avenue stood a large weave shed. The 1917 issue of the Official American Textile Directory gave a sense of the output of the Whitman Mills at their peak. $2 million of cloth were produced per year. Adjusted for inflation, this would equal more than $48 million in 2016. Whitman’s primary products included “Plain and Fancy Cotton and Silk Goods and Cotton Yarns,” produced on 138,128 ring spindles, 36,960 mule spindles, and 4,932 looms powered by steam and electric power. William Whitman, who built the mill, was a leader in New England’s textile industry for more than four decades. Whitman headed one of the world’s largest cotton textile manufacturing organizations and served as president of the Association of Wool Manufacturers. He also developed tariff policy related to the textile industry and advised Congress on trade matters. Despite Whitman’s business expertise, the mills he developed were not immune to economic pressures, and this one was no exception. Although the mill closed in 1932, the complex housed a variety of businesses including a cannery, in addition to Mars Bargainland, but they filled a small fraction of the space and employed a total of only about 500 people, less than a third of the Whitman Mills’ peak of 1,750 employees. Today, where once thousands of machines created continuous deafening noise, more than one-hundred elderly residents live in cozy studios and apartments. Named Whaler Place with unintentional irony, the development references the city’s more illustrious past rather than the textile industry that sustained the city long after the end of whaling. The floors once covered with a layer of cotton fiber now gleam with refinished wood and plush carpeting. The 18-foot ceilings are perhaps the only reminder of the buildings’ former use.
]]>Listen closely and you might hear the footsteps of hundreds of mill workers who lived in tenements on the block bounded by Rivet, Potomska, Second, and First Streets. Only two remain, but there once existed a complex of ten six-tenement buildings erected by the Potomska Mills for its workers.
Built in 1871 on South Water Street, Potomska Mills produced shades, umbrellas, jeans, and print cloth, rather than the sheets and shirts produced at Wamsutta. Potomska was the first textile manufactory established after the Wamsutta Mills more than twenty years earlier, but the two companies were not in competition. They produced different goods and shared the same president. Potomska also shared Wamsutta’s need to attract workers by providing suitable rental housing. Potomska worker housing took cues from the design of Wamsutta tenements on Hazard, State, and Austin Streets. Potomska constructed six “four-tenements” with four-room apartments stacked on two sides of the building and additional sleeping rooms on a smaller third floor. The buildings featured flanking entries surmounted by doorway hoods and modest Italianate-style brackets at the rooflines. As Potomska Mills expanded, its owners added four additional four-tenements to the original six, forming a quadrangle surrounding an unpaved laundry yard. Diagonally adjacent to the four-tenements, Potomska constructed six three-deckers, with single apartments on each floor and perhaps stacked front porches, which later defined this building form. Built in 1871, these may have been the first corporate-owned three-deckers in New Bedford. Potomska likely reserved them for the families of skilled workers, while unskilled workers lived in the ten four-tenements across the street, and in an additional sixteen Potomska four-tenements scattered throughout the area. Despite this tenement building-boom, by the 1890s the housing demand from the influx of immigrant mill workers outstripped available supply, and families often took in boarders to earn extra income. Potomska failed to adequately maintain the buildings, and in 1894, the New Bedford Daily Mercury referred to the “squalor” of the Potomska tenements. In 1898, the New York Evening Journal claimed they were "more filthy than any New York tenement." The Potomska Mills were demolished in 1935, and the area they occupied between Potomska and Blackmer Streets is now largely vacant. The three-deckers built by Potomska for their skilled workers were moved in 1900 to make way for a new public school to serve the children of this largely immigrant neighborhood. The whereabouts of these buildings is unknown. Out of the group of ten four-tenements, only two survive, in differing states of repair. Once surrounded by a dense residential neighborhood, they are now accompanied only by a behavioral health center, parking lots, and a silent vestige of their former courtyard.
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