Shortly before nine o’clock on the morning of February 27, 1897, a 16-foot boiler at Acushnet Mills exploded. Flying debris nearly demolished a building a quarter of a mile away, and a large piece of the boiler crashed through the roof of the south end police station 700 feet away. The sound of the explosion caused panic among the employees of the mill, sending them rushing for the stairways. Two workers were killed in the explosion: Manuel Mendoza, a boiler stoker, and Arthur Aspen, who worked in the loom harness room a short distance away. According to one account, “a piece of the boiler weighing half a ton released itself from the power house and with a velocity as swift as a cannon ball went flying through the air above the homes of numbers of the mill employees, and found a landing place several hundred feet away.” The homes referenced in this account were likely the housing that Acushnet Mills constructed for its employees shortly after its incorporation in 1881. Built in two rows of eleven houses with their gable ends facing Blackmer Street, the Acushnet Mills tenements more closely resembled single-family homes in middle class parts of the city than the double-houses or “four tenements” built by Wamsutta and Potomska Mills. The two-and-half story buildings included two apartments of six rooms each. Two additional one-and-a-half story tenements stood around the corner facing Front Street. At the time of the explosion, Acushnet Mills was operating day and night to fill orders, and the company repaired the damage of the city’s largest boiler explosion as quickly as possible. In the 1920s, Acushnet Mills modernized its operations to counter a regional textile downturn, but in November 1929 the company began to sell its machinery. By 1932, the mill buildings had been demolished. Only three Acushnet Mills tenements remain: at 98 Blackmer Street, and 424 and 426 South Front Street, the latter one built later than the others, between 1906 and 1911.
]]>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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