Everything about Lawrence Massachusetts totally explained
Lawrence is a city in
Essex County, Massachusetts,
United States on the
Merrimack River. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 72,043. Surrounding communities include
Methuen to the north,
Andover to the southwest, and
North Andover to the southeast. It and
Salem are the
county seats of Essex County. Lawrence is also part of the
Merrimack Valley.
Manufacturing products of the city include electronic equipment, textiles, footwear, paper products, computers, and foodstuffs. Lawrence was, for a while, the residence of
Robert Frost, where he published his first
poem.
History
Founding and rise as a textile center
Europeans first settled the area in 1640. The site of the city – formerly parts of
Andover and
Methuen – was purchased in 1845 by a group of Boston industrialists headed by the wealthy merchant and congressman
Abbott Lawrence, the community's namesake. The city was incorporated in 1853.
The industrialists, most prominently Lawrence, established textile mills near sources of abundant waterpower. Lawrence's location on the
Merrimack River, just downriver of
Lowell and a short train ride from
Boston was an ideal location to set up an industrial center. The Merrimack was dammed right above the city, and a canal was dug on both the north and the south banks to provide power to the factories that would soon be built on its banks.
The Bread and Roses strike of 1912
Working conditions in the mills were unsafe and in 1860 the
Pemberton Mill factory collapsed, killing 88 workers. As immigrants flooded into the United States in the late 19th century, the native population of Lawrence was replaced by unskilled workers from Ireland, Italy, Quebec, Germany and a wide assortment of other foreign lands. In 1912 the so-called
Bread and Roses strike or the
Lawrence textile strike, one of greatest labor actions in American history, began when Massachusetts law reduced the work week from 56 hours to 54 hours and subsequently lowered wages for thousands of women and child workers. The strike began on January 11, 1912 when mill workers discovered their pay had been reduced. The average worker at the time earned a mere $7 a week and paid an equal amount for their monthly rent. Unlike the strikes of today fewer than 1000 of the 25,000 strikers were members of a union. The Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) provided most of the leadership for the strike and also provided food and clothing for the strikers. The Massachusetts
National Guard, private and city police countered 25,000 strikers for two months. Although there were many skirmishes between the police, militia and the strikers only 2 people died and relatively few were injured on either side. Immigrant groups normally mistrustful of one another banded together in the common cause of higher wages. When police and National Guard assaulted a group of women and children, public outcry forced mill owners to capitulate. The striking workers won wage increases for themselves and thousands of workers across New England. One of the major companies involved in the strike was the
American Woolen Company, led ironically by a Portuguese immigrant,
William Madison Wood who had risen through the ranks in the textile industry.
Post-War history
Lawrence was a great wool-processing center until that industry declined in the 1950s. The decline left Lawrence a struggling city. The population of Lawrence declined from over 80,000 residents in 1950 to approximately 64,000 residents in 1980, the low point of Lawrence's population.
Urban renewal
Like other northeastern cities suffering from the effects of Post World War II industrial decline, Lawrence has often made efforts at revitalization, some of them controversial. For example, half of the enormous water-powered Wood Mill, once the largest mills in the world, was knocked down in the 1950s. Nothing has been built on the site other than a quarter-mile -long parking lot. More significantly, under the guise of "
urban renewal", large tracts of downtown Lawrence were razed in the mid-1970s and replaced with a parking lots and a three-story parking garage connected to a new Intown Mall intended to compete with newly constructed suburban malls. The historic Theater Row along Broadway was also razed, destroying ornate movie palaces of the 1920s and 1930s that entertained mill workers through the
Great Depression and the Second World War. Additionally, the city's main post office, an ornate federalist style building at the corner of Broadway and Essex Street, was razed. Most of the structures were replaced with one-story, steel-frame structures with large parking lots, housing such establishments as fast food restaurants and chain drug stores, fundamentally changing the character of the center of Lawrence.
Lawrence also attempted to increase its employment base by attracting industries unwanted in other communities, such as waste treatment facilities and incinerators. From 1980 until 1998, private corporations operated two trash incinerators in Lawrence. Activist residents successfully blocked the approval of a waste treatment center on the banks of the Merrimack River near the current site of Salvatore's Pizza on Merrimack Street.
Troubles of the 1980s and 1990s
Hispanic immigrants from the
Dominican Republic and
Puerto Rico began arriving in Lawrence in significant numbers in the late 1960s, attracted by cheap housing and a history of tolerance toward immigrants. In 1984, tensions between remaining working class whites and increasing numbers of Hispanic youth flared into a riot, centered at the intersection of Haverhill Street and Railroad Street where a number of buildings were destroyed by
Molotov cocktails and over 300 people were arrested.
Lawrence saw further setbacks during the recession of the early 1990s as a wave of arson plagued the city. Over 200 buildings were set alight in an eighteen month period in 1991–92, many of them abandoned residences and industrial sites.
Recent trends
Recently, a sharp reduction in violent crime starting in 2004 and massive private investment in former mill buildings along the Merrimack River, including the remaining section of the historic Wood Mill – to be converted into commercial, residential and education uses – have lent encouragement to boosters of the city. One of the final remaining mills in the city is
Malden Mills. Additionally, Lawrence's downtown has seen a resurgence of business activity as Hispanic-owned businesses have opened along Essex Street, the historic shopping street of Lawrence that remained largely shuttered since the 1970s. In June 2007, the City approved the sale of the Intown Mall, largely abandoned since the early 1990s recession, to Northern Essex Community College for the development of a medical sciences center.
Recent fires
In the morning of
January 21,
2008, a massive fire swept through a secondary neighborhood business district located on Lawrence's south side just across the Merrimack River from downtown. The fire, fueled by high winds, burned through 16 buildings, destroying 14 of them. It was traced to an abandoned nightclub that was being renovated. It didn't help firefighters that temperatures were in the low teens and wind chills were below zero. 380 residents were evacuated and many of those are now homeless. The fire destroyed many low income housing units and special-needs housing, including two houses completed days earlier by
Habitat for Humanity. The fire was considered suspicious by the state fire marshal because of the speed in which the building went up in flames. The investigation is still ongoing.
See link to photo essay below.
History of Lawrence immigrant communities
Lawrence has been aptly nicknamed the "Immigrant City." Starting with the Irish in the 1840s, it has been home to numerous different immigrant communities, most of whom arrived during the great wave of European immigration to America that ended in the 1920s. Since early 1970s, Lawrence has become home to a sizable Hispanic population, reaching over 68% of the population of Lawrence by 2006.
Immigrant communities, 1845–1920
Lawrence became home to large groups of immigrants from Europe, beginning with the Irish in 1845, Germans after the social upheaval in Germany in 1848, and French Canadians seeking to escape hard northern farm life from the 1850s onward. A second wave began arriving after 1900, as part of the great mass of Italian and Eastern European immigrants, including Jews from Russia, Poland, Lithuania and neighboring regions. Immigration to the United States was severely curtailed in the 1920s with the
Immigration Act of 1924, when foreign born immigration to Lawrence virtually ceased for over 40 years. In 1920, towards the end of the first wave of immigration, most ethnic groups had numerous social clubs in the city. The Portuguese had 2; the English had 2; the Jews had 3; the Armenians, 5; the Lebanese and Syrians, 6; the Irish, 8; the Polish, 9; the French Canadians and Belgian-French, 14; the Lithuanians, 18; the Italians, 32; and the Germans, 47.
The Irish
Irish immigrants arrived in Lawrence at its birth, which nearly coincided with the Great Potato Famine of 1842, the event that drove great numbers of Irish to the United States. The Great Stone Dam, constructed in from 1845–1848 to power the nascent textile mills, was largely built by Irish laborers. The first Irish immigrants settled in the area south of the Merrimack River near the intersection of Kingston Street and South Broadway. Their shantytown settlement put them close to the dam being constructed, but away from the Essex Corporation row houses built north of the river to attract New England farm girls as millworkers. The religious needs of the Irish were initially met by the Immaculate Conception church, originally erected near the corner of Chestnut and White Street in 1846, the first Roman Catholic church in Lawrence. By 1847, observers counted over ninety shanties in the Irish shantytown. In 1869, the Irish were able to collect sufficient funds form their own church, St. Patrick’s, on South Broadway. The German community was characterized by numerous school clubs, shooting clubs, national and regional clubs, as well as men’s choirs and mutual aid societies, Although most of the participants live in neighboring towns, the Feast of Three Saints festival continues in Lawrence today.
The French Canadians
French Canadians were the second major immigrant group to settle in Lawrence. In 1872, they erected their first church, St. Ann’s, at the corner of Haverhill and Franklin Streets. Within decades, St. Ann’s established a “missionary church”, Sacred Heart on South Broadway, to serve the burgeoning Québécois community in South Lawrence., as well as St. George’s Orthodox Church, the oldest Greek Orthodox-rite Church in the United States.
The English
A sizeable English community, comprised mainly of unskilled laborers that arrived after 1880, sought work in the textile mills where they were given choice jobs by the Yankee overseers on account of their shared linguistic heritage and close cultural links.
Yankee farmers
Not all immigrants to Lawrence were foreign-born or their children. Yankee farmers, unable to compete against the cheaper farmlands of the Midwest that had been linked to the East coast by rail, settled in corners of Lawrence. Congregationalists were the first Protestant denomination to begin worship in South Lawrence, with the erection in 1852 of the first South Congregational Church on South Broadway, near the corner of Andover Street.
Since the 1990s, increasing numbers of former Catholic churches, closed since the 1980s when their Irish or Italian congregations died out, have been bought by Hispanic evangelical churches.
The 2000 Census revealed the following population breakdown, illustrating the shift toward newer immigrant groups:
· Dominican Republic - 22%
· Puerto Rican - 22%
· Other Hispanic or Latino - 12%
· Irish - 7%
· Italian - 7%
· French (except Basque) - 5%
· Black or African American - 5%
· French Canadian - 5%
· English - 3%
· Arab - 2%
· German - 2%
· Lebanese - 2%
· Central American: - 1%
· Polish - 1%
· Portuguese - 1%
· Guatemalan - 1%
· Vietnamese - 1%
· South American - 1%
· Spanish - 1%
· Cambodian - 1%
· Scottish - 1%
· Cuban - 1%
· Scotch-Irish - 1%
· Ecuadorian - 1%.
Geography
Lawrence is located at (42.703741, -71.162979).
According to the
United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 7.4
square miles (19.2
km²), of which, 7.0 square miles (18.0 km²) of it's land and 0.4 square miles (1.2 km²) of it (6.07%) is water.
Aside from the
Merrimack River, other water features include the
Spicket River, which flows into the Merrimack from
Methuen, and the
Shawsheen River, which forms the southeastern border of the city. Additionally, Lawrence has two power canals that were formerly used to provide
hydropower to the mills - one on the north bank of the river, the other on the south. Channeling water into these canals is the
Great Stone Dam, which lies across the entire Merrimack and was, at the time of its construction in the 1840s, the largest dam in the world.
The highest point in Lawrence is the top of Tower Hill in the northwest corner of the city, rising approximately 240 feet above sea level. Other prominent hills include Prospect Hill, in the northeast corner of the city, and Mount Vernon, along the southern edge of the city. Most industrial activity was concentrated in the flatlands along the rivers.
Den Rock Park, a wooded conservation district on the southern edge of Lawrence that spans the Lawrence-Andover town line, provides recreation for nature lovers and rock-climbers alike.
Demographics
As of the
census of 2000, there were 72,043 people, 24,463 households, and 16,903 families residing in the city. The
population density was 10,351.4 people per square mile (3,996.5/km²). There were 25,601 housing units at an average density of 3,678.4/sq mi (1,420.2/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 48.64%
White, 4.88%
African American, 0.81%
Native American, 2.65%
Asian, 0.10%
Pacific Islander, 36.67% from
other races, and 6.25% from two or more races.
Hispanic or
Latino of any race mainly
Dominican or
Puerto Rican were 59.71% of the population.
There were 24,463 households out of which 41.4% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 36.6% were married couples living together, 25.7% had a female householder with no husband present, and 30.9% were non-families. 25.5% of all households were made up of individuals and 10.0% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.90 and the average family size was 3.46.
In the city the population was spread out with 32.0% under the age of 18, 11.1% from 18 to 24, 30.3% from 25 to 44, 16.7% from 45 to 64, and 9.8% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 30 years. For every 100 females there were 91.6 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 86.8 males.
The median income for a household in the city was $25,983, and the median income for a family was $29,809. Males had a median income of $27,772 versus $23,137 for females. The
per capita income for the city was $11,360. About 21.2% of families and 34.3% of the population were below the
poverty line, including 31.7% of those under age 18 and 20.1% of those age 65 or over.
By 2006, the population of Lawrence was estimated to be more than 68% Hispanic.
Government
Local
Form of government:
Plan B - "Weak mayor" - Mayor and city council, the councillors being elected partly at large and partly from districts or wards of the city. Party primaries prohibited.
Lawrence has an established
City Charter
and its form of government is a
Mayor-council government. There are nine city councilors and six school committee members; most are elected by district; three city council members are elected at large. There are six districts in Lawrence and all elections are
non-partisan. The Mayor serves as the seventh member and chair of the school committee. The city council chooses one of its number as president who serves as chair of the council. The city of Lawrence also elects three members to the Greater Lawrence Technical School Committee these members are elected at-large.
The current Mayor is
Michael J. Sullivan; the current City Council President is Patrick J. Blanchette.
| City Council |
Lawrence School Committee |
Greater Lawrence Technical School Committee |
- Patrick J. Blanchette (District A)*
- Grisel Silva (District B)
- Jorge A. Gonzalez (District C)
- Nicholas Kolofoles (District D)**
- David Abdoo (District E)
- Michael Fielding (District F)
- Nilka Alvarez-Rodriquez (At-Large)
- Frank Moran (At-Large)
- Roger Twomey (At-Large)
|
James Vittorioso (District A)
Martina Cruz (District B)
Priscilla Baez (District C)
Samuel Reyes (District D)
Peter Larocque (District E)
Gregory Morris (District F)**
Michael J. Sullivan (Mayor)*
|
Gerald Silverman (Andover)
Richard Hamilton, Jr. (Lawrence)
Leo J. Lamontagne (Lawrence)
Pamela Neilon (Lawrence)
Tom Grondine (Methuen)
Kenneth Henrick (Methuen)*
John Driscoll (North Andover)
|
* = President/Chair
** = Vice President/Vice Chair
State and Federal
Elementary schools
Lawrence Family Development Charter School
Community Day Charter Public School
High schools
Lawrence High School
The Greater Lawrence Technical School
Private schools
Elementary schools
Our Lady of Good Counsel School
St Patrick's School
High schools
Central Catholic High School
Notre Dame High School
Higher education
Public
Northern Essex Community College
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Private
Cambridge College
Massachusetts School of Law
Merrimack College
Media
Newspapers
The Eagle-Tribune - Daily newspaper
Rumbo - Weekly newspaper
Siglo 21 - Weekly newspaper
The Valley Patriot - Monthly newspaper
Radio
Power 800 AM
WCCM 1110 AM
TV
Infrastructure
Healthcare
Lawrence General Hospital
Greater Lawrence Family Health Center
Transportation
Airport
The City of Lawrence owns the Lawrence Municipal Airport located in North Andover, MA.
Boating
Local boating at the Greater Lawrence Community Boating Program
Bus service
Local busing options include the Merrimack Valley Regional Transit Authority.
Rail service
Commuter rail to Boston is provided by the MBTA Haverhill/Reading Line at the Senator Patricia McGovern Transportation Center.
Roadways
Lawrence is circled with expressways. Interstate 495 runs from the south-eastern portion of the city through the eastern edge of the city, Interstate 93 is to the west, running through Andover, Massachusetts. The final part of the circle is "The Loop Connector" (named after the The Loop shopping center) which runs through Methuen, Massachusetts, parallel to Route 113. Major street-level routes include Routes 28 (north/south) and 110 (east/west).
Telecommunications
Lawrence is served only by the 978 area code. Area code 978 was created as a split from area code 508 on September 1, 1997.
Points of interest
Lawrence Public Library
Essex Art Center
Saint Alfio Society Inc. the organization that puts on the Feast of the Three Saints
Lawrence Community Works
Lawrence History Center
Lawrence Heritage State Park
Lawrence Experiment Station
YMCA
YWCA
Notable residents
Leonard Bernstein, composer and conductor
John Breen, Mayor of Lawrence; First Irish-American Mayor in the United States
Susie Castillo, Miss USA 2003 and MTV VJ
Ferdinand W. Demara, The Great Imposter
William E. Donovan, major league baseball player and manager
Sully Erna, Godsmack, lead singer
Robert Frost, poet
Robert Goulet, singer
Steve Holman, voice of the Atlanta Hawks
William S. Knox, US Congressman from March 4, 1895 to March 3, 1903
Thomas J. Lane, US Congressman from March 4, 1941 to March 3, 1963
Abbott Lawrence, Founder of Lawrence, MA
Anna LoPizzo, a striker killed during the Lawrence textile strike
Robert S. Maloney, US Congressman from March 4, 1921 to March 3, 1923
Robbie Merill, Godsmack, bassist
James P. O'Donoghue Maglev Prototype Inventor
Endicott Peabody, former Governor of Massachusetts (1963-1965)
Joe Perry, guitarist of Aerosmith
Gil Reyes, former WBA, Fedecentro Welterweight Champion
William A. Russell, US Congressman from March 4, 1879 to March 3, 1885
John K. Tarbox, US Congressman from March 4, 1875 to March 3, 1877 and Mayor of Lawrence from (1873-1875)
Thelma Todd, actress
William M. Wood, Co-founder of the American Woolen CompanyFurther Information
Get more info on 'Lawrence Massachusetts'.
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