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From its beginnings New London's history is bound to the sea. Income from the whaling industry alone was fabulous. Yet the history of this unusual city at the mouth of the Thames, is one of many endeavors. Robert Decker has brought it all together, the pulse, the life, the excitement of a community over 325 years old. Illuminated by more than 150 photographs, documented with detailed reference material, there is high interest for both layman and scholar.
Eleven women went missing over the spring and summer of 1988 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, an old fishing port known as the Whaling City, where Moby Dick, Frederick Douglass, textile mills, and heroin-dealing represent just a few of the many threads in the community's diverse fabric. In Shallow Graves, investigative reporter Maureen Boyle tells the story of a case that has haunted New England for thirty years. The Crimes: The skeletal remains of nine of the women, aged nineteen to thirty-six, were discovered near highways around New Bedford. Some had clearly been strangled, others were so badly decomposed that police were left to guess how they had died. The Victims: All the missing women had led troubled lives of drug addiction, prostitution, and domestic violence, including Nancy Paiva, whose sister was a hard-working employee of the City of New Bedford, and Debra Greenlaw DeMello, who came from a solidly middle-class family but fell into drugs and abusive relationships. In a bizarre twist, Paiva's clothes were found near DeMello's body. The Investigators: Massachusetts state troopers Maryann Dill and Jose Gonsalves were the two constants in a complex cast of city, county, and state cops and prosecutors. They knew the victims, the suspects, and the drug-and-crime-riddled streets of New Bedford. They were present at the beginning of the case and they stayed to the bitter end. The Suspects: Kenneth Ponte, a New Bedford attorney and deputy sheriff with an appetite for drugs and prostitutes, landed in the investigative crosshairs from the start. He was indicted by a grand jury in the murder of one of the victims, but those charges were later dropped. Anthony DeGrazia was a loner who appeared to fit the classic serial-killer profile: horrific childhood abuse, charming, charismatic, but prone to bursts of violence. He hunted prostitutes in the city by night and served at a Catholic church by day. Which of these two was the real killer? Or was it someone else entirely? Maureen Boyle first broke the story in 1988 and stayed with it for decades. In Shallow Graves she spins a riveting narrative about the crimes, the victims, the hunt for the killers, and the search for justice, all played out against the backdrop of an increasingly impoverished community beset by drugs and crime. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, along with police reports, first-person accounts, and field reporting both during the killings and more recently, Shallow Graves brings the reader behind the scenes of the investigation, onto the streets of the city, and into the homes of the families still hoping for answers.
New Bedford, the 'Whaling City' where, for generations, men have rolled the dice to harvest the sea's bounty. Storms, reefs and fickle catches have traditionally plagued the New Bedford fisherman and his whalerman forebearer, but still New Bedford men put to sea. When times are tough, desperate men will resort to desperate means to keep their boat and livelihood intact. Such is the case with Mike O'Malley. When his aged dragger falls on hard times, Mike makes a deal with a notorious waterfront gangster to help make ends meet. What follows is a tale of greed, deceit, violence, revenge and redemption on the high seas during a vicious gale.
Everett S. Allen, through diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts of the period, follows the Quakers from Plymouth Colony to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where these "children of the light" lived and founded an enormously lucrative whaling industry and elevated it to an almost holy activity ordained by God for the enrichment of the "chosen." Allen recounts the full story of a famous 1871 Arctic disaster, in which thirty-two vessels in the New Bedford whaling fleet, carrying 1200 officers and crew, found themselves trapped in gale-driven pack ice. The shipwrecked victims were miraculously rescued without a single loss of human life. The damage to the fleet, however, was something from which New Bedford never fully recovered.
The whaling bark Progress was a New Bedford ship transformed into a whaling museum for Chicago's 1893 world's fair. Traversing waterways across North America, the whaleship enthralled crowds from Montreal to Racine. Her ultimate fate, however, was to be a failed sideshow of marine curiosities and a metaphor for a dying industry out of step with Gilded Age America. This book uses the story of the Progress to detail the rise, fall, and eventual demise of the whaling industry in America. The legacy of this whaling bark can be found throughout New England and Chicago, and invites questions about what it means to transform a dying industry into a museum piece.
This book paints an intimate portrait of an overlooked kind of city that neither grows nor declines drastically. In fact, New Bedford, Massachusetts represents an entire category of cities that escape mainstream urban studies’ more customary attention to global cities (New York), booming cities (Atlanta), and shrinking cities (Flint). New Bedford-style ordinary cities are none of these, they neither grow nor decline drastically, but in their inconspicuousness, they account for a vast majority of all cities. Given the complexities of growth and decline, both temporarily and spatially, how does a city manage change and physically adapt to growth and decline? This book offers an answer through a detailed analysis of the politics, environment, planning strategies, and history of New Bedford.