Against all odds, Mass MoCA thrives


The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the largest U.S. center for contemporary arts, is housed on a 13-acre campus of renovated 19th-century factory buildings in North Adams

In this story:

'Devoid of logic'

The Internet boon

Community reborn

A ways to go

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NORTH ADAMS, Massachusetts (AP) -- For generations, people in North Adams, Massachusetts, just off the Appalachian Trail, worked at Sprague Electric Co., making capacitors for the Apollo moon missions and the first atomic bombs. If you didn't work at Sprague, a friend or a relative almost certainly did.

And then, Sprague was gone, a casualty of the mid-1980s collapse of New England's manufacturing economy. When the company finally left town, it took not only 4,000 jobs, but a part of this community's soul. Skilled workers and businesses fled. Unemployment in the city of 15,000 reached 25 percent.

"A lot of families grew up with the company," says Joe Zona, 73, who worked at Sprague for 32 years until he was laid off in 1975. "I think in the back of their minds, people felt the company owed them more loyalty."

This stunning and isolated mountain town was left with little more than a painful reminder of past prosperity: the Sprague complex of 27 19th-century buildings, crumbling and leaking yet with handsome brick facades and plenty of space.

If only someone could figure out what to do with them.

And then came a crazy idea: Why not save an old, blue-collar mill town with a museum of cutting-edge, contemporary art?

'Devoid of logic'

North Adams has a sort of haunting quality about it, not unlike many old mill towns. It is at the same time gorgeous and strange, isolated and familiar.

But it was a tough world to crack, and not many people moved to this city nestled in a little valley at the confluence of two branches of the Hoosic River.

Joseph Thompson was unusual. As Sprague stumbled and then fell in the early 1980s, Thompson was studying at Williams College, a few miles up the road in Williamstown. Rather unfashionably, he settled in gritty North Adams and went to work for a man with an idea few believed could work.

Thomas Krens was the head of the Williams College Museum of Art, and he wanted to turn the old Sprague buildings into a world-class museum -- the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art -- an attraction that would bring Berkshires tourists to North Adams, a place they usually passed by.

For years, the plans got mostly laughs -- Mayor John Barrett III says no one would return his calls to talk about it. In 1988, a Boston Globe columnist called the project "preposterous" and "completely devoid of artistic and economic logic."

Then-Gov. Michael Dukakis and the state Legislature eventually promised $35 million, but the funding was cut during the recession of the late 1980s.

But Thompson, who took over the project when Krens left for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, continued to press, putting to use the MBA he had earned from the Wharton School of Business, along with his graduate degree in art history.

He raised $9.4 million in private money and eventually got the state to put up $22 million toward the $31 million cost of building the museum. Last year, what began as a crazy idea became a reality.

Mass MoCA, as it is known, opened in some old Sprague buildings as the nation's largest center for contemporary arts.

The facility offers artists something precious: space. Its cavernous warehouse galleries have room to display pieces like Tim Hawkinson's "Uberorgan," a functioning air organ that's as long as a football field and looks a little like a giant intestine; it recently became the first museum ever to display -- fully extended -- Robert Rauschenberg's "The 1\4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece."

And there's more than just artwork. There are artists in residence, a theater, an outdoor cinema and a "kids space," where all elementary school students in North Adams will be able to visit at least once this year.

The Internet boon

But from the beginning, no one believed a museum alone could replace Sprague. The plan was to use the museum to get noticed, and to rent out unused buildings to businesses that would help rebuild the city's job base.

In hindsight, the years in limbo were a blessing. The project was pushed back until the Internet era, and the accompanying flood of companies that can operate as easily in remote mountain towns as anywhere else.

Prodded in part by a venture capital fund set up by Williams College and three wealthy alumni, companies began to arrive in northwest Massachusetts, and some found their way to the old Sprague plant, which was wired with high-speed T-3 Internet connections.

There are now nine tenants, renting 50,000 square feet of office space, including eZiba.com, an online retailer, and Kleiser-Walczak Construction, a special effects company that relocated from Hollywood.

About 400 people work here -- certainly less than the number who worked at Sprague during its peak. But the effects are spreading. Housing prices are up in the city, though they still pale in comparison to nearby cities.

"Two years it was unheard of to sell any property for over $100,000," says Barbara Wagner, a real estate agent. "In 1999, and into this year, we've had 14 sales of over $100,000."

A handful of restaurants and a pair of coffee shops have opened on Main Street. A local high school is being renovated, and a string of once-dilapidated Victorian houses across from the museum is being renovated into an upscale hotel catering to Berkshire tourists.

"You measure it in small ways," Thompson says. "Six months ago, there were no cappuccino machines. Now there are two."

Most extraordinarily, the unemployment rate is now 2.8 percent. "Anybody who wants to work can work at decent jobs," the mayor says.

And have a decent life, many say.

Merritt Colaizzi joined the staff of Streetmail.com in December as employee No. 18. Now there are 70 employees in the company housed in the Mass MoCA complex.

"When I hang with my friends in New York, they say there are so few people that live in the Berkshires, that they're all cool," Colaizzi says. "You can go to a bar in New York and not see one person you want to talk to."

Community reborn

Colaizzi says she sees a divide between "old" and "new" North Adams, but they're starting to blend. Streetmail even entered a float in this year's Fall Foliage Parade.

And the "old" are also adapting to the sometimes provocative nature of the displays, Colaizzi says.


Mass MoCA's director, Joseph C. Thompson, raised $9.4 million in private money and eventually got the state to contribute $22 million toward building the museum

"I used to be in art education and work with kids, and it's easy to work with contemporary art because it's based on what people are experiencing everyday," she says. "Maybe they're thinking it's weird, but they are going and they are thinking about it."

Concerns about a slump in interest in the museum's second year have proved unfounded. Thompson says this year's attendance should keep pace with the first year's 100,000 visitors.

And they're coming for more than art.

Tony Talarico, who worked at the site during the 1930s when it was the old Arnold Print Works, has been using Mass MoCa's computer center, which offers residents job training and e-mail. With help from a local businessman, he set up a Web site that posts stories about his early life in North Adams.

He's now a believer in what the Mass MoCA supporters set out to do.

"They were smart," he says. "If it was strictly contemporary art, they'd come once and that would be it."

A ways to go

This isn't a bust-to-boom tale, not yet anyway.

Just a few blocks from the museum, run-down houses remain, though the city is working to rehabilitate them. At Mass MoCA, Thompson has rented less than half of the 120,000 square necessary for museum to stand on its own.

If things go well, he thinks he'll fill the space with three years. But people here know things don't always go well.

"We could fall into that trap -- boom or bust," says Barrett, the mayor. "Those dot.coms can be gone tomorrow."

"With all the problems North Adams has had, they're probably facing the biggest problem now, and that's success," says Joe Manning, who has written a book about North Adams. "How do we keep the momentum going and convince people we're still moving?

Every time a store closes on Main Street or a dot.com moves to San Francisco, people will say, 'Uh-oh, here we go again.' It's Sprague moving out again."

They also worry that success could come, but at too high a price.

"Main Street's great in that it's got a lot new faces downtown, but you fear that some of the older people that give the city character will be swept away," Manning says.

There is much to be thankful for, however, and it's more than a couple of cappuccino makers. Mass MoCa isn't solely responsible for the revitalization -- the jobless rate began to fall well before the museum was built, and the museum by no means plays the dominating role in city life Sprague once did.

But it can be credited at least with a revival of confidence. "There is money and there is spirit and there is self-esteem and the city is being put back on the map again," Manning says.