in another generation the old mills on the river were looked upon by most townsmen as scarcely more than huge symbols of economic gloom.

As a result the great Amoskeag complex has become another tragic victim of twentieth-century urban “renewal” and of a typical shortsighted caving in to the demands of the automobile. Economic vitality has returned to Manchester through other kinds of manufacturing, but to judge by what the city has done with its historic old mills, a new kind of bankruptcy of spirit and imagination appears to have set in. Instead of making an all-out effort to produce a plan befitting a vital and confident community, urban renewal has carried out only the most obvious stopgap measures, wiping out whole city blocks for parking lots.

Demolition began last year, along lines established a decade ago in a report drawn up by Arthur D. Eittle, Inc., a Massachusetts-based consulting firm. So far nearly all the long, curved buildings bordering the canal and two large mills have been torn down. Part of the great wall of brick buildings along the river will also be destroyed. Once the demolition is complete, the canals will be filled in. Not a single building is to be built on the urban renewal site except for an industrial sewage plant that will replace two blocks of the original housing (still in use) and thus ruin the essential continuity of what architectural historians have called New England’s handsomest cluster of nineteenth-century company houses. Two roads, sixty and ninety feet wide, will slice through the mill yard, over the old canals, and all remaining cleared space will be covered over with enough asphalt to accommodate 2,500 cars. At this writing it appears that some of the large rectangular mills will survive, but even so they will be left stranded in a sea of automobiles. Plans like this “simple and sensible solution,” as it has been called by advocates of urban renewal, have rarely if ever been the most creative solution; but increasingly they are becoming the “final solution” all over America.

At Manchester the alternative of making something of the Amoskeag mills, something inspired, such as a riverside cultural center (which might include a museum of New England’s illustrious industrial history), or even something as plainly needed by the community as a branch of the state university, has been rejected for the short-term gain of parking space for a few modern industrial plants. The result will be a large contribution to the very chaos that is destroying the city’s identity and sense of community. “Even with extensive improvements and upgrading, the millyard will never be an asset from an aesthetic point of view,” the planners of Arthur D. Little proclaimed; and that was that, even though it was abundant nonsense.

The modern American noncity with its freeway sprawl and its tasteless subdivision

monotony is advancing rapidly across the land, and one readily identifiable community after another is being carved up, paved over, and obliterated.

At Manchester the nation has suffered just such a loss. Of course, by some people’s standards the loss has been only a lot of old factories, and since the aesthetic value of anything is always a subjective matter, there is no easy way to refute this view. But that Amoskeag has long been a place of considerable historic importance, that the complex of mills, housing, and canals represented far more advanced urban planning and a more human environment than what it is being replaced by, and that the city of Manchester has lost an immensely fascinating and, to some, powerfully beautiful part of its heritage there is no doubt whatsoever.

—David G. McCullough