Earlier this month, with the temperature in the mid-eighties and the air a warm fog, a lone man in a tank-top shirt, ruggedly built but with graying hair and beard, stood alone in the sun with a chisel-edged mason’s hammer.
He was knocking the mortar, brick by brick, off the makings of what was once the biggest railroad service yard north of Boston. He was knocking off the edges of Concord’s history.
Most of the buildings of the Boston and Maine Railroad’s 28-acre yard, the area off South Main Street behind the climbing gym and the sign that says Big Jim’s, are long gone. The yard once employed hundreds of people. The jobs, when coal was king and Concord was a rail hub, were dirty and the work hard. But there was pride in the work, pride that shows in the old photos of railroad workers posing near the steam locomotives repaired in the yard, pride in the building’s brickwork, soon be no more.
It took skill and cost money to arch factory windows, time to lay corbelled rows of headers, stretchers, and soldiers that make two dimensions three to the eye and tie a building together, time to build a columned rather than flat facade like those of what must be billions of square feet of modern big-box buildings.
The site, known locally as the South End Marsh, has for decades served as a homeless camp within walking and biking distance of downtown – just follow the rails. Over the years, the property has been pitched as the future home of a minor league baseball team and a regional shopping mall served by two interstate highways, 93 and 89. The rail yards have been fought over, neighbors strongly opposed the mall proposal, but not loved or preserved.
The rail yard was the proposed site of a new cogeneration power plant to be built by Concord Steam. It would produce heat and electricity and include, perhaps, a greenhouse that would grow greens and vegetables year-round. That plan, too, was eventually derailed and the buildings continued to crumble.
We mourn the loss of history and architecture, but know the land deserves better. We hope that what eventually replaces the buildings will not be flat, shiny, cheap, and undistinguished, and that much of the land will remain green. It would be a great place for workforce housing, if, that is, there were any money to be made building affordable places for working people to live.
“Railroad Town,” writer Andrew Wilson’s comprehensive contribution to Crosscurrents of Change, the most recent history of Concord, recounts the role that rail played in the life of the city for more than a century. It includes photos of the rail yard, its employees, and this epitaph: “Popular opinion contends that by the end of the twentieth century, the railroad had abandoned Concord but in fact, Concord abandoned the railroad. Residents of the capital city shouldn’t take it personally; they were led away from the rails by the convenience and speed of government-built highways and airports and the shiny new products from General Motors, Kenworth and Boeing.”
The railyard’s buildings, the city deemed, became a public hazard and what remained of them had to come down. The property’s owner decided to have them dismantled rather than razed, which is, I believe, a tribute of sorts. The bricks will be sold, as will the sound timbers and the slate from its roof and live again. I imagine them shedding memories like trees shed leaves.
(Ralph Jimenez of Concord is a member of the Monitor’s editorial board.)