At first, Mark Ciborowski was skeptical of plans to tear up and narrow Concord’s downtown thoroughfare. By the end, he was bringing lunch to the construction crews, and threw them a party when the work was done.
When rehabilitation of the Capital Center of the Arts was underway, the initial thought was to just paint over the ceiling designs. Instead, Ciborowksi recruited dozens of volunteers and together, on rickety scaffolding several stories up, they scraped, stenciled and repainted the Egyptian detailing.
When he went to city officials for help as part of his vision to reinvigorate Phenix Hall, Sue McCoo was ready to go to the hearing. Even though the project would tear down the building housing one of her shops, Hilltop Consignment, she wanted to support her landlord of forty-some-odd years. She hoped her backing would prove persuasive (as it eventually did).
“This is not about me,” she said. “This was about doing something transformative for downtown.”
Ciborowski, who died of cancer this week at the age of 70, was a businessman and developer with a collection of historic properties in the capital city. But it was his fastidious protection of their history, his generosity of attention and care to both his buildings and the tenants in them, his volunteerism and his indefatigable belief in the potential of downtown Concord that earned him the moniker “Mr. Main Street.”
“He was a prince of Concord,” said Byron Champlin, a friend and the city’s current mayor. “Not in the sense of entitlement or privilege, but in the sense of service and stewardship.”
More than that, Ciborowksi was a fierce friend and devoted husband to his wife, Diane. He took every opportunity to put on a good shin-dig and succeeded at it. A natural athlete, he was a member of the 1992 Olympic canoe team. He had an affable charm and twinkle in his eye that led some to call him a hunk. He had eight best men at his wedding. He loved a cold beer at the Barley House with friends. He didn’t much like getting dressed up. He gave firm handshakes and tight hugs. He loved the Red Sox.
“They’ll be no one to replace Mark Ciborowski,” said Bobby Segal, a close friend. “It was never any false pretense, with him. When you were in, you were in.”
Raised in Worcester, Mark came to Concord as a young man in the late 1970s, helping his grandfather, Jacob, to manage his portfolio of properties. Jacob Ciborowski – who immigrated to Massachusetts from Poland as a teen and died in 1983– bought much of the land along Main Street over the preceding 20 years.
In some ways, a love for Concord was passed down to Ciborowski in every brick wall and mahogany door of his buildings. But he took it to new heights.
From rehabs of Bicentennial Square and the Sheraton Building, the Ciborowskis were revitalizing Main Street long before any concerted push, noted Steve Duprey, who also has substantial ownership of downtown.
It meant Ciborowski’s participation proved pivotal in projects down the line, from the Capital Center for the Arts to Main Street itself.
“From 1980 on to the last almost half century, he’s been one of the reasons Concord has thrived,” Duprey said. “I used to say he was the best unpaid project manager Concord ever had.”
The two started as “friendly competitors” and ended up, as most people who crossed paths with Ciborowski did, as friends.
Beyond construction, Ciborowski tried to nurture the business community on Main Street, both as a business owner and from his longtime role at the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce. He was named Concord’s Citizen of the Year by the organization in 2011.
He was notoriously picky about who he would take on as a tenant. They had to gel with the energy and vigor he hoped downtown would grow into – and he was ready to turn people down, and eat the loss of rent over time, until he found the right fit.
Many of the most enduring shops and restaurants along the stretch – from the Barley House to Viking House – are his tenants.
“We shared a belief that a vibrant Main Street becomes the living room for a community,” Duprey said.
This sense of devotion to his adopted hometown was a mere extension of the warmth Ciborowski brought to his friendships.
Just some of those close to him – and it’s a long list – described him in interviews as selfless, humble, genuine, dogged and vivacious. After several years of illness, his passing wasn’t a surprise. But it hasn’t made losing him any easier.
“He’s just extremely pleasant to everybody, and always a really good friend,” said Jane Berwick, who served on the board of the Capitol Center for the Arts. “I’ve never known a day that he ever was on the wrong side of the track.”
Ciborowski was a North Star whose gravity brought friends to weekly meetups, on trips across the world, and to watch Red Sox games on a big screen inside Phenix Hall.
In 2021, when the team’s home run celebration was to wheel the batter through the dugout in a laundry cart, Ciborowksi brought a shopping cart up into the historic event space and would give the same treatment to his friends. The group called themselves “the Swarm.”
Whenever Jim Roche, a former director of the state Business and Industry Association, would drive down Main Street and see his friend walking along the sidewalk, a common sight, he’d honk, roll down the window and flip him the bird. Ciborowski, regardless of being a kind of public figure in Concord, would never hesitate to flip one right back.
“He was saying ‘I love you,’ in our kind of way,” Roche said.
When Byron Champlin’s daughter Madeline was studying the human impacts on local frog populations over a summer and racing to finish her project before returning to school, Ciborowski brought her to Horseshoe Pond in his canoe and helped her collect the amphibians. When she had to hit the road in the morning, he personally returned the frogs to their home.
“His heart was so huge,” recalled Byron Champlin. “He didn’t have to do that.”
A service for Ciborowski has not yet been announced.
McCoo, who knew Ciborowski not just as her landlord but as a longtime chamber member and a friend, said that she and some others plan to donate in his memory to Intown Concord, the nonprofit focused on boosting downtown vitality.
“That’s a continuation of what he did,” McCoo said.
