USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 1916-1955 > Part 20
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Though the "hot war" in Korea ceased, the "cold war" with the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc went on, keeping
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defense expenditures high. Many orders for the direct and in- direct support of the military establishment came to Pittsfield, especially to the GE plant, more particularly to its Naval Ord- nance works on Plastics Avenue.
As the company's general business was also flourishing, em- ployment and wages at the Morningside plant remained high. In 1953 and 1954, its average payroll exceeded $1,000,000 a week, by itself a sizeable cash income for any community of 55,000 people.
But the policies of the top GE command had the city worried. After World War II, the company had announced its intention of not expanding its Pittsfield plant. Rather, it would stabilize operations there at a normal employment of 10,000-11,000 people. Even so, three out of five employees in the city would still be working for GE, principally in making transformers and in the naval ordnance shops.
The company had long felt that it played too large a role in the economic life of the city, that the community was too de- pendent upon the ups and downs of employment at the local plant. Many individuals and organizations in the city-notably, the Chamber of Commerce and the Pittsfield Industrial Devel- opment Company-agreed with this, recognizing the need of creating a broader economic foundation based upon diversified industry.
In 1952, General Electric announced expansion plans, which it carried out, for building a new $25,000,000 plant in Rome, Georgia, to make medium-sized power transformers, trans- ferring some Pittsfield personnel there.
Local trade union leaders, especially those of the IUE-CIO locals, were joined by many working people and small business- men in assailing this as another "flight" of industry from New England to the South where, with little unionization, general wage scales were lower. The cry of "runaway" went up again in 1955 when the company reported that it would build another transformer plant in the South, in Hickory, North Carolina, for the manufacture of small transformers.
To these critics the company replied that it was not "fleeing"
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Pittsfield, that it had too large an investment to abandon, that it needed additional facilities to meet competition in trans- former manufacture, that in building elsewhere it was carrying out its announced policy of not expanding the local plant above what it regarded as its most practical level of operation.
As evidence that it had no idea of abandoning or reducing manufacturing facilities for transformers at the Pittsfield works, General Electric cited the many great improvements and expan- sions recently made there:
In 1949, a $2,000,000 high voltage laboratory and a $1,200,000 receiving building; in 1950, a $3,500,000 power transformer test building; in 1951, a high voltage bushing building, a wire building, and a tube rolling building at a com- bined cost of $9,800,000; in 1952, a $1,200,000 distribution transformer shipping building and a $200,000 outdoor con- veyer; in 1954, the world's largest industrial Sound Laboratory and major additions to the power transformer tank shop and other facilities at a combined cost of more than $6,500,000.
All told, this six-year program for modernizing and expand- ing the Morningside works represented an investment of more than $24,000,000-the cost of a good-sized new plant-and brought GE operations in Pittsfield to a new high efficiency. During 1954, employment at the plant averaged 10,600.
In 1955, GE announced that the manufacture of industrial heating apparatus in Pittsfield would be moved to Shelbyville, Indiana. The local plant used for such manufacture, a large four-storied brick building on Columbus Avenue, was given to the Pittsfield Industrial Development Company to aid the latter in its efforts to bring new manufacturing concerns to the city and thus diversify its industry-a goal recognized by the com- munity generally as a most desirable one.
During the war and post-war years, a number of local busi- ness enterprises celebrated important anniversaries. The Sun Printing Corporation observed its 150th birthday in 1950, having roots running back to 1800 when Phinehas Allen found- ed Pittsfield's first newspaper, the Sun, a weekly which ceased publication in 1906.
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Another 150th birthday was celebrated in 1951-by Crane & Company of Dalton (which since 1879 has been operating its Government Mill in Pittsfield). The Agricultural National Bank was 130 years old in 1948. The Berkshire Mutual Fire Insurance Company celebrated its 120th anniversary in 1955.
A number of concerns reached their centenaries-in 1944, Holden and Stone Company, the oldest retail establishment in the Berkshires; in 1945, E. D. Jones & Sons Company, manu- facturers of paper mill machinery for a world market; in 1946, the Berkshire County Savings Bank; in 1951, the Berk- shire Life Insurance Company; in 1953, the Pittsfield National Bank and the Peirson Hardware Company. The latter's store, a landmark on North Street for almost a century, had been moved to Summer Street in 1947.
England Brothers department store, the largest store in the Berkshires, was approaching its 100th birthday, having passed its 98th in 1955.
In 1953, the General Electric Company celebrated the 75th year of its founding by Thomas A. Edison in a small electrical machine shop on Goerck Street, New York, and the 50th anni- versary of its purchase of the Morningside plant from the Stan- ley company in Pittsfield-the beginning of the city's rapid growth and development as an industrial center. Also in 1953, the A. H. Rice Company, makers of silk and synthetic threads, braids, and cords for a national market, reached and passed the three-quarter-century mark.
Other institutions in the community celebrated important birthdays-the city's public library, the Berkshire Athenaeum, its 75th in 1947; the Father Mathew Total Abstinence Society, now the Father Mathew Catholic Youth Center, its 75th in 1949; the Boys' Club, its 50th in 1950; the Berkshire Museum of Natural History and Art, its 50th in 1953; the South Moun- tain Chamber Music Festival, its 30th in 1948.
The year 1954 marked the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Community Chest, which early in 1955 merged with the Community Council to become the United Community Services of Pittsfield, Inc. In its first fund-raising drive in the fall of
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1955 the new organization set itself the record goal of $350,000, which it exceeded.
The 10th anniversary of the youngster-oldster community Halloween party was celebrated in 1952. The traditional large parade along North Street with floats and with people in cos- tume was notable for the surprise appearance of a huge elec- trically-driven monster almost 150 feet long. Built by GE men in their spare time, "Pitt, the Dragon," fascinated 30,000 or more spectators as he moved along "rolling his eyes, flapping his wings, and making horrible sounds."
Two well-known figures, long familiar to almost everybody in the city, left public office during the post-war years. After 32 years as chief of police, John L. Sullivan retired in 1947. He was succeeded by a captain on the force, Thomas H. Calnan, the present chief. At the end of 1954, Fire Chief Thomas F. Burke retired. Joining the department in 1912, he had headed it since 1933. His first deputy, Ward G. Whalen, was named to suc- ceed him.
For most local industries and businesses, the 1950-1955 period was a prosperous one. With employment high and wages rising, it was a generally prosperous period for Pittsfield em- ployees, too.
At the end of 1953, the average weekly industrial wage in the city was $82.14, the highest in the state and considerably above the national average. This stimulated local commerce. New retail businesses came in, including the Lincoln Depart- ment Store, part of a national chain, which opened a large store on North Street in 1951.
In the worst fire since the early 1940s, the old Michelman Building on North Street, originally the Burbank Block, burned to the ground in 1954 and was replaced with a $75,000 struc- ture. Fire having destroyed one of its old mills being used as a warehouse, the Berkshire Woolen Company added a $75,000 building in 1954. In the same year the city saw the first telecast from its own ultra-high frequency television station, WMGT, which built its transmitting towers on top of Mount Greylock.
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The Eagle extensively remodeled its triangular building on Eagle Street in 1950 to provide modern editorial and business offices, and installed presses which doubled its capacity. A new branch post office, largely for the purpose of handling parcel post, was built on New West Street at a cost of $38,000 and opened in 1955.
In 1953, the YMCA spent $300,000 to modernize its build- ing on North Street. Early in 1955, to raise funds for a new building for the Girls' Club, a drive was initiated under the slogan, "Girls are important, too." The community certainly agreed, oversubscribing the $350,000 goal by more than $86,000.
In the summer of 1955, the Berkshire Life Insurance Com- pany sold its home office building at the corner of North and West streets. Erected in 1868, Pittsfield's first large business block, long the home of many institutions other than Berkshire Life, the structure was bought by Frederick M. Myers and his son, Frederick, Jr., at a price said to exceed $500,0,00.
Previously, Berkshire Life had acquired a large 23-acre tract on lower South Street, opposite the Pittsfield Country Club, on which to construct a new home office building with plenty of parking space and room for expansion. Until the structure is completed-work has not yet begun-the company will lease its present quarters in the old building.
The Berkshire Mutual Fire Insurance Company likewise an- nounced its intention of moving its home offices from its present building at the corner of East Street and Wendell Avenue Ex- tension to a new one to be constructed on a large plot in the southeastern section of the city, at the corner of Elm and Wil- liams streets-another evidence of the trend of business away from the crowded center of the city.
In 1953, the Northeast and the Mohawk airlines began serv- ing the city, replacing the Wiggins company. The latter had been using four-passenger Cessnas. The Northeast and the Mohawk began using larger DC-3s. Air freight service, estab- lished in 1946 by the Greylock Airways, of which John A.
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Heaton of Pittsfield was president, did an increasingly large business.
Passenger traffic at the local airport in 1953 was twice as large as the year before. Even so, the Northeast and Mohawk airlines complained that they were operating in Pittsfield at a loss-at least, with no great profit. In the summer of 1955, they announced that they were suspending local service at the end of the year.
Of far more serious concern to Pittsfield and the surrounding towns was the almost simultaneous announcement of the local bus company, the Berkshire Street Railway, that it was drastical- ly cutting its services and would suspend operations entirely at the end of the year unless it were allowed to cure its chronic deficits by raising fares, or curtailing schedules, or both.
An immediate sharp reduction of services went into effect just as the 1955 summer season began. There were no local buses in Pittsfield and to many neighboring towns after six in the eve- ning. There was no bus service at all on Sundays and holidays.
Several smaller bus companies were granted a franchise to pick up passengers along their regular routes through the city. But this was no solution of the general public transportation problem. Curtailed bus schedules were a cause of inconvenience to thousands and a grave handicap for poorer families and for others who did not own or could not drive cars.
A big residential building boom began after 1950. New hous- ing construction reached record heights in 1953 and 1954. This was not due to any large increase in population. The 1955 state census reported that the city had 55,294 inhabitants, an increase of only 1,734 over 1945. The curve in Pittsfield's population growth, so steep after 1890, levelled off after 1930, when its population by Federal census approximated 50,000.
Rather than by population pressure, the post-war housing boom was stimulated in part by high wages and employment, in part by relatively easy mortgage payments afforded by the Federal Housing Administration, in part because there had been little residential building in Pittsfield for almost twenty years, not since 1927.
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Between 1945 and 1955, some 2,600 dwelling units were built. Though an apartment house or two was constructed, few of the new units were for rental purposes. Most of them were small one-family houses built for sale, generally having around them enough ground for a lawn, some shrubs and trees, and a garden. Many were of the flat ranch-type design, with all rooms on the ground floor and no basement. Others were adaptations of Colonial cottages, wanting a full second floor.
Built-many units at a time-by developers of large or small- er real estate tracts, the houses were designed, for the most part, to sell at $10,000 or less. Increasing use was made of prefab- ricated houses put together in factories in large sections and shipped to building sites to be assembled there.
With householders seeking more space and air and light, the city, always rather compact before, began to spread out widely into the suburban areas, especially toward the northeast, off Dalton Avenue, and toward the southeast along Williams and neighboring streets. To serve the growing population in the northeastern section, a $1,500,000 neighborhood shopping cen- ter was built at Coltsville, opening in 1955, with the two-storied Sears Roebuck store as the largest unit.
This building boom was not an unmixed blessing. The phys- ical expansion of the city placed a severe strain upon municipal facilities and services. The new sections needed streets, schools, water and sewer lines, garbage and trash collection, police and fire protection. Almost half of the houses built in 1954 were more than two miles from the nearest fire station.
To provide the necessary services meant that everybody in the city had to be taxed for them because taxes from the newly developed properties would not match the large capital ex- penditures for public services immediately required.
"Progress" often has its reverse side, as Pittsfield discovered in yet another instance. Increasingly plagued by traffic problems and by the lack of adequate parking space in the business dis- trict, the city adopted the wise pattern it had followed on other questions in calling on professionals for expert advice. A firm of parking and traffic consultants, the Ramp Building Corpora-
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tion of New York, was engaged in 1953 to conduct a survey and make recommendations.
Submitted in the summer of 1954, the Ramp report suggested a number of improvements for the better flow and control of traffic. These included rerouting of through-traffic to relieve congestion on busy North Street, the widening of certain main intersections, a new synchronized timing pattern for the traffic lights. These measures were designed not only to facilitate traffic but to reduce the possibilities of accidents to pedestrians and motorists alike.
In one of the first recommendations adopted for the better direction and control of motorists and pedestrians, the city built in the fall of 1955 new raised traffic islands in the much-used intersections around Park Square. Some complained that the numerous islands only made confusion worse confounded. Others welcomed the change. Only trial and experience could determine which of the groups was right.
On the parking problem, the Ramp survey revealed that ap- proximately 29,000 vehicles entered the central district on an average business day. Almost 20,000 of the drivers wished to park. But more than a fourth of them could find no parking space, with the result that thousands were finding it increasingly difficult and exasperatingly inconvenient to do their shopping or other business in the central district.
To remedy this, the report recommended in its major pro- posal the immediate creation of four large city-owned parking lots to accommodate 576 cars. One of the proposed sites was at the corner of East Street and Wendell Avenue, where the old Peace Party House stands. Another was on First Street, just off East Street. A third was on Columbus Avenue, running through to Summer Street. The fourth comprised almost the entire block bounded by First, Eagle, Pearl, and Fenn streets.
The estimated cost of the project, with the purchase of land the largest item, was rather staggering-$936,762. If this were financed by a long-term bond issue, the report estimated that the revenues from the parking lots, plus the monies collected in the parking meters along the streets, would pay all costs in
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twenty years and reimburse the general fund for the taxes lost on the acquired properties. The parking problem would pay for its own solution, as it were, without any charge upon the gen- eral taxpayer.
In September 1955, acting upon the advice of the Traffic Commission, Mayor Capeless submitted a proposal to the City Council that a $500,000 bond issue be authorized to provide a 240-car parking lot on almost all of the block bounded by First, Eagle, Pearl, and Fenn streets.
The Council favored the project by a 6 to 5 vote. But this fell short of the two-thirds majority (8 out of 11 votes) re- quired for the authorization of such a bond issue.
Shortly, Mayor Capeless submitted two alternate proposals to provide off-street parking in the same block-one for $90,000, to provide space for some 85 cars; the other for $400,000, which would care for 220 cars. The second proposal was accepted by the City Council by the requisite two-thirds majority. At the end of 1955, plans for this badly-needed public parking lot were moving forward, but demolition and construction work had not begun.
In 1954, more heat than light was generated in Pittsfield and neighboring communities when the Commonwealth proposed the establishment of a prison forestry camp in the Pittsfield State Forest. It was to serve as a means of rehabilitating and providing meaningful work for not more than fifty model pris- oners, all of whom would be carefully screened.
The chosen men-all first offenders-would build roads, do fire prevention work, help fight the insidious Dutch elm disease killing so many fine trees, and generally improve the public domain. They would be away from hardened criminals behind bleak gray walls. They could enjoy a healthy and purposeful existence. Only those applying for such work would be consid- ered for assignment.
With bloody prison riots occurring all over the country, stu- dents of the problem and many more besides realized the im- perative need for drastic prison reform.
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Massachusetts already had one such prison camp, established in 1952 in the Myles Standish State Forest near South Carver. By all reports, both those of the inmates and of residents living close by, the camp had worked very well. Other states had made similarly successful experiments.
The matter of a prison camp in the Pittsfield State Forest came before a public hearing at the courthouse. Those attend- ing from the city and neighboring communities were almost unanimously and quite vehemently against it. Such a prison camp might be very desirable. But it should be established somewhere else-as far away as possible. Because of local op- position, the proposal was withdrawn.
Though Pittsfield was not directly concerned, another pro- posed development aroused heated controversy in the city and neighboring towns. Early in 1955, a Pittsfield law firm began signing options on a large acreage in Richmond and West Stockbridge, obviously to be used for industrial purposes. There was wide speculation about what was intended. Soon, it was dis- closed that a large cement company, the Dragon, planned to build a $10,000,000 plant near State Line and quarry the lime- stone it needed in the quiet and almost wholly residential com- munities of West Stockbridge and Richmond.
West Stockbridge did not object, but Richmond decidedly did. As the company proceeded with its test borings, the Rich- mond Civic Association made an exhaustive study of the phys- ical and other effects that cement manufacturing would have on the town and surrounding communities. The study led the mem- bers of the Association, a large part of the electorate of Rich- mond, to vote their strong opposition to the cement company's plans-a vote which indicated that Dragon would have little or no chance of getting the permission it needed from the town.
A few months later, announcing that the Richmond-West Stockbridge area lacked sufficient deposits of suitable limestone, the company abandoned its plans for South Berkshire and turned its attention to North Berkshire-to North Adams, an industrial community with several limestone quarries close by.
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The Dragon project had wide support in North Adams, but it was opposed by the Sprague Electric Company, the communi- ty's largest industry, employing some 4,000 workers. The Sprague company declared that dust from a cement factory would seriously affect the delicate electric equipment it manu- factured. When the head of the company announced that Sprague would move out of North Adams if a cement plant came in, that seemed to write finis to the Dragon story in the Berkshires.
The echoes of this controversy had scarcely died away when there was a loud outcry against another proposed development -this time, in Pittsfield, on its very doorstep so to speak, right in the heart of the city.
Late in 1955, a local outdoor advertising concern bought the Gas Company building at the corner of Bank Row and South Street, partly for the purpose of placing on top of it some huge billboards, which would overlook Park Square and the historic buildings around it.
When the City Council approved of the advertising com- pany's petition to the State Outdoor Advertising Division for permission to erect these billboards, those who valued historical and cultural tradition and the attractiveness of the center of the city set up stout opposition to this "improvement" of Park Square.
"If we are going to have big signs up there, gaudy by day, garish by night," said one, "we might as well erect billboards around Park Square and close it up. And then we might con- sider plastering the City Hall and the Library with signs, maybe the churches and the courthouse, and let the Square go at that."
Popular opposition, supported by the City Planning Board, led the City Council rather hastily to rescind its approval of the advertising company's petition by a vote of 10 to 1. When the matter came before the State Outdoor Advertising Division, the company requested a "temporary" withdrawal of its petition. There the matter rested. Saying that he did not know what was meant by a "temporary withdrawal," the chairman of the Divi- sion declared that "as far as the Board is concerned, the petition
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is withdrawn, and the issue is now dead." But some feared a resurrection.
Other proposed improvements were not quite so controver- sial, though certain to be subject to sharp debate. Engaged to study and make recommendations on municipal operations and administrative structure, the J. L. Jacobs Company, a public administration consulting firm of Chicago, submitted late in 1955 a report suggesting wide changes in the city government .*
Another report that gave Pittsfieldians food for thought and cause to look at their pocketbooks was submitted late in 1955- by a Boston engineering firm, Fay, Spofford & Thorndike. The firm had been engaged by the Pittsfield Airport Commission to make recommendations on development of the $500,000 mu- nicipal airport. The report stated that almost $1,500,000 should be spent to improve the airport's facilities and lengthen its run- ways so that it could handle 24-hour air service, especially by larger commercial planes.
The report pointed out that 75 per cent of the cost of the project would be borne by Federal and state funds, that Pitts- field's share would be approximately $350,000, that the sug- gested improvements could be undertaken over a period of years.
Even so, many in Pittsfield felt that the community had more pressing needs and more immediate use for its tax dollars. In any case, the city had the facts on which to proceed in improv- ing its airport if it decided that resulting economic gains and greater travel convenience might outweigh the cost of the project.
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