Given what I call Newburyport’s often “historic amnesia” I am very grateful to the Newburyport Daily News for their series on Newburyport’s Urban Renewal, “A Port In Progress.”

The series can be found online. According to the Newburyport Daily News, the newspaper would like to “carry “A Port in Progress” over a long haul.”

My hope would be that the Newburyport Daily News would leave this series up permanently, because it is the only thing that I am able to find online about Newburyport’s Urban Renewal.

From an informal conversation, it sounds as if the Newburyport Daily News has been working on this for a long time, not only on the stories, but going through various archives for the photographs about Newburyport’s Urban Renewal as well.

And for me, having those photographs easily available to the public of what Newburyport was like, is priceless.

I moved here in 1981, just after downtown Newburyport had been restored. The rest of Newburyport, MA was beginning to follow. And it was far from the “upscale metropolis” that it is now in 2007.

One of my concerns as I’ve been blogging, is that the people who have moved here “recently” (and that can be defined in so many ways) have no idea of the kind of trauma and then growing pains this small New England seaport city has experienced in the last 4 decades, a very short amount of time.

One look at some of the photographs of the demolition and then agonizing restoration, puts so much of what Newburyport has been through in perspective, almost instantaneously.

So check out this series ” A Port In Progress ” by the Newburyport Daily News. It is a series to be learned from and it is a real service to our community.

A very big “thank you” to the Newburyport Daily News.

Mary Eaton
Newburyport