Why Worcester Is The Opposite of Every US City

Worcester, Massachusetts is where John Adams studied law, where the first armed overthrow of British rule in America took place in 1774, and where the three-decker home — the building type that defined dense working-class urbanism across the entire Northeast — was invented. It had centuries of accumulated architectural fabric, a pre-grid organic street network refined over two hundred years, and a manufacturing economy that made it one of the most productive mid-sized cities in New England. Then, in roughly fifteen years, Worcester demolished most of it — not after the economy collapsed, but while it was still functioning. The city that gave the industrial Northeast its defining residential form does not look like it belongs in the industrial Northeast. This is the story of the city that built urban America and then bulldozed itself into anonymity.