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2012 Biennial Cruise - CT to ME and back
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The Boston Globe had an article on Gloucester's new 1.2 mile harbor walk. Something to do before dinner.


Here is the text:


Boston Globe/July 19, 2012

GLOUCESTER — Among the weathereddocks and fishermen’s shacks of this renowned port lives another Gloucester: a world ofsea serpents and seafaring stories, world-renowned artists and beloved culturalicons.

The problem has always been how to find it. The workingwaterfront that supplies the city’s lifeblood also presents a maze of piers andindustrial lots that are as difficult for visitors to navigate as they arecrucial to Gloucester’seconomy.

Next month, the city hopes to solve that problem with theopening of Gloucester Harborwalk, a 1.2-mile loop that brings to lightpreviously hard-to-find historical and cultural lore and reunites the city’smain streets and its seaport. It does so with a network of 42 markers that isaccompanied by a virtual tour that can be downloaded onto a smartphone.

City officials see the Harborwalk as a way to lurevisitors who stop by for lobster, whale watching, or a trip to the beach intolonger stays that will help drive the local economy.

Related

 “We want people to linger,” said Mayor CarolynKirk, as she led a reporter on a preview of the walk on Friday. “We want peopleto immerse themselves in the history of Gloucester.”

The trick was to get visitors to engage in the waterfrontwithout getting in the way of it. Over three years of planning and communitymeetings, it became clear that people did not want to “Disney-fy” Gloucester, Kirk said.Rather than sanitize the gritty waterfront, the project was designed to zig-zagin and out of docks that had been inaccessible, giving visitors a glimpse ofthe maritime port and the cultural treasures within.

“It was designed to avoid that fear of reducing Gloucester to a gimmick,”Kirk said.

The walk stretches from St. Peter’s Square, where viewerslearn about St. Peter’s Fiesta and can watch a video of the famed Greasy Polecontest, and leads past City Hall, Main Street, local museums, and waterfront sites.

Outside City Hall, Kirk stopped at a short rectangularpillar of gray, Cape Ann granite. It containeda small panel dedicated to Virginia Lee Burton, the author of the classicchildren’s book “Katy and the Big Snow,” which is set in a fictional town thatshe modeled after Gloucester.The panel has a QR code, a black-and-white speckled square that, when scannedby a smartphone, brings up websites connected to the author, including asymphony composed by a Gloucester musician in her honor, and a cover of thebook.

Another marker displays Winslow Homer’s renowned painting,“Breezing Up (A Fair Wind),” and describes how the artist’s best-known work wasinfluenced by his visits to Gloucesterin the late 1800s.

Closer to the waterfront, a marker tells the story of theGloucester Sea Serpent, first reported in 1638 and hundreds of times since.According to these accounts, the chocolate-colored creature, whose lengthranges from 40 feet to 100 feet, circled boats and sunned itself on the beach of Ten Pound Island.

An interactive segment of the tour describes the story ofHoward Blackburn, a Gloucesterfisherman who survived five days lost at sea in the winter of 1883 by freezinghis hands to the oars of his dory and rowing back to shore.

Visitors are led to a dory similar to the one Blackburnrowed, and a fisherman’s shack full of the gear a Gloucester schooner might have had aboard.This all takes place on the dock adjacent to Maritime Gloucester, a museum andeducational center that tells the story of the harbor from the point of view offishing as well as marine science.

There, the schooner Ardelle operates charter voyages alongthe coast, and a shuttle that conducts tours of Gloucester Harbormakes a stop. On a hilltop nearby, markers point out the twin bell towers ofOur Lady of Good Voyage Church, between which stands a sculpture of the VirginMary, who cradles in her left arm a Gloucesterschooner.

The city broke ground for the harborwalk in February, andhad hoped to open it at the beginning of summer. Instead, workers are stillpatching up a section of boardwalk leading to a public wharf, and working outthe bugs in the technology, such as links that do not work. Kirk said that thecity has spent $950,000 of the budgeted $1.2 million; she says there will be asecond phase that might create pedestrian walkways from the water to Main Street, or addlighting, but that the project will not go over budget.

The city is now targeting the first week in August for theopening.

Prospective walkers are well warned to remember thatGloucester is about fish ­— the “unloading, filleting, salting, drying, boning,cutting, grinding, smoking, boxing, packaging, and canning,” as one panel putsit. The tour is no way to beat the heat for anyone who finds the smell of fishin various stages of production less than refreshing.

“That smell means money,” Kirk likes to say, “and jobs.”




Leo Corsetti has a good rundown in the Harbor Notes forum on facilities in Boston Harbor for those transiting enroute to or from the cruise.

The harbor has been cleaned up at great expense over the last years and is now an excellent venue for cruisers wishing to imbibe city life on salt water.


John Harvey
New Day T-37 #16
Those transiting the New England coast this summer should be aware of a new facility in Newport RI for transient boaters, the Newport Maritime Center. No new slips but showers, laundry, wi-fi, etc and the best map of all the harbor transient dinghy docks and anchorages I have seen.

John Harvey
New Day T-37 #16

Check out the Harbor Notes forum, it has excellent notes on Mass and Maine stopover points in the Maine Cruise 2008 thread.


John Harvey
New Day T-37 #16

Tell us your cruise plan, ask about anchorages, coves and ports enroute, and have a general discussion of the 2012 TONE Cruise.


John Harvey
New Day T-37 #16
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