My View of Life on the Dock
After five years on the block of Whistlestop mall in Rockport, Mayflour (and its bakery/coffee shop formerly known as Blume) is temporarily closed. Mayflour is reopening in 162 Main Street, Essex come Spring 2023, just perfect timing for new beginnings. How will they build out and design their new space?
Photos: Mayflour, Rockport. November 21 and December 30, 2022
177 Main Street was most recently occupied by a CVS pharmacy branch which moved to Gloucester Crossing.
Photos: November 17, 2019; November 17, 2022; November 21, 2022; December 4 2022
The property was acquired by Granite Cove Equities in March 2022
Jan. 10, 2023.
Before spring, DPW is managing a gas work project on Main Street between Duncan and Hancock Streets.
A temporary staging site has been set up on I4,C2 (65 Rogers St). Street signs alert drivers on Main. This job is by National Grid that has a subcontractor, Neuco.
Public Works is heavily involved in all aspects of any utility work in the city and “stays tight with projects every step of the way.”
Picnics, promenade, and polar plunge- there were fresh starts everywhere we turned.
Photos: Gloucester, Ma. New Year’s Day, 2023. Coffin’s Beach, Long Beach, Good Harbor Beach, Niles Beach, Stacy Boulevard, and Wingaersheek Beach.
Just outside the window, my neighbor encountered a hawk which had been there all morning. Here’s the expressive Juv. Cooper’s Hawk. Dec. 30, 2022 that took breaks digesting and feasting on a branch in a tree, on a downed branch, and the ground during a four hour window that was long after its feast began.
Opted for a downed branch, then ground.
Back up to 2nd perch, more digesting. Head turn in response to distant train whistle.
This is all normal digestive process for the bird. It takes hours depending upon the size of the prey (birds, small mammals). Prey is ripped apart and swallowed down the esophagus into an ingenious multi compartment stomach sorter –a hopper (the “crop”), the acid bath proventiculus, and gizzard– then on through intestines till it poops. The pellet is coughed up long after.
Dec. 25, 2022
Gloucester, MA 2022
May your day be merry
and bright
Dec. 23, 2022
Views from winter storm walk an hour after high tide when the splash over waves settled back from the Long Beach seawall. The waves are not as huge as some storms. Still, stair and platform debris at both ends of the beach. Surge pushed back into the street. This is the 2nd of 3 high tides in the forecast.
at St. Ann’s 12/19/2022
Dec. 17, 2014 throwback- East Gloucester Elementary theater holiday concert, and before the show seeing the classroom snowman decorating friendly competition displayed
listen to 14 seconds from 2014 singing at EGS theater holiday concert (snow falling down, down, down)
Update. http://mema.mapsonline.net/
9AM. 72,000+ out across Mass.; 1006 in Gloucester; 9 in Essex
Jingle Bell Storm rise sunrise photos Dec. 23, 2022, about 3 hours before the next high tide: Power is on at Long Beach; Creek level at Good Harbor Beach footbridge; Salty Salt Island; Twin Lights, Thacher Island – sunrise spray and waves; Back Shore
8 AM No power outages reported on Cape Ann – 60,000+ in Mass.- http://mema.mapsonline.net/
9AM Update – 1000+ outages in Gloucester
Traffic signs on Stacy Boulevard, Dec. 22, 2022
Forecast
Massachusetts power outage map MEMA
MEMA phone here: mema.mapsonline.net/phone.html
MEMA desktop here
Four of nine siblings–Joseph, Gene, Vic and Ed Urick– were a big singing sensation. I’m listening to a compilation of The Ames Brothers singing classic Christmas songs. Their voices are stunning. Fans know Ed from his acting and solo singing career as well. I didn’t know they were from Massachusetts or their Ukrainian heritage.
See Wicked Local article: “His parents, David Urick (Eurich) and Sarah Urick (Zaslavskaya) immigrated to the USA in 1905, due to the increased pogroms and discrimination against Jewish people in the Russian Empire.”
“In 1956, they starred in their own show, The Ames Brothers Show, which was seen on Friday nights. It was the first syndicated television show to be shown in foreign countries…
Ed is the last surviving member.”
Wikipedia page here: read
Video clip – O holy Night
Robert Mitchum & The Ames Brothers “Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra”
Moonlit Bay
Happy Chanukah 2022
Reminder – Menorah lighting celebration is tomorrow, Tuesday Dec. 20th, 2022, 5:30-6pm
Day | Night photos: Lobster trap menorah is up. The 3rd candle will be lit in sequence tomorrow. The shamash candle raised in the center is lit first, to help light the others.
Here’s hoping that the heavily accessed– and heavy!– door at the Rose Baker Senior Center parking lot entrance will be remedied as soon as possible. Of all the doors in Gloucester, it’s this one for seniors, in most active use, that’s a mystery to me why it’s not automatic. I’m there a couple of times a week dropping off and picking up. Every time I see people with canes, walkers, and strength issues unable to pull that door.
Rose Baker Senior Center exterior was attended to in 2019 with the new parking lot, and
yet that door wasn’t fixed.
More exterior work is slated soon as a new roof is coming (see 2022 bid notice here) and replacement HVAC unit (see 2022 bid notice here). The city’s contracted state-of-the-state building plan road map (read here) does not include such glaringly red flag accessibility issues as this one despite studies and phases. Trusting that the door can be updated by them this month because of cold and inclement weather. It’s very windy in that lot, too. While they’re at it, they could throw in a button at the temporary SFL site, 21 Main St.
Gloucester neighborhoods are shining bright! There are some 350 houses on the 2022 map. The map is smart phone ready with house pictures. A little light goes a long and welcome warm way. It’s dark so early now!
New homes mapped on December 14th,16th, &18th cover some of Gloucester’s main roads, mostly in West Gloucester, Magnolia, and along Rt. 127. Enjoy scenes from:
(Scroll down to see photos. Pinch and zoom or double click depending upon your phone/desktop. On mine I double click and then have to select “Full size”. Scroll down to map.)
and buoy ornaments inside and out
Annual merry dazzler Rt. 133
Batch 1 photos and gifs published 12/5 here
Batch 2 photos and gifs 12/9 here
Batch 3 photos and gifs 12/13 here
Christmas Topper: Rooftop Santa and Reindeer… on the car roof. With twinkling tree. And Hope, Peace.
merry car – “crazy hat” car decked out in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Dec. 16, 2022
Question: On Sunday, December 11, 2022, Jill wrote GMG wondering if the photographs she found showed a Gloucester hotel.
They don’t.
“Hello,
I came upon your website while trying to research some old photos. I have an old photo album, c. 1900s – 10s, of people from Boston. This hotel (see attachment) looks similar to the Oceanside Hotel, but not similar enough. I don’t know your area at all and wondered if you wouldn’t mind taking a look and seeing if it looks familiar? Thank you so much for your time.
Jill, email to GMG Sunday, December 11, 2022, 1:09 PM
Jill mentions Gloucester’s glamorous Oceanside Hotel as a comp, recognizing that it’s a close one but no cigar, and so many grand resorts operating at this time in our area. This special postcard shows Oceanside Hotel, Gloucester, MA, a 400 room hotel built in 1878. The building burned down to its foundation in 1958.
*photo of a postcard from the David Cox postcard collection, shared with me, and featured on the HarborWalk.
The Buena Vista Springs was a luxury property banking on expectations of the tony Pen-Mar vision: a scenic park and amusement destination development that was constructed in 1877 on the Pennsylvania and Maryland border in the Blue Ridge mountains accessible by direct rail from regional hubs. The opulent hotel was built out ca. 1890 but shuttered fast– its short run a casualty of the 1893 financial crash. New owners stepped in. The building stood until a 1967 fire.
Both historic hotel properties reveal an elaborate architectural design, room capacity, timeline, and collapse. Both hotels catered to their respective regional brass and competed for summer destination status promising relief from the heat. One hailed its coastal bona fides, the other its proximity to the Blue Ridge Mountains, Gettysburg, and clean, healing waters. Clean fresh air and water was emphasized at the time of the Russian Flu Pandemic, hence the marketing of “springs” in the name which doubled as short hand differentiation from other Buena Vista towns.
one could hike there- advertised in printed matter
See the original Rennert’s marketing brochure from the Collection of the National Library of Medicine
“What the Catskills and the Adirondacks are to New York, Buena Vista Springs–the most enchanting spot of the Blue Ridge (the Alps of America)–is destined to be to Baltimore and Washington, a resort for the betterment of health, pleasurer and recreation. It is easy to access: taking as the starting point, Baltimore, to which railroads from the North, South, East and West converge, the route lies over the Western Maryland Railroad, a line which traverses a section of country charming in the picturesqueness of its undulating lands, and which has been described as the Garden of the state by travellers of discernment. There is not a mile of this territory but has its special features to entrance the eye and leave their pleasant impression…Seated in these luxuriously appointed parlor cars, the visitors are whirled past towns and villages, pastoral scenes and busy mills, until a faint tint of azure fringes the landscape–the first glimpse of the Blue Ridge. The special “Blue Mountain Express” trains make the distance of seventy one miles between Baltimore and Buena Vista Spring Station in about two hours…”
Buena Vista Spring Hotel pamphlet – PDF here – includes topo map and floor plan
“Buena Vista Spring Hotel is most advantageously situated; There are no mountains rising above or near it to shut off the ozone impregnated air. The mountain zephyrs, in all the wantonness of summer idling, have free and obstructed access, and freighted with the odors of a thousand blooms and the balsamic aroma of a thousand mountain blooms and the balsamic aroma of a thousand mountain pines…”
Water analysis as sales tool:
Gettysburg back cover
1913 “Love Affair Again Rumored “
Hotel guests included foreign dignitaries and politicians. Medical conferences were a draw including at the time of the 1918 Flu Pandemic; the locale maintained a focus as a restorative retreat. (For more about the 1918 Flu epidemic and Gloucester see here)
1915 – “Tuberculosis taken up by conference”
1916 – “Rotarians Plan Trip by Motor for Days Outing”
Regional Tourism AD
100 more homes mapped as of December 9, 2022. New streets (and/or newly lit homes on previously mapped streets), especially in East Gloucester, include:
Abbott Road, Abbot Place (off Harrison), Bass Ave., Brightside Ave, Chapel St., Crestwood Terrace (off Harrison), Davis St., Decatur St., East Main St., Grapevine Road, Green St., Harrison Ave., Hartz, Haskell, High Popples, Jacques Lane, Mt. Pleasant Ave., Perkins St., Rocky Pasture Rd., Skywood Terrace (off Harrison), Witham
Dec. 12, 2022
Good Harbor Beach, marsh estuary, Back Shore, Long Beach
Good Morning Gloucester 