It had not only become a leading printed textile manufacturer, but also an essential element in North Adams’s community and economy. From a company of 100 employees in 1870, the Arnold Print Works expanded to over 3,200 workers in 1905. By 1890, the Arnold Print Works had constructed most of the buildings that now comprise MASS MoCA and the firm continued to grow. In 1872, Building 4 was the first new structure erected after the fire, with Building 10 rising later the same year. An 1871 fire destroyed the company’s mills, but rebuilding began immediately due to the print works’ surging profits. Their company, Harvey Arnold and Company and, later, the Arnold Print Works, began production of printed cloth in 1862 and experienced rapid growth due to the Union Army’s demand for uniforms during the Civil War. In 1860, the Arnold brothers, sons of a local farmer, purchased a small existing cotton mill on a peninsula where the Hoosic’s branches met. Light industry first formed along the banks of the Hoosic River, which separates into north and south branches in the town. MASS MoCA’s innovative reuse of an industrial space demonstrates how historic buildings can function within regional economic, social, and cultural revitalization efforts.įrom its origins as a colonial agricultural settlement, North Adams, in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts, developed into an industrial center beginning in the late eighteenth century. Throughout the 1990s, museum professionals, civic leaders from North Adams and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, architects, preservationists, and the residents of North Adams reclaimed the deteriorating collection of vacant factory spaces, warehouses, and administrative buildings and transformed them into the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (known as MASS MoCA), a world-class art museum, performance space, and community cultural center. Simultaneously, the directors of the nearby Williams College Museum of Art sought a home for its collection of large-scale contemporary art that could not physically (or, often, conceptually) fit within existing museum spaces. Over a dozen empty brick industrial buildings, mostly dating from the late nineteenth century, crumbled as the surrounding city of North Adams sought to redefine itself in the postindustrial age. By the late 1980s, the sprawling campus of the former Arnold Print Works and, later, Sprague Electric Company, sat unused.
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