When Hunter S. Thompson came to New Hampshire’s largest city to cover the 1972 presidential campaign, he described it as “a broken down mill town with an aggressive Chamber of Commerce and America’s worst newspaper. There’s nothing much else to say for it.” Manchester’s downtown business district was drying up, its sewers poured excrement into the Merrimack River and most of the massive brick mills sandwiched in between were empty husks, awaiting a revival of U.S. manufacturing that would never arrive. For a quarter-century thereafter, there was little to prompt the casual visitor to reappraise this fallen industrial city of 110,000, an hour north of Boston.
But today there’s no missing that Manchester—laid out in the 19th century as an American manufacturing utopia—has gotten its groove back, successfully resurrecting its massive riverside mill district into a teeming knowledge industry hive. Led by a world famous inventor colorful enough to have invited comparisons to Thomas Edison, Willy Wonka and Dr. No, high-tech firms have colonized the millions of square feet of red brick textile mills along the cleaned-up Merrimack. All is not quite perfect in Manchester—it struggles with the same heroin and opioid problem bedeviling much of New England—but developers have added restaurants, museums and hundreds of high-end loft apartments, while two of the state’s largest higher education institutions have nestled their programs among the new-economy businesses so hungry for skilled recruits.
“For a fast-growing company like us, we just love the mills because it’s a palette in which you can do almost anything,” says Jeremy Hitchcock, CEO of Dyn, an Internet performance company. Dyn opened in Manchester 12 years ago with 15 employees and has expanded its Silicon Valley-like home office to accommodate more than 300 workers, with ample room for indoor putting greens, playground slides and conference space. “All my Boston contemporaries, when they come up here, are just jealous. Where would they ever get this kind of room?”
Manchester owes its transformation to a fortuitous and somewhat unlikely marriage of preservation and innovation. During a decades-long dormant period city officials pined for an industrial heyday that would never return, but they awoke from a nearly fatal slumber to discover that with a few smart changes to their dating profile they might better attract a class of forward-looking suitors who admired the city’s signature buildings for what they could be rather than for what they once were. The Queen City’s 21st-century vitality has become a model for dozens of “first wave” industrial towns and cities spread across the Northeast and the Southern foothills—from Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Biddeford, Maine, to Graniteville, South Carolina, and Prattville, Alabama—as they ponder how best to transform and compete in a fast-moving global economy.
“There was a sense of civic patriotism, some luck, and a lot of people willing to work the extra mile,” says Brian O’Donnell, a Jesuit scholar who wrote his doctoral dissertation on how the city and its rivals confronted the collapse of their traditional industries. “That’s the general prescription for any Rust Belt city: bury the hatchets, get pulling in one direction, and be aware of the possibilities.”
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Manchester is not just a 19th-century industrial city, it’s the 19th-century industrial city, the ultimate expression of the New England establishment’s vision for reconciling the ideals of the American Revolution with the realities of the Industrial one.
The entire city, mills and all, arose from a central plan drawn up at the behest of its corporate benefactors, a group of powerful Boston merchant families whose Puritan roots compelled them to justify their money-making ventures as engines of the common good. These investors—Cabots, Amorys, Lowells and Lawrences, among them—were well aware of the awesome power of Britain’s new textile mills, where water-powered mechanical looms wove cloth at a speed almost unimaginable in the former colonies where yarn, cloth and clothes were made at home by hand. Yet as they drew up their plans during the War of 1812, they fretted over the implications for the young American republic. The Founding Fathers and British aristocracy had shared the belief that economic independence was a prerequisite for citizenship; what separated British and American elites was the latter’s hope that most white males might become independent farmer-producers. British-style industrialization, with its masses of downtrodden laborers, wasn’t merely distasteful, it was considered a threat to the American experiment.
The New Englanders’ solution was what became known as the “Lowell System,” by which their companies didn’t just pay their employees, they provided them houses, schools, hospitals, libraries, parks, churches, banks and even moral supervision. Hoping to reproduce the orderly, self-governing ethos of the pre-industrial New England village, the first mills at Waltham and Lowell, Massachusetts, employed farmers’ daughters, housing them in model dormitories. But companies’ insatiable demand for labor soon had entire families, children and all, tending the looms. Manchester—so named because it aspired to overtake its British predecessor—exceeded them all.
It was here, at the site of the most powerful waterfall in the Merrimack Valley, that the Brahmins laid out the city you see today, from the mile-and-a-half long Millyard to the location of City Hall, the schools, parks and Elm Street, the central boulevard. Parallel power canals stretched north-to-south through the mill district, carrying water that drove turbines in each building. Dormitories were built alongside for ordinary workers, townhouses for middle managers and comfortable manses for their bosses. A foundry churned out the necessary metal goods and, later, locomotives, fire engines, and, during the Civil War, Springfield rifles for the Union Army. The complex was built in red brick and granite, with hardwood floors supported by hundreds of 14-inch-square yellow pine beams, all to unified architectural standards. Everything, even the reversion rights for City Hall and other civic structures, was owned by the investors’ corporate entity, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, which grew to become the largest textile manufacturer on Earth by the early 1920s, its factories containing more than 600,000 spindles and more floor space than two Empire State Buildings.
“Adaptability was the key,” says John Clayton, executive director of the Manchester Historic Association, whose museum is one of several housed in Mill No. 3. “Unlike the dinosaurs, they managed to change as the circumstances did.” But in the last quarter of the 19th century, the flood of immigrant Irish and French Catholic workers and low-cost competition from the American South undermined what was left of the noble principles of the Lowell System. Companies “became less adaptable and less benevolent,” Clayton says. Amoskeag’s chief executive for much of this period was Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, a great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson, who had not inherited Jeffersonian values. “I believed myself to belong to a superior class,” he once wrote, “and that the principle that the ignorant and the poor should have the same right to make laws and govern as the educated and refined was an absurdity.” Unwilling to invest in new technologies, Amoskeag’s owners put the squeeze on the company’s employees, increasing hours and speeding up the machines, provoking a strike of its 17,000 workers in 1922 that was broken after nine divisive months. “Everybody went back to work,” Clayton says, “but a big part of the city’s spirit had been taken away.” The Great Depression dealt the final blow, sending the firm into a death spiral. On Christmas Eve, 1935, it declared bankruptcy. By the following summer, all of its assets were headed for the auction block.
Against the odds, the Millyard didn’t die then and there. Manchester’s business elite, having long toiled in the shadows of Amoskeag’s absentee owners, raised the then-staggering sum of $5 million dollars in just 30 days to bring the complex under local control. The state’s electrical utility bought the dam and hydroelectric plant, while area banks, insurance companies and businessmen formed a partnership to manage Amoskeag’s 6.8 million square feet of manufacturing space and 760 tenements. When Raleigh News & Observer editor Jonathan Daniels visited the city in 1939, 60 percent of the mills had been rented out to 62 firms, including soap, tire, bandage, and casket makers and a host of firms looking for cheap storage. Manchester had begun calling itself “The City That Wouldn’t Die,” but it hadn’t recovered its health, either. Together, Millyard firms employed less than a quarter as many people as Amoskeag had, and the owning partners lost money until World War II and its lucrative contracts saved the day.
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The Millyard’s industrial epilogue was short-lived. Interstate 293 smashed through its southern edge in the 1950s, drawing people, stores and manufacturers out into the new suburban hinterlands. An anthrax outbreak killed four workers at a goat hair processing concern in 1957, ultimately forcing authorities to undertake what was said to be the largest decontamination project in history: The affected mill building was torn down, its beams incinerated, its bricks soaked in chlorine and buried. A few blocks to the south, cows lined up at an old-fashioned slaughterhouse which in those pre-Clean Water Act days poured the resulting blood and guts into the fetid river. The two disused power canals had become open sewers, stinking up the district from one end to the other. The shoe and textile companies that continued to operate there slowly surrendered to cheaper Southern and overseas competition.
By the early 1960s, the city was considering knocking the whole place down and starting over, a position endorsed by many former Amoskeag workers, who had few fond memories of working in the world’s largest sweatshop. But historical preservationists argued the Millyard should instead be repurposed as a mixed-use urban center. “Amoskeag is one of those rare instances in the field of city planning and design when the social, economic and technological characteristics of an age combined with the shape of the particular site, the vision of the planners and the sensitivity of the designers in such a way as to produce a wholly original work of art,” building conservationist Randolph Langenbach argued in 1969 as part of a lengthy plea in the Boston Globe. He urged the University of New Hampshire-Manchester to move in rather than go through with plans for a suburban campus, a recommendation not acted on until the 1980s. It is “as priceless as the work of the most famous painters, sculptors or composers, and more universally meaningful and important to the peoples of the nation and the world.”
The city, convinced that manufacturing would return if the district’s physical conditions were improved, chose a middle path. During the ’60s, its federally funded urban renewal project filled in the canals and knocked down the smaller, curving brick buildings that ran alongside them to create wide roadways and parking lots. Langenbach denounced the plan, arguing architectural treasures were being destroyed when regulating traffic flow and building some parking garages would achieve the same purposes. City officials were unimpressed. “Bunk, we are not destroying any monument. We are giving it a lease on life by clearing away the junk,” urban renewal director Cary P. Davis told Manchester’s Union-Leader. “What is mainly being leveled ... is nothing but a lot of rickety rats' nests and firetraps.”
John Hoben returned to his hometown to take over as city coordinator in 1972, just as the urban renewal project was being completed. “By then all the companies they were anticipating would use the space were either gone to suburban single-story manufacturing structures that were far more functional or efficient for them or had left New England altogether,” he recalls. “They’d done something starkly cheap and utilitarian at just the time when industry didn’t want that any more.”
“I remember standing in what is now Arms Park with a couple of other people and looking out over this huge cavernous parking lot without a job in site,” he says. “We saw that something wasn’t working here.”
Hoben and his colleagues knew the river was getting cleaned up and that it would prove a better economic attractant than another parking lot. They started acquiring easements along the riverfront and installing attractive street lamps and brick-surfaced sidewalks on the streets leading to it. They drew up plans for canoe races and waterfront concerts and started referring to the Millyard as part of a riverfront park system rather than a factory complex. “We wanted to get people more focused on the unique environment of the area,” he says.
And then, a rising young genius took notice, placing Manchester on an entirely different path.
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In 1981, Dean Kamen was a 29-year-old college dropout and self-made millionaire whose inventions had already transformed the lives of thousands. The son of a Long Island educator and an EC comic book artist (publishers of Tales from the Crypt), he’d been out-earning his parents long before graduating from high school by designing automated light shows. While at Worcester Polytechnic—from which he never graduated—Kamen had a conversation with his brother, a medical student, who complained of the difficulty of constantly administering low doses of intravenous drugs to hospital patients, inspiring Dean to devise the world’s first automatic drug infusion pump, a small wearable device that freed diabetics and other patients from the hospital. He expanded his parents’ basement to build his first manufacturing plant but soon had so many orders he needed more space. Already frustrated with New York’s high taxes and onerous licensing, he was captivated by the motto on the New Hampshire license plate of a passing car: “Live Free or Die.” “That’s the place for me,” he concluded.
Short, dark-haired, and always dressed in the same outfit—denim shirt and jeans, camouflage jacket—Kamen moved his Autosyringe Inc. and 20 employees to the outskirts of Manchester. But his eye kept being drawn to the Millyard complex on the river. “To Dean they symbolized a time when American engineering and technology had led the country to greatness and changed the world,” biographer Steve Kemper writes. In 1981, shortly before selling Autosyringe to Baxter HealthCare for $30 million, Kamen purchased two 70,000-square-foot riverfront buildings and began rehabilitating them. He didn’t intend to rent them out. He wanted them to house his dream invention factory.
By the time DEKA was fully operational, Kamen had made a big splash in New Hampshire’s tiny pond. He built a mad scientist’s lair atop the area’s tallest hill, a hexagonal house with a full machine shop, an indoor pool with a grotto, a bookshelf that opens into a hidden room when you pull the right volume (Ingenious Mechanisms for Designs and Inventions, Volume IV), a secret passageway connecting his lab and bedroom and a heliport from which he commuted to the roof of DEKA’s new headquarters. Occasionally, he’d fly instead to North Dumpling Island, his 3-acre scrap of sand and gravel in Long Island Sound where his getaway home features a lighthouse, a wine cellar and a diminutive copy of Stonehenge. When New York state balked at his plans to build a wind turbine to power it all, Kamen declared himself Lord Dumpling, announced he was seceding from the U.S., and issued the island’s constitution, currency and national anthem.
But most of the time, Kamen worked. DEKA, which grew to employ over 300 engineers, churned new inventions from its Millyard base. There was HomeChoice, a dialysis machine the size of a suitcase, rather than a refrigerator, small enough to take on an airplane, quiet enough to use while asleep. There was an intravascular stent created for Johnson & Johnson, an example of which currently resides within Dick Cheney. There was the iBot, a gyroscopic electric wheelchair that can stand stable and upright on two wheels, climb stairs, hop over curbs, roll across sand and let its user look people in the eye.
The whole while, Kamen continued buying riverfront Millyard buildings, including another 70,000-square-footer in 1984 and yet another in 1991, even though his own firm didn’t need the space. His goal in buying them, he told the Union Leader in 1984: “bring the area to a point where it has a large enough high tech base that it starts developing itself.” To that end, he lobbied the city to loosen zoning regulations to allow nonindustrial uses.
He was joined by John Madden, a developer who in the mid-1980s formed a partnership with the city to rehabilitate one of the large mill buildings but struggled to find manufacturing tenants. “There were law firms and similar office users who would have wanted to relocate to these great buildings as well back then, but the City was working to attract industry,” he recalls. Downtown commercial property owners resisted, fearing increased competition, but the desired changes were fully implemented by the mid-1990s.
“The traditional way of zoning in America was a separation of uses, but in the ’80s and ’90s you started to see pushback, with the successes of mixed-use areas like the Meat Packing District or Williamsburg in New York City,” says Scott Hastings, an urban planner who studied the Millyard’s transformation. “Dean Kamen was the catalyst to push the city to act.”
The inventor was also at work on a super-secret project, one that became the subject of furious global media speculation after someone who had seen it—Apple’s Steve Jobs—said it was an invention as significant as the personal computer. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called it “so revolutionary, you won’t have a problem selling it.” Everyone wanted to know what DEKA was building inside the old spinning mills: a cold-fusion reactor? Jetpacks? A Star Trek-style transporter? Kamen wasn’t saying, but for the first time outside a presidential primary season, all eyes were suddenly on Manchester.
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But while Kamen’s engineers had been building their secret invention—unveiled as the Segway human transporter in 2001—Manchester had continued to stumble along. In a single day in 1991, federal regulators closed eight New Hampshire banks, half of which were based in the city, after they were overwhelmed by bad real estate loans. “It was traumatic for the city, and it went through a terrible time,” recalls high school principal Robert Baines, who would serve as mayor from 2000 to 2006. “I remember in the early ’90s being down on Elm Street one Saturday morning and watching a guy at one of the catch basins dumping his own feces out of a newspaper in front of City Hall. My friend remarked: ‘So it’s come to this.’”
Many Millyard buildings remained vacant or underutilized, occupied by homeless people and great hordes of pigeons, and with trees growing from their roofs. “Have you been to Beirut?” asks Don Clark, Kamen’s property manager. “In the 1990s it looked like that: bombed out.” Developer Arthur Sullivan, whose firm bought the 500,000-square foot Waumbec Mill in 1995 for $15,000 and back taxes, recalls it as “a time where people didn’t feel secure walking down the Millyard’s streets, especially in the night hours.” Rents were very low, making major investments in the aging buildings a risky proposition.
But city officials took a few important steps that helped lay the groundwork for the boom. There was a $150 million investment in expanding Manchester airport from a sleepy terminus to a regional hub able compete with Boston’s congested Logan International and get would-be businesspeople anywhere they needed to go. There was a $200 million civic center at the edge of the Millyard to host major concerts and a minor league hockey team. There was the final realization that East Asia now manufactured the world’s shoes, sweaters and electronics, thus the Millyard would be a mixed-use city district, not an urban industrial park. The city then rescued one of the large mills from demolition, deeding it to Kamen if he would transform it into a home for museums and other nonprofits. A joint venture with Madden finally brought the University of New Hampshire-Manchester to the Millyard.
“The city really wanted change to occur, and had started developing the partnerships that were necessary to help bring people and money to the Millyard,” says Julie Gustafson, founding director of the Amoskeag Business Incubator, where two dozen mostly high-tech startups took root in the late 1990s. “People finally realized that having a vital Millyard would help create a vital downtown, not the other way around.”
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By the turn of the millennium, professional and high-tech firms clustered in Boston, Cambridge and the Route 128 corridor were starting to feel the pinch of expensive rents, combative commutes, limited space and relatively high taxes. Some started tracking those “Live Free or Die” plates up I-93 to southern New Hampshire, where there were no income or sales taxes (only property tax), ample open land and lower costs. Passing over the Merrimack en route to Hanover or Concord, many confronted the vista of the Millyard, now no longer an eyesore and located near a thriving airport. Here was a clutch of high-tech businesses—from a pack of former incubator companies to the maker of Segways, of all things—all clustered with an expanding university campus in high-ceilinged brick buildings with hardwood floors, exposed beams, and tall windows with often striking views of a river. Fifty minutes from Boston, 10 minutes to the airport departure desks, an hour from the ocean and the White Mountains, the complex began attracting noticeable interest.
“Suddenly our buildings started filling up quickly,” says Sullivan, whose firm saw its lower-rent mill buildings rapidly filling and responded by buying and rehabilitating the massive Jefferson Mill into the district’s first high-end office space. Kamen attracted Texas Instruments into one of his original buildings, then moved to buy and renovate others, eventually winding up with eight in all. The state’s electric utility, now called Eversource, announced in 2000 that it was renovating the abandoned power plant at the north end of the complex to serve as its new corporate headquarters. “The mill buildings had all these desirable characteristics, and they were located right next to a major highway,” says Ross Gittell, chancellor of New Hampshire’s community college system, who has studied the revitalization of industrial cities. “Whereas an old steel mill is often an unattractive shell with serious pollution issues, these textile mills are beautiful and much easier to revitalize.”
Dave Arnold, one of the pioneers of the state’s tech industry, had seen little reason to locate in Manchester in 1985 when he founded Softdesk, which became a dominant player in an architectural software market, and based it 30 miles to the northwest in Henniker, the sleepy town where he’d attended college. He sold the company to industry leader Autodesk in 1997, and was surprised when, three years later, the California firm moved operations to one of Kamen’s newly renovated waterfront mills. Now he’s followed suit, having moved his rapidly expanding wireless video firm, Retrieve Technologies, into the same mill a decade ago. “It’s close enough to the 128 belt to bring people up, and close enough to Boston to do things we need to do there,” he says. “And since then Manchester has become cool, which didn’t dawn on me until I started recruiting millennials. They like being in these spaces, walking distance to town, like living in a Baby Boston.”
Meanwhile, Jeremy Hitchcock was graduating from Worcester Polytechnic (the same school Dean Kamen never finished) and looking for a place to expand Dyn, his nascent Internet security and performance company. “We saw the writing on the wall, with the outer Boston suburbs being unsustainable and all these tech companies moving downtown and overfishing the pool of talent,” he recalls. Then he happened to talk to Baines, his former principal at Manchester West High School, then the mayor, who said he ought to bring it home. “His pitch was that there were all these interesting people working here, and my access to talent would be so much greater than Boston.” Dyn came to Manchester in 2004 with 15 people. Now it has nearly 400 spread out over two floors of a huge mill building and satellite offices in Boston, Britain, Australia and Singapore and a client list that includes Twitter, Pandora and LinkedIn.
The Internet itself has made it possible for other 30-something entrepreneurs to make a go of it in their home town. Travis York moved back from Boston and took the leadership of local marketing firm GYK Antler, helping transform it into a regional player. “Growing up, our cousins lived in California and they were literally at least five years ahead of us on every trend,” he recalls. “But I knew the Internet was flattening the world very quickly, and just because you were in New Hampshire, your access to information was no longer limited.” His brother Kyle, a classmate of Hitchcock, left a Silicon Valley software firm in 2008 to become Dyn’s vice president for sales, allowing the two to collude with their three brothers to revive the family’s athletic footwear company. It’s now housed with GYK Antler in the 19th-century factory building their grandparents had owned a half-century ago, which the brothers purchased and renovated in 2014. “There are these handfuls of entrepreneurial people who created clusters of companies, and that’s given opportunities to others,” he says. “The rising tide has raised all the ships.”
The presence of the likes of Autodesk, DEKA and Dyn has definitely transformed Elm Street—where boarded-up storefronts have given way to trendy restaurants. “These high-tech businesses have come into the Millyard and a younger crowd has started working at them, creating a domino effect,” says Sara Beaudry, who heads Intown Manchester, the central business district association. “Where are they all going to eat? Where are they going to live? It’s been huge for our city.” (Kamen, frustrated that the Millyard had no restaurant to his liking, recently opened his own, The Foundry, an homage to the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company that’s outfitted with a 10-foot-tall power loom drive wheel, $60,000 in decorative steel hardware and his personal dining room.)
Millennials, famous for their generational disdain of cars, have created demand for Millyard housing. Brady Sullivan completed the first 110 lofts three years ago, renting them all out at an average of $1,500 a month before construction was completed. They’re now completing an additional 300 high-end units in a behemoth, 600,000-square-foot Amoskeag mill building on the west side of the river, which is also nearly sold out. “It’s a perfect storm, with all these people working in the Millyard and looking for a type of lifestyle that doesn’t involve living in a 1970s style apartment on the outskirts,” says Sullivan. “Because these buildings are so large, you can have amenities that you wouldn’t have in an older, garden-style complex—basketball courts and putting greens and meeting rooms with thousands of square feet where people can congregate—all in a riverfront location.”
But if Manchester’s job and housing markets are thriving, it’s still a work in progress. The Millyard is woefully short of parking, and public transit isn’t sufficiently developed to allow people to get around without a car. There’s a civic center and a minor league baseball park, but little in the way of grass-roots, homegrown arts, music and culture. “We have a bar and restaurant scene, but it’s going to need some retail and more diverse entertainment,” says York.
Then there’s the Holy Grail: truly linking the city to Boston by extending the latter city’s commuter rail system 33 miles north to the Millyard from its current terminus in Lowell, Manchester’s 19th-century industrial rival. “Many of us view that as the lifeline for the community, allowing young people to commute to or from here to work,” says William Craig, the city’s director of economic development.
Additionally, Kamen has long argued for a streetcar line through the Millyard to solve its parking problems, Clark says, but thus far to no avail. In any case, he’s had his hands full, creating a thought-controlled mechanical prosthetic arm for DARPA, a Manchester-based global robotics competition for high school students and, in the science museum he established, the largest permanent Lego instillation in the world, a massive 1:55 scale recreation of the Amoskeag Millyard circa 1900 that took a team of volunteers two years and 3 million blocks to complete. Now he’s working with Coca-Cola to deploy to the impoverished villages of Africa a portable water purification system-cum-electrical generator that can run on cow manure and make potable water from a latrine and has the potential to prevent millions of deaths. The prototypes are humming away now, deep in the bowels of the Amoskeag mill, waiting to realize their utopian promise.