Historic New England envisions the Haverhill Center for Preservation and Collections as a catalyst for a global-national-regional-local arts and culture district in downtown Haverhill, Massachusetts.
A BOLD VISION
Explore living archives, state-of-the-art storytelling, and pioneering exhibitions. Experience dynamic installations and performances by world-class artists breaking new creative ground. Expand your knowledge with hands-on learning opportunities from top innovators and makers. Get excited.
Historic New England will evolve its downtown Haverhill location to unprecedented visitor and exhibition spaces and partner to develop residential, innovation, hospitality, and dining facilities. The Haverhill Center will support an improved streetscape, including expanded public art, lighting, signage, and green space.
This cultural district will serve as community catalyst, strengthening local and regional businesses, arts, environmental, and social institutions and significantly drawing new visitors and revenue to the area.
“We envision collaborating with the community to develop sustainable, more livable, resilient, and dramatically improved amenities, anticipating that the impact of the downtown cultural district will reverberate internationally.”
—Vin Cipolla, president and CEO, Historic New England
EXPLORE THE COLLECTIONS
Historic New England’s collection includes more than 125,000 objects and over 1.5 million archival documents. From teddy bears to tattoo flash, there’s something for everyone! To understand the breadth of the collection and the many stories it contains, you can explore a small sample below.
![Between Two Worlds](https://haverhillcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2024/07/CyrusBruceJuly1-scaled.jpg)
Cyrus Bruce, free man, formerly enslaved, was known for his dapper appearance when he worked at Langdon House in Portsmouth, NH in 1783, yet when artist Richard Haynes embarked on painting his portrait in 2018, no image of Bruce existed. Haynes created this interpretive portrait of Bruce in an artist's residency and exhibition, A Life in Color: Two Cultural Makers, Centuries Apart at Historic New England’s Langdon House. “I have the opportunity to capture the image, the portrait of an unknown man and through this, together, we are going to be cultural keepers and makers. We are going to share the black heritage, the forgotten history, through art.” –Richard Haynes Jr.Between Two Worlds
Learn more about how Richard Haynes creates a portrait
![](https://haverhillcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2023/06/MIG-2b.-306838-1940s-Charles-Sumner-shoes-002-crop.png)
Historic New England Haverhill Center is located in one of the largest former shoe factories in Haverhill. In 1900, 40% of the country’s shoes were manufactured in Massachusetts and Haverhill—“the Queen Slipper City”—was the third largest shoe manufacturing city in the United States. Adapting to changes in fashion and with the advance of organized labor, the Haverhill shoe industry continued to flourish. In 1941, a profile of Haverhill boasted the city as the largest manufacturer of women’s shoes in the US, with over fifty shoe factories in the city, along with other associated businesses in wooden-heel manufacturing and leather tanning. Queen Slipper City
![](https://haverhillcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2024/07/CrockpotJuly1.png)
Haverhill Center preserves objects of everyday life like this 1974 crock-pot. The crock-pot slow cooker gained popularity in the mid-twentieth century as a time-saving technology. The inspiration for the modern crock-pot invention actually dates to a nineteenth century Lithuania town, where villagers slowly cooked a traditional Jewish stew called cholent in the town bakery’s hot ovens cooling overnight, to have dinner ready for the Sabbath.
![](https://haverhillcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2024/07/NavajoRugJuly1.jpg)
This Navajo rug was purchased in 1906 by a visitor to Wyoming. In the early twentieth century, Indigenous American goods became popular due to both an interest in handcrafts and, ironically, the subjugation of Indigenous American tribes. Indigenous Americans, deprived of their land resources, created successful enterprises with craftwork, including rugmaking and basketry. This rug is on view at Historic New England’s Castle Tucker in Wiscasset, Maine.Adaptive Enterprise
![](https://haverhillcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2023/06/deborah-sampson_1.png)
“She was everywhere received as a blithe, handsome, agreeable young gentleman.” –Herman Mann, The Female Review: or, Deborah Sampson is famous for enlisting in the continental army during the American Revolutionary War. This is her wedding gown. Sampson avoided discovery for eighteen months, until she contracted yellow fever and received an honorable discharge in 1783.Enlisted as a Man
Memoirs of an American Young Lady. 1792
![](https://haverhillcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2024/05/420107-1.jpg)
Photograph of the China Trade Gate, colloquially known as the Chinatown Gate, in Boston, Massachusetts. This photograph was taken in 2017 by John D. Woolf as part of a series intended to highlight threats to Chinatown from gentrification and development. Signed by John D. Woolf on verso. John Woolf (b. 1952) has worked as a photographic artist for more than forty years. His photographs of Boston’s Chinatown and diners in the Northeast are part of his effort to document the transformation of the American urban architectural landscape and the fast disappearing twentieth-century roadside architecture of the Northeast industrial corridor. Woolf’s photographs document the Chinatown many are hoping to preserve. The gateway, proposed by noted Boston entrepreneur and longtime community activist “Uncle” Frank Chin, was commissioned by the China Trade Center, designed by architect David Judelson, and gifted from the Taiwanese government to the Chinese community of Boston in 1982. Made of painted steel tubing on a concrete base, the paifang, also known as pailou, archway at the Beach Street entrance to Chinatown was installed in 1988 and rededicated in 1990.Urban Landscape
![](https://haverhillcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2024/07/TrailblazerJuly1.png)
Paul R. Williams Plan book of homes designed by trail-blazing African American architect Paul R. Williams. Each design covers a two-page spread, with one page dedicated to highlighting the design's unique features, and the opposite page showcasing an illustration of the completed design and a floor plan. Paul R. Williams was a prolific architect who was designed some 2,500 public and private buildings, including homes for Hollywood stars such as Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra, and Barbara Stanwyck. Much of his work was centered in Southern California, and he is considered a major influence on the twentieth-century architectural style of Los Angeles, though he designed internationally. Born 1894, Williams was the first black architect to become a member of the American Institute of Architects in 1923, and in 1957 he was inducted as the AIA's first black fellow. Williams was known for his distinctive style, with signature effects of elegant lines and indoor-outdoor harmony, this including use of patios and retractable screens. The lettering on the iconic sign of the Beverly Hills Hotel is adapted from his own handwriting, as Williams gave the hotel a facelift in the 1940s. Even as Williams was creating the now-famous look for the hotel, he was not permitted as a guest at the establishment, nor could he use the pool, because of his race. While the work of Paul R. Williams is associated with California, this plan book is in the Historic New England Archive as part of the Richard Cheek collection, one of the finest plan books collection in the country and much of which is being donated by Cheek to Historic New England.
Trailblazer
New Homes for Today, 1946.
Murray & Gee, Inc., Hollywood, California
![](https://haverhillcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2024/07/BannedBostonJuly1.png)
Massachusetts banned tattoos in 1962 when a hepatitis break-out in New York was linked to tattoo needles. The ban didn’t stop people from getting tattoos; the whole business went underground, giving tattoos the aura of cool. Tattooing has been used by Indigenous Americans for thousands of years and for different cultural meanings—tribal identity, life milestones, and healing.Banned in Boston
![](https://haverhillcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2024/04/307237hpr.png)
Strawberry Hat Ethel Atkins was a prominent Boston milliner of the twentieth century with an establishment on Arlington Street, straddling the city’s fashionable Back Bay and Beacon Hill neighborhoods: Boston milliner Ethel Atkins—often titled Queen of Hats by her Proper Boston clientele—has been reminding women for 30 years that minus a chapeau they are akin to a painting without a frame…Boston Propers considered a black hat the height of elegance. But Miss Atkins has always been mad for color.” - Marian Christy, “Milliner to Proper Boston,” The Boston Globe, June 4, 1968, 32.
Mad for Color
1950-1960
Ethel Atkins, milliner
![](https://haverhillcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2024/07/BLMJuly1.jpg)
Elliot Isen This image is part of the 2020 Historic New England project, A Time to Remember. This project started as an initiative to collect the stories and images of the COVID-19 pandemic in real time, but quickly evolved to a fuller endeavor as the Black Lives Matter movement was born. Historic New England staff member Elliot Isen photographed the fence on Boston Common where demonstrators had placed their Black Lives Matter placards after a protest in May 2020, during the chaos of COVID-19. As the turbulence of the pandemic eventually lifted, the Black Lives Matter has had a lasting impact, shining a light on racial injustice and drawing a multiracial coalition of support.
Black Lives Matter Project
Black Lives Matter Collection
![](https://haverhillcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2023/06/MIG-gropius-teaset-thumbnail.png)
Walter Gropius, founder of the German design school known as the Bauhaus, was one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. Escaping Nazi Germany, he designed Gropius House as his family home when he came to teach architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Historic New England preserves his home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and many of the household objects he designed.Icon of Modernism
ENGAGE WITH US
upcoming events
You can help shape the vision for the Haverhill Center. Join us at community events around the city that showcase exciting stories, creative activities, and compelling traditions. Please come see us to learn more about our vision for the Haverhill Center and become part of the story.
news
“Historic Future” with Vin Cipolla, Traditional Building Magazine
Panel: Inclusive Design: Disability, Culture, and Preservation (Historic New England Summit 2023)
Panel: Embodied Carbon: The Sustainability Imperative of Preserving Places (Historic New England Summit 2023)
Historic New England Lays Plans To Transform Haverhill into a Cultural Destination (Northshore Magazine)
Historic New England plans major expansion (Boston Globe, June 29, 2023)
The Haverhill Center: Leading Architecture Firms Respond to a Design Provocation
Historic New England: Recovering New England’s Voices
Historic New England Haverhill Center
Historic New England is the largest cultural real estate presence in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Our campus is conveniently located approximately 35 miles north of Boston in Haverhill’s historic downtown and easily accessible by Amtrak, MBTA Commuter Rail, and three major highways.
SUPPORT THE VISION
To learn more about the Haverhill vision and how your philanthropy can have a transformational impact, please contact Elliot Isen, Haverhill campaign officer, at [email protected]
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ABOUT HISTORIC NEW ENGLAND
Historic New England, founded in 1910 as The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, is the largest and most comprehensive independent preservation organization in the United States, welcoming hundreds of thousands of visitors each year to 38 exceptional museums and landscapes, including several coastal farms.
Historic New England operates the Haverhill Center and has the world’s largest collection of New England artifacts comprising more than 125,000 decorative arts and objects and 1.5 million archival documents, including photographs, architectural drawings, manuscripts, and ephemera. Engaging education programs for youths, adults, and preservation professionals and award-winning exhibitions and publications are offered in person and virtually.
The Historic New England Preservation Easement program is a national leader and protects 121 privately owned historic properties through the region.