Lizzie’s Fall River

by Mark Amarantes

First published in April/May, 2005, Volume 2, Issue 2, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.

Growing up in Fall River since the late 1960s I had always felt that I had missed something. I knew the history of the city somewhat, and of course I had heard of the Lizzie Borden saga. Chances are, if you grew up in the “Spindle City,” you had, too. It was like a birthright. What it was I missed I wasn’t sure, but Fall River now seems like an aged prizefighter who collects soda cans for the nickel deposit. I know that the city was once bustling and some even had called her great—but those days are long gone. Now she is struggling to keep her municipal head above water, but then again, what city is without its daily operational problems?

Yet, today’s Fall River isn’t really all that different from the days of Ms. Lizzie. We still have different social classes divided by the location of the piece of dirt you own, if you own dirt at all. The poor kids from “below the hill” still go to the Victorian Highlands for the good Halloween candy. The first streets to be plowed and sanded after a winter storm are more then likely the same streets that once housed some of Fall River’s finest names—Durfee, Borden, and Brayton. The only real difference is that now the middle class live in the fashionable Highlands and the well-to-do make their money in Fall River and live elsewhere—in Little Compton, RI or Marion, MA, or some other quaint little town with a pretty name.

As far as the once great buildings of Ms. Lizzie’s Fall River, some still stand. You just have to know where they are. They are now modernized to fit in with the newer ones. My wife happens to work at the Andrew J. Borden building at the corner of South Main and Anawan Streets. While it looks nothing like it did when Andrew passed by on that fateful day back in 1892, it is still his building nonetheless. I remember it as J.J. Newberry’s, an offshoot of the famed F.W. Woolworth 5 and 10-cent stores. As a kid, I can clearly remember going in the front door and heading directly downstairs to the toy department. My mother would be off at the food counter reliving days of shared coffee shakes with whomever it was she was seeing before my father. 

It’s funny how each generation remembers the same building as a different thing. My grandparents would remember it as the A.J. Borden Building, I remember it as J.J. Newberry, and my kids will remember it as the Travelers Insurance Building. Who knows, maybe by 2018 it will be a Wal-Mart. 

There are plenty of other concrete and plaster icons from days gone by that I’m sure Ms. Lizzie would probably recognize. The church that socially expelled her after the trial still stands. It’s now a culinary school and restaurant. The interior also holds the distinction of being shown to millions of viewers on MTV in the Aerosmith video “Crying.” Another Lizzie relic is the B.M.C. Durfee High School that still sits proudly on Rock Street. Now a courthouse, this stately granite structure was sure to have dominated the Fall River skyline back in 1892 as it does now. Of course we all know that the famed house of horrors on Second Street, as well as her later residence on French Street, still stand, but not many people stop in front of the old red brick schoolhouse on Morgan street where Lizzie learned to read and write. The school is still in use today. Children run crazily around the schoolyard without a care in their pre-pubescent lives, unaware that the footprints they are making in the dirt could be the same Ms. Lizzie made so many years ago. 

The many buildings from 1892 surviving today do so thanks to their ability to change with the times. What used to be a great cotton mill pumping out yards and yards of cloth is now a sprawling apartment complex complete with in-ground pool housed in the mills’ former boiler room. So, while the Fall River of days gone by has lost a lot of its old gems, it has retained its tenacity as a city that will be reborn out of the flames of neglect and despair. 

I think that what it was I missed was the old Fall River of which people were proud. This was the Fall River that boasted the tallest smoke-stack in the country, the Fall River that could weave more cotton in one month then most southern states could weave all year, the Fall River that had the finest line of steamships operating on the Atlantic seaboard, and the Fall River that welcomed with open arms the poor, tired, oppressed, hungry immigrants willing to work for far less just to feed their family. I missed the city at its zenith – I suppose I was born at the wrong time. I often wish I could walk the unpaved streets of the city, knowing what I know now. But it’s not to be—I’m living in the Fall River of today. The older that I get the more I’m learning to appreciate this old city. I’m learning that no city is great all of the time. Some have their periods of fame, and some of those eras last longer then others. As for my hometown, it may be only a shadow of what she used to be, but know that I still long for her at the end of a long hard day.