Voices: When city nicknames no longer apply
HOLYOKE, Mass. — Most of the paper mills are gone, but my hometown is still the Paper City.
The nickname lingers mostly in commerce — Paper City Deli, Paper City Music Shop, Paper City Brewery; in faded signs painted on old brick buildings; in the memory of a place that took its identity from what it made.
It's that way wherever past manufacturing prowess is commemorated by anachronistic municipal nicknames, from the Whip City (Westfield, Mass.) to the Plow Capital of the World (Moline, Ill.).
As many people are out of work or working without a raise, these nicknames evoke a time when almost anyone who wanted a decent job could get one.
In Holyoke, we were proud that the Paper City once produced more than 200 tons a day of fine writing paper – about half the nation's supply, including Tiffany's. We learned about paper making in grade school; when we went away to college, we wrote our exam essays in blank blue notebooks made in Holyoke.
The boastful civic nickname is a Massachusetts specialty. Athol is Tool Town, Winchendon Toy Town. Quincy, which produced John and John Quincy Adams, is the City of Presidents.
The civic alias often outlives the industry it touted. Southbridge is the Eye of the Commonwealth, even though American Optical ended production there 30 years ago. Gardner is still the Chair City even though its greatest furniture maker closed down in 1979. The last whaling ship left New Bedford, the Whaling City, in 1925.
An old nickname says a lot about a city. For instance, if you know that Paterson, N.J., is (or was) the Silk City, you understand why its City Hall is modeled on the one in Lyon, the center of silkmaking in France.
Some cities transcend themselves. Tampa, the Cigar City, is doing fine even though its Ybor City district is down to its last cigar factory. Brockton, Mass., the erstwhile Shoe City, has rebranded itself the City of Champions, a reference to native son boxers Rocky Marciano and Marvin Hagler.
Given foreign competition, Greenville, S.C., could never have remained Textile Capital of the World. Instead, the metropolitan area attracted foreign companies' U.S. headquarters, automotive research facilities and Caterpillar and General Electric plants.
Some industrial towns still live up to their nicknames. Dalton, Ga., is the Carpet Capital of the World, despite the Great Recession. Albertville, Ala., is the Fire Hydrant Capital of the World, with a gleaming chrome-plated one outside the Chamber of Commerce to prove it.
The digital economy doesn't breed this sort of boosterism. California tech towns such as Cupertino (with Apple) and Mountain View (Google) don't have nicknames. They don't have to; they're in a place with one of the most famous nicknames of all – Silicon Valley, named for the element in electronic semiconductors.
Elsewhere, the challenge is to replace buggy whips with new products and services. The Whip City's downtown stores cater to the thousands of students at Westfield State University. Peabody, Mass. – the Leather City, whose high school teams are still called the Tanners – looks to the Northshore Mall for tax revenue.
In Holyoke, the water power that once served Holyoke's mills has attracted the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, which houses supercomputers for research.
Context tempers enthusiasm: In 1893, 20 Holyoke paper mills employed 3,260 people. The computing center, which cost $165 million and occupies as much space as several paper mills, employs 16.
There's still plenty about U.S. manufacturing of which to be proud. The problem is that fewer places are able to share that pride.
Rick Hampson is a national reporter for Paste BN