Ben Baker would probably have hated this story.
He would not have liked the public attention, getting credit for the work he’d done for the city of New Bedford. Better, he thought, to let the spotlight fall on others, and on the work.
If you know the Southeastern Regional Transit Authority, you’ve seen his mark. You’ve seen his hand if you know the waterfront historic district surrounding the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and the Regional Airport. The people who run the Zeiterion Performing Arts Center had seen enough of the work he and his wife, Deborah, did for them that they gave them an award a few years ago.
Baker, who served as city planner, mayor’s aide, community booster, bookstore co-owner and arts philanthropist will be honored in a memorial service at 11 a.m., Jan. 27, at Grace Episcopal Church, and with a Celebration of Life at the Whaling Museum immediately after. The South Dartmouth resident, who was not born in New Bedford but made the city his life’s calling, died on Jan. 9 at St. Luke’s Hospital. He was 84 years old.
Mayor Jon Mitchell called him “a person of consequence,” who along with his wife, Deborah, was “enthusiastic about the city’s prospects, looking for ways to contribute” — and finding them.
“His service to New Bedford, what he did for New Bedford needs to be recognized,” said former Mayor John Bullard. “He did so much and never wanted to draw attention to himself.”
The last time Bullard saw Baker was in the fall, as Bullard read from his new memoir, “Hometown,” at a gathering on Johnny Cake Hill, in the waterfront historic district. The cobblestone streets and gas lamps setting made a closing circle of sorts for the two men, who had met for the first time in the New Bedford Department of Planning, where they worked on a local ordinance that would use state law to protect the historic character of that district.
That was 1970. After graduating college and sailing for months while trying to figure out what he would do with his life, Bullard worked in the planning office before heading off to graduate school in architecture and planning. He worked for Baker, the city planning director, for only about six months, but the brief stint left a powerful mark.
“He was a great teacher,” said Bullard. “He certainly was a mentor of mine … I was lucky to have him as a first boss.”
Raised in the inland ground of Millis, Massachusetts, a suburb southwest of Boston, Baker was drawn to the water. He served in the Coast Guard, enjoyed boating under power and sail, and took to New Bedford.
Close associates all say he loved the city, but they cannot recall him saying why, or why he embraced New Bedford and decided to make his life here. They figure it was the lure of the water.
“I think it was the ocean,” said Richard Walega, who worked for Baker in the planning department and later served as city planner himself. Also, he said, he thought Baker liked the scale of the city.
A Harvard graduate who had earned a master’s degree in urban planning from the University of North Carolina, Baker served in the planning office from the 1960s through the late 1970s under three mayors: Edward F. Harrington, George Rogers and John Markey. Markey, who served 10 years as mayor, himself died over the weekend at the age of 89.
John ‘Jack’ Markey, longtime mayor and judge, dead at 89
Former New Bedford mayor John “Jack” Markey has died.
Markey, 89, was the patriarch of a leading New Bedford political family. He was mayor for 11 years between 1972 and 1982. He went on to serve as a District Court judge, retiring in 1999.
Markey, according to his sons, John Jr. and Chris, died Sunday.
Until current Mayor Jon Mitchell surpassed him in 2022, Markey was the longest consecutive-serving mayor. His son John Jr., a prominent waterfront lawyer, was a key player in Mitchell’s first successful campaign for mayor in 2012. His son Chris is a state representative for Dartmouth and the Far North End of New Bedford.
New Bedford Light columnist Jack Spillane will have a full appreciation for the former mayor this week.
As Bullard tells it, he worked under Baker designing playgrounds, and also drafting a local ordinance to protect the waterfront historic district, an area of about 15 blocks surrounding the Whaling Museum. Bullard said the planning department worked with the Waterfront Historic Area LeaguE, or WHALE, to help the people of that neighborhood see why the ordinance, eventually adopted by the City Council and enforced under state law, was a good idea.
“The ordinance was the right remedy for the right place at the right time,” Bullard wrote in “Hometown,” published last summer. “Credit goes to City Planner Ben Baker and WHALE for seeing that.”
Baker, who was a private pilot, also took particular interest in the New Bedford Regional Airport, and saw to it that the airport got its first master plan and its share of development grants from the Federal Aviation Administration, Walega said.
Baker also saw the New Bedford-Fairhaven Bridge — a slow-moving, sometimes malfunctioning Acushnet River swing-truss span that opened around 1900 — as a choke point in the city’s economic development. He thought something had to be done.
Walega recalled that over beers, amid floors strewn with peanut shells at the Ground Round on Pope’s Island, he and Baker “schemed” to drum up support for replacing the bridge. They hatched a plan to approach Gerald Tache, then-publisher of The Standard-Times, to run a series of stories on the bridge.
They succeeded in that the stories appeared, and they managed to get Gov. Edward J. King’s support for replacing the bridge. Unfortunately, King managed to lose in the 1982 Democratic primary to Michael Dukakis. So went the bridge plan.
Walega noted that now, more than 40 years later, the state at last is moving toward replacing the span, with construction slated to start in 2027. Too late for Baker to see it.
It’s not clear if Baker knew about recent developments involving SRTA, which announced in November that all bus rides would be free for the first six months of 2024 and it was launching Sunday service.
As Walega and Bullard recalled it, the Southeastern Regional Transit Authority was Baker’s creation, lashed together, at least in part, from bus-line remnants of the Union Street Railway Co.’s trolley network. Eventually, it became Baker’s sole focus, as he left the planner’s job to run the organization.
But City Hall called him back.
He had worked on the successful 1985 mayoral campaign for Bullard, who had by then been working for years under three different organizations on waterfront historic preservation. After Bullard defeated Mayor Brian Lawler in a rematch of their 1983 contest, he knew immediately whom he wanted for his first chief of staff.
“He was the best chief of staff you could have,” Bullard said. “He knew city government inside and out.”
As Bullard recalled telling Baker, their protocol for dealing with people bringing requests to the mayor’s office would be simple: “If the answer is ‘No,’ you tell them. If the answer is ‘Yes,’ I tell them.”
Baker soon had an office nickname inspired by the villain in the first James Bond movie: “Dr. No.”
City Hall staffers knew they could find him in the little office crammed with reports and papers, some stacked, “two to three feet” high, said Irene Schall, who worked in the city solicitor’s office, then as City Treasurer.
Knowing the bookish Baker would read everything, and would want to have materials at hand, Bullard said he assigned him a very small office to try to contain the rising mounds of paper, and the potential fire hazard.
Schall said folks got used to seeing official papers marked up in Baker’s hand in green ink. He pointed out what he thought was important in a document that came in from outside, or what he thought was not quite right in something written in-house.
“He was a stickler,” said Schall, “and if you weren’t doing it right he would tell you. He worked very very hard.”
Angela Natho, who had worked as a secretary in the personnel office then was hired to run that department, remembered Baker from her interview with Bullard. There he sat, saying not a word, a “quite intimidating” presence, she said.
“Once you got to know him he was a Teddy Bear,” she said. “He was a joy. He was funny.”
That less stern side emerged more readily when Baker left Bullard’s staff after about 18 months to join with his wife, Deborah, in opening Baker Books, a store first located downtown in the William Street side of the Cherry & Webb building. The move was a natural for Baker, a voracious reader, whose bachelor apartment years before on Second Street was so crammed with stacks of books you could barely walk around, Walega said.
At the start, Walega said, Baker got a laugh out of the fact that so many people were lined up for the store’s grand opening in 1989 that they blocked traffic on William Street.
“I don’t think I ever saw him as happy at anything as when he had his bookstore,” Walega said.
“The store was widely beloved,” said Mitchell.
In a time of increasing difficulty for local booksellers, Baker Books lasted 25 years, moving once to State Road in Dartmouth, then to a spot in New Bedford’s South End. The Bakers closed the business in September 2014.
Three years later, the public spotlight Baker meant to avoid found him, and his wife. In spring, 2017, leaders of the Zeiterion Performing Arts Center presented them with an award for decades of work in raising it from a rundown downtown movie theater in the early 1980s to a center of city cultural life.
“It’s been a long pull for the Z from where it started to where it is today,” Baker told the Standard-Times in April 2017.
Deborah Baker told the S-T that “Ben has been working for years to turn around the theater’s image and improve it so it would thrive.”
The story on the award presented at the Zeiterion’s annual fundraiser was an anomaly for Baker, who by all accounts never wanted his name in the newspaper.
It was a way he had of living, Bullard said, finding ways to make life better for a place and the people who live there, “without drawing attention to yourself …That’s a great example of how to live a good life.”
Email reporter Arthur Hirsch at ahirsch@newbedfordlight.org.
He and his wife were my landlords in the building they rebuilt across from the Whaling Museum–the building that housed the Moniz Gallery. It was a well done rebuild, a great space. I really only worked with his wife, Deb. I heard that Ben was an inclusive and progressive planner of the sort we could have used those years I lived downtown (2005-2009). Sympathies to Deb and their sons.
My heart goes out to you Deb & your entire family to see this sad news…I have such great memories at the bookstore meeting you & Ben…Love Martha💗💞
The time I spent working at Baker Books was a wonderful way to connect with the community I loved after spending much of my working life in Brockton and Boston. So many great memories! New friendships, great customers and co-workers, a welcoming environment! Very grateful to the Bakers for this hub in the reading community!
Dear Deborah,
I am thinking of you, your family and all who were directly touched with Ben’s love of life with his many passions. Wishing you moments of peace and comfort in all the days ahead as you celebrate Ben’s wonderful life. Sending you love and strength as Ben’ heart will beat in yours forever. My heart truly aches for your loss.