The new National Club marks a milestone in New Bedford history

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Twenty-five years ago, I wrote a story about a local businesswoman’s departure from lower Union Street. Edie Nichols had operated Rent an Event, a party supply store on the last block of Union, and said she was leaving because of the city’s failure to address relentless illegal drug activity in the area.

The late city councilor George Rogers complained at the time of “the many arrests” that had taken place at a notorious fisherman’s bar on that block named The National Club.

The place had such a reputation that it earned the following description a few years ago on Reddit from a fisherman who remembered being dragged there by his shipmates: “The bathrooms looked like the spot of multiple near murders. The flooring was worn down deep in spots. There was a menu board over the back side of the U shaped bar sporting prices for food that hasn’t been cooked in forever.”   

Well, there’s a new National Club in New Bedford as of last week. And the owner of the old National Club, the legendary Dick Alcobia, must be wondering from the other world at a transformation that seems to have been blessed by God himself.

The irrepressible Steve Silverstein has built and rebuilt so many successful restaurants in the city and beyond that both he and the rest of us have stopped counting. But never ever has Silverstein re-imagined an establishment with such inspiration and such magic as this new National Club, which is officially called The National Club Mexican Cantina.

The upscale restaurant and bar is stylized along the lines of a place you’d find among fashionable dining spots in Boston or New York: clean lines and lighting everywhere, quality locally-produced art on the walls, a veranda that looks across the city’s main thoroughfare and over to the harbor, a patio for outdoor dining in the good weather, and even gorgeously-decked out bathrooms upstairs and down.

Silverstein and his wife Judy, who oversaw the design, have thought of everything, including a multi-colored chihuly replica chandelier, a mosaic of the big red ‘N’ for National, and of course, a Day of the Dead “uno skeleton” painting.

“I believe that all great restaurants start with great design,” said Silverstein. These days, eating out has become like a hobby for a lot of people, he said. “People want to have fun; that’s what they do for fun.” And they are looking for a total experience. “If you have great food and great hospitality and it’s a dumpy place, it doesn’t work.”

The new National Club is very definitely not a dumpy place.

Silverstein is the guy who built the six-state Not Your Average Joe’s chain, the phenomenally successful Cisco’s beach-side patio, the harborfront’s Black Whale, the fine dining Candela Cucina, and the Padanaram neighborhood pub Sail Loft. He knows how to make successful restaurants.

But as Silverstein himself says, The National Club is “the next level.”

There are no shortage of taco and burrito shops in New Bedford, including my own beloved No Problemo, which to my mind has always been the beating heart of the revived downtown. The new National Club is not that.

You won’t find lobster tostado, pork shank carnitas and a sweet potato y mushroom enchilada on the menu at other Latino spots in the city, but you will find them at The National Club’s extensive menu — not to mention a bar that includes 125 different kinds of tequila.

With its upscale-dining experience and its location on the corner of Union and Route 18, right across the street from the island ferries, it is the gateway to New Bedford’s tourist district. And much of it seems designed with that in mind.

With the expanding Whaling Museum exhibit space and the coming re-imagining of the State Pier, this restaurant is arguably the most important reconstruction of a city establishment since the creation of the National Park. It will be the new gateway to tourist New Bedford.

The reimagined National Club is actually part of Lafrance Hospitality’s rebuild of the whole Beckman marine supply warehouse block between Commercial Street and Union. That side of the development is predominantly market-rate historic housing. Just down the street, Lafrance is doing another luxury apartment development at Elmwater Landing. A few blocks up, Steve Beauregard’s mixed-income, mostly affordable five-story building, One Custom House Square, just opened.

The rejuvenation of lower Union Street has been talked about in New Bedford for at least 20 years. There’s been some slow but sure progress, with successes like Rose Alley Alehouse, Cork, and the new Cultivator cocktail bar paving the way. In the last decade, Moby Dick Brewing Co., PLAY Arcade and New Beige have come on as well. 

But the National Club, located at the long, empty, and — let’s be honest — run-down intersection of the downtown and the main boulevard into the city has always been a problem. It’s a missing tooth at the city’s gateway that discourages visitors before they even get started.

Steve Silverstein did not have to do this building. At 66 years old, he’s made enough money to kick up his feet in some retirement resort in Florida or Arizona. But he’s never done that. Every project, he seems to say, will be his last one, but it never is. With his son Will and a bevy of longtime company managers assisting him, Silverstein’s reach is wide and deep. 

Along with folks like the Lafrances, Beauregard and Mayor Jon Mitchell’s emphasis on quality planning and economic development, the city has come a long way.

Not all the way. Not even close to that. 

Over the last few years I’ve written about the many empty storefronts that continue to plague the downtown, as well as the commercial thoroughfares of Acushnet Avenue in the North End and Rivet Street in the South End. The decline of American industrial cities in the second half of the 20th century was cavernous, and New Bedford was an especially bleak case. No single Mexican cantina or contemporary apartment building is going to bring it all the way back.

But guys like Silverstein have helped us make a lot of progress — so much so that gentrification in New Bedford is now on the cusp of becoming a genuine problem. It will be important as we go forward to build in the kind of zoning and commercial and residential protections for New Bedford that keep it a city of diversified incomes. Failure would be to become more like Newport or the Islands, where the working classes that keep those fantasylands going have to live somewhere else.

None other than Dick Alcobia predicted this dilemma 25 years ago. The Whaling National Historical Park was having its first successes, and the pressure to clean up lower Union Street had begun. One former city councilor, Denis Lawrence Jr., at the height of the drug and crime miasma, called for the city to purchase the whole block of lower Union and redevelop it.

That was not, and has not been, the solution. In those days, Alcobia, who I think in some ways was a social worker of sorts, made a plea for the city not to forget the working men of the waterfront.

“People are not going to want to see junkies nodding off at the corner of the streets,” he acknowledged. “But they just can’t go around kicking out the fishermen.”

Earlier this year, Alcobia’s obituary described The National Club, which he had put his heart and soul into, as a non-judgmental place. Yes, it was a place where the down-and-out could get some respite. But that respite came at a cost to the rest of the citizens from the bad behavior that went on thereabouts. And the rest of the citizens of New Bedford had a right to feel safe in a block in the heart of their downtown. 

Yes, the city badly needs an upscale tourist economy and upper-middle-class residents living somewhere other than around Buttonwood Park and the tip of the peninsula. Things have needed to change for New Bedford to move forward. And yes, the city will also always need its share of working-class establishments: places like No Problemo and Cafe Mimo, Sebastion’s and Celia’s, and dozens more like them. If you live here, you know their names.

For today, this is a time to celebrate the opening of The National Club, and New Bedford’s next step forward in its long fight for rehabilitation from the end of whaling and the departure of the mills. And it’s a time to remind ourselves to make sure the new New Bedford will not make the mistakes of success that come at the expense of some of its own citizens.

Email Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

Editor’s note: Steve Silverstein is a member of The New Bedford Light’s advisory committee. The Light’s newsroom is scrupulously independent. Only the editors decide what to cover and what to publish. Founders, funders and board members have no influence over editorial content.

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