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NEW BEDFORD — In the center of Old Bedford Village, amid triple-deckers, broken streets, and Cape Verdean flags, sits the former Morse Cutting Tools site. A white shed stands on the southeast corner, surrounded by a chain-link fence. There is a small community garden on the northwest corner.
That is everything that’s popped up on the two blocks between Wing, Bedford, South 6th, and Purchase streets in the 25-plus years since the abandoned cutting-tool factory was demolished. It’s been roughly a decade since state environmental regulators determined the cleanup of toxic chemicals in groundwater and soils at the site was completed to state standards.
Still, Old Bedford Village Development Corporation’s executive director John “Buddy” Andrade sees a space in transition.
Walking the site with a reporter from The Light earlier this year, Andrade pointed out a plot of land for a senior center, which would go next to a community health center, which would go next to a recreation center with basketball courts encased in glass. Andrade sees theaters and businesses and a shared-use kitchen space.
“I’m trying to make it so this is a destination place,” he said.
Andrade and Old Bedford Village Development Corporation are working with the City of New Bedford and the environmental services company EnSafe to assess and prepare the Morse Cutting Tools brownfield site for reuse in the historically-underserved Old Bedford Village neighborhood south of downtown.
The project is being funded by an $800,000 Environmental Protection Agency grant awarded to the city. Work started in 2023, and has not been affected by recent federal spending cuts.
The team is reassessing the contamination at the Morse Cutting Tools site, and working to confirm that the responsible polluters cleaned up contaminants from the groundwater and soil as described in government records. If the data shows that there is still contamination above state action levels, the project team will look into cleanup options.
The team may reach out to homeowners in Old Bedford Village, to see if contamination from the site has spread underneath their homes and vaporized inside, depending on the results of soil vapor monitoring.
The project team is also working with neighborhood residents and the Cape Verdean community to develop a reuse plan for the site.
The partners will host a meeting on May 13 to discuss the results of the soil vapor monitoring, what work must be done before redevelopment, and what should be done with the property. A tentative plan calls for a mixed-use space that could include housing, businesses, and a community center.
Old Bedford Village is a census-designated opportunity zone, and is made up largely of Cape Verdeans and African-Americans.
Jacqueline Pina, a community liaison for the Morse project, said the team wants development at the site that inspires Old Bedford Village to grow and thrive, after generations of its residents suffered health and economic harms related to Morse Cutting Tools.
“To have this would be very important,” she said. “It would lift people’s spirits, and they would be inspired to do more.”
Old Bedford Village’s history
When Pina was growing up in Old Bedford Village, Cape Verdean-owned and Black-owned businesses lined the blocks east of County Street to Acushnet Avenue, and from Walnut Street to Grinnell Street.
“I felt enriched,” she said. “We had barbers, we had grocery stores, we had cleaners, we had our own. Before it was taken from us.”
Old Bedford Village has long been a cultural and historic hub in New Bedford. The neighborhood forms part of the original tract of land incorporated as the town of New Bedford in 1787.
When commercial whaling took hold in the late 18th century, many people from the Caribbean, Cape Verde, and the Azores immigrated to New Bedford, settling in Old Bedford Village. The city was also a stop on the Underground Railroad, and Old Bedford Village attracted formerly enslaved Black people seeking freedom and work (including Frederick Douglass). After the whaling industry collapsed, these migrants became the predominant workforce in the fishing, textile, and cranberry industries, and opened small businesses in the neighborhood.
Things started to change when inventor Stephen A. Morse developed the twist drill, a revolutionary cutting tool for the manufacturing industry.
Morse patented his invention in 1863, and built a cutting tool factory, the Morse Twist Drill and Machine Company, in the residential Old Bedford Village community in 1864.
Over the next 50 or so years, Morse expanded its holdings to the full two blocks of the former site. At its peak, it employed over 1,700 workers and operated on three daily shifts.
Old Bedford Village residents felt the negative impacts of living next to the Morse factory.
The sickly-sweet smell of burning solvents blew out of the factory buildings and into the neighborhood. At the “weeping wall” on Purchase Street, cutting oil seeped through masonry into the soil.
Many Old Bedford Village residents claim a cancer cluster developed around the Morse site, but a 2000 assessment by a federal agency found no evidence of one.
During urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s, Andrade said, the city demolished businesses and parts of the neighborhood to make room for a waterfront industrial area and Route 18. Andrade and others say the city did not invest enough in Old Bedford Village during that era.
That all contributed to the collapse of businesses and social institutions in Old Bedford Village, he said. That then fueled riots in 1970, as urban renewal continued.
Decades of cleanup at Morse site
In the 1980s, Morse Twist Drill and Machine Company, rebranded as Morse Cutting Tools, began experiencing financial challenges. It was bought and sold several times. In 1990, the company was sold and ceased all operations in New Bedford, leaving the abandoned factory buildings behind.
Morse then brought on a contractor, Harborline, to investigate possible oil spills at the property. The contractor found there had been chemical spills in the factory buildings, and the site had been contaminated with toxics like petroleum, toluene, vinyl chloride, and benzopyrene. The data showed those chemicals got in the soil and bedrock groundwater beneath the eastern part of the property.
Morse then contacted the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and the EPA. These authorities brought in environmental service contractors that confirmed the site needed to be cleaned up. The contractors removed contaminated infrastructure from the factory buildings in 1992.
In the mid-1990s, New Bedford took the site from Morse over non-payment of taxes. The state designated it as one of the first brownfields in its brownfield remediation program. The city got a grant to demolish the former factory buildings in 1997.
In 1998, New Bedford worked with MassDEP and the EPA to identify the party responsible for cleaning up the remaining groundwater and soil contamination at the Morse site — CBS-Viacom. The company assumed liability for the site when it acquired Gulf and Western Industries, a former parent company of Morse Cutting Tools.
CBS-Viacom decided to clean up the site to the minimum state standards required for site closure.
The company’s contractors built a network of wells and a vacuum extraction system to remove the contaminants in the soil and groundwater at the site. They excavated chemical storage tanks and catch basins. They installed ventilation systems in some local homes to mitigate the risk of exposure to chemicals. They regularly monitored hazardous chemical levels in the soil, bedrock, and groundwater.
In 2017, data collected by CBS-Viacom’s contractors showed levels of hazardous chemicals at the site met the minimum state standards, and they submitted the mandatory site closeout documents to the state. Yet they did not report all of the cleanup work they did in these closeout documents.
The state audited the Morse site cleanup, and approved the response actions in 2018. The City of New Bedford then asked CBS-Viacom to decommission and remove wells on the site, which they did in 2018 and 2019.
Grants for redevelopment
After 2018, progress stalled on the Morse Cutting Tools site.
New Bedford Director of Environmental Stewardship Michele Paul said she trusts the CBS-Viacom contractors that produced the numbers in the audited report. Yet she would have liked to have seen them clean up the Morse Cutting Tools property more thoroughly, and with greater transparency. Residual contamination is also still present in the soils and groundwater, according to the site closure documents.
Paul added that while the city committed to reusing the site, it wants to verify the results of the cleanup, and conduct any additional remediation necessary to prepare it for future use.
In 2020, with the help of Andrade, the city got an EPA grant for this work. New Bedford then hired EnSafe to do it in 2023.
The project team has since been conducting community outreach to talk about what they are doing at the site, hosting community walks and meetings.
They conducted soil vapor sampling in March, with the help of interns from the Old Bedford Village community. The project team may work to get residents to allow them to conduct air sampling for contaminants in their homes, if the soil vapor data shows it is necessary.
Most contaminants at the Morse site are organic hydrocarbons, which degrade over time, Paul said. So Ensafe should find there is less contamination at the site now than there was after CBS-Viacom’s contractors submitted their 2017 final solution statement.
If additional cleanup is not necessary, the team can start planning the next use for it, Paul said. If there are still dangerous levels of soil contamination, there is grant money for limited remediation. If significant contamination remains, the city will work with the community and MassDEP to bring the responsible party back into the remediation process.
What comes next
What comes next for the Morse site remains unclear.
City officials have been looking to develop more housing and space for small businesses at the Morse site. Yet local community leaders like Andrade say the neighborhood would be better served by a community center with programming and businesses, and no housing. They have compromised on a tentative plan for a mixed-use space.
In 2022, Underground Railroad Cafe and Gallery owner Carleen Cordwell worked with Andrade, city officials, the EPA and the Marion Institute on a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to plan future uses for the Morse property. She said the team identified a community commercial kitchen space as a priority project, which residents could book times to use. The Underground Railroad Cafe has been working to set this up.
Old Bedford Village is a food desert, and home to numerous food-insecure households. A shared commercial kitchen will provide opportunity for neighborhood culinary entrepreneurs to make and market their products and services, and help alleviate food insecurity, Cordwell said. The project team also wants a teaching kitchen, to show residents how to cook with healthy food they get from pantries and community partners.
Cordwell personally hopes to see a community recreation center, to give young people a place to be and to grow their talents and skills.
Andrade said building a senior center, which residents have wanted for decades, is another priority. He hopes to see a community health center, so people won’t have to go downtown for prescriptions or basic treatment.
Many people in the Old Bedford Village community are skeptical of the Morse project, Pina said. They have seen city officials bring in funding for projects that don’t end up benefitting the community, she said. Yet Old Bedford Village leaders are actively involved in this one.
Making their voices heard about the Morse site now gives residents a chance to benefit from New Bedford’s growth, Pina said — growth that they say they have been excluded from for decades.
Cordwell said she will ensure “whatever goes there will… provide services and space that this community needs to create its sustainable development.”
Thank you for the great in depth article from Adam, his commitment and passion to get it done RIGHT is evident and something this community does not get! It shines new light on the LIGHT.
I wish him well, he will be missed!
The area needs more housing desperately. Many residents have asked for more housing in this project.
An opportunity like this is rare. These properties should be built up with lots of apartments over the other proposed community spaces.
Our local government should demonstrate bravery by dedicating the space to PEOPLE not cars. Expand the tax base by building apartments over commercial/ community spaces, and not requiring parking minimums. These properties are located on the bus line, and city council should ensure that SRTA doesn’t move the bus line (which SRTA has planned), to preserve access.
Anyone who lives within walking distance should come to the WARD 4 meetings to discuss.
I grew up on Pleasant Street in the 1950’s and 60’s a few blocks north of the mill. I remember a walkway bridge over Pleasant street connecting the mill buildings on both sides of the street. During the holidays, the mill would have lights in the shape of a Christmas tree on top of the walkway bridge. Interesting the childhood memories that come when an old building is mentioned. One of my old neighbors on Pleasant Street, who was like a grandfather to me, also had worked at the mill in the 1940’s.