Living at the City’s Green Edge: Bancroft Heights a Planned Neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts

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TAKING AS HER CANVAS forty-plus acres on the west side of Worcester, Massachusetts, Susan Ceccacci has created a rich tableau that captures the city’s cultural and industrial development over the past two centuries.

A small, but centrally located, agricultural village and county seat of 2,400 residents in 1800, Worcester had become by 1900 a robust manufacturing center of 110,000. This story follows the tract of farmland that became Bancroft Heights as it passes from the eighteenth century Bancroft family to the hands of Worcester benefactor Stephen Salisbury III, who originated the gracefully planned community that has thrived here from its very inception. Many of the first residents of Bancroft Heights were manufacturers who chose to live in a city neighborhood not far from their factories, rather than isolated in a suburban enclave. Yet green surroundings were not absent from the plan.

Stephen Salisbury III and his cousin Edward Winslow Lincoln were instrumental during the latter part of the nineteenth century in promoting the planting of shade trees throughout the city and in creating the Worcester park system. That sensibility, which enriched the planning of Bancroft Heights, has been sustained by neighborhood residents for well over a century. An architectural historian, Ceccacci has done justice to the architectural styles of Bancroft Heights, but she has done much more than that. She has given life to the neighborhood itself by following the families who have lived in each house. Living at the City’s Green Edge is a history of an exemplary phase of Worcester’s physical development, which also tells the tale of key players in the city’s cultural and economic life. This is a living history that will engage newcomers to Worcester history as well as those who know it well.

This is a remarkable book. I know of nothing quite like it. It stems from a local group’s decision to commemorate its neighborhood’s history and significance. The result is an outstanding chronicle of an important slice of the Worcester story. It will be referenced and quoted for years to come.
—Al Southwick, Worcester Telegram
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