THRIVING NO MORE

FITCHBURG -- Donna Van Hillo used to listen to Frankie Avalon records at
The Book Shop on Main Street, and then head down to The Fitchburg Lunch
with high school friends for a burger and fries.

Van Hillo -- gleefully reminiscing -- gestured toward a battered awning on
Main Street and said she'd buy shoes at the same spot when it was Spencer's
Shoe Store. "I used to love to come downtown every Saturday. I'd take the
bus," Van Hillo said. She walked by some black, boarded-up doors at the
Theater Building last week, next to where she once bought fresh caramel corn.

"It's kind of a ghost town, now. It's really sad," she said. "It's not safe
on Main Street anymore."

The 55-year-old still travels Main Street every day to her job at the
Alfredson's Ambulatory Clinic.

"You used to be able to walk down the street without even worrying about
it; now people come up to you and ask you for a dollar or a cigarette," she
said. Downtown Fitchburg was once lined with three-story department stores,
a five-star restaurant, a Sears and several five-and-dime stores when Van
Hillo was a teenager. Now 16 storefronts sit empty along Main Street
between Day and Academy streets, at times littered with beer bottles, trash
and broken glass. The abandoned doorways and dark niches beckon drug abuse
and violent crime, said Fiore Brogna, who owns Ritter For Flowers, a flower
shop on lower Main Street. "Empty stores attract a bad element," Brogna
said. "We had a stabbing right across the street in broad daylight."

A man stabbed and killed disc jockey Frederick Martinez, 31, while he was
waiting to get a hair cut at the barber shop across from Brogna's store
last April. No one has been arrested yet in connection with the slaying.
The street is thick with temporary employment agencies, law firms and
insurance agencies. Pedestrians on a recent sunny weekday either grabbed a
quick bite to eat at a pizza place or stopped in at City Hall.

No one lingered as they walked by the homeless people huddled outside the
Christ Church Episcopal.

Just decades ago, Fitchburg and Leominster were mill towns with thriving
downtown areas, filled with working-class families making their home in
North Central Massachusetts.

By the 1980s and 1990s, however, most of the mills had closed, and the Twin
Cities found themselves embroiled in unemployment, crime and drugs. While
Leominster's Main Street is once again vibrant, downtown Fitchburg still
struggles.

Longtime residents and officials told the Sentinel & Enterprise that the
closing of the mills, along with the General Electric plant in Fitchburg
and Fort Devens, sent the local economy reeling.

Some residents left the region, while others worked two jobs to stay
afloat. As housing prices dropped, some landlords, desperate for money,
rented to drug dealers, who brought the illegal drug trade with them.
People went from using marijuana to more serious and more addictive drugs,
like cocaine and heroin, and police and officials initially turned a blind
eye to the problem.

At the same time, major drug dealers took advantage of the situation and
the region's geographic isolation, and set up shop in North Central
Massachusetts. Crime rates rose, and police began making more drug-related
arrests. Before long, drugs had infiltrated both cities, with street corner
drug deals marring blocks where children used to ride their bicycles. As
city police and officials struggled to react to the growing drug problem
and curb its swell, they wondered, how did the area's drug problem get so
bad? The end of an era Woolen mills and paper factories, which employed
thousands of people living in the area, closed steadily in the 1970s and
1980s, said state Rep. Emile Goguen, D-Fitchburg.

"I know it put a lot of people in a precarious position, where there was no
work or they had to take a lower-paying job," Goguen said. Residents
couldn't find jobs or make enough money to feed their families, paving the
way for a vulnerability to drug sales and abuse, the next booming business.
Six hundred area residents lost their jobs when the General Electric plant
in Fitchburg closed in 1998.

Fort Devens closed in 1994, and 6,000 to 8,000 area residents lost their
jobs. "There's a direct relationship between drug problems and
socioeconomic distribution," said Leominster Ward 4 City Councilor Robert
Salvatelli. "There used to be a strong blue-collar community that suffered
an economic downturn. There were some great factories that are no longer
functioning." Fitchburg Ward 2 City Councilor Norman Boisvert mentioned the
Dupont factory and Borden Chemical in Leominster as other large
manufacturing companies that went out of business.

Latchkey kids "People lost everything they had because they had no job.
Some of them moved away to find work, and some of them took lower-paying
jobs and stayed," Boisvert said. "The lower-paying jobs wouldn't be enough,
so they'd get two jobs. Now you have a society of latchkey kids that don't
have a hug from mom when they come home."

Fitchburg Police Chief Edward Cronin said a shift in local economics and
immigration played a role in the regional drug problem. "Thirty or 40 years
ago, there were manufacturing jobs," Cronin said. "Someone could get out of
high school and go straight to a job, like tough-man labor. People would
start in a tenement, and then move into a house. There were opportunities
for unskilled people."

But those opportunities dried up as factory jobs disappeared, Cronin said.
School Superintendent Thomas Lamey said he feels Fitchburg should have
taught students how to adapt to more technical jobs as the manufacturing
base began to erode. "I think to replace the market base with something is
something we should have done more aggressively," Lamey said. "Once those
jobs left, we didn't have anything to replace them."

Turning to drugs Boisvert said young people suddenly had trouble finding
work. "Work is hard to get these days, and kids realized what a large
return they could get selling drugs with only a small investment," Boisvert
said. The rapid reduction of jobs in Fitchburg and Leominster, combined
with a need for cheap and easy shopping, also lead to the deterioration of
the Main Streets in the Twin Cities.

Both downtown Fitchburg and Leominster used to be filled with stores and
crammed with shoppers, said Boisvert.

"The downtown was beautiful. It was a bustling place on Fridays and
Saturdays," Boisvert said. "It was thriving. There were dress stores and
bakeries. It was very, very busy."

But downtown Fitchburg began to empty during the late 1960s and 1970s, when
the Searstown Mall and other shopping centers became popular, Boisvert
said. The Sears on Main Street, located where Montachusett Industry
Resources is now, moved its flagship store to open the Searstown Mall, Van
Hillo said. Losing retail Steven Duvarney, of Duvarney & Co. jewelry store,
owns one of the last retail stores open on Main Street in Fitchburg.

"Ninety percent of the businesses on the street are service-orientated,"
Duvarney said. "One of two things happened to the retail stores: Either
they became an older mom-and-pop store, and couldn't compete with the
malls, or they reached retirement age and their kids didn't take over the
business." Duvarney said the bulk of retail stores were gone by the late
1980s. "The recession of the early '90s took its toll on what was left,"
Duvarney said. Kent Bourgault, manager of Shack's clothing store, called
the loss of the small retail stores "evolution."

"Business evolved, and retail business gravitated to the mall," Bourgault
said. "I just don't think we've been very successful at replacing the
stores that left." Bourgault gestured to the Christmas decorations still
hanging on Main Street in mid-March.

"I mean, don't you think it's time they took the Christmas lights down?" he
asked. Vacant storefronts People began to commit more crimes on the street
because the street was vacant, Duvarney said.

"When Main Street had a lot of stores and more people on the street every
day, there were more eyes on the street. I think that was a deterrent,
certainly," Duvarney said.

The cost of the crime is increased insurance and less business for stores
already struggling to survive, said Brogna.

Vandals have smashed the windows of his flower shop at least seven times
during the past year.

His insurance carrier might drop him, Brogna said. "It's very costly,"
Brogna said of the window repairs. "If we could just fix up Main Street,
and clear it of this riffraff."

"It's been hurting Fitchburg, not just Main Street," he said of the crime.
Off the beaten path Fitchburg Mayor Dan H. Mylott believes the Twin Cities
fell prey to the drug trade because of their unfortunate geography.

"For a lot of very logistical reasons, we became a place where it was easy
to transfer," Mylott said. "It was a good stopping point off the beaten
path." In the large-scale drug business, drugs need to be transported from
the eastern seaboard to the rest of the country, Mylott said. Close to the
coast, Fitchburg and Leominster saw high quantities of drugs move through
before being unloaded in more western towns. "We were known throughout the
East Coast as a place people used to transport drugs," Mylott recalled. "It
was all geographic."

Leominster Police Chief Peter Roddy said the drug problem also grows with
the population.

"The city is growing, and so is the highway system," Roddy said. "This is
an easily accessible city from the highways."

Police recently busted two alleged drug trafficking kingpins on a quiet,
tree-lined street in Leominster, who used the highways to drive at least
1,000 pounds of marijuana to houses in the area.

A Union Street house was the hub of a drug network where drug dealers
allegedly grew marijuana in Mexico, then smuggled tons of it to Arizona,
then shipped it to Massachusetts, according to U.S. District Attorney
Michael Sullivan. Police arrested the two Leominster men suspected to be
the kingpins of the illegal drug-trafficking operation, and they seized
more than a ton of marijuana and $500,000 in cash.

In addition, dealers could rent apartments here cheaper than areas closer
to Boston, and the police departments weren't as wise to the problem.
Hidden away in a seldom-traveled part of New England, the drug trade
flourished.

"At one point, we had people coming from Devens and Lowell to buy drugs,"
said Leominster Mayor Dean Mazzarella. "It was like an open-air market. It
was horrible." "The big misconception is that (drug abuse) is a city
problem, but now it's made its way into everybody," said Mazzarella.

The mode of buying and selling drugs also has become more sophisticated,
with larger-scale home operations replacing street corner transactions.
"It's another generation we have to deal with, and it's not street corner
anymore," Mazzarella said. "They have a sophisticated network, which makes
it harder." Mylott agreed, attributing the increase in the region's drug
trade to the increase in crime.

"It was not the domestic drug trade that was the problem. It was the
dealing that became the problem, causing hard criminal things to happen,"
Mylott said. "People in a serious business were protecting their
territory." Moving out As the factories closed and the jobs went elsewhere,
people who had made their livelihood in Fitchburg often moved to where the
jobs were. "A lot of the people that worked in the factories moved out
because they needed to get jobs," said former Fitchburg Mayor Mary Whitney.
"There was a breakdown of family structure."

The area's demographics also shifted. Like the rest of the country, North
Central Massachusetts became a destination for Boston-area residents to
move to the suburbs. "I think it was an increase in population," Whitney
said. "We had an increase in different groups of people coming in though
this area." Fitchburg and Leominster became home to a more transient,
less-permanent population.

Where previously the region was home for multiple generations of families,
now schools are filled with children whose families don't have roots in the
area and, consequently, aren't as invested in the community. "One of the
largest problems is the transients," Boisvert said. "They come in and they
don't have ties to anybody, so they don't care about the community."
Whoever they could Multifamily homes that used to be filled with mill
workers now remain empty or go to whoever can pay the rent, Boisvert said.

"The factories are gone, and when they closed, they left empty multi-family
dwellings," Boisvert said. "They would get whoever they could, and drug
dealers could certainly pay."

Goguen believes drugs became prominent in the area during the peace
generation in the 1960s and 1970s.

"I think that this all started in the early '70s when people started
growing their hair long," Goguen said. "From then on, it's just increased
substantially. It seems like you can kill one cockroach and suddenly
there's six new ones come as pallbearers."

Contraband didn't start to cause real problems until the arrival of cocaine
and heroin, which would soon consume neighborhoods, lives and communities.
More powerful drugs "Kids have been smoking pot for the last 40 years,"
said Leominster Ward 4 Councilor Robert Salvatelli. "What's happening now
is that more powerful drugs are out there, and people are paying attention
to it." Cocaine and heroin are not only more addictive than marijuana, but
they cost more and oftentimes trap users into an endless cycle of abuse.
"In years past, it was marijuana, then it was cocaine, then crack cocaine,
Oxycontin and Ecstasy. People with disposable income would buy drugs,"
Roddy said. "With the price of heroin dropping, that's certainly much more
addictive." And often people addicted to drugs are more than willing to
steal or rob to pay for their fix.

Gardner Police Chief Neil Erickson said nearly all of the people his
officers arrest are stealing to get money for drugs.

"Every robbery we solved, there was a drug situation there," Erickson said.
"Nearly every burglary has been drug related in the past several years."
The psychedelic drugs of the Vietnam era gave way to the cocaine of the
1980s. What people didn't realize, however, was the host of problems the
new drugs would bring.

"Different eras and different generations have different viewpoints on the
types of drugs that they consider recreational," said Leominster Ward 5
Councilor Richard Marchand. "In the '80s, cocaine became the designer drug.
The yuppie generation fell privy to that."

Marchand, who teaches drug education in Shrewsbury, attributes the advent
of harder drugs like cocaine and heroin to the societal turmoil of the
1970s. "In the '70s, one of the big issues that had a major impact was the
lowering of the drinking age to 18," Marchand explained. "It didn't lower
drug use, it did just the opposite."

Boisvert said the drug problem seemed to "creep up" on officials in
Leominster and Fitchburg, but he admitted that many people ignored the
problem as it began. Turning a blind eye "People have forgotten how to look
out their windows and pay attention to what's going on," Boisvert said.
"People always say, 'When are the police going to do something?' But my
question is, when are you going to do something about it?" Boisvert said
Cleghorn was so bad in the early 1990s people went out of their way to
avoid it.

"We had gangs running rampant. In Cleghorn we had an enormous problem. The
majority of people didn't want to drive through there, never mind walk
there. You'd take your life in your hands if you walked through there,"
Boisvert said. The increased crime that came along with the drug trade
caused local police departments to finally wake up to the problem, Whitney
said. "When it was first here, nobody really dealt with it in a public
way," Whitney said. "It started out as something to try, something
different, and it has increased to something extremely dangerous."

Whitney, who has lived in Fitchburg for close to 70 years, has watched
neighborhoods and generations evolve over the years. "Twenty years ago,
there was no such thing as anybody carrying a gun," Whitney said. "Now,
youngsters have access to guns. Now I'm afraid to even see some of the kids."

Staff reporter Rebecca Deusser contributed to this report.