“Tear it down, and they will come.” That could have been the rallying cry for the urban-renewal program that bulldozed 12 acres of the city of North Adams starting in the late 1960s. More than 100 of the city’s commercial and residential buildings in the downtown area were demolished, including such landmarks as the Richmond Hotel, the YMCA, and the James Hunter Machine Co. The city had to relocate hundreds of people, many of them elderly residents who were living in small apartments above stores.

But city officials were unable to deliver on the promise of significant new development. For many years, the south side of Main Street was, in the words of one resident, “The most depressing place I’d ever been in–a big, dirty parking lot.”

The demolition program was one of many such projects that changed the face of urban New England after World War II, a reaction to the decline of manufacturing and the shift of commerce from downtowns to shopping malls. The North Adams Transcript reflected the thinking of the time when it editorialized in favor of tearing down “old, undesirable buildings” in 1963. “Once deterioration starts it spreads like cancer,” the paper warned.

When I visited the city for the first time in July 1996, my eyes focused on what was there, not what was missing. From end to end, it looked like a row of Edward Hopper paintings, encircled by steep hills dotted with Victorian houses. A three-hour walk that day amid towering church steeples and faded brick mills inspired a half dozen poems. I was back a week later for the first of many return trips to a city I fell in love with. Over time, I interviewed more than 100 residents about their city and its past, filling two books with their thoughts and memories.

North Adams was dominated for years by Sprague Electric, a paternalistic manufacturing company that opened in the 1930s and by 1968 employed half the city’s adult population. In 1986, Sprague abandoned the 13-acre site, which stayed vacant until the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1999. Rather than tearing down the factory buildings or retrofitting them to look like a traditional art museum, Mass MoCA preserved the large, gritty spaces, right down to the many layers of paint on the brick walls. It’s hard to imagine a greater contrast to the urban-renewal process that leveled most of downtown North Adams.

“I can remember going into people’s houses and talking, knowing I would eventually tear their house down,” says Charles L. Flint, who at the age of 22 won the city’s demolition contract–along with his father, crane operator Charles E. Flint. “It’s strange to sit in someone’s warm, decorated house, and then you walk in and it’s empty and you’re ripping the piping out.”

Now an antique dealer down the road in Lenox, Flint says that his demolition contract included salvaging rights. “We sold tons of bricks. We sold doors for $5 apiece. I remember a house that had fairly new kitchen cabinets. We met a couple who were doing their house over and had no money, so my father and I decided to give them the cabinets. We came back next day, and somebody had stolen them….”

The demolition uncovered uncomfortable truths about some of the town’s most venerable buildings, Flint recalls. “When we tore down the First Agricultural Bank, the wall from the street to the vault was only two bricks deep. I showed it to the president of the bank. Blood drained from his head. If somebody had parked a truck really close, he could’ve cut a hole, taken whatever he wanted, and drove off.”

When the Flints tore down the Richmond Theater, which had closed in the early 1950s, the demolition attracted plenty of spectators, as did all of the city’s bulldozing efforts. “It was like they hired a band for one night, and it stayed for three years,” Flint says.

Not everyone found the destruction so entertaining. Lois Daugherty, who lived with her eight children in a rundown tenement, found herself in the middle of a cliffhanger. “I had about a year to find a place,” she says. “Things around us were goin’ down, and they were getting closer and closer.”

Simone Rohane worked at the relocation office, where she was able to move some demolition refugees into better quarters than they left. “Many went to the new high-rise apartment building for the elderly,” she says. “That gave them a quality of life they never had. There was an elevator, so they didn’t have to walk up those millions of stairs to the hot, dark apartments that had been their homes for so long.”

But some displaced business owners weren’t happy with the way things turned out. “They paid people for being put out of business. [But] they said I wasn’t making enough money to qualify,” says Sam Veazie, who ran a rooming house. “Jack Flaherty, the old police chief, was in charge of that.” But this being North Adams, Veazie didn’t make a fuss. “I was a little perturbed, but I didn’t say anything. I had known him all my life, and I didn’t want to start anything.”

For years after the demolition projects, much of downtown North Adams was taken up by vacant lots. In the early 1980s, a developer finally bought a large parcel on the south side of Main Street and leased it to Kmart. The late Joe Bianco, who served four terms as mayor during the 1970s, arranged the deal, which generated such strong opposition that it forced a referendum. The vote went Kmart’s way by a small margin. “People had ideas of having a Macy’s in the center of town,” Bianco told me in 1998. “I decided that we couldn’t have a vacant lot there anymore, so I got Kmart. Otherwise, I think it would still be empty.”

In addition to Kmart, the developer built a modest row of one-story shops along Main Street. But with population declining (from 19,000 in 1970 to 15,000 today) and Berkshire Mall opening in nearby Lanesborough in 1988, more and more downtown retail space emptied out. Recently, however, a sizeable number of restaurants and specialty stores have opened, their owners hoping to attract the 100,000 tourists generated annually by Mass MoCA. Ironically, the Kmart store is now slated to close.

Feelings still run deep about the razing of North Adams, and they don’t go just one way. Lew Cuyler, who was the city editor of the North Adams Transcript in the early 1960s, says that his employer favored urban renewal, in part because the newspaper stood to gain a new building and printing press as compensation for the city taking its building by eminent domain. Years later, he bemoans the devastation downtown.

“The great tragedy was that it wiped everything out,” says Cuyler. “They should’ve taken down the buildings you couldn’t rescue and rehabilitated the buildings that you could…. [Instead] they destroyed neighborhoods and they destroyed culture, which was replaced with sterile buildings. There was no more sense of place.”

But Louis Sinclitico, who headed the city’s redevelopment authority during its demolition phase, gave no credence to such misgivings. “Urban renewal was the best thing that ever happened to North Adams,” he insisted shortly before his death in 1999. “Every time something new was built on that property, the city got more back in taxes than all the old owners ever paid.”

Carl Robare, a 78-year-old who used to work for the phone company, also resists the tug of nostalgia. “A lot of people say, ‘Things were wonderful back then.’ Well, we liked it. We’d come out every day for lunch, and Main Street was full of people. There was Newberry’s and Grant’s and Woolworth’s. But it never could’ve lasted. We would be left with some nice old buildings, but they would be empty.”

Francis Abuisi, 55, reluctantly agrees. “Sprague would have left anyway, so 4,000 people would not be working. That’s 4,000 people that wouldn’t be hitting the streets anymore at lunchtime.”

But Abuisi’s brother, Tony, says such logic doesn’t make up for the loss. “One of my wife’s high school classmates comes back to visit every year,” he says. “She’s always trying to find the things that were here when she was a little girl.”

Joe Manning is the author of Disappearing Into North Adams and Steeples: Sketches of North Adams, which can be ordered from his Web site at www.sevensteeples.com. Contact him c/o Flatiron Press, 575 Bridge Road, Unit 9-1, Florence, MA 01062.