North Adams, Massachusetts
North Adams, Massachusetts. Tucked into the Berkshires, a former mill town that reinvented itself around a contemporary art museum the size of a factory — because it is, in fact, a factory. Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, known as MASS MoCA, sits in a sprawling 19th-century industrial complex right in the middle of downtown. It’s the largest contemporary art museum in the country.
I arrived on a Tuesday. The museum is closed on Tuesdays.
The Walk
I pulled out of the hotel, turned right on Main Street, and walked the length of it. Every storefront was empty. I’m not exaggerating for effect. Every single one. A bakery with a sign: closed. Jack’s Hot Dogs, hours 3 to 7. A coffee shop, shuttered. One person on the street in the first twenty minutes. I eventually found a muffin somewhere — the universe was not going to let me go entirely without — and asked the woman behind the counter what was going on.
She said they took a hard hit during COVID and never bounced back.
I’ve traveled through towns that struggled, towns that were trying, towns that had found a second act. North Adams was somewhere in the middle of all of that, and the museum was right at the center of the question. When I asked if the museum really drove the whole economy here, she said pretty much. So on Tuesday when it’s closed, it’s a ghost town.
I happened to be there on a Tuesday.
What I Actually Found
Here’s the thing about dismissing a place too quickly: you miss what’s actually happening. I was about to walk back to the hotel and count North Adams as a swing and a miss when I wandered into a converted factory building that stopped me in my tracks.
A man named Norbert was in the co-working space inside — I don’t know if he worked maintenance or was one of the principals, he was just there and he was proud of the place and he gave me a tour. The building had been, at different points in its history, a textile mill, an aluminum anodizing operation, a wallpaper printing facility. A Brooklyn design firm called Leighton Bills — Perry and Carla Rothstein — bought it in 2015 and started converting it. Raw brick, exposed structure, a massive event space that seats eight hundred, co-working areas, live-work lofts on the upper floors. Weddings every weekend in October. A local organization called Pops Cares that uses the space to raise money for people dying of cancer, giving them funds for whatever makes the time they have left a little easier.
I stood there thinking: this is exactly what I had in mind for a warehouse I looked at in West Palm Beach years ago. The bones of what a post-industrial building can become when someone has the vision and the patience.
Norbert showed me photos on his phone from earlier that morning — fog rolling through the color on the hillside above town. He was genuinely in love with the place and the season. I appreciated the unsolicited tour more than I can say.
A Note on the Project
I was thinking about Bourdain on the drive out of North Adams. His tagline on No Reservations: I write. I travel. I eat. And I’m hungry for more. That’s the version of this I keep trying to build toward. Not the scenic drive montage, not the hotel room review, but the Norbert in the co-working space, the fisherman who retired from General Dynamics, the woman at the muffin shop who told me the honest truth about her town. That’s the story.
I’m getting better at finding it. I’m still figuring out how to ask for it before checkout time.
Williamstown next, then a scenic drive, and eventually Hudson. More to come.
