Geography
The district is bounded by Front Street on the east, Elm Street on the north, Acushnet Avenue and the Central New Bedford Historic District on the west, and Commercial Street on the south. This area includes 11 city blocks and part of a twelfth. On these 19.6 acres (7.9 ha) are 20 buildings, mostly historic but with some modern intrusions, mainly parking lots, a gas station and newer additions to the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Cobblestone paving and gas lamps have been added since the historic district was designated, in order to recreate the neighborhood's 19th-century appearance. The majority of the buildings are commercial in design and use, but there are some houses, and some mixed-use structures.
Just east of the district is the John F. Kennedy Expressway (MA 18), a limited-access highway which has become a barrier between the district and the neighboring waterfront, is still in use. Local preservationists have supported a plan to redesign the highway and restore access to the waterfront that spurred the area's original development. The city received a $16.3 million grant to make this possible.
Read more about this topic: New Bedford Historic District
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“Ktaadn, near which we were to pass the next day, is said to mean “Highest Land.” So much geography is there in their names.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The California fever is not likely to take us off.... There is neither romance nor glory in digging for gold after the manner of the pictures in the geography of diamond washing in Brazil.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)