by SARAH JAWORKSI Community Engagement Assistant
At the of Person and Place A changing city adds a new chapter to its social and cultural history “I DON’T KNOW WHEN IT CLICKED,” sixteen-year-old Eric Fila Jr. of Haverhill, Massachusetts, says about coming to the realization that ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic antipathies serve only to squander human capital. “The diversity in Haverhill…really helped me figure out that it’s not just the material things.” 28
Historic New England Summer 2018
Fila is one of ten Haverhill residents who shared their stories as part of the exhibition We Are Haverhill: Changing Faces of Haverhill’s Neighborhoods. A project in Historic New England’s Everyone’s History series, the exhibition looks at the changing demographics of Haverhill, with emphasis on the late twentieth and early twenty-first cen-
turies. Pairing photographic portraits with oral histories, the exhibition explores the impact of neighborhoods, as well as the city as a whole, on some of the individuals who live in the city. Haverhill is one of the dozens of former industrial communities in Massachusetts known as “gateway cities”—midsize urban centers that once