Bridgewater Film Fest -- Boston Strangler

As I discuss in two earlier posts -- Bridgewater State ... What? (2009) and The Other Bridgewater State (2010) -- one of the first things I learned about our town was that it had once housed Albert DeSalvo, better known as the Boston Strangler.

So when I heard that local journalist Tiziana Dearing was going to be discussing a new film about the Boston Strangler, my first thought was to wonder whether the film would feature Bridgewater. 

The 18-minute Radio Boston segment puts the film in context, and I recommend listening to it before watching the film. As Dearing and her guests say, Boston Strangler (on Hulu) is about many things. Most important among these was the expectation that "girl" reporters in the 1960s could not and should not report on crime. A close corollary was that the press should not question the authority of the police, which of course is a big part of what a free press is for.

The film did not disappoint -- it presents a nuanced portrait of the work of the two women who investigated the story and who gave DeSalvo his nickname. Those who -- like us -- are not familiar with the story in detail will be surprised by quite a few aspects of the case.

And yes, it does mention Bridgewater. None of the filming took place in Bridgewater, but part of the story was set here. There is no shortage of old brick government buildings in Boston that could be used for the Bridgewater State Hospital façade as well as the interior scenes with its most notorious inmate.  

Bridgewater Film Fest: The Bridgewater Triangle on The History Channel

Local leaders always seem to get excited when cameras show up in Bridgewater (unless of course it's negative news, in which case no one wants anything to do with them). If a movie or television crew shows up to film in the area we can count on breathless local coverage giving the impression that Bridgewater is the next Hollywood. 

The almost giddy tone of a recent story in the Brockton Enterprise about The History Channel's segment on the Bridgewater Triangle is one example. Nevertheless our interest was piqued so we paid the fee to purchase the streaming episode of Beyond Skinwalker Ranch through Amazon Prime. The show itself was disappointing. We felt like we were watching middle-school kids making a film while they were camping out (except everyone involved was a grown man). While the crew does speak to some locals about the history of the area, we have no idea what their credentials are. No one from the Wampanoag tribe was interviewed about King Philips War or Puckwudgies even though both were discussed in the piece. 

The "evidence" they collect is laughable. For instance they take some footage of a flying glowing ball "It's not a plane! It's not a plane" they exclaimed over and over again. Perhaps it was a weather balloon? We don't know. They made no effort to find out. Bridgewater State University has an aviation department. If I were involved I might have asked someone there what they thought. 

The crew is also astounded that they have three different compasses pointing to three different "norths" in the Hockomock Swamp. Compasses not working properly isn't exactly proof of paranormal activity. In fact, it's pretty common especially in a place with a lot of electromagnetic activity (high electromagnetic activity is not a paranormal phenomenon either). Again, I might have taken advantage of the nearby university and spoken with someone in the geology and geography departments for further explanation.

It seemed the most extreme abuse of "evidence" collection was the fact that several pieces of  their (battery operated) equipment failed at the same time (again, in a place with a lot of electromagnetic activity) so they were unable to collect "data". They determined that this lack of data was in fact data. Holy moly.

This all made me think of the concept of "peer review". As an academic librarian I am very often asked to help someone find a peer-reviewed journal article. What they mean is a scholarly article that has been through a process in which other experts in the same field have determined that the author(s) did credible research with appropriate controls. Of course the term "peer" by itself simply means someone of your same age and/or circumstances. I sometimes tell students, for instance, that the entire University website is "peer reviewed" in the sense that the University vice-presidents all tell each other that they did a great job putting together a site that is simply a PR piece.

Likewise, the guys who made this show were simply clapping each other on the back telling themselves that they must have found something (because that's what they wanted). A healthy bit of skepticism was definitely in order. 

This was perfectly awful. For those interested in the Bridgewater Triangle we recommend the 2013 Bridgewater Triangle documentary

Cape Cod (the book) by Henry David Thoreau

We have a lot of bookshelves, each with many books. Some of these books we have both read (or read together), some only one of us has read, others have yet to be read by either of us. Thoreau's Cape Cod now is officially in the category of read by both of us. James says he read it some (perhaps ten) years ago. Pam has only just finished it. By way of a bonus for this Bridgewater couple, the book mentions our own town - twice!

Thoreau and his companion stop in Bridgewater overnight on their way to the Cape. He mentions "picking up a few arrow-heads there". The only arrow head I ever found was also in Bridgewater - it was left in the basement of our home by the previous owners.

Thoreau meets and talks to a lot of locals as he walks through the Cape. Fishermen, in particular, and not surprisingly, are mentioned frequently. 

I have heard of a minister who had been a fisherman, being settled in Bridgewater for as long a time as he could tell a cod from a haddock.

For those inclined to read this work it is available for free from Project Gutenberg 

Bridgwater/Bridgewater Connections

One of the early posts on this blog related to this letter "To the inhabitants of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, New England, America from the residents of Bridgewater, Somersetshire, England" regarding the abolition of slavery.

Recently, these two Bridgewaters once again came together in a joint Black Lives Matter protest
The event was covered by the Bridgwater (no "e") Westover Web. 

I often see things that indicate that Massachusetts was the first state to abolish slavery in the United States, but rarely is it mentioned that it was the first state to legalize it as well. More information about the history of slavery in the Bay State can be found here.

The Bridgewaters Project Makes the Big Time

Last week a reporter from the local newspaper (The Brockton Enterprise) visited with us in our home for an interview about The Bridgewaters Project. The article, with some fun photos was published in print yesterday, and online today. Read all about it!

Photo: Marc Vasconcellos, who has taken photos of James
in a variety of contexts before stopping by for this one!

July 2023 addendum

As much as we continue to enjoy our Bridgewater and the others we continue to explore, this might be our last full year in Cloverfield (as we call our 1885ish Bridgewater home). As we downsize to Whaling House in Fairhaven, we will be parting with some of the Bridgewater treasures in this hallway. For this reason -- and to allow others to enjoy them online -- we have gathered the images in a Flickr folder called Bridgewater Hall (not to be confused with the Bridgewater Hall performance venue, which is in our London-area travel dreams.

Bridgewater Film Fest - Bridgewater Triangle Premiere

Just as the Mapparium in Boston is the perfect date venue for us (a globe in a library), so too was the world premiere of The Bridgewater Triangle the perfect date event for this librarian-geographer couple. Not only does it include our adopted home town in its title, but it also features maps and books throughout, with at least one direct mention of a library. And of course, attending the premiere was almost mandatory for purposes of this life-long blog project, which after all seeks to cover -- eventually -- all Bridgewater-related phenomena, in this world or any other.

As I mentioned in Isosceles or Scaline back in March we were both intrigued and skeptical about this film, but when we learned about its premiere, we bought our tickets right away. We were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the work. We do not watch a lot of film or television about the paranormal, and most of what we have seen either takes itself far too seriously or suffers from laughable production values, or both.

The Bridgewater Triangle avoids both of these tendencies; it really is presented as a documentary about modern folklore, rather than an investigation of the phenomena themselves. Throughout the film, the focus is on the stories as stories, though of course some are sensationalized a bit and the case is steadily built that "something" might be a common cause of all the strange creatures and occurrences that arise from these stories.

The film begins with a map, and then with the words of author Loren Coleman, who coined the term "Bridgewater Triangle" in his landmark cryptozoology tome Mysterious America back in 1983 (there is also a new expanded version). When he first started researching the folklore of paranormal events in North America, he noticed that many of the stories did emerge from the Hockomock Swamp (the largest wetland in New England -- spooky in folklore but vital in ecology and water-supply protection) and areas to its south. He eventually identified a roughly triangular region encompassing some 200 square miles and all or part of about a dozen towns. From among the possible names for this region, Bridgewater suggested itself because when he first heard about the Hockomock Swamp, he associated it with Bridgewater, and he quickly learned that there were three such towns, in a small triangle of their own. (As I explained in one of this blog's earliest posts, "The Bridgewaters" have been thought of as a trio since North Bridgewater was renamed Brockton in 1874.)

In the Q&A afterward --  for Mr. Coleman was one of many paranormal investigators on hand for the event -- he further explained that he just has a knack for places, events and phenomena names that get attention, and Bridgewater Triangle is just the best-known of several examples. At this point, he claims that it is the third most-cited paranormal Triangle on Earth, after the Bermuda Triangle and Devil's Triangle in Japan, exactly opposite the Bermuda Triangle in terms of longitude, but at the same latitude north of the equator. (That term "Devil's Triangle" can also be used as a synonym for the Bermuda Triangle or to refer to an area of particularly twisty highways in Tennessee.)

An interesting aspect of the documentary is the frequent reference to the violent history of conflict between Native Americans and English Settlers in the region, which was most brutally experienced during the King Philip's War of 1675-1676, in which 500 English and 3,000 Wampanoag were killed. Some see that violence as the cause of subsequent disturbances, citing an "Indian Curse," while others see the war itself as evidence of dark forces that have affected the region for millennia.

The film also mentioned quite a few Wampanoag - Algonquin names, including Nunckatessett. This happens to be the name of a trail project James is working on with students and others in the region, with the intention of bringing people closer to the land throughout The Bridgewaters (more to come on this project as it unfolds -- the Nunckatessett Greenway is a developing part of the Bay Circuit Trail).

We have learned over the years that university bureaucracies can be almost as mysterious as the Triangle and as impenetrable as the Hockomock swamp. The location of the world premiere provides an excellent example. The film opened to an enthusiastic crowd of 500 people in the main auditorium at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. That campus is near the triangle but not in it, and certainly does not bear its name, but it was the only campus whose bureaucracy the producers could navigate in time to release the film.

Fortunately, they did eventually find the right connection, and The Bridgewater Triangle will be coming "home" to Bridgewater very soon. We plan to see it again!

Bridgewater Triangle @ Bridgewater
October 28, 7:30pm
Horace Mann Auditorium
Bridgewater State University

Tickets $8/person
Students and children free

For tickets call the Box Office at 508-531-1321 or email boxoffice@bridgew.edu.

Isosceles or Scalene?

A student recently shared this trailer for a documentary about the Bridgewater Triangle phenomenon that Pam described earlier in this project. As an active member of the community and follower of local news, it is surprising that I had not heard of the film yet, even though the trailer is six months old, and that I do not recognize any of the people who speak in this clip. I assume that the trailer is part of a fund-raising effort in support of a film not yet complete, but if so, it does not make a direct appeal.

The YouTube account that posted the video appears to be that of a small production company, but no "Trailer 2" is as yet available. The producers and commentators, in fact, seem to be as elusive as the phenomena they are pursuing. I have to confess a certain skepticism of the entire enterprise, though I do admire the inclusion of a stylized locator map in the closing frames (oops -- Spoiler Alert!) that employs a very pleasing color scheme.

Watch the clip to make a comparison with this more detailed map from Cryptmundo.

Click to enlarge.

Bridgewater Film Fest-Little Erin Merryweather

James mentioned in his recent post about A Small Circle of Friends that imdb.com lists several feature length movies that have Bridgewater (Massachusetts) as their location. One of these is Little Erin Merryweather, which was filmed almost entirely on location in Bridgewater. Most of the scenes take place at the fictitious Willow Ridge State College and were actually filmed at Bridgewater State University. There are also scenes at the local hangout  My Sister and I restaurant, as well as scenes filmed in Raynham and Middleboro.

The film is surprisingly well made compared to other independent films we have seen in this genre. Pam discusses the film itself on her "Library" Books blog. In addition to a lot of landmarks very close to home, the film actually makes humorous reference to one of our retired colleagues, who is apparently a family friend of the filmmakers. The film appears to have been made during spring break, judging from the relatively uncrowded campus, the greenness of the grass, and the occasional presence of the snow. Careful observers will notice that the snow is heavier in wooded areas than on campus, where it seems to ebb and flow!

We are now Bridgewater completists in terms of feature-length films, but the growing participation of our students in film festivals has resulted in a growing number of shorts that we should seek out, including Little Red Riding Hood, available on YouTube. We watched it in the midst of writing this post, because of the obvious parallels to Little Erin Merryweather, but it is not nearly as well executed, nor does the short make any kind reference to the location in which it was filmed. We could not find any Bridgewater landmarks in the latter film, nor could we understand why it was made, other than to give actors a chance to scream a lot and the director a chance to use the same prop to represent the severed limb of two different characters.

Not much better as a film but definitely making better connections to its Bridgewater setting is Scrabble: The Motion Picture, also available on YouTube. As with Little Red Riding Hood, it substitutes loud swearing for actual writing and acting, and it relies too heavily on Cold War tropes. It does, however, feature a lot of Bridgewater landmarks, a number of maps, and one of my favorite games.

We have a number of other festival films to view and/or endure while waiting for the DVD release of yet another feature-length Bridgewater movie. In this case, the name of our town actually appears in the title, but as a surname rather than as a location. And as with all other Bridgewater films, this seems to accentuate the dark side: The Bridgewater Murders is a thriller that was filmed this year in New Orleans.

Bridgewater film fest - Riot in Bridgewater (but not really)

Recently -- thank goodness -- film festivals have added some diversity to the cinematic output of our adoptive hometown. The Bridgewater, Massachusetts location link on IMDb currently lists 11 films, most of them recent and under 20 minutes. Of the four feature-length films, all involve mayhem of some kind. One of these, of course, is the notorious 1967 documentary Titicut Follies, which had to be filmed here because it was of actual atrocities taking place on the southern margins of our fair town.

But in the other three full-length entries, it seems directors have chosen Bridgewater only when faced with the need for a venue in which to do some serious damage. When we first learned that the 1980 film A Small Circle of Friends -- which focuses on a love triangle set at Harvard during the late Vietnam era -- was filmed in Bridgewater, we assumed it was because the real Harvard was too busy for filming there. So when we watched it a few years ago, we scrutinized every scene for familiar landmarks on our own campus.

We searched in vain for the first hour, when finally we saw Boyden Hall -- our icon and main administration building -- in a chaotic, late-night scene involving police assault on a student. Clearly this was something the production team could not get Harvard to allow.

That evident refusal by Harvard ca. 1980 illustrates a major theme of the film, which is the intrusion of war on the gentility of Harvard ca. 1969, when the character Haddox -- a radicalized student from small-town Texas whose name sounds like a cross among a fish, a bovine, and some kind of weapon -- advises that it is "time to say good-bye to middle class."

It is interesting, in fact, that so much of the film was shot at Harvard, given the critical positions it occasionally takes. The film insinuates, for example, that admissions policies were slanted against Jewish students in an effort to weaken radical movements. Perhaps unintentionally, the film highlights my pet Harvard peeve -- its elimination of geography in the 1950s. A major character admits not knowing where the DMZ was -- and in fact not knowing that it was irrelevant in Vietnam -- and then later suggests that Egypt is in Europe.

The film as historical fiction worth watching, as it captures an era just a few years before our own coming of age. It portrays a political left that has not yet consolidated around war, race, and sexism, so that one of the characters who is most radically opposed to the war is tone-deaf on race and an absolutely misogynist boyfriend to the supposed love of his life. His ignorance in the bedroom(s), in fact, caused me to ask, "When was Our Bodies, Ourselves published, anyway?" It turns out it was not published until 1971, and probably did not reach male audiences for some time after that. The film clearly shows feminism as a nascent and very separate part of campus radicalism in the years leading up to that publication.

As a librarian, Pam is always interested to see how libraries are portrayed in popular culture. This film had three library scenes, but no librarians, even while one of the library scenes involved some actual "shushing". Other scenes included theft of library property (with the thief insisting that the "ends justify the means"); and a  
small library inside the bunker where the a group of radical student terrorists live. Haddox says he never read
as much as a student as he does as a terrorist. Some say reading is a dangerous thing.

Bunker Library

Non-spoiler alert: We will not describe the two major plot twists in the final 15 minutes or so, but they are worth waiting for. Oddly enough, we both thought that the sound track in the final act sounds very much like an orchestral version of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" -- Turn around, bright eyes! 

We will give this much away -- the very last frame is foreshadowed in a discussion earlier in the film.

Sacco & Vanzetti

For years I've heard of Sacco and Vanzetti, often as a punch line in a bit of dark humor about injustices of one kind or another. I had heard that they were political prisoners who were executed solely for their points of view. I had never heard anything terribly specific, though, and had no idea how close to home -- literally -- their story would eventually become.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed on August 23, 1927 for a crime that took place on December 24, 1919 in Bridgewater, a half-mile north of what would eventually become our home. On Valentine's Day this year, in fact, we took a walk -- in an icy wind -- to the scene of the crime. Thanks to the research of local historian Christopher Daley, we know that the armored-car robbery of which they were convicted took place at the corner of Hale Street and Broad Street, where today one can find a barber and a Friendly's restaurant. Hale Street runs parallel to the tracks in what was the industrial heart of this once heavily industrial town. Remnants of the old factories can still be found along both sides of what is now primarily a commuter rail line. The L.Q. White shoe factory at which the truck was delivering payroll is long gone, however, its remnants buried beneath a parking lot for Bridgewater State College commuters.

For me, what is most fascinating about the case is what it reveals about a Bridgewater that is fading quickly from memory. Today it is known for its college -- on almost half a square mile in the center of town, with over 10,000 students and over 1,000 employees (including both authors of this blog) -- and as a bedroom community for thousands who commute to white-collar jobs in Boston on the revived train line or the straight, dangerous shot up Route 24. A third major factor is the state prison complex on the south edge of town (old "State Farm"), but I lived here for a decade before I met anybody who works there, and it only comes up in conversation if there is a prison break or someone is remembering the 1967 Titicut Follies movie.

For many who have lived in the town for decades -- or generations -- the town has a different identity: a working-class, industrial town. At least three of the town's major park sites, for example, were once home to industries ranging from bricks to iron to ship-building. Where newcomers such as myself see second-growth forest, older neighbors remember their fathers working at furnaces. Where we see empty lots today, some neighbors remember active freight yards.

My brief research into the case has raised more questions than it has answered. Even the locations of many of the factories extant at the time are difficult to determine despite the availability of very detailed Sanborn maps. (Sanborn insurance maps are a great resource for historic and environmental research; they show industrial and commercial buildings at 1:1200 scale for almost every town in the United States between the late 1800s and the early 1900s. Bridgewater State College has a subscription to the Massachusetts maps; most public libraries have copies of maps for their own towns.)

For example, the 1921 Sanborn map shows the White shoe factory between Spring Street and the rail lines, but almost everything on that part of the map has now changed, as a current satellite image of the same area shows. The robbery itself was just off the edge of this map, where Hale Street meets Broad Street, which is a main road toward Boston.

View Larger Map

Police were first led to Sacco and Vanzetti as suspects in the murder because a witness indicated that the perpetrators appeared to be Italian. The entire area to the northwest of the crime scene was a tight-knit Italian community, focused around the mills. In fact, the neighborhood surrounding Wall and High Streets, about 2000 feet away, remains something of an enclave to this day, surrounding the old Stanley Iron Works site, at which iron was forged for centuries. The satellite image below is centered on the old mill pond, and immediately to east and west are private clubs that continue to operate -- each sporting its own bocci court!


View Larger Map

To this day, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti stirs debate. From the hundreds of thousands of people who protested their sentence at the time, to the governor who pardoned them decades later, to books and articles that are still being published, their guilt or innocence remains uncertain. A Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society meets twice each month in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An article by  Robert D'Attilio at the University of Pennsylvania summarizes some of the legal debate, as does an article on the web site of Torremaggiore,  Sacco's hometown in Italy.

It is unclear whether Sacco or Vanzetti ever even visited Bridgewater -- a gang who were holed up in a shack in nearby West Bridgewater eventually confessed to the crime -- but their association with the town reminds us of several important aspects of its identity and history.

North Bridgewater -- a.k.a. Brockton

Bridgewater stands at what was once the Western Frontier of English settlement in the United States. A "frontier" is the boundary between the area that is considered civilized and the "wild" lands beyond. The notion to "Go West, Young Man!" originated as population grew in the original Plymouth colony, setting off a land grab that moved slowly and eventually gathered speed, until the closing of the frontier in the Great Plains around 1870. Had the original pace continued -- Plymouth 1620, Bridgewater 1656, the English would probably just now be reaching the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but of course things eventually did start to change much more rapidly.

That original purchase took place at a rock in what is now East Bridgewater, and included all or part of what are now seven cities and towns. The very northernmost parts included Rockland, Whitman, and Avon, which were dropped early. By 1716, the remaining town divided into four pieces: North Bridgewater, South Bridgewater, East Bridgewater, and West Bridgewater -- arranged more or less as quadrants of a diamond. Those boundaries were originally drawn so that each of those areas could have a Congregational Church. Eventually, the names evolved, with South Bridgewater becoming simply Bridgewater and North Bridgewater becoming the City of Brockton -- famous first for its shoes and later for its boxers (pugilists, not underwear).

Early in my time in Bridgewater, I noticed some interesting patterns -- for example, the four original towns have roughly the same areal extent, but East and West have small populations, South a bit more, and North more than double the other three combined. This is reflected in the density of street networks -- I first noticed this on a realtor's map of the region -- and has implications for water, taxes, and a host of other matters.

I eventually taught an entire course on the Geography of Brockton, in which I learned at least as much as the students. I taught it in 2007 and 2008, and look forward to doing so again in the future. These days, Brockton is a frequent destination for my Project EarthView visits; I am always amazed by the rich diversity of children and teachers who participate. Five miles from our home is a virtual United Nations!