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Nothing screams history and sets an historic area apart more than one way signs and parking restriction signs on historically appropriate, though electric, street light posts in the Whaling Museum National Park in New Bedford where cobble stone streets and the fronts of restored historic buildings are lined with parking meters so that at any time of day or night a beautiful picture of a beautiful area cannot be taken without a car in it and any aura of history is shattered by the presence of the traffic signage.

When the cancelled Netflix mini-series was filmed in the National Park, to bring the street back to the 1930s, the parking meters and signage were removed. If it takes that to bring the area to the 30s, obviously these things are detrimental to the history of that area going back to when the Mariners’ Home was first a mansion. For the few days after the filming ended, the streets in the National Park had their historic aspect restored.

And then was lost again.

I am, therefore, proposing this to the city.

Between the hours of 9:00 am on day and 1:00 am the next, the area between Front Street on the East and Acushnet on the West, and Union on the South and Elm on the North will be closed to vehicular traffic. Pedestrian only.

Deliveries to stores and restaurants should be made between 11:00 pm and 9:00 am with exceptions made when this time is impossible for them, but not routine.

Pedestrians are free to wander the whole area without fear of automobiles, and stores and restaurants can use street side space outside their establishments to create the old mercantile look and allow for street side eating.

The streets in that area will be more welcoming and this will add to future waterfront plans.

Community and history related events will no longer have to contend with traffic, giving more space for and variety of what can be scheduled.

This will eliminate the need for meters as no one will be parking there during the time the city’s meters are live and all the traffic signage can be removed as there will be no traffic that would call for it.

There is parking at the Elm Street garage and there will be more if the plans to redo the State Pier are realized. The only parking allowed in the National Park area should be those businesses already present that already have parking lots, but these must be approached directly from the closest non-park entrance without wandering around sight seeing.

Setting the area aside in this way could encourage a whole new approach to the area and increase foot traffic.

Boston has done this with Down Town Crossing for decades so limited traffic and parking is not a fantasy.

When areas are set aside and their little bubble becomes obvious, use adapts and the area takes on a new life that traffic has been preventing.

Certainly, the loss of income from the removal of parking meters in the National Park will not be that much of a drain on the city’s funds but the foot traffic that sees the district as welcoming will increase as will the money from the increased business.

This will also be a good move as it will eliminate the problem of joining the old, presently existing campus of the Whaling Museum with its new property across William Street which at the present time requires proposed designs have to accommodate vehicular traffic and would have to incorporate its existence into any design to get people from one side of the street to the other while keeping the two segments of the future campus a unified whole not two parts possibly  joined by an elevated walkway that cuts across the façade of the icon at the end of William, the white pillars of the bank.

Throwing this out there in case it has a chance.

If it is already being considered or even being worked on, let the public know.

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When I was a little, pre-pubescent kid, I was watching the movie Moby Dick on our Black and White TV with my mother. In those days of three national networks and a local educational channel, movies got on television rather fast after the initial theater run.

Years later I was both surprised and disappointed that the movie was actually in color. Then and now I prefer viewing the movie with the television adjusted to black and white as I, as it turned out even as a child, like the film noir of the black and white version I assumed it was, and thought, and still do, that it became too “commercial”, too cheap in color.

I was fascinated with the basic plot, Ahab, and all the whaling lore. Years later, ending up in New Bedford, I met people who had been children when their off-shore whaling fathers living in the Azores stepped in as extras in real chase scenes only seen from the back with the actor’s close ups added later, and who had the immigrated here. Working at the New Bedford Whaling museum as a volunteer transcriber, I have come to learn a lot of the behind the scenes trivia about the movie like where the hydraulic whale that almost killed Gregory Peck has rested since the filming off the archipelago, and the ship, the Pequod, was the one built and used by Disney in Treasure Island, and just working at the Whaling Museum and sometimes reading at or, more likely, doing some volunteer job or two during the annual reading of the unabridged version of the book at the Moby Dick Marathon, there is so much more I have learned to have me appreciate the movie that much more. 

When the movie had ended on the TV and my mother got up to begin preparing supper I asked her if besides everyone but the one guy getting killed, was the whale also killed or did it get away. I felt for the whale because both the first time when the captain lost his leg and the second when he went to get revenge, he had gone after the whale not the whale after him. Until their first encounter, the whale had no reason to even wonder if Ahab even existed, much less go after him and hunt him down.

I just felt it would be wrong for the whale to have been killed by the man who had wronged him first.

Diplomatically and rather Schrodinger-ish, my mother just commented that we were not meant to know. Depending how the movie hit you whether or not it lived or died would be what you figured it was.

Ishmael may have claimed that he alone survived, but how did he know what happened to the whale?

He had picked up Ahab’s arrogance.

I like having the choice. It reveals who you are by who you rooted for, the people or the whale.

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