Cape Ann is already experiencing climate change. These 27 vignettes show how Cape Ann’s critical infrastructure, beloved cultural landscapes and historic downtowns are changing before the storm arrives.

Jodrey State Fish Pier

Gloucester, MA

heritage, cultural infrastructure, commercial district, seawall, contamination

Gloucester has been an active fishing port since 1623. Since that time, the continuously operated working waterfront along Gloucester’s Inner Harbor has represented a natural, cultural, and historic resource on Cape Ann. The Jodrey State Fish Pier, an anchor of the community’s fishing industry, is located within the Commonwealth Designated Port Area.¹

A person walks onto the docks at the Jodrey State Fish Pier. Photograph by Paul Bilodeau, 2021. www.gloucestertimes.com/news/local_news/henri-bringing-more-rain/image_c344423f-166c-56bf-bf54-214297693d72.html

The Pier was constructed in the 1920s and repaired beginning in 1993. The ten-acre complex includes on-site seafood processing and fishing boat docking facilities, including a fifty-four-slip marina for boats up to one hundred feet in length, three berths for ships up to 145 feet in length, a five-thousand-square-foot office building, a fifty-thousand-square-foot fish processing facility, and a forty-thousand-square-foot freezer facility. The Pier is owned by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation and managed through a lease to Massachusetts Development Finance Agency, which leases space to commercial fishing companies, boats, and operations.²

Lobster boats sit idle Feb. 14 at the Jodrey State Fish Pier. Photograph by Paul Bilodeau, 2021. www.gloucestertimes.com/news/fishing_industry_news/lobster-boat-tracking-coming-to-protect-whales-fishery/image_3340d0bf-9e38-55a5-a907-2456a24a76a5.html

Despite a variety of proposals to shift the region toward marine and biotechnology, Gloucester’s working waterfront has been on the decline for over twenty years.³ ⁴ ⁵ Due to the ongoing decline of high-value groundfish catch in Gloucester, as well as the shift from shipping fish by boat to road, the high cost of waterfront building, maintenance, and permitting premiums have shifted many fishing industry facilities inshore.⁶

The remaining companies on the Pier, along with the majority of Gloucester’s Inner Harbor, are already vulnerable to coastal flooding and have been devastated by previous storms.⁷ The 1835 gale destroyed thirty-two schooners anchored by Ten Pound Island and eighteen other ships in the harbor, killing an estimated fifty people.⁸ The largest waves recorded during the 1938 hurricane were recorded in Gloucester Harbor. The Great Storm will similarly damage the Pier and its seawalls, which will breach into the surrounding downtown area (including critical evacuation routes behind Jodrey Pier along Route 127) or Main Street, causing irreparable damage to the fishing industry.⁹

Metropolitan Area Planning Council, City of Gloucester Hazard Mitigation Plan 2020 Update (Gloucester: Metropolitan Area Planning Council, 2020), 74. ↩
Cecil Group, Inc with Fay, Spofford and Thorndike, LLC., Jodrey State Pier Planning and Feasibility Study: Existing Conditions, Trends and Needs (Gloucester: Cecil Ground, Inc., 2009), 1. ↩
Timothy Beatley, Blue Urbanism: Exploring Connections Between Cities and Oceans (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2014), 46. ↩
David R. Borges, Michael Goodman, Katherine J. Kahl, Michael McCarthy and Elise M. Rapoza, North Shore Blue Economy Phase I: Findings and Vision Forward (Gloucester: UMass Amherst Gloucester Marine Station and UMass Dartmouth, September 2021). ↩
City of Gloucester, 2014 Gloucester Municipal Harbor Plan and DPA Master Plan (Gloucester: City of Gloucester, 2014), 11. ↩
Cecil Group, Inc with Fay, Spofford and Thorndike, LLC., Jodrey State Pier Planning and Feasibility Study: Existing Conditions, Trends and Needs (Gloucester: Cecil Ground, Inc., 2009), 3. ↩
Kleinfelder, Coastal Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptation Plan (Gloucester: Kleinfelder, June 29, 2015), 20. ↩
Roger Wolcott Higgins, “Great Disasters and Strange Phenomena,” in The Story of Essex County, ed. Claude M. Fuess(New York: American Historical Society, 1935). ↩
Kleinfelder, Coastal Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptation Plan (Gloucester: Kleinfelder, June 29, 2015), 43. ↩