What to See in North Adams - Top Sights and Attractions

Acclaimed museum for new art. The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is a museum in a converted Arnold Print Works factory building complex located in North Adams, Massachusetts. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing arts in the United States.

Built by the Arnold Print Works, which operated on the site from 1860 to 1942, the complex was used by the Sprague Electric company before its conversion. MASS MoCA originally opened with 19 galleries and 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m2) of exhibition space in 1999. It has expanded since, including the 2008 expansion of Building 7 and the May 2017 addition of roughly 130,000 square feet when Building 6 was opened.

In addition to housing galleries and performing arts spaces, it also rents space to commercial tenants. It is the home of the Bang on a Can Summer Institute, where composers and performers from around the world come to create new music. The festival, started in 2001, includes concerts in galleries for three weeks during the summer. Starting in 2010, MASS MoCA has become the home for the Solid Sound Music Festival.

MASS MoCA, along with the Clark Art Institute and the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), forms a trio of significant art museums in the northern Berkshires.^[1]

The North Adams Museum of History and Science is located on State Street in North Adams, Massachusetts as part of Western Gateway Heritage State Park. The building it inhabits was originally built in 1880 as a coal distribution center. The museum, however, was established by the North Adams Historical Society in 1988.

The first floor of the museum contains exhibits on the Industrial Revolution, and its effects on what became an industrial center during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This exhibit displays machine parts and goods of some of the major manufacturing companies in the town during this era: Hunter Machine Company, Arnold Printworks and Sprague Electric. This floor also contains artifacts that depict farming, education, and home life during this era. One can find a children’s room, North Adams school paraphernalia, city uniforms, and household objects.

The second floor is particularly notable for its Freight Yard exhibit. A moving train set has been constructed to model the town of North Adams and its train system. In this room there are also exhibits on immigration, which highlights French, Lebanese, Welsh, Italian, Jewish, Irish, and Chinese immigration to the area; religion, mainly by showing the churches that have been built in North Adams; and ballooning. In an adjacent room exist displays on flora and fauna, geography (containing a topographical map of this area of the Berkshires), and a kids’ room relating to flora and fauna of the area.

Finally, the third floor is centered on political and military history of the area. It contains a voting machine from the nineteenth century, information on past mayors of North Adams, information on military heroes of the area, and Native American artifacts of those who inhabited the area before the settlers. There is also a side room dedicated to Fort Massachusetts, an English fort in North Adams during the French and Indian War. Finally, there is also a blacklight gallery that is used as a display of the Solar System.

The museum’s hours are Saturday 10AM-4PM and Sunday 1-4PM November through April, and Thursday through Saturday 10AM-4PM and Sunday 1-4PM May through October. The museum is closed on holidays.^[2]

Cemetery in North Adams, Massachusetts. Hillside Cemetery is a historic cemetery on West Main Street between Brown Street and Charles Street in North Adams, Massachusetts, United States. Located on the western fringe of the city, the earliest portions of the cemetery date to 1798; it is the community's oldest public burying ground. The cemetery is divided by Route 2, with the older section to the north and the younger section to the south. The cemetery's location at the foot of Mount Greylock gives it excellent views of the surrounding area, and of the urban core of North Adams.

The older portion of the cemetery is less formally laid out than the newer section. It includes a fairly steeply sloped hill and a bowl-shaped valley, and is lined by grassy paths laid out in a grid. The oldest graves are at the top of the hill, the oldest dating to 1798. The southern portion of the cemetery is much larger, and is laid out with narrow roadways, most of which were in place by 1878. The terrain of the southern section is similar to that of the northern, also featuring a hill and valley. The most prominent memorial is the Tinker Mausoleum (1926), located in the northern section.

The oldest surviving cemetery in North Adams is the Old Congregational Burying Ground (1780). Hillside appears to have been established as a family cemetery of the locally prominent Knight family, who buried their daughter Olive in 1798. Members of the Knight family were among the first to introduce textile manufacturing into North Adams, its early source of growth and prosperity in the 19th century. The town of Adams (from which North Adams separated in 1878) purchased the southern tract in 1858. North Adams' second public cemetery, located in the southern part of the city, was opened in 1898.

The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001.^[4]

Synagogue in North Adams, Massachusetts. Congregation Beth Israel is a Jewish congregation located at 53 Lois Street in North Adams, Massachusetts. The congregation was founded in the early 1890s as House of Israel by Eastern European Jews recently immigrated to the United States. The Chevre Chai Odom congregation broke away from House of Israel in 1905, but re-united with it in 1958, and the congregation adopted its current name in 1961.

Originally Orthodox, it became Conservative in 1969 and Reform in 2000. The congregation has had five synagogue buildings since its founding, and moved to its present location in 2003.

Beth Israel's first rabbis were Irving Miller (1925) and Moses Mescheloff (1936–1937). Rabbis in the 1950s and 1960s included Abraham Halbfinger and Earl Fishhaut. Jeffrey Wolfson Goldwasser joined the congregation as rabbi in 2000. Rachel Barenblat succeeded him in 2011.^[6]

The H. W. Clark Biscuit Company is a former industrial complex in North Adams, Massachusetts. The bakery that Herbert W. Clark built at this site began at a facility on Liberty Street, and expanded into a shoe factory building that Clark had operated with a partner. When the Liberty Street plant was destroyed by fire in 1913, Clark placed its employees on a second shift in the shoe factory building, and had the building now called the Icing Building constructed. This building was built in a style reminiscent of mills built in North Adams fifty years earlier, and is still sometimes thought to be an older building.

In addition to the Icing Building, Clark in 1913 built a Boiler House, which was attached to a warehouse formerly associated with the shoe business (and is the oldest surviving building on the property, dating to 1884). In 1922 Clark embarked on an ambitious modernization of the facility, constructing the Baking Building out of reinforced concrete to a design by New York architect William Higginson. It was the first reinforced concrete building in the city.

Clark sold the business in 1928 after his health began to fail. His successors operated the bakery until 1954. The buildings underwent a series of ownership changes, but were used for nearly forty years by the Tartan Machine Company. That business vacated the premises in 1990. After being vacant for two decades, the property was rehabilitated and converted to residential use.

The complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.^[11]