Chicopee is a city of about 55,000 in Hampden County, on the east bank of the Connecticut River where the Chicopee River flows in from the east. It sits between Holyoke to the north and Springfield to the south, sharing a continuous mill-belt along the river with both. Chicopee was set off from Springfield as its own town in 1848 and incorporated as a city in 1890.
The four districts
Chicopee is functionally a city of distinct neighborhoods rather than a single downtown. The four are:
- Chicopee Center (also called Cabotville): the original industrial center on the Chicopee River, with the City Hall pictured above and the densest concentration of late-19th-century brick commercial buildings.
- Chicopee Falls: a separate village around the second falls on the Chicopee River, two miles east of the Center. The 19th-century mills here turned out everything from swords to bicycles to golf balls.
- Willimansett: the Connecticut River frontage on the north side of the city.
- Aldenville and Fairview: the residential western and northern districts.
The city has a regional reputation for its Polish-American and French-Canadian communities; both came in waves to work the 19th-century mills. The Basilica of Saint Stanislaus, Bishop & Martyr in Chicopee Center, completed in 1908 and designated a minor basilica by Pope John Paul II in 1991, is the parish anchor of the Polish community and one of the more dramatic religious buildings in the Valley, with twin brownstone towers with copper-domed cupolas, in a free Baroque Revival idiom. Kielbasa, pierogi, and gołąbki are everyday food here; the city has been called the “Kielbasa Capital of the World,” and several of the major Polish- food producers in New England (Chicopee Provision Company, Millie’s Pierogi) operate out of Chicopee.
The industrial spine
Chicopee Falls was a serious manufacturing center for most of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Ames Manufacturing Company, founded in 1834, produced swords, cutlasses, cannons, and machinery. It was a major supplier of edged weapons to the Union Army during the Civil War, and from about 1850 onward did large-scale bronze casting as well. The bronze doors on the East Wing of the U.S. Capitol and the original casting of Daniel Chester French’s Minute Man statue at the Old North Bridge in Concord were both Ames work. A.G. Spalding, the sporting-goods company, operated a major plant in Chicopee for much of the 20th century, and Callaway Golf still produces golf balls in the city today.
The brothers Charles and J. Frank Duryea had a Chicopee connection. Frank worked here as a toolmaker before the brothers moved their work to Springfield, where they built and test-drove the first gasoline-powered automobile in the United States in 1893. Their later Stevens-Duryea Company did manufacture cars in Chicopee Falls from 1901 into the 1920s.
Westover Air Reserve Base
The northern part of the city is occupied by Westover Air Reserve Base, the largest Air Force Reserve installation in the United States. Westover was built as an active-duty heavy-bomber base in 1940 and converted to a Reserve installation in 1974. The base’s runway is one of the longest in the Northeast and the 439th Airlift Wing flies C-5M Super Galaxy transports from there. The base hosts the Great New England Air & Space Show in some years (typically every other summer); it is the largest event in the city by far.
A walk in the city
- Chicopee Center has the City Hall (1871, Romanesque, pictured), the Edward Bellamy House (1852, a National Historic Landmark; Bellamy was the Chicopee-born journalist and utopian novelist whose 1888 Looking Backward was one of the best-selling American novels of the 19th century), and the Carreau Block of late-19th-century commercial buildings.
- Chicopee Memorial State Park in the eastern part of the city is a 575-acre DCR park around the former Cooley Brook water-supply reservoir, with a 25-acre swimming pond with a guarded beach and bathhouse, plus picnic areas and walking and biking trails.
Sources
- City of Chicopee
- Chicopee, Massachusetts — Wikipedia (2020 U.S. Census population: 55,560)
- Westover Air Reserve Base — official site