On the streets of Pawtucket, anger, sadness and resignation about loss of PawSox

PAWTUCKET, R.I. — Elaine Palagi sat in a booth at the Right Spot Diner — a cozy eatery outside McCoy Stadium with what suddenly seemed an ironic name Friday — and explained how she often returns to her childhood neighborhood for lunch. 

“We’ll come and see friends and stand on our roots a little bit,” said Palagi, 68, who now lives in Seekonk. Her husband runs an ice cream business down the street. Her son is a firefighter stationed next to the PawSox ballpark. But “we moved out 13 years ago when we saw the decline in the neighborhoods.”

Like her mother, Palagi worked her whole career at Memorial Hospital up the street until it closed last year. She’s heard nearby Hasbro, the international toy company, is considering relocating. And she still recalls the destruction of the Leroy Theatre, 30 years ago.

Once, “Pawtucket was like a little dream city to live in,” she said. “Nothing ever changed and everyone knew each other.” Now, “it feels like the old West. It’s slowly becoming a ghost town.”

Like others with strong Pawtucket connections, her sentiments seemed all the more plaintive as news spread that the PawSox — since the 1970s part of the fiber of this long-ago mill city — are planning to move to Worcester in two years; another Pawtucket institution gone. Though Palagi stressed that Pawtucket needs a hospital much more than a ballpark.

Steven Porter, owner of the new Stillwater Books shop — it opened in March across Main Street from where the PawSox' dreams of a new baseball park used to be — greeted the baseball news with anger.

“We had a deal on the table with the state. The Senate approved it, the governor was in favor, as was the city. And really one person stood in the way and stopped it’’ — House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello. “If you want to talk about who killed the PawSox, it’s on him.”

“We will continue to plod along,” said Porter. “We will be here for many years to come. But what could have been a really wonderful thing, that’s what really hurts the most.”

Several blocks south and adjacent to the closed Memorial Hospital, Jack Choquette carried a chair out of the Care New England medical center to a patient’s car. A carpenter on the hospital grounds for 23 years, the Lincoln resident used a baseball analogy to describe what the PawSox departure will mean for Pawtucket.

“It’s like pulling the [infield] tarp over the whole city,” he says.

Choquette opposed the state’s proposed financing plan for a new ballpark on the Apex building site beside Route 95. The project would have cost taxpayers millions, he said, and not generated the crowds its supporters proclaimed.

Still, he said the team’s departure will hurt the city. “It’s sad. I wish they had fought more to keep it there [at McCoy].”

Evelyne Osorio, 49, of Pawtucket, had driven her mother to the medical center for blood work. Osorio lost her phlebotomist job when Memorial closed last year and now works at Sturdy Memorial Hospital, in Attleboro.

With the announced move of the PawSox, “it just feels like everything is being ripped away from us, slowly.”

So many downtown office buildings are vacant, she said. “They’re trying to make downtown a historic place but there is nothing there. Nothing lasts.”

Like the Gamm Theatre which moved out earlier this year after 15 years downtown.

At the downtown Blackstone Valley National Heritage Corridor visitors center, large illustrated wall displays tell the history of Pawtucket.

Of how Samuel Slater brought textile manufacturing technology to America in 1789 and turned the banks of the Blackstone River into the center of the Industrial Revolution; of how those many mills began closing in the 1920s when their owners moved their factories to the south, where nonunion labor and electricity were cheaper.

One small poster rests on a easel by the information desk. It tells the story of how Mayor Thomas McCoy in 1936 commissioned the building of a sports complex “that would rival any baseball stadium in the country.”

The six-year project would be criticized for skyrocketing costs and, as World War II approached, cited by the War Production Board for violating rules prohibiting the use of war materials such as steel.

The story goes on that despite financial problems through the 1970s when the ballpark became home of the Pawtucket Red Sox, “McCoy Stadium and the PawSox are a major Rhode Island attraction.”

The poster may now have to be rewritten — in the past tense.