Public Profile

New Bedford is a port city on Buzzards Bay, in southeastern Massachusetts, with a working harbor that has been continuously and consequentially fishing since the late seventeenth century. By value of catch, it is the largest commercial fishing port in the United States — a distinction it has held without interruption since 2000, and which it brings up early in any conversation with an outsider.

The city’s economic identity is bound, completely and unsentimentally, to the sea. Approximately 4,800 residents are directly employed in the catching, processing, distributing, or insuring of seafood, and a further estimated 7,000 in associated trades — vessel repair, refrigeration, ice manufacture, gear fabrication, and the inland trucking of frozen scallop product to distribution centers in New Jersey. Scallops account for the majority of the harbor’s annual landed value, a market position New Bedford defends with the steady, slightly aggrieved confidence of a city that suspects, correctly, that no one else is paying close attention.

The city was once the global capital of the whaling industry. This fact is acknowledged at the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park, which receives approximately 280,000 visitors a year, most of whom appear, to local observers, to be in transit to somewhere else.

The harbor district remains physically and culturally distinct from the rest of the city. The piers — Pier 3, Steamship Pier, Leonard’s Wharf — operate on schedules dictated by tide, weather, federal closure, and the fluctuating political status of the foreign-built vessel question, which has been the city’s defining federal grievance for more than a century. The Jones Act, the federal cabotage statute that requires inter-port U.S. shipping to be conducted on American-built, American-flagged, American-owned vessels, is regarded in New Bedford with the settled, multigenerational hostility usually reserved for weather.

Politically, the city is a quiet, durable Democratic stronghold whose representatives — local, state, and federal — are nonetheless expected, as a condition of office, to demonstrate annually that they have been working on the Jones Act. They have not, in any practical sense, been working on it; the Act has not been substantively amended since 1920. This is widely known and does not affect the expectation.

Local Character and Recurring Themes

  • Working harbor primacy. New Bedford does not romanticize its waterfront. The harbor is a place of business, not a place of view. Civic disputes regularly arise when waterfront real estate is rezoned for residential or recreational use, and these disputes tend to end in the favor of the fleet.
  • Multigenerational fishing families. A meaningful share of the city’s working fleet is operated by families who have been operating it for three or more generations. The Hennessey family — see Marvin Hennessey — is representative.
  • Federal grievance. Beyond the Jones Act, the city maintains active grievances against NOAA, the New England Fishery Management Council, the European Union (over imported seafood standards), and the Massachusetts Department of Marine Fisheries. These grievances are not always coherent in combination but are individually enduring.
  • The Whaling Park. Tolerated. Underused by locals. A frequent destination for school field trips that go better than expected.
  • St. Anthony of Padua. The largest Portuguese-American Catholic parish in the United States. Center of civic life for a substantial fraction of the city’s fishing community. The annual Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, held each August in nearby Fall River, draws an estimated 200,000 attendees over four days and is treated as a regional civic event.

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