At the dawn of the 20th century, Haverhill, Massachusetts, was an industrial powerhouse, filled with towering shoe factories that by 1913 were producing one-tenth of all the shoes in the United States. As in so many cities, though, Haverhill’s shoe industry eventually died out, turning its “Queen Slipper City” heyday into a mere memory. Only the industrial buildings themselves were left behind, standing abandoned, neglected, or clumsily repurposed for decades. Now, an ambitious new project by the preservation organization Historic New England is reclaiming some of those buildings and that history, turning a gritty, downtrodden neighborhood into a living archive and world-class cultural center that promises to thrust Haverhill back into the spotlight.
The project will transform two historic former shoe factory buildings and several vacant properties across three acres of land into the Historic New England Center for Preservation and Collections. It will take roughly five to seven years to complete, will cost around $150 to $200 million, and may include housing, retail, a hotel, a theater, public green space, and spaces for artists and makers.
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Its first phase, the Welcome and Exhibition Center, will open in summer 2026 and showcase some of Historic New England’s incredible collection, which includes more than 125,000 historic objects and artifacts and upwards of 1.5 million archival documents. “It’s a space that’s meant to be a precursor to the entire large project that we’re envisioning, creating the Historic New England Center for Preservation and Collections and really turning our facility inside out, creating a living archive, and bringing the public into conversation around what the history in those buildings means and can inspire in the future,” says Carissa Demore, vice president and chief policy director for Historic New England.
The two shoe factory buildings at the heart of the project have storied histories of their own. Built as a pair in 1911 and 1912 respectively, the Lang and Burgess Buildings were constructed out of poured concrete after a devastating fire known as the “Great Conflagration” decimated many of Haverhill’s factories in 1882. The concrete was a direct response to a new focus on fire safety and prevention.
“They display their character in an understated kind of a way, where you can see the hands that built them,” Demore says. “You can see the formwork of how the concrete was poured. You can see the way that the rebar was placed as the technology was evolving and we were learning how to create buildings of that scale out of concrete.” The eight-story buildings were never home to a single company. Rather, they housed many different companies, including one where famed shoe designer Stuart Weitzman apprenticed under his father, shoemaker Seymour Weitzman, at his eponymous shoe company, Mr. Seymour, in the Lang Building.
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Stuart Weitzman recently donated 127 pairs of shoes from his personal collection to Historic New England, including many that were originally designed by Seymour Weitzman and manufactured in the Lang Building. Highlights of the Weitzman collection will debut this summer in the welcome center’s opening exhibition, “Shoe Stories: Past, Present, Future.” The exhibition will also feature a large-scale video wall; archival materials from Historic New England’s collection, like vintage shoe advertising; examples of shoes from contemporary designers; and other elements.
The Lang and Burgess Buildings were built with poured concrete to survive the Great Conflagration of 1882, a decision that ironically helped preserve the city’s industrial DNA even as the shoe factories themselves closed. It is a familiar pattern in New England industrial history: the structures that once drove the economy are often left to rot when the work leaves, but those same structures offer a durable skeleton for modern reinvention. The center plans to function as a “living archive,” a concept that attempts to solve the problem of how to store history without freezing it in amber, allowing the public to interact with the physical remnants of the industry that defined the region.
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Within only a few years of the Lang and Burgess Buildings being built, the shoe industry in Haverhill began to change and eventually faded completely, but the buildings and the memory of what they witnessed remained. Now, thanks to the Historic New England Center for Preservation and Collections, they’re gaining new life, helping to revitalize a whole neighborhood and providing a living sign to the way historic preservation can breathe new life into cities and towns.
“It honors things that are important about the past, it recognizes what kinds of decisions have brought us to the point that we’re at, and it provides inspiration and solid grounding for how we make decisions for the future,” Demore says.
