CultureNOW - NECCO: Peter Vanderwarker

NECCO

Dates

1927

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Two pictures taken in the same place illustrate changes in Cambridge, and in America. In the older photo, seven women are at work on a production line of chocolate candies. In the newer view, four women, similarly dressed in white, look at us from a high-tech laboratory. The chocolate makers are obviously posing for the camera. But it looks as if normally they'd be stuffing the chocolates into cardboard boxes, or perhaps culling the imperfect ones. The space they occupy resembles a basement. It's dimly lit, with a low concrete ceiling and a tangle of overhead pipes and conduits. This is not quite a sweatshop, but it may be close. It appears to be the kind of mass production Henry Ford and a generation of "efficiency experts" believed in, where each worker performed one small task over and over, an anonymous cog in the big machine that was the factory.

The women are working at the New England Confectionary Company -- NECCO for short, as in NECCO wafers. They're in NECCO's then-new building, which opened in 1928 on Massachusetts Avenue near MIT.

Fast-forward three-quarters of a century. NECCO moved out in 2003. Today the structure is the research headquarters for the pharmaceutical company Novartis. The four women in the newer picture are researchers who work in what's called a Models of Disease Center. They dream up experiments that replicate human diseases in the lab, then search for gene-based cures. Novartis uses lots of light and glass to make its labs "transparent," so everyone can see what everyone else is doing, in the hope of inspiring researchers from different specialties to collaborate.

From left, the researchers are Myrtha Constant, Nicole Hobbs, Katya Henderson, and Tina Santackas. When you talk to them, you discover that they're keenly aware that their professional opportunities extend far beyond the reach of the women at NECCO.

Seen from outside, NECCO-Novartis is forgettable. But in 1928, it got a worshipful review from Alfred H. Barr Jr., soon-to-be founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Barr never mentions the working conditions. What he loves is the fact that the architecture is bare, lacking traditional ornament. Comparing NECCO with a beloved New York landmark, he writes, "If only some archangelic hand would shave away the Gothic stubble of the Woolworth Building!"

NECCO is still around, headquartered in Revere, pumping out such delights as the Clark Bar a remembered joy of this writer's youth.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Sweet Smarts", Boston Globe, 19 June 2005

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Location

Massachussetts Avenue & Albany Street
Boston, MA 02139
United States

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