Looking back: Once-dominant tanneries disappear

By ALAN BURKE
Essex County Newspapers

PEABODY — “You must have seen something like it in the movies,” says Mayor Peter Torigian.

It's the only way he can describe a world once so familiar, a world he watched every day as boy, looking from his window in a three-decker on Warren Street. There was the whistle blowing, shifts changing at the nearby tannery, workers walking to their homes carrying lunch pails.

"There would be hundreds of guys and gals coming out," Torigian says, recalling an era when tanning leather was a way of life in the Tanner City.

Today, fewer than a handful of tanneries remain. Moreover, over the past several decades, North Shore cities and towns have had to find jobs for the workers who once labored in them _ and they have had to find industries to fill the empty, red-brick factories.

Nowhere was this metamorphosis more dramatic than in Peabody, which in the early 20th century was one of the leading leather producers in the nation.

Producing leather was always back-breaking work. As a teen, Torigian followed his father into the tanneries. A high school football player, he'd been advised by his coach to work hard all summer, to come back in top shape to play football.

But carrying hides in 112-degree heat proved to be more than he bargained for. Sweat poured from him, day after day.

"I lost 12 pounds. I didn't come back stronger. I came back weaker. Those in the leather industry never got their just due for being so hard-working."

Tanning hides, turning the skins of animals into useful leather, became Peabody's major industry starting in the 19th century.

"The leather industry came here because of the water," explains Barbara Doucette of the Peabody Historical Society. "Peabody has plenty of water, all the brooks that run through Peabody and Peabody Square, like Goldthwaite Brook and the North River."

Moreover, explains Michael Orgettas, the chemical make-up of the city's water is completely conducive to tanning leather. Orgettas' family operates one of the few remaining tanneries in Peabody, Travel Leather.

More than 150 years ago, the advent of railroads gave Peabody's leather factories plenty of raw material to work with. Hides came rolling in endlessly from the vast West.

By 1900 there were up to 100 leather factories in Peabody employing as many as 8,000 people.

The tanneries enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with New England's booming shoe industry. It was when the shoemakers began leaving, seeking cheaper labor, that the tanneries began to close.

Doucette says, "So many other countries started getting into tanning leather. And then there were unions here. And the companies couldn't come up with what the unions wanted and still compete."

Over the years, the problems have not lessened _ to the contrary.

Orgettas' plant is largely automated and employs more than 50 people. It's hard work, he says, but nothing like the Dickensian existence that previous generations knew. "Even though we have a better product, it takes much longer to ship the leather overseas," he says. Thus the foreign shoemakers rely on local producers.

The advent of strict environmental regulations created another hurdle for local tanneries. "We don't run on city water," says Orgettas. "We have our own water." But he concedes that keeping his operation environmentally friendly boosts the cost of production.

These days, Orgettas adds, the leather business is slow. Most of his product goes for shoes and shoes, for some reason, don't sell as well during economic booms.

"It's been slow all over the world," says Orgettas. "When people are making money, they will be more likely to spend it on high-ticket items. .... It's slow, but it does run in cycles. I notice that it's been slow for the last couple of years. But hopefully things will turn around."

In business for 40 years, Travel Leather recently bought the name and sales list of one of its few Peabody-based competitors, Bob-Kat Leather Co. Orgettas thinks the industry can yet survive here, but he adds, "Tanneries will have to get business overseas. Perhaps they'll have to set up joint ventures with foreign companies. ... I wouldn't think you're going to see new tanneries opening up. But any business has to adapt to new conditions and we keep adapting."

Torigian is even more pessimistic about the future of the tanneries. "There is no future," he laughs.

He can laugh because the city has worked hard to replace the industry, and Torigian makes a pointing of noting that Peabody's new employers are a diverse group.

"Centennial Park," he says, "has three and a half million square feet of industrial office space. There are 6,000 employees."

Torigian cites high-tech companies, medical suppliers and book warehouses, indicating that Peabody is no longer a one-industry town and all the better for it.

Centennial Park was previously residential or unoccupied. But elsewhere in the city, the buildings that once housed tanneries are now condos or senior citizens complexes. The former Sirois Leather factory has been replaced by Leather City Commons.

"That used to be a six-story, asbestos-covered, wood-framed building," says Torigian.

Sometimes converting the properties has involved an extraordinary effort. Torigian lists the newly opened Stop & Shop, which stands alongside a stream not far from Peabody Square, an area once chockablock with tanneries. "It took $1 million by Stop & Shop to make that area environmentally safe."

Other cities have followed the same formula.

In Newburyport, The Tannery Mall seems to have no connection to the process that contributed to its name.

One resident paused at the mention of the place. "It used to be a foundry, I think?" she said uncertainly.

Today, it is all bustling shops, but more than half a century ago, one wing of the building was taken over by the Saftel-Kaplan Leather Tannery employing nearly 100 people.

George Cashman remembers because his family owned the building and rented the space in those days. "My grandfather built it in the 1920s," he says.

It was the only tannery in the city, Cashman believes.

"Newburyport was nothing like Peabody, the size of Peabody," he recalls. In fact, different sections of the long, brick structure were used for many other things, including the construction of home oil tanks and even clam shucking.

The leather company was a good neighbor, though. "It smelled a little," Cashman concedes brightly, "now and then, on a hot day. But there was a sewerage treatment plant nearby that smelled 10 times worse."

Several shoe factories in Newburyport put the leather to use, including Lewis Shoe and Dodge Brothers Shoe. "But they're gone now," says Cashman.

In Gloucester, the Strong Group creates everything from leather pouches to leather gun holsters for the police. "But we are not a tannery," says spokesman Dan Donahue.

Strong does not use local leather in its products, turning to suppliers from the Western United States.

"People always like leather," says Donahue. "These days there seems to be a trend toward it."

While he remembers the history of Peabody's tanneries, Donahue confesses that the continued existence of any Peabody tanneries is news to him.