2014 Blackstone Canalfest

Worcester’s Canal District is served by an active Canal District Alliance. The District hosted the annual Blackstone Canalfest - this year's is on Saturday, September 6 - as well several other tourist-attracting, community-building events. Last June, the annual Paulie’s New Orleans Jazz & Blues Festival.​ was held there – attracting thousands of people.

More than a decade ago, a group of Worcester business and political leaders, including John Giangregorio, began promoting either a Providence-like opening and restoration or a reflecting-pool-like replication of the Blackstone Canal, from Union Station south to Kelley Square. These days, they are also pushing for passage of federal legislation to create a Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park, which will overlay the boundaries of the existing Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor.

Unlike the Heritage Corridor, the Historical Park would be an annual line item in the National Parks Service budget. With a regular revenue stream, the Historical Park would be better able to, among other things, help realize the long-awaited canal restoration/replication vision.

Giangregorio chairs Worcester’s Canal District Business Association and is also president of both Worcester's Canal District Alliance and Preservation Worcester. He acknowledges that the proposed $20-million plan to either restore or replicate the northern-most portion of the nearly 200-year-old Blackstone Canal “is complex and will cost money.” But an 11-year-old cost/benefit analysis of only a replication, he adds, demonstrates that even that sort of project “will greatly benefit” Worcester and the rest of the region as “a proven economic-development tool.”

The canal project, Giangregorio observes, will also “help to rebrand the city, contributing a ‘wow’ factor, a raison d’être,” to help attract businesses to locate and expand in Worcester. The restored/replicated canal, when connected to the opportunities resulting from the proposed Historical Park, he adds, will create a Worcester destination that attracts 50,000 new visitors annually to the city, “reinforcing the Canal District as a destination neighborhood.”  This activity, he adds, “supports the current downtown initiatives and healthy-city goals as a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly city.”