“What’s Up With Downtown Worcester?: Prospects for Revitalization”

For many years, Worcester’s public officials, downtown business and property owners, workers who frequent downtown daily and residents who travel through occasionally have all talked about the need to restore the kind of vitality to downtown that existed in the 1950’s. According to a number of the City’s older residents, downtown in 1950 was a vital, bustling center of commercial and civic life with four department stores, five high schools, offices filled with doctors and dentists, and several movie theaters, among them the Poli Palace Theater (recently renovated into the Hanover Theater).