1,000 places to define 'great'

In New Bedford, fishing boats have cast off on voyages that chart the ups and downs of the city and state. (David Kamerman/Globe Staff)

HOLYOKE - Among the brick buildings and calm canals in the center of this city, a certain greatness echoes, as though something come before could be again.

Such potential in timeworn timber and brick stirs with the efforts of artists creating new life in long-shut paper mills. The artists come to live and work, but more.

"Dreaming. And reinvention. And reimagining," said Torsten Zenas Burns, whose medium is video. "It's not 1880. It's not paper. We'll honor all that by not tearing down the buildings."

Burns and three other artists purchased an abandoned paper baron's office and patched the leaking roof, coated walls with new paint, and repaired tin-molded ceilings to create Parsons Hall Project Space.

Does the place, with all its history and future packed into the still-shaping present, count as great? One definition of great is "full of emotion," as in "great with joy," a dream for something to be other than what it is.

People across Massachusetts should have a mighty chance to ponder what counts as great in the state, when a newly-approved commission begins a search for "1,000 great places," from the salt-sprayed edge of Cape Cod to the forest-thick Berkshire Hills. A bill signed in January calls for the naming of a commission to certify such a list, a kind of seal of approval to boost civic pride and promote interest in destinations across the state. The process itself could prove an interesting exercise in deciding what is worthy.

Well-known anchors of Yankee heritage, whether Plymouth Rock, Bunker Hill, or Walden Pond, will no doubt get plenty of play. But think of the rich range a list 1,000 places long will allow.

What about something for the 21st century, such as the website theconesproject.com, where Cambridge artist Peggy Nelson posts photos of an orange cone saving a spot in various Boston-area sites: on the T, in a bar, on a couch, etc. Bostonians have been described as the people who did not go west, and two centuries later Nelson's project points out they are still guarding their turf.

Or what about cooking up another location, such as Alex's Chimis, which serves succulent rotisserie chicken in Jamaica Plain? Sure, many an old oyster house may make the list, but the bustling bastion of take-away chicken spiced with garlic sauce is worthy as a culinary crossroads for an emerging immigrant community. Or why not look at something that spans a longer arc of space and time, such as the docks in New Bedford, where fishing boats have cast off on voyages that chart the ups and downs of the city and state that stand behind the harbor?

One person's idea of great, of course, can be another's inspiration for indifference. The point is not to argue one over the other, but to consider closely the state so many seem to know. While Emily Dickinson's home in Amherst may today make an obvious choice, what about little-known places of current creation such as Parsons Hall Project Space? On May 8, Parsons Hall will host an outdoor video exhibition, which will coincide with a weekend-long "Pulp Science Fiction" exhibition of sculpture, performance, and installation art at Paper City Studios next door.

Kari Gatzke, a painter and Burns's partner, renovated much of the Parsons Hall building and fashioned much of its furniture, at times salvaging old lumber from within.

"We have planks in the basement 18 inches wide," Gatzke said. "There aren't trees that are 18 inches wide anymore. At least not ones that aren't protected."

Some of those stand in Mohawk Trail State Forest, near the northwestern corner of the state. There, on a Saturday morning, two avid tree trackers, Bob Leverett and John Knuerr, walked from a snow-covered parking lot

toward the Grove of Peace, where dozens of white pines more than 100 years old rise toward blue sky. Near the bottom of a short, steep hill, one tree that is thought to be the tallest in the state stands 168 feet high.

Leverett routinely uses a laser and trigonometry to calculate tree heights to within a few inches. Last year, a climber reached the top of the tallest and dropped a line to confirm Leverett's math.

The tallest tree is called the Jake Swamp Tree, so named for a contemporary chief of the Mohawk tribe, and its trunk is too wide for human arms to encircle. Before Colonial times and the westward settlement that followed, such trees were far more common across Massachusetts. The time it takes for something so grand to grow can be too much for the modern mind. Is that not great?

About as far away from the Jake Swamp Tree as can be, yet still in Massachusetts, the two-century-old timber steeple of the Independent Christian Church, Unitarian Universalist rises high above the streets of Gloucester and the gray-blue harbor.

The steeple itself was built from timbers of a sunken ship. Today, though it leaks in heavy rain, it supports a Revere bell that on Sunday mornings at 10 sounds the call to worship.

In the small yard below, churchgoers stroll from huddled homes and climb into the chapel built in 1806, a few decades after John Murray came to Gloucester and founded the first Universalist church in the United States.

The organ looms at the west end of the room, and on a recent Sunday congregation and choir sang as musical director David Bergeron played sweet sounds from the pipes.

Church member Loren French stood in the pulpit and shared "thoughts from the periphery," personal reflections on an evolving relationship with God that continues two centuries after Murray.

Perhaps that should be a measure of what qualifies as great: places where people continue some kind of journey, cultural or culinary, historic or artistic, in search of a scientific invention or soulful connection.

Downstairs at the Gloucester church, as children darted among grandparents sitting at folding tables and coffee flowed freely, Bergeron said:

"This is where history and current events all converge. And this building, architecturally, is the place where that happens."

Tom Haines can be reached at thaines@globe.com.