EVERETT – With just a few blows from the metal fist of a backhoe, a historic but weatherworn home on Rockefeller Avenue in north Everett crumbled Tuesday morning.
By the end of the week, all the 11 remaining Donovan homes in the block between 13th and 14th streets will be reduced to rubble.
It’s the end of the picket-fence dreams of blue-collar mill workers who carried this town early in the 19th century.
Yet, it’s also the beginning of another dream, one that could save the lives of many cancer patients.
Dan Bates / The Herald
Providence Everett Medical Center spent years purchasing each of the homes in that block. The hospital lobbied the Everett City Council for approval to build a $70 million cancer center there, and debated with owners of nearby homes who wanted their historic district to remain intact.
Half the homes in the block were claimed by a developer, who moved them to a lot off Poplar Street. The rest were left behind.
It’s an exchange: one dream for another.
From industry to technology.
From creaking floorboards, remnants of decades of family life polished into the grooves, to a concrete parking garage for 2,500 cancer patients in the first year alone. By May 2007, the patients will walk across the street to a 21st-century building filled with the best cancer treatment medicine has to offer.
Like the mill workers before them, the cancer patients will come to north Everett with the hope of a better life.
Reporter Krista J. Kapralos: 425-339-3422 or kkapralos@heraldnet.com.
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