Corky Row Historic District

Corky Row is a 96-acre working-class neighborhood just south of downtown Fall River, Massachusetts, bordered roughly by Plymouth Avenue, Second Street, Lyon Street, Hartwell Street and Route 195. Its 435 residential structures are mostly three-story frame tenements of four to six units, many with mansard or gable roofs, bracketed cornices and paired two-story bays. The earliest have Greek Revival door frames. Houses were packed tightly together near the mills and downtown, creating courts and alleys. A cluster of high-style single-family homes along lower Second Street dates to the period before 1874, when mill owners lived near their work. The name comes from the Irish immigrants who dominated the area after 1845 and worked in nearby mills such as Tecumseh, Robeson and Davol. They helped start Fall River's labor movement, and James Tansey, later first president of the United Textile Workers of America, emerged from here. The district shows how mill-workers' housing developed from the Civil War era to World War I.