How Massachusetts ‘Gateway Cities’ Are Crafting New Identities

Angie Jimenez is a graduate of Entrepreneurship for All, a business accelerator program in Lawrence. She’s starting a cooking school in a renovated mill building in the city. Credit: Jesse Costa/WBUR
The hum of textile looms once filled the 19th-century mill buildings throughout downtown Lawrence. Immigrant workers from Ireland and Germany were among some of the first laborers.
Today, many of the mill buildings in Lawrence are home to refurbished work spaces — buzzing with the sounds of artists, innovators and entrepreneurs like Angie Jimenez, who is arranging pots and pans in the site of her future cooking classroom.