Business View Civil and Municipal | March 2021

52 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL MARCH 2021 GARDNER , MASSACHUSETTS In the 1920s, Gardner was considered a ‘large’ town and officially became a city in 1923 during the height of its factory days. Back then, it was known as ‘The Chair City’ because it produced more chairs than anywhere else in the world. Gardner crafted chairs for Buckingham Palace, the Boston Garden, and the White House. The two remaining chair factories are still in production today. As times changed, so did the city’s manufacturing industries. Despite some difficulties during the Great Recession in the late 2000s, the city’s economy was fortunate enough to remain steady unlike other cities in the U.S. Nicholson explains, “Gardner’s small retail sector, as well as our manufacturing and engineering segments, actually grew during that time. Gardner has the largest cable ties manufacturer in New England and the Northeast. And our manufacturing sector now has a couple biomedical sectors. We have a large biomedical engineering firm called vivitide that has doubled in size over the past ten years, working on different peptide formations for targeted chemotherapy. It is working to create special proteins to put into chemotherapy to target just the cancer cells, so the healthy tissue remains the same, minimizing the negative side effects to the patient.” Also under constant improvement is the city’s business development. An example is a project Nicholson describes as one “people seem to be very excited about.” It involves the smaller business district, with the movie theatre and several car dealerships, located right off of Route 2, the major highway intersection in Gardner. Currently, a new plaza is under construction there that will house a Ninety Nine Restaurant & Pub, a Starbucks, a cannabis company, a swimming pool company, and a financial investment firm. Even though the plaza itself is not finished, the Ninety Nine Restaurant & Pub has been open for business since August 2019. Nicholson reports, “When it was first built, it had a wait Mayor Nicholson with Congresswoman Lauri Trahan, City Council President Elizabeth Kazinskas, and State Representative Jonathan Zlotnik at a site at which Comcast recently committed to installing high speed internet services