# Worcester Courthouse history



## PBC FL Cop (Oct 22, 2003)

Worcester Magazine

*If these walls could talk*

Written by Ellen O'Connor

Thursday, 15 November 2007 
From dive-bombing birds to quirky attorneys and legendary judges, Worcester's old courthouse may be empty but it's filled with stories

By Ellen O'Connor

It was her first argument ever in Worcester Superior Court and Room 18 was packed with other attorneys waiting their turn before the judge. It was a complicated argument, and on that hot summer morning many years ago, she needed the court's full attention.

"I told the judge I had four points to make," says Sandra Hautanen, a Worcester County assistant district attorney, recalling her first exposure to the Worcester legal scene. "He was nodding at me. I think I even held up four fingers." Despite the warm weather, the judge was focused.

"I got through points one and two and had just started on point three when I noticed the judge was not looking at me anymore," she says. "He was looking above my head at the ceiling. I looked around and so was everybody else."

A pigeon had flown into one of the open windows and was buzzing around the room, frantically flapping its wings, a court officer in hot pursuit with a rolled up newspaper.
The bird was now the center of everyone's attention. The judge, the court officer, the lawyers, the clerk, the court reporter - were all following the flight of the intruder. It took about 10 minutes before the bird flew out the way it had come in, through one of the courtroom's enormous windows that had been opened to help relieve the heat.








Whatever momentum the assistant district attorney may have gained in her argument to the judge had flown the coop, so to speak. 
"I lost the motion," says Hautanen. 
But what she gained was becoming a part of the lore of Worcester's courthouses, which first began dispensing justice to Worcester County residents in the 1700s. They are buildings that have seen historic happenings of all kinds, happenings certainly of more import than the bird invasion.

In September of this year, the Worcester Superior Court - and all the other courts housed on what came to be known as Court Hill (with the exception of the juvenile court, which was sited in the Memorial Auditorium) - moved into their new home at 225 Main St. The distance from the old courthouse to the new one is not far, really, maybe a five-minute stroll. But it is a walk from Worcester's past into its future.

"The new building is beautiful," says Joanne Herring, who served as the assistant clerk in Room 12 of the Superior Court. She now works in Room 20 of the new building. "The facilities here are magnificent."

Still, Herring misses the room that she worked in for the past seven or eight years. It was a quirky, sometimes cranky and temperamental building, but it was a building with an unmistakable sense of history.

"You would go into Room 12 and it would just take your breath away," explains Herring. "There is a lot of history in that room, all the things that have transpired there. You just can't take that with you, that marvelous sense of history. Very important people in the 1800s were in Room 12, doing very important things. You wonder what transpired here."

During her tenure, Herring witnessed countless trials and motion hearings in a room that dates back to 1845. It is the oldest still-existing courtroom in Worcester County. She has seen her share of humorous events - courtesy of the building itself and its equally idiosyncratic denizens. These stories are a part of the room's more recent history.








Heating and cooling the old courtrooms in the Superior Court was always rather touch and go. The people who worked there never knew what to expect - stifling heat in the winter from an overactive heating system, frigid July days due to an overachieving air conditioning system. But they always came prepared with extra clothing, if need be.

And then there were the Tuesdays after a holiday in the dead of winter. The boiler that heats the building is so old that it had to be shut off over the weekend because there was no one available from maintenance to monitor it. 
"After a long weekend, we were sitting there with coats and mittens, and the court reporter had those half-gloves and the judges were wearing their suit coats under their robes," recalls Herring. "When the heat finally kicked in, you could hear it."

To say that the pipes banged and clanged as the heat came up would be an understatement. For the uninitiated, it could be somewhat disconcerting.

A jury that had just been impaneled after one of those winter holiday weekends had never heard the racket before, so the late Judge Daniel Toomey had to reassure them that there was nothing to be concerned about. 
"Don't worry, those are just gremlins," he told the perplexed jurors. "We always have them this time of the morning," he helpfully explained.

*The attorneys*

Of course, the many people who plied their trade in the old courthouse are another part of the history of the building, which housed the superior court, the district court, the probate court, the housing court, and the registry of deeds. The various courtrooms of the complex certainly saw more than their share of characters. 
The late Donald Feldman, a Worcester attorney who did criminal defense work as a big part of his practice, represented his share of people who, it is safe to say, had little chance of winning the cases that the government had brought against them, according to Edward Simsarian. Simsarian is a long-time Worcester lawyer with an institutional memory.

Feldman, who had lost many, many of his cases due to the nature of his clientele, was at the district court one day defending someone else who had gotten into trouble, recalls Simsarian, who told the following story. 
"Judge, the law is on my side," Feldman told the court. 
"What law may that be, Mr. Feldman?" inquired the curious judge.

"The law of averages," replied Feldman, who was clearly not relying on case law, but nonetheless felt he was way overdue for a win.

There is another still-working criminal defense attorney who has a propensity for citing cases by name and page whenever he is before a judge, says Simsarian.

The trouble is, the case that had been confidently cited with incredible specificity would turn out to be "about a zoning problem in Abington, Massachusetts," which really had nothing to do with the matter at hand, recalls Simsarian. That never seemed to deter the anonymous attorney, however, who made such case references a staple of pretty much all of his court appearances. 
James Reardon, who died in 1999, was a flamboyant and very respected trial attorney. He was also well known for his closing arguments. During one of his more impassioned defenses of a priest accused of sexual abuse, Reardon was imploring the jury to acquit his client, said his son James Gavin Reardon Jr., who, as a young attorney, was there for the trial and his father's closing.

The elder Reardon was standing between the defense table and the prosecutor's table, which did not have much room between them, when he swung his hands wide during his speech, says the son.

"He knocked Mary Sawicki [the assistant district attorney] in the back of her head with one of his arms and her forehead hit the table. She was wearing a bow in her hair and somehow the bow stayed in."

Never one to miss a beat, the elder Reardon joked, "I'll kill you, Mary, before we're done here." Sawicki, who is no longer with the district attorney's office, is said to have kept the bow as a memento of the occasion.

Peter Ettenberg, another long-time Worcester attorney who has been practicing since the early 1970s, recalled Judge Ed McCooey.

"He was a character," says Ettenberg. "He had about 50 pencils on his bench and he would write down verbatim everything that was said in his courtroom, better than any stenographer."

When the pencil he was using was no longer performing its function, the judge would throw it down and pick up another one from the big pile strewn about his bench. 
"He would fill notebook upon notebook," says Ettenberg, who points out that the judge, through his meticulous note-taking, knew _exactly_ what was going on. "He got stuff right. Boy, did he ever. It was perfect."

Ettenberg, who does criminal defense work, also recalls what the district court was like in the early '70s, when there were Saturday morning sessions. It was an era when the judges were part-time and the criminals mixed in with those there to press small-claims actions.
"It was a free-for-all," says Ettenberg. "All kinds of humanity were flowing into courtrooms on Saturday mornings."

And, of course, there is a bird story. Yes, another one. 
Once again, the huge courtroom windows of Room 12 in the Superior Court had been opened, this time to let in the fresh air of the first really beautiful spring day. Sure enough, a bird soon had members of a shocked jury ducking and dodging as it would dive-bomb various jurors, as a court officer tried valiantly to chase it down.

"It was hysterical," says Herring. "You could not ignore the bird. I think it was Judge Toomey, God rest his soul, who told the jurors, 'OK, we're going to take a little break now.' " 
Luckily, this bird - and the previously mentioned bird of Room 18 - left nothing behind but memories.
Finally, there is the story about the high-tech world of today meeting a world that had had its start a couple of centuries ago.

A few years back, Room 12 was host to a big jury-waived trial. The lawyers wanted to put on a PowerPoint presentation and it was really involved, says Herring. They had a big screen for the jurors, individual monitors for the attorneys, and one for the judge. They decided to have a technician come in and set up everything the day before.
The technician got the whole thing set up, hit the switch and ... "he blew the circuit breaker and he blew his hard drive," says Herring. "You can't do that kind of thing in an old building."

Luckily, the tech must have had a sense of exactly where he was - he had brought sufficient back-up equipment for just this eventuality.

So, the trial went forward in the same courtroom where lawyers from another century had first made their pleas for justice, a courtroom where justice had been served for 162 years running, until Sept. 14 of this year, when the doors of Room 12 closed for the final time. o

Courthouse was witness to history
The courthouses that sat - and still sit - on Court Hill are an integral part of Worcester's and this country's history.

It is a past that most people are not aware of, but Judge Francis Fecteau recently had the opportunity to remind us of "our colorful legal history." As part of the dedication ceremony for the new courthouse, Fecteau, who sits in Worcester Superior Court, wrote a short narrative about the courthouses that have served Worcester County since the 1730s, when the first of five courthouses was built on Main Street.

As Judge Fecteau noted, both the famous - and the infamous - have passed through these old buildings. There was John Adams, who would become the second president of the United States. In 1775, after graduating from college, Adams worked as a teacher in a schoolhouse close enough to the courthouse so that he could occasionally stop in and watch the proceedings. By the time Adams began dropping in on trials, a second courthouse, another wooden structure a bit bigger than the first, had already been built on the hill.

And there was the notorious Bathsheeba Spooner, who was convicted (along with three co-conspirators) in the second courthouse for the crime of killing her husband. As the judge pointed out, diversions were in fairly short supply in 1778, so the trial had to be moved out of the courthouse to a bigger venue to accommodate the spectators. When the four were convicted and sentenced to death, an even bigger crowd turned out to witness the executions in what is now Washington Square.

In 1781, this same courthouse also heard arguments in a series of cases which decided a basic human tenet: "that, as a matter of Massachusetts law, slavery was contrary to the rights of every person to be free," the judge wrote. This decision made Massachusetts the first state in the nation to abolish slavery - 82 years before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

In the same history-making vein, the first African-American to be allowed to serve on a jury did so in 1860 in one of Worcester's courtrooms, either in the Bulfinch Courthouse, a brick building constructed in the early 1800s that no longer exists, or in the fourth courthouse, a granite structure built between 1843 and 1845. The courtroom of the fourth courthouse is Room 12, the oldest still-existing courthouse in Worcester.

Construction of the fifth courthouse, the one that fronts Main Street today, began in 1898. Between 1955 and 1957, the Harvard Street addition was built, which primarily housed the district court. In 1985, a final addition was built for the housing court.

Judge Fecteau noted a couple of other famous names that are associated with Worcester's courthouses. There was Levi Lincoln, who represented Quork Walker, an escaped former slave. Lincoln went on to serve as President Thomas Jefferson's attorney general. And there was Daniel Shays, who rebelled against taxes and the imprisonment of debtors. Shays evicted the justice of the Court of Common Pleas (as it was then called), forcing the court to find another location until the rebellion was suppressed.

This is the history that Joanne Herring referred to when she spoke of why she misses Room 12, which began its operation so long ago.

"I just hope they keep these [old] courtrooms," she says, having an unabashed bias to keeping at least Room 12.

"Eventually, in 100 years, this courthouse will have its own history," she says, referring to the new building that opened for business about two months ago. 
But for right now, the place with the stories is at 2 Main St.
- _Ellen O'Connor_​


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