Everyone knows Lynn Harbor is full of water and probably a few fish and sunken cars. But during the last century, the harbor teemed with scandal.
Even as the spend-happy 1920s roared across America, would-be developer Charles V. Knightly found himself riding out a storm of accusation around his harbor development plans.
Knightly came to Lynn in 1924 insisting he was an engineer doing advance work for a massive housing project planned along the waterfront. But newspapers led by the Boston Post cast Knightly as “an international crook and swindler” who went to jail for “activities in behalf of Armenian immigrants.”
His name became attached to claims about the Ford Motor Company taking interest in building a plant on Lynn’s waterfront. Knightly denied ever making the claim but the bad press stuck to him with the newspapers stating Knightly concocted the fictitious Seaboard Engineering Company and even used two made-up names in his dealings with city officials.
“The name Charles Valentine Knightly is known to the New York police as successor to Diamond Phil Weinseimer, a labor leader, who did 20 months at Sing Sing for grafting and who opened an office at 80 Wall street following his release from jail under the name of the Seaboard Underwriters association,” the Daily Evening Item revealed in November, 1924.
Undaunted, Knightly redoubled his plans in 1925 insisting that a leading New York civil engineering firm had plans in the works for Lynn’s waterfront. He promised to build 100 homes at the rate of one every four days as soon as the winter frost melted away.
It was Knightly who ended up melting away. By February, 1925, he was defending his plans and insisting Lynn residents — “not outsiders” — were involved in formulating them.
By the end of the year, the press claimed Knightly posed as a commissioner delegated to build “Lynn’s $1.5 million outfall sewer” in order to collect a service fee from a New York law firm.
Detroit police subsequently arrested Knightly and charged him in connection with another home building project. He popped up in Baltimore in 1928 “representing himself to be the nephew of a railroad capitalist.”
The harbor wasn’t always an anchorage for bad news a century ago. The state Legislature in 1915 appropriated the then-significant sum of $25,000 for a harbor dredging project that added nine acres to the harbor.
As the Great Depression worsened, local politicians and business leaders dreamed of expanding Lynn Harbor into a commercial waterway with the Item crowing in February 1932: “Starting Lynn Huge Harbor Development Toward Ultimate Goal of a Bigger and Busier Lynn.”
A giant dredger went to work digging up harbor mud. Lynn residents flocked to the waterfront to watch the giant machine at work.
The dredger pulled up thousands of tons of mud from the harbor floor and pushed it through 30-inch-wide pipes onto land. The possibilities for waterfront development seemed endless.
“The reclaimed area contains many acres of new-made land which will soon be available for industrial, commercial or transportation development. Undoubtedly there is ample space for the creation of an industrial city greater even than any one of the industrial undertakings the people of Lynn have yet seen develop locally in all the years of the past,” gushed the Item.
Three months later, the news from the waterfront was somber. “Finis to a great dream” read the headline over a story detailing the Universal Tide Power Co.’s demolition.
Tide power inventor John A. Knowlton did not live to see his dream’s demise. But he admitted to state public utility regulators that he sold more than $900,000 of stock in his company although the project’s cost totaled less than half that amount.
“The main invention of the company, which was found to be only experimental” resulted in 10,000 stockholders losing $1 million.
The company’s demise was an oft-told cautionary tale detailing how the rampant speculative investing that characterized the 1920s translated into the plummeting financial losses that defined the Depression.
