Lobster News

Keeping Gloucester’s Lobster Business Thriving: Mortillaro’s Lobster

   Mortillaro Lobster, a $30-million-a-year business, stands unassumingly at the head of Gloucester harbor’s Harbor Cove, the inner most part of the harbor ringed with similarly plain buildings, all zoned for maritime industrial use: Cape Pond Ice, Ocean Crest Seafoods, Felicia Oil Company, Intershell, and the Fisherman’s Wharf fish auction.
For all their lack of scenic charm these businesses, almost all of them born from the long branches of one Gloucester family—the  Linquatas—are the old school, working to transform Gloucester into a forward-thinking, relevant, 21st century city.

Mortillaro Lobster began 50 years ago and a few steps away, just across Commercial Street, amidst the sheet metal buildings and idling tractor-trailers of Gloucester’s Fort neighborhood. Past the walls of industry, Commercial Street turns right, into a neighborhood of wooden houses that cling to each other and this promontory of rock like a cluster of barnacles. Gloucester’s outer harbor laps at the base of this ultimate point of land, with views across to the grand homes of Eastern Point.

For generations, the Fort was where new immigrant populations came when they first landed in Gloucester. It was here that they found work and shelter, working in the fishing industries just down the street, packing into the wooden homes at the end of the point.

The Fort was a dead end of Gloucester that no one else wanted, but home to generations of the city’s residents, sardined into houses with cousins, aunts, and uncles. Crowded, noisy, and almost tree-less, with fish, sea, sky, and squawking seagulls, this neighborhood had its own cuisine, rooted in the Sicilian villages the most recent immigrants left behind. Continue