www.wbjournal.com • Worcester Business Journal 51
25 YEARS: IN REVIEW
Officials propose a plan that would
save Worcester City Hospital by
merging it with the University of
Massachusetts Medical School and
Hospital, which would assume control
of the facility. An agreement closed
the city hospital as an acute-care
facility and transferred operations to
UMass Medical.
Norton Co., now part of Saint-
Gobain, breaks ground for an
80,000-square-foot electronics center
in the Greendale section of Worcester,
part of the company's goal to pick up
more global revenue.
The Bank of New England, one of
the largest banks in the region, fails in
January and is taken over by Fleet/
Norstar Financial Group.
David Forsberg, Worcester's chief
development officer, proposes an
intermodal passenger transportation
center at Union Station, along with a
domed stadium and a revitalized
Worcester Galleria mall. A top priority,
in particular, for the area is reinstating
commuter rail service to Boston.
Another priority: connecting the city
with the rest of the state via better
access to the Massachusetts Turnpike,
which skirted the city when the road
was built in the 1950s.
The national collegiate men's Division
1 basketball tournament, aka "March
Madness," makes its debut in
Worcester, with the University of
Massachusetts advancing to the Sweet
16 for the first time in school history
following an overtime victory over
Syracuse. Officials estimate that the six
games at the Centrum (now the DCU
Center) made an economic impact of
about $3 million in the area. The tour-
nament returned to the city in 2005.
Norton Co. opens a state-of-the-art
world grinding technology center in
Worcester in January in hopes it would
give the company an edge over
Japanese competitors. The new
82,000-square-foot facility featured the
latest furnace technology and a
research laboratory that would boost
the company's latest innovations.
1991
1992
1993
Saint-Gobain, a
French conglomerate,
acquired Worcester's
Norton Co. in 1990.
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