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Your Search Yielded No Results

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I ended last week’s post with a snarky comment about Asheville and Grand Forks. Right on cue, as I’m doing some Saturday afternoon light reading in preparation for today’s contribution to my ouevre, I see this:

It’s too perfect: A.R.T.. And it doesn’t mean what you think it means. It’s “Asheville Redefines Transit”. Wow, The oh, so important story at the heart of this article summarized and linked to on this website which caters to city planners all over the world? Asheville is buying seven 30′ long diesel-hybrid buses instead of 50′ long electric buses. And spending some cash to renovate this:

a.r.t.’s sole transit station.

Spectacular. That really is great news for Asheville’s transit patrons who count on “art” for over a million transit rides a year:

What does this have to do with Rational Urbanism?

I started this blog just over 7 years ago because I couldn’t find anything with an urbanist’s perspective written about Springfield or cities like Springfield. There was (and is) always plenty to read about the superstar cities, and trendy cities, and even a fair amount about rapidly declining cities, but almost nothing about the places in the middle; so I decided to do it myself. It hasn’t caught fire, or even gone viral very often which perhaps explains why Planetizen and CityLab continue to ignore Springfield and places like it.

But for anyone who is interested in, let’s say, public transportation, there are some pretty interesting things going on in this northeast provincial backwater. For comparison, here are some numbers:

Yes, Springfield’s PVTA (Yes, that’s Pioneer Valley Transit Authority, think of the “V” as a “U” and remind yourself that 1) most of the PVTA’s riders are Hispanic, 2) “The Pioneer Valley” was just a name given to this region by marketing experts hoping to get vacationers to stop here on their way to the Berkshires, and 3) apparently anything is better than putting “Springfield” in your name!) has ten times the ridership of a.r.t..

And apart from these two ancillary stations in Holyoke and Westfield:

Both somewhat recently opened, the PVTA has only been using this little ol’ place as its primary hub for two years:

And just opened this new facility:

And the Union Station hub has added at 14 daily trains on two new services going north and south, and creating increased east-west service appears to be on the front burner in Boston.

I mean, it’s not 7 whole new buses or anything, but it seems like a tiny little revolution in transit for a region of 3/4 of a million people.

This goes for the MGM development too, by the way. A corporation with a name perhaps second only to Disney in entertainment plops down a billion dollar development in the heart of a struggling formerly industrial city in New England and…I haven’t seen any in depth coverage on it show up anywhere but in local news outlets. Leaving aside that the world’s largest rail car manufacturer decided to place its North American headquarters here as it produces rolling stock for Boston, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, (maybe that belongs in the transit story?), or the redevelopment of one of the oldest hotels in the United States along with an amazing baroque style theater, just the MGM story has about 10 angles to it. Which I’m trying to get to, by the way, but it’s almost like my job as a Spanish teacher gets in the way.

It seems that what’s happening, and what’s not happening here doesn’t hold any interest for the editors at CityLab or even those who mostly link to the content of local media (like Planetizen). 

I’ll take this to the bank, though. There is no better place to be in the month of September in the entire world than Springfield, Massachusetts. It’s not just the Basketball Hall of Fame and its yearly induction of the greatest players and coaches ever in the world’s second most popular sport, it’s the Mattoon Street Arts festival, Glendi, and JamFest, and, of course, the largest fair in the east, New England’s great state fair, The Eastern States Exposition. I can literally look out my back window and see Six Flags New England, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and MGM Springfield, and I can walk out my front door and be at “The Big E”, on foot, in a few minutes. 

Next month the symphony starts its new season, the Thunderbirds are back in the nest at the Mass Mutual Center, and it will be time to settle in and watch the leaves change along the longest navigable river in New England and up and down the foothills of the Berkshires. Sure, we don’t have more craft breweries per capita than anyplace else in the world, but maybe dulling your senses in the Pioneer Valley in autumn would be a pretty stupid thing to do.

Take a Flyer

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The pilot program Valley Flyer train service began last week bringing something like commuter service to the communities north of Springfield. I say “something like” commuter rail service because, perhaps as a pilot program should, it only expands two way travel options to a very small subset of potential users of the corridor north of the newly reopened Union Station.

In searching for news and opinion on the Valley Flyer I happened upon an incredibly nerdy but rather informative old fashioned message board devoted to the “Amtrak Northeast Corridor, Springfield Shuttle, Regional, and Greenfield Route”; over 100 pages of experts and rail enthusiasts opining on everything imaginable and quite a few perhaps unimaginable things. As often happens, having access to the back and forth of people who are highly focused on a particular topic helped at the very least to expand my awareness of my ignorance on topics like the interplay between freight and passenger service, equipment adaptability and storage, and crew accommodation.

Turns out you can’t just make more trains appear wherever, whenever and have them go any which way at any time! Who knew?

So with a nod to the realities of expanding service on a busy rail corridor I want to lay out what this new service facilitates, what it doesn’t, and what I would love to see it turn into if the rate of use of the new service appears to warrant it.

When CTRail began its New Haven to Hartford, then Springfield, service it became possible to get to New York City reliably on a daily basis in the morning. For people leaving from Union Station in Springfield that also meant that commuting to a job in Hartford or New Haven by rail became a legitimate possibility assuming that said employment was situated either near a handful of train stations or was connected, reasonably, by other transit. Given the number of employers in downtown Hartford and New Haven and the close economic ties which have been shown to exist along the I-91 corridor this wouldn’t be an altogether unusual circumstance. 

I would add that, despite the existence of “Super-commuters”, I can’t imagine someone living in Western Massachusetts commuting every day of the week to a job in New York. For someone who travels to the city say once or twice a week, however, I imagine this service is highly useful.

What this service has never done is allowed people from Connecticut to get to jobs in Springfield before 10 a.m.. Obviously Springfield’s downtown doesn’t have the density of employment of Hartford, but Union Station does offer excellent service on the PVTA’s two primary axes of service to Mass Mutual, Baystate Medical Center, Mercy Medical Center, American International College, and Springfield Technical Community College to name just the most prominent institutions.

Unfortunately, this expansion of service not only does nothing to remediate that, it perpetuates it.

Using the Valley Flyer will give people in Greenfield the chance to go by rail round trip to NYC in a single day. It could also provide transportation to and from a morning meeting anywhere from Northampton south to New Haven provided you were done and ready to return by early afternoon. If, however, you wanted to commute daily anywhere along that same NoHo-NHvn stretch you wouldn’t be able to return until after 9 p.m.; hardly a reasonable option.

So, putting CTRail and the Valley Flyer together: you can commute from Springfield to points south on a daily basis; you can get to Springfield after 10 a.m. from Connecticut and return in the early evening; and you can get to New York City in the early morning from Greenfield, Northampton, and Holyoke and return that same evening. What you can’t do is commute into Springfield, Holyoke, or Northampton from any direction. From the south there is no morning service which extends north of Springfield and what service exists to Springfield arrives after the start of normal business hours. If you leave from anyplace north of Springfield then you cannot commute to Springfield or any points south because the only service after mid-afternoon doesn’t depart New Haven until almost 8 o’clock in the evening, departing even later then from any other location.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is subsidizing the Valley Flyer service, and the stated goal was to provide service for people north of Springfield to get to New York and back in a single day. This does that. Maintaining and expanding the service beyond the two year window the state has funded will require that ridership reach 24,000 trips a year. When you add up the number of trains each way given 4 trains on weekdays and 2 on weekends and holidays that means an average of around 20 passengers per train. That’s certainly not a ridiculously high bar, and while the populations they service might be very different, overall demand for this current service isn’t an unreasonable barometer to use when trying to get a sense of the other.

For me, the end goal of this process is a transformation of land use in the valley. If a convenient, reasonably priced, trustworthy fixed transit corridor becomes available then it is reasonable to assume that businesses, for the convenience of employees and customers, will want to locate along that corridor; there is no dearth of commercial, manufacturing, and retail space from Northampton to Springfield which is a reasonable distance from their respective train stations. If employment begins to aggregate along the corridor not only will demand, and therefore level of service increase, but demand for housing along the corridor will increase and a critical mass of all of the above will transform the region into an even more vibrant and resilient ecosystem. 

I was reading an article about the concept of the mega-region. In it the author mused on the supposed Washington-Boston megaplex, but opined that the Hartford and Springfield links in that chain were dubious because they lacked institutions of higher learning. Sure, apart from the University of Connecticut, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, Elms, Westfield State, Springfield College, American International College, Western New England College, the University of Hartford, Saint Joseph’s, Trinity College, Albertus Magnus, Wesleyan, and a few others there aren’t any colleges around here. It is true that unlike Harvard, Brown, and Yale they are not Ivy League and mostly are not within the walkable footprint of the city.

Making Springfield and Hartford more obviously connected to the institutions of higher learning in their corresponding, geographically very small, metropolitan areas could change facile assessments like this. Not all of the colleges and universities associated with Boston are walking distance to city hall, but they feel as though they all form part of a whole. In the Knowledge Corridor they don’t yet seem at all connected to their closest urban center. 

As a final note, I saw on CityLab and at Planetizen articles on the expansion of bus service in Birmingham, Alabama. Birmingham is one of those cities and metros which is theoretically “bigger” than Springfield and so gets more attention. It has a population of 100,000 more people…spread out over literally 10x the area! I checked the numbers, the Birmingham-Jefferson County bus system has 1/3 the ridership of Springfield’s PVTA. In just over a year Springfield has seen the reopening of a spectacular intermodal transportation center with now two expansions of train service and a significant relocation of its local bus maintenance and operations headquarters, and the introduction of a (poorly designed and nearly unused) free downtown “Loop” service and…not a mention in any of the usual online sources. 

Being wedged in between Boston and New York makes being taken seriously as an urban area very difficult. As I’ve mentioned ad nauseam the Springfield to New Haven corridor taken together has a larger population than Denver but in half the area; I’d say that makes this place kind of urban. Massachusetts and Connecticut, together, are making some really intelligent relatively low cost experiments designed to expand transportation options in this area. It seems like the kind of thing that might spark interest in people who publish stuff on walkability in Asheville and Rail Trails in Grand Forks.

Slum Lords

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Most of the discussion I hear regarding affordable housing is so foreign to my personal experience here in inland New England that I realize that I have very little to offer in the way of helpful input. People in this region can spend ridiculous amounts of money on housing if they choose, but many people use the Springfield Strategy or its variants: the Holyoke Strategy, the Chicopee Strategy, or even the Ware/Warren Strategy if they want more of the feel of Appalachia in their life. 

As far as the poor are concerned, the aforementioned cities are nowhere near their peak populations and housing options exist in what appear to be ever growing numbers. One Springfield developer in particular, Gordon Pulsipher, has already created a handful of entire neighborhoods of gorgeous apartment buildings by combining tax credits for both historic preservation and affordable housing. In doing so he has given the city these streetscapes which look for all the world like affluent locations in Manhattan or Brooklyn. As an aside I sometimes wonder if he has a secret plan to corner the market on these places and when the “affordable” restrictions time out he’ll be left with thousands and thousands of units of market rate housing at a time when, in this fantasy of mine, walkable urbanism becomes all the rage in western New England. 

That one example aside, problems regarding housing for the poor in this region strike me as being very similar to the claim that Springfield is a food desert; being poor stinks. Everything is more difficult when you’re poor because it is definitionally having fewer resources to bring to bear to do things. With that firmly understood I would say that this region is one in which being poor makes finding housing less onerous than in many other regions of the country.

With that far too extensive preface out of the way, I was struck this summer by a weirdly inverted situation regarding the passing of housing from one economic and social class to another. Often I have heard in the conversation of affordable housing that one should not build housing for the poor intentionally. The more natural process is to construct housing for the middle and upper classes, who have the resources to create demand, and allow those homes, apartments, and condominiums to slowly work their way down to the poor once their style and condition are less suited to those with more resources.

I live in a townhouse which began its life as a domicile for the upper class; the deed to my home includes an easement (I believe is the term) which allows my servants to access Union Street from the rear of my property by passing through the back of the townhouses at 82 and 84 Maple Street. My house became a rooming house in the early 20th century, a single family home again in the 70’s, and was a law office from 1980-2008. 

What I saw in Cold Spring, New York was altogether different; this was housing for the working classes, the moiling and toiling factory workers of the West Point Foundry. Today these are smallish unassuming houses, some of which are valued at over a half a million dollars. These are homes on small lots which were built out of necessity with minimal artistry or pretense:

The property taxes on these homes are over $7,000 a year with Zillow estimated mortgage payments of $2,000 a month.


I have no idea what this means, if indeed it means anything. I suppose it might teach a little humility; who knows what things in the built environment and beyond future generations might view as of great worth? 

MGM Year One: Retail

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It’s been a year since MGM Springfield first opened its doors and, given that, it is entirely appropriate to assess the impact it has had on the neighborhood. This isn’t about a global critique of casinos, the political decisions that legalized the gaming industry in Massachusetts, or the process which brought a $960 million resort to downtown Springfield; I’ve covered those topics before. It is about what I’ve seen compared to what I expected and what was promised. 

As the concept transitioned from proposal to projects a number of enormous differences became apparent. The one most often cited is the transformation of the MGM Grand hotel from a modern glass tower to a more modest looking series of 5 story façades along Main Street. This faux eclectic strip was originally to be the site of MGM’s market rate housing, instead it is now hoped that MGM will fulfill that commitment by investing in the rehabilitation of the Court Square building. Much less remembered is that the very first plan included an enormous retail footprint which continues to shrink, that the old armory building was to be the centerpiece of the development, that there was to be no ticketed entertainment within the MGM footprint, and that the boxes of cops’es were to be occupied 24/7/365.
Given the enormity of the resort, and MGM’s commitments my hope is to create loose categories and assess them. I have no doubt that some of my judgements will prove to be mistaken over time. It may be that my misjudgments become the most valuable of judgments over time as perhaps I and others may learn to better understand what we see after learning from my misperceptions. These assessments come from an interest in downtown revitalization that goes back to collecting magazines about the topic in junior high school…which may explain why I was still a virgin on my wedding night 10 years later. Nearly all of the years since I have lived no more than a 5 minute walk from what is now MGM Springfield, and so by dint of interest and experience I believe that what I have to share may be of some value.

Beginning in no particular order, topic #1:

Retail

The original plan made available as a model for viewing at the MGM offices on Main Street included an enormous enclosed mall and also promised up to 40 shops and restaurants in tens of thousands of square feet of retail space, then shrank to perhaps 1/4 of that, and now is made up of a hotel gift shop, a clothing store, a candle shop, and a jeweler; both the number of retail establishments and the square footage dedicated to retail have greatly diminished.

This blueprint is post “mall concept” but still shows 19 separate retail outlets not including food and beverage:


Later that dropped to 14:

The final project has 8 if you also include a tv station mini-studio, a spa, and the wine store in the Italian restaurant AND…

… the Starbucks (food and beverage but, potentially at least, a retail outlet) on Main Street, which has already disappeared to be replaced by another VIP bar:

Another never opened retail space on the south plaza has become an outdoor bar:

This storefront has remained empty since day one:

What were first envisioned as multiple free standing shops may now become a single Wahlburgers:

I can’t imagine that the Indian Motorcycle store will last another year, and closing of the Kringle Candle store would leave a huge crater in a very visible location; either they will be encouraged to stay by very generous terms moving forward, or MGM will have a plan in place to try to make the departure look insignificant.

My take is that, while the lack of retail energy on the property, and the ubiquitous empty storefronts all around the project are not a good thing, the removal of the mall from the plan, and the changes in quantity and location of the in-footprint retail are net pluses for downtown. Even before the onset of the retail apocalypse Main Street had an abundance of high quality storefronts, and at least three downtown retail malls (Tower Square, The Marketplace, and the old SIS mall) but still suffered from a lack of anything anyone would call an attractive retail environment. 

The shops which were here long before MGM arrived and have continued to succeed are the ones which cater to the people who live in Springfield. 

The Shean Block and the much maligned Crown Fried Chicken:

Like them or hate them, and many of the suits do not like them at all, they clearly create a core that the city needs to build on. As I mentioned in my essay on invisible retail, there is an ecosystem of healthy local entrepreneurial retail establishments which mostly caters to a very different demographic from the one to which I belong; bodegas, phone stores, nail salons, barber shops, take out places, laundromats, clothing stores, pawn shops, beauty supply stores, and so on. There is enough space these to coexist with shops designed to attract visitors and tourists.

There have been changes, and some expansion, of retail perhaps due to MGM. CVS is moving out of the Main Street frontage of Tower Square and into a building on Main Street just the other side of MGM, Lorilil Jewelers has kept its store in Tower Square and added an outlet directly across from MGM. A store which was proposed as an outlet for recreational marijuana is now a CBD shop, and a fine menswear store has opened (and moved once already).

It has been said that the landlords who control the best storefronts across from MGM do not inspire confidence as partners, and are asking for fairly high rents given the risky nature of downtown retail. I have no knowledge one way or another. Whatever the reason, there they sit:



I have already expressed my disappointment that the retail development we were promised as the capstone of Davenport Square turned out to be a CVS, although I must admit that it brings “our pharmacy” to within a block of the house and I am sure as a family we will end up making more purchases at that establishment than we would have at the notional shops which were floated as a possibility:

Red Rose has shown that food outlets in particular can easily attract casino patrons. I was surprised to learn that the lower end food offerings at MGM were both, relative to the South End, high in price and low in quality. So far all of the locally owned restaurants near the casino are still open, not just Red Rose, but City Pizza, Milano’s, Raices, Mom and Rico’s, La Fiorentina, Frigo’s, Ciro’s, Crown Fried Chicken, Sun Kim Bop, and Sol Karibe. MGM is claiming that a contract is in place and that a Wahlburgers franchise will break ground within a month at the corner of Main and Union streets. The “coming soon” bunting has been up for almost a year at this point, so I will believe it when I see it.

As a resident all of this represents at the very least a small step forward. Let me explain why. A friend expressed surprise the other day when I revealed that I had just eaten for the very first time at the downtown’s hottest new lunch place. I thought about it for a while and realized that as a resident and not a downtown worker it was almost never open when I was looking for a place to eat. When my wife first moved here we found that on weekends the only lunch options available were the lower budget places like Crown Fried Chicken. Sometimes we’d have to wander down to some franchise place at the Hall of Fame if we were looking for a sit down place; the downtown doesn’t have enough middle/high income residents to justify staying open to sell $12 meals or even $8 sandwiches. It is also still standard practice for some downtown restaurants to alter their hours of operation without notice especially and weekend afternoons.

As far as non food retail is concerned I have to express ambivalence. I was dismayed to find out that a Main Street Northampton retailer which at first closed, and then announced a move to a nearby mall was owned by the same people who own the jeweler inside MGM. In the media at least those owners expressed that they were not sure whether or not to reopen and, if they did reopen, where to reopen. Was that not a perfect opportunity for MGM to work with people they already had a relationship with to bring them either to one of their empty retail spaces, or to arrange a lease with a nearby landlord? As a resident I’d like to be able to buy groceries, clothes, books, and hardware in my neighborhood, but I know that is very unrealistic; I’m lucky to have two local hardware stores a 5 minute DRIVE from my home and only a bookstore and a clothing store might dovetail with the desires of the occasional gambler.

My verdict would be that the retail situation we see in and around the casino isn’t particularly different from what existed in the downtown before MGM’s grand opening but the real lack of energy and entrepreneurial endeavor is mostly on the part of local businessman who have, at best, decided to take a wait and see approach or who, as appears most likely, are hoping not to take any risks but would rather sell or rent to a person who does. 

Still to come: Security, Entertainment, Infrastructure, Transportation, and Perception.

Afternoons in the Garden of Guilt

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Earlier in the summer I came very close to writing a post about a Catch 22 connected to my backyard. For many of my neighbors the only semi-private outdoor area they have access to is a glorified fire escape. When the weather starts to warm they start spending a great deal of time outside. On a given summer evening it isn’t unheard of for two or three families to be hosting friends and neighbors in their limited deck space. 

Although humble by suburban standards, for our block we have an enormous outdoor space which we have spent some time, effort, and money to transform into an area with a variety of spaces to sit, relax, eat, drink, and socialize. Apart from the family, we generally host 3 or 4 people 3 or 4 times a summer; and that’s being generous. The emotion I’ve felt quite often in the past is guilt. Guilt when having friends over and having such a large and, again, while modest by some standards, relatively opulent space to entertain. Often though, I’ve felt even worse when we haven’t been using the space and our neighbors have been hosting huge parties on their humble fire escape.

(I took these picture with the essay on guilt in mind earlier in the year)



As this year has gone on things have changed. I’ve dedicated myself much more to maintaining the social spaces in the back; more weeding, more raking, and more frequent straightening up. With that we’ve used it much more as a family; to read, to sleep, to relax, and to unwind. The garden has always inspired the creation of friendships around here, and that has expanded with its more frequent use. We’ve always shared the product of our garden with neighbors, invited them over for food and drink (though not often), and given advice for growing things like tomatoes and peppers downtown. Some friends have known for years that they can sit and enjoy our backyard anytime.

What is new is our increased care, and that has completely washed away the guilt. Perhaps the guilt was never about use or lack thereof, but was strictly about the lack of appreciation I afforded the place. There have been years when I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that 90-95% of the time I spent in the garden was working it with only the remaining 5-10% dedicated to just experiencing it. That started to change last year when I read all of Moby Dick back there. This year I read The Stand and spent a good deal more time just enjoying what our efforts have wrought.

To highlight some of the progress we’ve made and things we’ve learned this year:

Some newspaper and mulch has eliminated the need to weed almost completely and reduced watering to the point that even after going almost 30 days without rain there was plenty in my rain barrels and tote to get us through without using any city water. I actually learned that I had overwatered the beds which we had mulched. What an energy saver it has been.

With winemaking being an enterprise we enjoy we decided last year to move our combination dining table/arbor to a new location so as to maximize grape production. The new vines actually produced a modest number of grapes this year, and the older vines look ready to produce a bumper crop; we still need to do much better at pruning, and I’m sure our grapes fall far below any sommelier’s standards for excellence but my motto is always that the perfect is the enemy of the good. We got 13 bottles last year between the grapes and the excess peaches:


We sowed lettuce, Swiss chard, and kale after we harvested the garlic. It went against everything we’d been told about planting in the heat of mid July. The same shade from the growing fruit trees that made our garlic miniature has made this the best season for leafy greens we’ve had since year one:

This year was the best ever for blueberries and strawberries, and our “ever-bearers” are still producing a handful or two a week:


We left the asparagus bed alone. Next year will be year three and I think then we’ll have some to harvest:


At the risk of sounding redundant, we’ve also had the best year ever for hot peppers, and by leaps and bounds the best ever for sweet peppers:

Cool aside; we gave away some seedlings but still had a few extra. Rather than toss them we stuffed them into a very narrow window box container to keep in case some we planted in the beds died off. I kept watering them. They seem to enjoy density!


As usual we get more cucumbers than we could ever eat from the one plant, but the zucchini and eggplant are less productive:

Despite my horrible pruning both the early and late peaches seem to be doing really well:


Now for the bad news.

Most of the tomato plants seem sick. At first I thought it was just the early season overwatering given my ignorance regarding the amazing impact of the mulch, but it has continued. It may be that it was the overwatering but there just isn’t any way back, or it’s something else. Either way, most of the plants have produced plenty of fruit but I’m concerned that we won’t get the usual October-November harvest we usually get.


I was hoping that last year’s two apples would mark a turning point in apple production but this year we’re down to one lonely fruit and trees that look terribly bare. It might be a magnesium and iron deficiency in the soil. I’ve used some spikes to add some nutrients to the soil and spread some ash from the wood stove around the trees in hopes that next year might be better. If not we may have to consider taking them out and going in a different direction.


My wife does most of the work on the plants themselves but she doesn’t have the summer off. We’ve divided up our composting between a worm farm Liz manages in the basement, and just leaves and coffee grounds in the old compost barrels. Next year we hope to add a tiny outdoor kitchen where the grill is now, and we hope to use this idea we stole from Boscobel to make the grapes along the back fence easier to care for and harvest.

Feel free to share any tips! We love it, we can see that things are progressing, but we also know that there’s a lot we don’t know.

Marcia, Marcia, Marcia

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I was standing at the edge of the Saint Lawrence in Montreal waiting for L’International des Feux Loto (fireworks) to begin and as a friend began to explain to me what the various landmarks were I realized how eerily similar it all seemed. There was a city to be sure, and a river with a promenade and pedestrians crossing a railway line, but there was also a casino, a number of bridges, a dome, even a Six Flags theme park, and of course, finally, the fireworks. 

I generally don’t venture down to the river on Independence Day to see the fireworks over the Connecticut River; this year Luna and I walked down to watch them explode over the MGM castle. Watching our local urban equestrians race along Main Street during the event was a surprising addition to the festivities. Because we needn’t commit a great deal in order to watch this yearly spectacle we generally don’t push to get the best view. The most entertaining bit for me is watching the thousands of cars jostling to get out of the downtown once the show is over. It can take a couple of hours to get traffic back to normal.

In Montreal the pace of the cars and of the pedestrians was much less frenetic. We wandered back to the hotel San Sulpice which, now that I think of it is probably about the same distance from the river as our home is in Springfield. Many, many more people in Montreal, it seemed, viewed the fireworks as marking the beginning, not the end, of the evening’s festivities. True to our roots, we were done for the evening.

What fills me with hope after spending some time in a world class city like Montreal is noticing that it still has many of the same issues with which to deal as little old Springfield. There are vacant storefronts, the homeless sleeping on park benches, surface parking in ridiculous places, obstacles to pedestrians, ugly buildings, obtrusive highways; but the takeaway is that Montreal’s positives so far outweigh the negative that it is a scintillating place to experience. 

No one will ever ask which Montreal we visited. Springfield’s early economic and cultural success has given rise to dozens of eponymous communities the ubiquity of which has made it the ultimate generic fictional place from the Simpsons to The Guiding Light. Unlike Poughkeepsie, Peoria, Woonsocket, Albuquerque, Tulsa, Baton Rouge and countless other places it will never be a Cher, a Madonna, or a Sting of urbanism. Wedged in between Boston and New York we are destined to shriek “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” for all eternity if we insist on comparing ourselves to them…and we will.

There’s no comparing the variety and vitality of Montreal to that of provincial Springfield, but we have a plaza here, and a museum there that can compare favorably now and again. Until our friends got us out of the touristy areas every meal we had was overpriced and underwhelming. (After that we found great food, and sometimes it wasn’t even pricey) I read that there’s a movement toward more mediocre places for Millennials, although it might do Baby Boomers a bit of good to find some places to survive in semi retirement with inexpensive housing, cheap entertainment, low cost dining, lots of public transit, and a well funded social safety net. 

In a lot of ways what makes this place so great is its mediocrity. Two readers have recently commented specifically on how a transformed community, whether Springfield or Bellows Falls, can make it unrecognizable and even unlivable to those who would have it transformed. I can’t help but want better for the place I call home, but I do wonder if it ever becomes a shiny new thing to those on the outside if to me it might lose its luster.

Barry Kingston

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There’s an infantile instinct which I’ve never been able to shake. I can remember very distinctly, and therefore probably erroneously, its earliest manifestation. I remember watching the most popular boy in the 5th grade at Washington Street School riding his bike with Lynn (Linda?) D’Agostino on the handlebars up Tiffany Street. Lynn (Lisa?) said hello to me. Really, she did. I knew I had no chance with her; Barry Kingston was already a babe magnet, even before his band had a video on MTV or anything, and I was, well, a kid who was going to grow up to write a blog on urban issues in declining Rust Belt cities.

Later on that day, or a month later or something, the topic of Barry Kingston came up and my next door neighbor said that she didn’t like him. Didn’t like him? “You don’t get to ‘not like him’.” 

It all gets really twisted and contorted in here, so let me give a different example of this infantile instinct from when I was in my early 20’s:

In the late 80’s things in Utah were pretty bleak. It was hard to find a job in Provo that would help pay for my schooling at BYU. I drove in to Salt Lake City every morning to work as an “independent contractor” (read: scam) cleaning movie theaters. It paid very little, had no benefits, and I had to pay the social security taxes as employer and employee. I also worked for two or three hours in the morning at a radio station in Salt Lake. My wife found a minimum wage job at a mall where she managed to get maybe 10 hours a week. Eating out meant Little Caesar’s Crazy Bread.

When our neighbor in West Valley City shot herself, and I ended up with her blood all over my clothes after trying to revive her, we decided to move back to Massachusetts. I got a real job with flexible hours and benefits, and my wife found work at Mass Mutual. I was able to take a free bus to a nearby state school to complete my teacher certification, and buses ran every 10 minutes up State Street to Mass Mutual. Within a few months our lives were stable economically. We could get an actual pizza from a real pizza place(unknown in Utah).

My sister-in-law and her new husband were finding life on the Wasatch Front similarly difficult and paid us a visit to see if a move back east might work out for them. Yes, I had a job with great benefits; but I was a bellman at a hotel. Yes my wife worked for a Fortune 500 company, but it was low level data entry stuff. And we lived downtown in a small apartment so we didn’t need a car. 

Well, they were hoping for more, ya know, executive track positions. 

Wearing uniforms and taking buses was beneath them.

That’s the thing. It is partly the “offense” that somehow what I do is beneath someone else, but there’s something that turbo-charges it when what I am doing is beneath them but they claim to need my help. They can’t afford McDonald’s but want me to help them dine at Ruth’s Chris…by “loaning” them my Big Mac money.

Our vacations to the Cape are always last minute. We live fairly close and I can only spend two or three days there before I go a little crazy so we wait and see if there’s a time when family is spending a week or two when we can squeeze in a few days and the weather is nice. Then my wife heads over to Expedia and looks for some deals. 

This year we spent two nights at the Sandcastle Resort in Provincetown. We booked just a few days in advance but it was perfect for what we wanted to do while there: Stroll along the beach and collect seashells, wander up and down Commercial Street, and give Luna the opportunity to make some money busking in front of town hall. 

The accommodations for the three of us were a full sized Murphy bed for the grownups, and a pullout couch for Lu. With both beds open/down there may have been 20 square feet of floor space. There was a teeny tiny kitchenette, and a small table at which to dine…after the Murphy bed and the pull out couch were restored to their original positions. It was fine. Our plan was not to do anything in the room but sleep, shower, and change our clothes.

Two things tickled my fancy. One was that this was called a resort. It had a tennis court, a pool, and beach access on the bay side, but that was about it. Two, signs like this:


referred to “owners and guests”. Owners! There was a time, my guess would be in the 50’s, when this place was built that the beach access, the pool, the tennis court, and its location on the tip of the Cape would have been enough to make the average middle class American feel as though they were having an adequate enough resort experience, given that their last name wasn’t Kennedy, to purchase a unit as (I assume) a time share.

I’m not buying a timeshare, but it was nice enough. And there’s something about the fact that it isn’t enough for other people that grates. This follows in a series of posts where I’ve expressed that, yes, the American Dream is out of reach for many, many Americans because of deindustrialization, the financialization of the economy, the failing safety net and the like. But it is also true that the 50’s American Dream included a house less than half the size of the average home today, and perhaps one car, and a lifestyle that still included public transit, public parks, public pools, and maybe one trip…ever…to “Disney”. Even McDonald’s was still a treat!

I know, I’m getting old and grouchy, and the poor and the working class are getting the shaft today. That said, there’s an economic cohort, of which I am a part, which seems to fancy itself too good for those things that my father’s generation pointed to as luxuries, and yet wants to be seen as victims because (true story) a public school system wouldn’t grant them the use of personal time to spend a week in Bermuda (or the Bahamas or something) during the school year when they had an opportunity for a free trip. 

I’m not railing against avocado toast, see:

If you have the money for avocado toast, have avocado toast; if you don’t have enough money for avocado toast but you still want it, make sacrifices elsewhere so that someday you will. The point is, nothing was ever beneath me. I cleaned toilets, crawled in the mud (fun, actually), drove vans, schlepped luggage, delivered newspapers, fixed pallets, and I can’t remember what else. Sometimes I take my hard earned cash and I splurge on something ridiculous, but sometimes I eat a homemade peanut butter sandwich. 

My life is filled with luxuries and so, more than likely, is yours. For me part of being happy is keeping that in mind, and when I’m with people who’ve clearly lost sight of that it really irks me. My gut says that we’re headed for a time when a lot of things we view as normal will no longer be commonplace. If I’m wrong I’ll just continue to idiotically feel especially lucky because I can have a cheeseburger on a freshly toasted bun while listening to (annoying) jazz music in a beautiful public space. If I’m right? I don’t know, I suppose that if I’m right we’ll all look back and realize how much we took for granted.

Ayuh

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Education popped back onto my radar this week, propelled by two separate online sources. An article at CityLab failed, crashed, burned, and then disintegrated as it took claims made in a report by an equity in education think tank and, in essence, unknowingly made the case that every claim which the report made was refuted by the facts. In the other an interviewer and interviewee reveal that they have spent millions of dollars, in the case of the former, and decades of their life, in the case of the latter, to finally arrive at the conclusion they could have garnered from any one of my “It’s the Schools, Stupid” series: we reverse cause and effect when it comes to educational outcomes and students.

In “The Whiter, Richer School District Right Next Door” Adam Harris selects the Waterbury, Wolcott, and Plymouth school districts in Connecticut to highlight how disparities in funding create disparate outcomes between students. Unfortunately for him a commenter discovered that Waterbury, the “poorer, browner” school district outspends each of these Whiter, Richer School Districts Next Door on a per pupil basis according to ctfinance.org. I was unable to find that data myself and so I just put “per pupil spending” and the names of the towns into Google and got the same results. 

Furthermore, in looking into the report itself I noticed this little tidbit: In Massachusetts, Springfield isn’t analyzed. Hmmm, could that be because the city gets so much state funding that it dwarfs the spending of most of the surrounding communities? Instead, working class but hardly poor Chicopee is made the poster child by comparing it to neighboring Ludlow. I’m not sure, but I think that might be what’s called “cherry picking” your data.

I agree with the basic argument that poorer districts should be able to fund their schools at levels which correspond to surrounding communities, but pretending that balancing out those inequities, where they exist, will lead to similar outcomes belies ALL OF THE DATA. The single greatest determinant of educational outcomes is parental incomes regardless of per pupil expenditures.

Poor schools need more funding because poorer kids are harder to educate. You don’t increase resources in an emergency room in hopes that you can make the outcomes correspond to those of your GP, you do it because the ER needs resources, and you judge what’s done with those resources by looking for overall improvement, or comparing outcomes to those of other equivalent emergency rooms.

Two people from opposite ends of the political spectrum have a conversation on the podcast Pitchfork Economics in which they arrive at the same conclusion. Diane Ravitch, Assistant Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush, and Nick Hanauer, self proclaimed progressive admit that they were both misguided in their attempts to reform the American educational system, and that in the end they both have done more harm than good. They’ve determined that the overall economy and salaries drive successful schools and not vice versa.

I’ve read Diane Ravitch’s book Reign of Error and recommend it, but I was surprised to hear her say in an aside during the interview that “integration was successful”. She must mean that during the brief period before the dynamic impact of integration, White flight, occurred, there were some positive outcomes. Forced integration wasn’t even successful at forcing integration. Having failed to actually create integrated schools, how could it be successful at doing anything else?

I further recommend the Jacobin Radio interview last week with Lily Geismer on Race and Class in the Liberal Suburbs. It more or less covers the same ground I did in my Crossing the Divide  (minute 51) presentation. In essence wealthy liberals talk a good game when it comes to integration, but they pay enormous premiums to make sure their kids don’t go to school with Black and Hispanic kids unless their numbers and characteristics, those of the minority children, are carefully vetted. 

To conclude this media centric post I recommend Chuck Marohn’s interview with Chris Andrade. There’s a lot of there there and not all of it relates to my situation in Springfield, but the idea of staying in a particular community is one which resonates with me. It isn’t that I feel that anyone who moves away from their hometown is maladaptive or evil, but seeing value in a non-superstar place is often viewed as abnormal by folks in the “front row”. It is a much more common sentiment expressed in the MSM and by elites; it was only a little while ago that Richard Florida in particular commented in an extensive essay that the desire of many people to remain in their communities was an obstacle to be overcome. Apparently more of us need to move to San Francisco or Cambridge. What could go wrong?

(Photos by Luna)

My wife just got home from the Food Zone with Luna. The closing of the more mainstream Food Mart at that same location some years ago initiated talk of a food desert here in Springfield. It’s hardly a place where you see a lot of White middle class folk; like my wife and LuLu. But it is right on one bus route and a block from at least two more. It doesn’t stop there, they will not only deliver food to you, but they’ll deliver you to the food if you can spend $50! Non sequitur? Not really. Listen to the podcast with Chris Andrade. Food Zone isn’t Albertsons. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t know what half the stuff they sell in Food Zone even is. But I think most of the people in the neighborhood do. It’s not a food desert because I can’t buy a rotisserie chicken or get a nice bottle of wine. 

What? I can get a bottle of wine there?


That can’t be good.

Notes From Underground

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The attorneys who sold me their building ran nine window unit air conditioners to keep the offices cool during the summer. I know because they left me all of them. After 4 years of running between 3 and 6 of those units my wife and I made the decision to try something different. We had insulated the basement and all the walls and the ceiling of the top floor where there quite literally had been none, and I climbed up on to the membrane roof and painted it white with some leftover acrylic paint. (Just two years ago we had to replace the old roof and did so with one intended to be white in color.) We free-cycled the AC units and bought some fans.

Since then my summer routine has been to blow in air on the first floor and set three or for industrial fans to blow air out on the top floor; he basement apartment stays fairly cool without any involvement in the process, and having those windows open would be a security risk. In the morning I close up the house and during the day I see to it that no sunlight enters the home. It does an excellent job of keeping the house nice and cool on most days.

On most days.

The Weather Channel reported two days ago that July was the hottest month ever recorded in Boston, and in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. Windsor Locks might seem like a random community to choose, but it is the location of the shared Hartford/Springfield “Bradley International Airport” (The Best Airport in America!). On the other hand, a professor at UMass put last month down as the 6th hottest on record in Chicopee (the former Springfield neighborhood where Westover Air Reserve Base is located).

Either way, last month was hot. Hot enough to make me wonder if the climate was changing if not for my awareness through the media? I still don’t know. In any case one interesting factoid was that not a single daily high temperature record had been broken and despite the threat to do so not once did it reach 100 degrees. On two occasions, however, records had been broken: records for the highest low temperature. 

That is especially important to me because my strategy for keeping the house cool depends much more on getting cool air in than it does on keeping the hot air out.

This is a situation where the house being huge is a good thing energy wise; it takes a lot of warmth from the outside to heat it up during the day and the east side is “insulated” by two other townhouses. On a normal summer night the temperatures drop into the mid to low 60’s and getting the house down to 68 degrees or lower is a piece of cake. Early in the summer I can get it down to almost 60. With the white roof, insulation, and keeping the curtains closed it is 5 or 6 o’clock at night before the temperature creeps up say 5 degrees. By 9 o’clock I’m opening up again to let in more cool air and the process starts all over.

One thing I’ve always known is that the dew point holds the key to all of this. The dryer the air, the more quickly it cools and the farther the temperature will fall. If, however, the dew point is in the high 60’s or even the low 70’s things won’t cool until 10 or 11 at night, and the temperature will only fall so far. On two successive nights last month the dew point was in the upper 70’s. That’s tropical stuff, Florida stuff. 

I was glad that some warmer days in the past few summers had concerned me enough that I purchased one high efficiency portable AC unit for the basement. It’s a two hose unit, important for higher efficiency, which works perfectly with the openings I had made for my solar heater; I swap out the outdoor solar box with the indoor cooler-dehumidifier and the already cooler basement can be cooled even more.


This is no joke. I take the potential of climate change seriously. A recent report had said that Springfield was, so far, among the least impacted metros in the country from increased heat with only 3 days per summer than normal over the average summer temperature in recent decades compared to the mid 20th century. The average for all metros was 15. That said the combination of the urban heat island effect and Springfield’s location in a very distinct valley location makes it warmer than surrounding communities. 

I know that as I age heat can be more dangerous for me than cold. Just as I have purchased a wood stove, built a solar heater, and added storm windows in part to be able to “shelter in place” in any sort of “cold emergency”, I don’t want to have to abandon my home for a cooling center in case of extreme heat. The basement is its own self sufficient apartment with two beds, a kitchen, a full bathroom and its own entrance. It stays cooler than the rest of the house anyway, as most basements do, and giving it a little help makes it quite comfortable. 

So last month, whether the hottest month ever, or just really hot, we ran the air conditioner for all or part of 7 days, and slept down there twice. Twice, for a period of two days each, the upstairs got in to the 80’s, and on two nights the house never got below 78 degrees. It was nasty. It was nice to have the downstairs there for a cooling break. Elizabeth and Luna only slept down there once, and I was the only one who spent any serious time during the day in the basement; doing some boring organizational stuff I had put off for as long as I could. I just wanted an excuse to be in the cold air I think!

In any case, lower lows are more important than lower high temperatures when it comes to keeping a big house cool without air conditioning. A heat wave arriving earlier in the summer makes keeping the house cool more challenging overall. Having a backup plan in place when your Plan A “crashes and melts” is always a good idea. And putting together an outdoor kitchen has become my top domestic priority for Summer 2020. Don’t worry, I’ve already begun to pick Johnny Sanphillippo’s brain for ideas!

Looking Backward

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Some quick shot updates and observations to start this week’s contribution.

Kids are doing wheelies in areas with heavy concentrations of pedestrians in places other than Springfield as it turns out. Commercial Street in Provincetown is the finest example of a shared space corridor that I have seen anywhere. For cars and delivery trucks it is a one way street, for bikes it is a two way corridor, and pedestrians wend their way along sidewalks on either side or along roadway. 

Twice I saw kids “riding recklessly” up Commercial Street, and I was quick enough to snap a picture of it once:

The shops didn’t close, people didn’t run away in fear, and that despite the fact that in one case the miscreant was clearly of the minority persuasion. On that occasion the cyclist did, in fact, slam into a car, but since the car was barely moving there was no noticeable damage to car, to bicycle, or to the rider.

KMO appears to be getting fed up with Bellows Falls, Vermont. My readers might recall I visited Bellows Falls a few years ago with my wife to attend a screening of the Wizard of Oz, and we passed through it while taking the Vermonter to Burlington. It’s a picturesque little town perfectly situated to be just the kind of community which could thrive in the Long Emergency, but KMO is less interested in collapse these days, and much more focused on the chaos which Artificial Intelligence will unleash upon us all. As is always the case with these questions I think the best strategy is to create a life you love which has facets that can be helpful in as many as possible of the multiplicity of scenarios we may face.

As an interesting aside, KMO has spoken at length, many times, about his view that it was at least in part a crisis in his own life which caused him to latch on to what might be termed “sudden collapse doomerism”. While he still concedes that the Peak Oil phenomenon is having and will have far reaching effects, he regrets that his doomerism caused him to both alter his life so drastically, and distracted him from the impacts technological advances were having on society.

All very reasonable. There’s a lot in the tech sphere which doesn’t interest me, most of it in fact. My lack of interest in it, of course, doesn’t preclude it from biting me in the ass, and so I try to keep abreast through those who are interested in it; like KMO.

On the other hand, I find his assertions regarding “doomerism”, and its correlation to an overall failure in life, interesting. For many people it may be so, I wouldn’t argue against that. What interests me more, however, is the tendency of the depressed to actually be better at assessing themselves, i.e. avoiding Dunning-Kruger, and their life situation. That is to say that people going through tough times may very well be more likely to become doomers, but that not only doesn’t mean they’re wrong, it may mean that they are more likely to be right.

Hampshire College appears to be pulling back from the abyss, but their plan for survival, surprisingly, doesn’t appear to follow the guidelines I suggested. I recommended they sell the entire property so that it could revert to farmland, and that they move their campus to downtown Holyoke. For those unwilling to follow the link, the reason I suggested that is that one of their professors, Michael Klare, is perhaps the world’s leading expert on resource depletion, and yet the campus of Hampshire College is perhaps the finest example of edu-sprawl in the United States with a Walkscore of 17 whereas downtown Holyoke has a Walkscore of 90!

Instead, the plan is to sell land for…auto-oriented sprawl! 




Do as I say, not as I do?

If you haven’t read Chuck Marohn’s series on his transformation from free market ideologue to Strong Towns advocate I recommend you change that. The core of the Strong Towns message is still the most important in the United States today. As with many simple messages it can become corrupted with well meaning but misguided and naive orthodoxies, but supporting the traditional development pattern and eschewing auto oriented development is the key to economic and environmental survival.

To close on an optimistic note, some years ago I remarked on the general skepticism of the public regarding intercity rail in the region by highlighting how two significant local radio personalities mocked the rehabilitation of Union Station and the expansion of CT Rail into Springfield as a ridiculous backward looking fixation on a “choo-choo”. Last week Bax and O’Brien discussed (minute 14)the Springfield to Boston rail study, and their only critique was that the state was not moving fast enough to expand commuter options via rail.

That said, the success of the CT Rail Hartford Line hasn’t been well advertised; I’ve yet to see a story pop up at City Lab or Planetizen despite the fact that the New Haven, Hartford, and Springfield metros it serves have a combined population of 3 million people in an area 1/2 the size of greater Denver. The expansion of service north to Holyoke, Northampton, and Greenfield next month has likewise received no attention despite the fact that it is the start of what I believe could be the most significant transformation this region has seen since the National Armory was situated in Springfield by George Washington. 

Those three communities plus Springfield connected, eventually, by frequent and reliable rail service make the region one of the most dynamic its size in the country with: the second highest concentration of universities, lots of low cost housing, major corporate headquarters, abundant water for drinking, manufacturing, and hydro-power, loads of tourist attractions, quick and easy access to a wide variety of recreation, all wedged in neatly between Boston and New York City.