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La paradoja

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The key question in poetic analysis is why is this poem a poem? That is to say, what is it about the expression of this idea as a poem that makes more more effective than if it had been expressed as an essay, a short story, or a novel. It’s a conceit, of course, but I have found that it helps students to understand what can make poetry special. As I take my students through the steps of poetic analysis I always have them conclude by attempting to uncover for themselves which literary device or structural component of a poem best embodies the theme.

In “Balada de los dos abuelos” by Nicolás Guillén they can see how the two distinct assonant rhymes, one for the White grandfather and the other for the Black grandfather, become one harmonious rhyme by the end of the poem; that new combination of sounds mirroring what has become a new identity in the poetic voice itself.

In Rosario Castellanos’ “Autorretrato” the dearth of poetic language mirrors the theme that she is ill-fitted to the world; as a poet even her poetic self portrait is prosaic:

Antonio Machado writes his ode to the common man He andado muchos caminos in folkloric “arte menor” whereas Rubén Darío announces to his fellow Hispanic Americans that their culture is at least the equal of the United States in “A Roosevelt” in the erudite and grandiose “arte mayor”. 

When I get to the term “paradoja”, if any of my students have any difficulty in understanding the concept I use my go to example: forced integration of the Springfield public schools. A Supreme Court decision held that segregated schools were unconstitutional and the city’s schools were racially integrated and 65 years later the schools are…more segregated than ever. That is a paradox alright. 

What amazes me is that virtue signaling has gotten so ridiculous that political candidates will criticize opponents for being against such an obviously failed policy. I would go one step further and argue that forced desegregation may have been the most harmful policy idea in the post Civil War United States. To explore that only requires a quick study of my hometown, but I am going to begin by stating, categorically, that I personally reject segregation. I live not just in a city, or a neighborhood which is diverse, but just to include the properties contiguous to my own, there are Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and immigrants from North, Central, and South America, as well as immigrants from Africa. I know them. They know me.

I was a student who was part of the busing program from 4th grade on. I suffered no ill effects, and my daughters attended schools in the City of Springfield which were still under a desegregation order 30 and 40 years later. Of course when I attended the schools were over 80% White, by the time my daughters began the schools were 80% “minority”, the White middle class population having decanted almost completely to the suburbs; and therein lies the rub.

To be succinct, the resources do not exist to obligate real and thorough integration. Minority parents don’t want their children in minority majority schools, and neither do White parents, but many of the White parents have the wherewithal to see to it that they don’t. In Springfield houses in the city were more valuable than equivalent houses in suburban areas in 1970 (before busing). By 1990 houses in the City of Homes had declined sharply relative to those in suburban locations because inner ring suburbs weren’t included in “desegregation”; as a matter of fact a 99% White school in Longmeadow was legally considered “segregated” because its population “reflected the makeup of the community” whereas as a Springfield school with a population made up of equal parts White, Black, and Hispanic students (literally 1/3, 1/3, 1/3) was “segregated”…because White kids were “over-represented”! Amazing.

In cities where inner ring suburbs were included in desegregation White folks left those communities as well and pushed suburbanization into ex-urbanization. 

As an experiment in social engineering it failed. 

As educational policy it failed. 

In increasing the pace of suburbanization it has been a disaster for the environment and the fiscal stability of government at every level.

I know it is a policy I WOULD HAVE BEEN IN FAVOR OF before IT BECAME OBVIOUS THAT ITS IMPACTS WERE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO THE GOAL. Seeing that, I’m now against it. Government perhaps can use certain policies to promote a better and higher functioning society, but attempting to force enormous and politically powerful groups to act in ways contrary to deeply held, if abhorrent, beliefs will have unintended negative consequences. Happy that religious loons in Kentucky and Alabama are forced to recognize gay marriage? Cool, soon women in Missouri and Georgia won’t be able to get abortions. Think those things aren’t connected? You’re wrong. 

Race, like religion, is still a powerful factor in our society, it amazes me how assiduously we avoid it. In this region, for example, Boston is the “mega-hub” the all powerful economic jet engine. If you seek to reap the rewards of its vitality you must accommodate its inconveniences. Weird though, how some smaller urban communities in New England thrive or struggle depending on their ability, or their inability, to attract wealthier residents. Hmmm. Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Springfield, Providence even, these places struggle a bit, even with, in some cases, Ivy League universities, major corporate headquarters, and centers of state government, and they seem to have lots of “brown people”. Burlington, Portland, Worcester, these cities are really doing well by most measures and, oh, weird, they’re all, like, “whiter” than the communities on that first list. It almost like you could make a chart of “whiteness” and another for “economic revitalization” and they would, like, mirror each other. Shut! up!

This won’t be made any better by passing a law, but I think it could be made worse. We’ll never know how this region might be different had Springfield schools never been integrated, but I don’t see any reason to think that the snail’s pace of suburbanization and White flight which existed before 1973 would have accelerated like it did without forced desegregation. How much less suburban sprawl would the region have experienced, how many more acres of farmland might still exist, how many more people might be using public transit, how much more economically vibrant might the city be, and finally, how much less segregated might the schools be(!) if we hadn’t insisted on integrating them? ¡Qué paradoja!

Hypocrisy is the Mother of Detention (Centers)

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I was buying radishes at the farmers’ market yesterday when this pretentious ass, you know the type, the kind who buys his veggies at a farmers’ market, tells me I’m cutting in front of the people standing beside me. Now, it turns out that there were two different lines depending on method of payment and the other people realized they were in the wrong line and switched over; though it wasn’t a big deal since the cashiers didn’t seem to enforce the distinction on check out. Anyway, this complete freaking idiot, the pretentious jerk who warned me about cutsies, sees the check out open up in the other line and proceeds to…cut in front of the people in that line.

Classic.

It’s my pet peeve, this hypocrisy thing, although I must say it isn’t so much the existence of hypocrisy, it’s just the inability people seem to have in recognizing or admitting it. I’m a feminist from a philosophical point of view, but I’d have to be pretty un-selfaware not to detect my misogynistic tendencies. Ditto the issue of race. One of the reasons I moved here, to this house in this neighborhood 10 years ago was that I couldn’t imagine doing anything else or living anywhere else given my stated beliefs.

It was thrilling then to read, on my birthday no less, essays calling out hypocrisy (especially of the left, the left of which I am a part) regarding four of my current pet issues: climate change, immigration, “affordable housing”, and America’s illegal and immoral aggression all over the planet. The enormous impacts on our cities of these issues are obvious with the possible exception of the “illegal immoral aggression” thing, but I think the financial effects of 800 bases on foreign soil and a budget nearly equal to that of the other 95% of the population of the planet has an impact, not as much of an impact as the illegal immoral use of a missile blowing up my house and ripping my family members’ bodies to shreds as collateral damage (Tulsi Gabbard 2020), but an impact nevertheless.

On the issues of climate and housing, turns out if we build more housing, but it’s designed in an auto-oriented style then it will have a negative impact on the climate. What, what, what!?!?!?! Who knew? So the way in which we inhabit the land has an impact on our energy use and that relates to our carbon footprint? Whoa. So we could all change our incandescent bulbs to LEDs and, like, it isn’t going to accomplish anything unless our society allows externalities to be priced in to the cost of the way in which we live? The hell you say! Someone else can’t just do something differently so that I can continue to do what I’ve always done? Screw you then!

I was having this discussion with a friend and I pointed out that his habit of traveling by air kind of negates his bicycle use in terms of carbon footprint, later I acknowledged that my “excess house” certainly puts a crimp in my climate change bona fides. (But not before he outed me to his female companion as not necessarily supporting the equal pay argument of the USA Women’s Soccer team. Misogyny? I don’t think the curling team, men or women, should get what the soccer players get, and the lady figure skaters should get more than the men. It’s not gender, it’s the revenue stream each sport creates.) 

How do I rationalize it, and is it hypocrisy? There’s an element of hypocrisy that’s roughly equivalent to what my wife and I refer to as admitting that “our generosity knows bounds”. Do I care about the poor and the wretched? Sure. I donate to worthy causes. All that I can? No. I could live in a room at the Y, eat at the soup kitchen and donate almost my entire salary to charity. Of course, that extreme sacrifice would have very little overall impact on the problem, but I would be sacrificing quite a bit. 

So I rationalize doing what I’ve done living here by noting that most of the money I’ve spent on this house has been spent on improving energy efficiency. When the old roof needed replacing I paid for a white reflective one, I’ve insulated the attic and the basement from floors to walls to ceilings. The list goes on, I’ve written on the topic before and I’ve continued to the point that I’d say the house uses 1/4 the energy it used to. The next step would be to rent the basement apartment and either sublet rooms or make the place into 3-4 separate living spaces. Will I do that? If I have to. My “generosity” knows bounds.

Of course, just as I start to feel as though the whole world is getting on board with this anti-hypocrisy thing I read about a protest…in Northampton of course, about “closing the detention centers” on the border. Cool. How many random totally undocumented visitors are you willing to take in at your house in Florence I wonder? How many children in your child’s classroom? If you really think that totally open borders are a great thing, why don’t you live anywhere near a border or in a community with a huge percentage of refugees? Sure, the stories of the refugees are so poignant and heart-warming and they are such wonderful people; then why aren’t you relocating to live as close as you possibly can to where they live? 

I know why not: because that’s the hard work. Confronting the difficulties and complexities surrounding culture and accommodation when things stop being just “poignant and heart-warming” and become part of the daily struggle to deal with realities of the conflicts that will arise. 

The Center

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I don’t know if vindication is something I’m looking for most of the time when I put down my views here at RationalUrbanism since so much of what I express here is subjective. I don’t want my hometown to thrive because it’s demonstrably true that some fact or other makes it the rational outcome of a well reasoned process; I want it to thrive because it is a place which matters to me in a uniquely personal way. In the last few weeks though I have read and heard some things here and there which did support some ideas I had pondered on these pages, but in venues more widely respected and, in some cases, after some lengthy technical analysis.

Feargus O’Sullivan is a columnist at CityLab and writes that perhaps “livability” rankings aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, that they assess more broadly what cities provide “clusters of amenities” to a certain percentage of people who already live in a particular place and have the means to take advantage of them. In my words, Cambridge and San Francisco might be super “livable” if you’re ultra rich, but they might suck if you’re not. In Springfield I can do so much more for so much less and spend more of my “life” doing and less time earning the money to pay for it.

It also re-affirms in its own way my very recent take on housing for the poor. In Feargus’ example perhaps Zurich isn’t such a livable place for the less affluent, whereas as I don’t see Westport as particularly livable for that same group. Just last week another public meeting got all out of control because a suburban town here in western Mass is looking at the possibility of some affordable multi-family housing being built on the site of a former strip mall. More than anything I enjoy the denizens of these communities straining for arguments to be against housing for the poor without just screaming “Poor people suck, and lots of them are Black and Puerto Rican!” 

One person actually went this route: “Oh my God, the traffic!”

More traffic than the supermarket it’s replacing?

But it’s not a great place for affordable housing. The vacant land 5 minutes, two minutes away from Union Station, the primary transportation hub for the entire region and adjacent to one of the most walkable neighborhoods in all of western New England, that’s a great place for building housing which will be more affordable because it’s reasonable to live there without a car.

Daniel Herriges at Strong Towns uses a study by George Washington University to discuss just how little of our built environment would retain its value without the ubiquity of the automobile. It uses studies and analysis with charts and graphs; I just sat down right where I’m sitting now and thought about it. If we ever do end up being forced as a society to become less auto-dependent then that will occur at a time when we are also limited as to the resources we have to build new human environments. In that case most of what has been built in this country in the last 75 years will become visible as “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world”. 

As I wrote just weeks ago, should that day arrive, there will be a rush to the exits in suburbia, but the escape portal will become narrow indeed. Who will the buyers be and what value will be left in the soil of those despoiled places? And walkable land, like arable land, will have value because “they’re not making any more of it”.

This week my parental duties, as can often be the case, took me into places I wouldn’t normally go if left to my own devices. First, I was in the wealthiest part of the richest community in the entire region; in a residential neighborhood with near million dollar homes. I mentioned off handedly to Luna that Longmeadow was such a small community, both in geographic size and population, that its residents attended high school in Springfield until the 1950’s. My thoughts went back to my time in one of those high schools barely 20 years later when we were told how, at one time Classical High School was arguably the finest public high school in the United States and that a simple phone call from its principal could get any student into Harvard or Yale. 

I assume it was right about the time that stopped being the case that Longmeadow-ites (Longmeadownians?) decided to build their own building on Grassy Gutter Lane. Being rich means you want the best, and if something stops being the best…well, you get something else.

Just a day later I was in what used to be one of the most run down and certainly one of the most violent neighborhoods in Springfield picking up a different set of Luna’s friends for a day at the beach; but, oh! How that neighborhood has been transformed! The developer used both historic preservation and affordable housing tax credits and restored a dozen or more apartment buildings to their turn-of-the-century splendor. Stunning, truly stunning. My guess is the per household income might be 10% or less of that of the neighborhood we visited in Longmeadow the day before.


We got back late from Ocean Beach Park and The Book Barn and so I found myself watering the flowers out in front of the house much later than usual. Two neighborhood characters, perhaps homeless, were wandering by across the street. One drunkenly screamed at the other to give him a light; but then, a moment later, he asked him to give him back his lighter. A brief altercation ensued, a little tussle and it was over. In this neighborhood. In this neighborhood of historic homes. In this walkable neighborhood where all of the region’s energy, transportation, water, sewer, and communication infrastructure is based.

Will the two knuckleheads arguing over a lighter be the inheritors of this amazing legacy? I really don’t think so. The great fear of the Zombie Apocalypse is that the lighter-fighters will swarm over the cities like a swarm of locusts. I think it’s more likely that, as things begin to crumble at the far reaches of the systems we have already put in place that the swarm will be coming from without. Those who occupied the far flung beautiful places will abandon them as soon as they cease being optimal environments for living, and they will once again occupy the beautiful turn-of-the-century places and get access to what they want and what they need.

I’m trying to imagine a scenario in which the wretchedly poor, the homeless, the mentally ill, and the drug addled have electricity, water, natural gas, Internet access, transportation services, and the like; all systems which flow out from this central location, but the wealthy have no utilities, and are reduced to getting water from trucks manned by the National Guard. That might happen in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, but if it were to continue for any period of time the well-off would find new digs.

Sometimes things fall apart and the center cannot hold, but more often than not things on the edge fall off, and the center is the one place that keeps it all together. In the end that is what makes the center, the center.

A Sunny Monday

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At the risk of giving you more insight than you might want into the inner workings of RationalUrbanism, I tried to multi-task by earning some step-dad bonus points as I slyly took some photographs intended to support an opinion at which I had already arrived. One problem: the experience didn’t match my expectation and so, with much regret, I have decided to alter my opinion instead of selecting some non representative pictures and going ahead with what I had planned to say.


I told Luna she could have some friends over and I’d take them down to the riverfront, make them lunch, and otherwise perform parental tasks so as to facilitate such a get-together. After hanging around the house for an hour or so the girls donned their bathing suits and off we went. We took the pedestrian bridge behind the old Basketball Hall of Fame over to the park and, weirdness of weirdnesses, there were people coming back as we were headed over. It didn’t stop there; there were people crowded along the benches in the shade along the bike path. 

What?

(Tips on becoming a photographer!)

Ok, there was a maintenance guy hacking back the sumac getting ready for the July 4th extravaganza; dependably the ONE day a year the park gets some use…even overuse. But there was also an older gentleman sauntering along the walkway and I could see people sitting by the new picnic benches. And people fishing. And kids at the playground and, oh, the splash pad was already spraying water which meant that someone had recently activated it. The gate to State Street was open and people dressed in business clothing were wandering across the railroad tracks.

(Nice spot for a b-ball court near the Hall of Fame)

I was prepared to make the case that without more amenities, like a basketball court near the pedestrian bridge, (and the Hall of Fame!)the park would quickly fall back to its prior level of (dis)use and become much more of a security and maintenance hassle than it’s worth, but now I’m not so sure. There wasn’t a trickle, there was a steady stream of people coming into the park. We were there just after noon, but in this live news report at the entrance to the park at 5:31 you can see people walking by as well:

Maybe the new play equipment, the splash pad, the new bathrooms, the 9/11 memorial, and the police substation are enough to create sufficient use for now to keep people coming back. The prior iteration wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t good enough to overcome the isolation of a spot just outside the downtown but with extremely limited connectivity.

The challenges haven’t changed:

*The bike path is a wholly disconnected segment and isn’t long enough to attract serious bikers.

*Undergrowth creates cover in which the homeless tend to reside and, however benign their presence, makes many people uncomfortable.

*”Overgrowth”… of sumac in particular, obscures the view of the river without which the bike path loses all of its aesthetic power and also increases the sense of isolation.

*No food available within the park.

Apart from confronting these challenges, connecting the bike path to Forest Park and Agawam to the south, to the new and proposed bike paths in the interior of the city to the east, and, eventually, north “to infinity” would completely change the dynamic of the park. It would have been ideal had the renovated formerly private marina had been closer to the park, but at the very least the city should study other ways to give people more access to the river itself in as safe a way as possible. 

I see the next big move, apart from the Hall of Fame contributing to a basketball court, being the presence of Six Flags New England on the riverfront. It’s just a few miles down the river to the largest amusement park in New England; an amusement park which doesn’t have a single major hotel on or near its property, not any closer than downtown Springfield anyway. A water connection from downtown to the former Riverside Park existed for years. Re-creating it with some water taxis to give families a “park once” experience of Six Flags, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, MGM, the Springfield Armory National Historic Site, and the Incredible World of Dr Seuss (as well as the 4 other museums of the Quadrangle), from any one of 7 major downtown hotels might be attractive. Something like a merry-go-round located in the park both for people enjoying the park and those waiting the arrival of the Tinker Bell (the old Peter Pan bus lines pontoon boat) could also act as advertising for Six Flags to the millions of cars which drive by on I-91 every summer.

Many locals can’t get beyond their jaded view of Springfield in general, and the Connecticut River in particular. They look across the river and see the electric plant and know that the Bondi’s Island sewage treatment facility, the landfill, and the trash burning plant are right there, only obscured by the trees; but the plant has a spark of industrial chic, and, for the visitor the rest is out of sight, out of mind. It’s got some real potential and, I’m surprised to say, it isn’t so bad right now.

You Could Move to Bridgeport

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It would be the height of hypocrisy for me to criticize advocacy journalism; so here goes!

I learned early on after deciding to live in downtown Springfield that the bulk of the nuanced thought would come from people with skin in the game, people who actually lived in the neighborhood and had to live with the consequences of decisions. Outsiders, almost always from above the tofu curtain, were those who lobbied for absolutes with absolute certainty.

The “tent city” on the lawn of St Michael’s Cathedral was perhaps the simplest example. Of course homelessness was a problem, and with the city of Springfield essentially in receivership programs for the poor were not being funded in the most robust manner. At the same time teachers were in a multi year pay freeze, street lights were turned off all over the city, and police and fire budgets were suffering as well. 

Getting back to tent city: In my home I’m sometimes naked, my wife and I have sex, we argue (usually NOT at the same time), we drink alcohol, we urinate, and we defecate; as do “homeless” people living in tents. The one uncomfortable difference is that the solid walls of my abode make those behaviors less public, more hygienic, and less intrusive relative to those around us. People from Williamsburg and Amherst advocating for the rights of the homeless to go about their lives in tent city without the meddlesome intervention of local officials didn’t live across the street, didn’t have 10 year olds going to the children’s room of the city library next door, and didn’t have a paycheck dependent on tourists not being scared away from the museums at the Quadrangle. 

For those of us who did have skin in the game we understood the need to balance the needs of the homeless with the tenuous equilibrium of the neighborhood as a whole; a community which drives out all people of even moderate means can’t afford to provide any services to anyone in the long term, and when those people are you and your neighbors it’s easy to understand that a balance must be maintained. Advocates from the hinterland go home to front and back yards where drunk naked people aren’t pooping nearby, and aren’t having knife fights (and?) or sex as their kids walk by.

With that in mind, I read what really is a fine piece of advocacy journalism a few weeks ago. There was some thoughtful analysis and lots of data. It even covered one of the topics I’ve touched on now and again, with much less erudition, here on my blog: locating affordable housing outside urban communities. My own view isn’t straightforward: I mock the hypocrisy of the NIMBYs, but at the same time I don’t think that isolated, unwalkable neighborhoods are really great places to be poor. 

In this article the author makes what I see as an irrefutable case against well-to-do towns in Connecticut which use sleight of hand…well, sleight of zoning, to keep affordable housing out of their communities. Right off the bat though, there’s a problem with the “up close and personal” real life example we’re given to illustrate the hardships such a lack of affordable housing creates:

Really sad. Only. Let’s think about it. She can’t afford a place to live…in Bridgeport, never mind Westport. Right? Even if she could afford a place to live apart from a shelter in Bridgeport she would still need to make the trek to Fairfield every day (though we will touch on that in a moment), but Bridgeport is about as affordable a place, and has about as much affordable housing as anyplace in New England, and this woman, bless her soul, hasn’t been able to find housing there! Are we surprised that she hasn’t been able to find a pied-à-terre in Westport? Is it disgusting that the rich people in Westport chose to live in Westport precisely to not live around poor people? Sure, you might think they’re assholes, but they’re rich assholes who don’t want to live around poor people. Being rich is so popular precisely because it helps you do what you want to do. If they were rich people who wanted to experience diversity they wouldn’t live in Westport.

Now, turning to the minimum wage job at the daycare center in Fairfield. That sounds like a real long term deal, the kind of position that a person stays in for decades. I’m sorry, did I say decades? I meant months. Maybe. So if this woman gets an apartment in $7 for a gallon of milk and $6 for a dozen organic eggs unwalkable Westport and somehow manages to get to Fairfield every day, what’s she going to do when (not if) that job goes away? How many jobs does Westport produce? It consumes a lot of jobs: doctors at Yale New Haven, lawyers and hedge fund managers for Wall Street, but the place isn’t really a wellspring of employment opportunity.

Of course, maybe her kids will then be able to attend “a good school” except…read this and follow the links. If you don’t care to read about that issue again, I’ll summarize: the schools aren’t “good”, the kids who attend them are rich, and those schools have NO IDEA how to deal with kids who aren’t ready to learn: they’d be better off in school in Bridgeport.

So how do we deal with the problem? Focus on Bridgeport. Imagine if Ashana could find a job in Bridgeport, a job she could get to using the public transit which is ubiquitous(relative to Westport) in Bridgeport. Imagine if all the Ashanas out there could get jobs in Bridgeport. Then getting employees to watch the rich brats of Westport at their snooty Fairfield day care center would become…WESTPORT’S PROBLEM. And rich people have a way of dealing with problems; it’s almost like being rich is such a sought after status because it provides people with the wherewithal to resolve problems! 

I’m sorry, but I have to go a step further. In doing some google searching and snooping regarding this article I found another piece written by the same journalist comparing the success of urban schools in Massachusetts to their struggling counterparts in Connecticut. And while I stick by my assertion that a poor kid can be better served by a school in Bridgeport than in Westport, I have to admit that this is a fine piece of journalism. 

Further snooping though also showed that this reporter has a child, and this reporter has lived in, or at least been “linked” to Hartford, and West Hartford. Hartford and West Hartford. Two very different communities in terms of affordable housing and public schools. When this reporter’s child reaches school age (if he or she hasn’t already) will the author see to it that her child goes to a diverse school…by being the diversity, will she live in an economically diverse neighborhood…by being the economic diversity? 

To me, if you believe in affordable housing live in a community that has a commitment to affordable housing; and live as close to that affordable housing as you can because that’s what you’re asking others to do. Believe in improving the quality of urban public schools? Advocate from the inside, send your kids to them. Listen to this guy:(52:00-101:16)

Pretty freakin’ eloquent. I like that guy. This was part of a panel discussion on “a divided America”. The man who brought the concept to life told the story of its inception. Without irony he recounted the story of how he and a friend were talking at a coffee shop in one of the wealthiest and most exclusive towns in the United States about how divided we are as a nation. Why? Why are there no poor people at your exclusive coffee shop in a far flung Boston suburb? Yeah, what’s wrong with those poor people? Why don’t they hang out with us? 

Let’s see…you could go hang out with them. I mean, maybe you could swing the cost of a place in Dorchester. Nah. Donald Trump! He’s the one dividing us. Bastard.

For an extended period of time the most shared article on City Lab was an interview with a French academic discussing the Trump phenomenon in the United States in comparison the the Yellow Vest movement. I read it three times. This paragraph hits on some familiar themes:

By all means raise awareness about injustice when you believe you see it, but live your life in a way that doesn’t perpetuate the injustice you decry.

Updates

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With the conclusion of Fresh Paint Springfield LunaLucia appeared, looming over Dwight Street. Many of my friends have commented at the irony that she is gracing the side of a parking garage, given my aversion to such structures:


GoodSpace Murals was the name of the group of artists from Minnesota who created the idea and executed the mural on the Skyview Towers parking garage. Their method of forming the finished product out of smaller pieces of canvas which can be painted, paint by numbers style, by members of the community is beyond any shadow of a doubt the process which created the most energy and excitement during the festival. 

I have to note here that the former Chestnut Towers, now Skyview Towers, was considered by many a sort of Pruitt-Igoe for downtown Springfield. To the members of the GoodSpace Murals team it was Xanadu. They couldn’t stop talking about the welcome they received and the constant barrage of food, goodwill, and help with their work that came with it.

The team also seemed to fall in love with the city itself. I mentioned to a member of the team that others have said that Springfield reminds them of St Paul to which he responded, perhaps in a display of Minnesota Nice, that he found Springfield to be a much more beautiful city than either of the Twin Cities. Every member of the team expressed a strong desire to return here to work as soon and as often as possible stating that they had never had such a phenomenal experience.

On the same day Luna’s visage appeared on Dwight Street I caught John Simpson still working on his Dr Seuss mural:

Some of the projects simply couldn’t be completed in just one week!  John’s art beautifies the One Financial Plaza building, the Dr Seuss Museum at the Quadrangle, and the MGM Plaza.

As my wife and I walked through the downtown on Friday…during what was a school day in Springfield, we saw a few young cyclists plying their trade on the sidewalks and going the wrong direction on the streets, and even on bike paths:


Had we been a few yards further down the sidewalk, or if we were elderly this might have gotten ugly. This is a nuisance.

This cyclist wasn’t being particularly provocative:

 We experienced 5 incidents of cyclists behaving…non optimally as we walked the downtown and, yes, they were a greater nuisance than even automobiles. It’s not just that bikes are ubiquitous; a good thing. The young men on bikes behaving badly has really become endemic to walking downtown truth be told and it just might provoke a response.

The Worthy Brewfest attracted a large crowd as usual:

I enjoy the atmosphere and the architecture at least as much as the beer:

As chance would have it I accidentally captured one of my colleagues from school in this photograph; and not just any colleague, but a colleague whom I have often referred to as the UN-me. I even wrote about him in one of my very first posts here at Rational Urbanism. He was the teacher who expressed that not only would he never live downtown, but that he was considering a move from his exurban home because there were plans to build a house like his house near his house. What was this avowed anti-urbanist doing at this most urban of beer festivals? Turns out he’s been spending some time at MGM and he and his wife have enjoyed it and so they decided to give the Worthy Brewfest a chance. He did take a shot at Manhattan as we spoke; I’m not sure if that was to maintain his anti-urban cred, or if it was to endear himself to me.

I also met a fellow urban pioneer at the Worthy; he threatened a violent response if anyone (well, the mayor) called him an “urban pioneer” one more time so I thought I’d oblige. The more of us there are the less pioneering it will seem and the better for all of us. His family really loves the movie theater a at MGM.  It’s possible that the nay-sayers  were wrong and the “magic feather effect” is affecting its magic.

Luna enjoying her new favorite band, Shakazoba, at the MGM plaza…

and a John Simpson mural in the background:


Full circle.

Beer Gardens, Food Trucks, and Farmers’ Markets

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James Howard Kunstler:

“We don’t have to have a craft fair to get people to come here.”

“A public place so dismal that the winos don’t even want to go there.”

Most of Springfield’s public spaces reside on the better end of this continuum of public space, but, often due to a dearth of programming on the edge, most require something akin to a craft fair to truly energize them. In a paradox endemic to America, much of this public space is privately owned. Even in the downtown the automobile is granted an often annoying presence at the periphery of pedestrian space, and places blessed with an abundance of public space can’t program all of it all the time.

I chose my first day of summer break to meander through a handful of the city’s newly restored, redesigned, and refurbished parks and plazas to grab some lunch, to have a coffee, and to see if anyone would be joining my wife and me in any of Springfield’s outdoor rooms.

We started at Food Truck Friday at the MGM plaza:

A former student was taking orders at the slider truck so I got to hear a hardy “¡Señor!” called out when my order was ready. I shared one with Liz, and she got me some hummus from the Holyoke Hummus Co.. Fun. When we got there it was buzzing, by the time we left it was packed.

MGM does a good job of programming the plaza, day and night all year ’round. They really have to, the retail apocalypse has made what they had hoped would be some attractive shopping options into a candle place, one T-shirt shop, and a jeweler. I kid you not; $1,000,000,000.00 doesn’t go a long way in retail these days!

From there we wandered down Courthouse Walk; easily the most authentic and European feeling space in the downtown, but its eastern edge sits totally vacant while a $40 million redevelopment plan sits $3-$4 short of funding. On this day a few dozen people ambulated through it while passing from the farmers’ market in Court Square to MGM. 

The market occupies onlyone side of the square, but it does have room to grow!

On Mondays there are classic car shows here, and later on this summer the Jazz and Roots festival will cover almost the entirety of the square. This space hasn’t been touched in the most recent round of rehabilitation, but it is easily the king of urban public spaces west of Boston in New England…in terms of its potential. There are 8 unique spaces in and around the blocks it occupies, including Courthouse Walk, each with its use, its charm, and its beauty, most of which can still be sensed despite its most significant structures sitting vacant for decades.

One of those unique spaces is the oasis Evan Plotkin has created at One Financial Plaza. Today he has displaced the Palazzo hot dog cart to the farmers’ market and the difference can be felt:

Monday through Thursday this is reliably the most active outdoor room in downtown Springfield. How did he do it? How did he take a quintessentially bland 1980’s corporate plaza and transform it into the place to be? Music, either live or piped in at all times. Water, by restoring the original fountain. Food, by placing a café at one corner, and the aforementioned hot dog cart at another. The cart is now owned and operated by the owners of the café, but it wasn’t always so. Convincing a brick and mortar establishment to let a hot dog cart in its territory at lunchtime must have been a hard sell but, as often happens, once it was established they saw that it drew in more business to the area than it stole from their regular customer base. Another element which can’t be overlooked is movable tables and chairs. It’s right out of the PPP manual: people prefer chairs that move! Public art rounds out the composition.

It also doesn’t hurt that while sitting in Evan’s plaza you can see all this(from Jazz and Roots a few years ago):

Around the back of the building Nadim was setting up his outdoor dining area. On Saturday we’d decide to celebrate surviving the Worthy Brew Fest by dining al fresco with Nadim himself. I could see the campanile from where I sat. I couldn’t help but think that people pay a great deal to fly to Europe to have no more aesthetically pleasing an experience:

On this day we stopped at Starbucks, don’t judge, we were offered free drinks by the owner for signing up for a Dr Seuss license plate. Clouds had started to fill in and only a few people sat with us in front of the Forbes and Wallace fountain, but the people watching was extraordinary.

The park occupying the place of the former Steiger’s department store was mostly empty. The summer beer garden is open Wednesday-Friday from 4-9, and Saturdays 12-6. We’ve been 4 times already, twice just to grab a bite to eat on the way through the area, once as part of the mural festival, and once we walked down expressly to just enjoy the experience. Unlike many downtown events there is an actual mix of White and Black Springfielders. I don’t think it is at all coincidence that the owner is an African American native of Springfield. It’s a great idea and it energizes Main Street wonderfully well, in ways other activities and events of a similar sort have not.

Stearns Square and Duryea Way were quiet. The night before the BID had had their pre Bruins Stanley Cup Game 7 beer party on Duryea Way, but we were at a community event celebrating the conclusion of the Fresh Paint Springfield mural festival and so I wasn’t able to get there to take some pictures of the space being fully utilized. The replica of the first American gas powered auto, the Duryea, attracts people to the space, and it does its job of being a welcoming pass through from Union Station to the heart of downtown remarkably well.

That brings me to some brief (let’s hope!) editorializing: In a city like Springfield not every public space can be activated all the time. Willow Walk, Duryea Way, and even Courthouse Walk are mostly going to be attractive areas to walk through, not destinations unto themselves (at least until the Court Square building is completed). The activation of Stearns Square is dependent upon the success of the dining establishments which surround it and their willingness to expand their outdoor dining opportunities, upon which the entire redesign of the surrounding area was based. The McKim, Mead and White plaza and the fountain by Augustus St. Gaudens really preclude a redesign of the space with a water slide and picnic area! It’s enough that the renovation allows access to the fountain by anyone wanting to cool off on a hot summer day.


This is the public park contiguous to the MGM property:

Nice. But it could use a splash pad or a sprayground.

Speaking of water features, only the Riverfront Park and Pynchon Plaza will have fully kid friendly splash pads. I’m a little surprised MGM didn’t include some water in the design for their numerous outdoor spaces; here water is abundant, unlike Las Vegas. Perhaps therein lies the answer. The new Riverfront Park will be fully open in a few days. The playground, fountain, 9/11 Memorial, performance space, and bike path, along with limited access to the river with areas for fishing or just viewing the river make this a very different park space from the rest. There are numerous issues to be dealt with still which I will mention in a later post, but it is a beautiful place, and acts as a reminder that Springfield is only here because the river is here.

The places and spaces we visited are all well within a half mile of a central location downtown, and I haven’t included the Springfield Armory National Historic Site at all, despite the fact that it to has just undergone a complete reconfiguration of its grounds, nor have I treated downtown’s most active public space: the Quadrangle.

When Pynchon Plaza is finished, about a year from now, we will begin to see if it does a better job of connecting Main Street to the Springfield Museums than its predecessor. 

I have also left out the Apremont Triangle. Mass Mutual has contracted the services of the Project for Public Spaces to engage the neighborhood (including yours truly!!!) in creating a plan to energize that public place. As I have written many times, it has tremendous potential and could become the center of a second main street on a newly re-invigorated Chestnut Street, a Chestnut Street which looks to have the capacity to become Springfield’s answer to what Greenwich Village was to Manhattan.

I’m optimistic. It’s sad that the commercial energy isn’t there to have bookstores instead of pop-up mini libraries, cafes instead of food trucks, permanent arcades instead of bean bag toss and giant Jenga, but such is the state of urban retail. Most of these spaces are surrounded by misallocated (from an urbanist perspective) ground floor uses which could be reprogrammed tomorrow. In the interim these temporary measures will have to suffice to keep the public realm active and alive. I’m looking forward to spending my summer right here. 

Fresh Paint Springfield

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For mid-sized cities having an identity is a challenge. I was working in radio when the laws controlling ownership changed and saw just how quickly “local radio” all but disappeared. The same is true of banking and retail, food and drink, news and entertainment; the list goes on. Lots of places have been staging a comeback in this regard of course with things like local breweries, farmers’ markets, programs on public media, blogs, podcasts, and countless other ways; in the main most people still live in a geography of nowhere made up of Applebee’s, cable news, I Heart Radio, Bank of America, Budweiser, and Target.

Springfield has it particularly bad in this regard as it is so close to two of the world’s most dynamic major cities and, of the seemingly few people who feel any connection at all to place, they choose to identify with Boston, or New York. Somehow wanting to be where you are in a place like this is identified with failure, whether as a young person or as a retiree; you should always want to be somewhere else doing something else bigger and better. My view has always been the contrary; make up your own rules of the game and declare victory.

The arts are funny category of stuff in particular as connected with all of this. For the majority the only “art” they experience is mass produced and would be identical in Peoria or Providence: Arianna Grande, The Avengers. For those who consider themselves more discerning it’s Hamilton, and maybe a trip to the Metropolitan Museum. It’s still not local, it’s still not really yours unless you identify with the Superstar City. 

It has been great to see Springfield turn this on its head in the last week with Fresh Paint Springfield. A few months ago a woman contacted my wife on the phone and asked if she could meet with us about having Luna help her with doing some promotional work for a first of its kind Springfield mural festival. We invited Britt Ruhe over to meet Lu and get some idea as to what the project entailed. It seemed amazing in concept but, with mere weeks to throw it all together and Britt being an outsider from “above the tofu curtain” (Amherst in this case) I really thought that there was a fair to middling chance that Springfield’s general hard-core, thoroughgoing malaise combined with a fair dose of bureaucratic red tape would chew this idea up and spit it out.

Oh, was I wrong. This thing has taken off. 

Even in a week where our own in-house star found herself performing in three different locally written and produced theatrical productions, including the start of a tour which will take her to 8 local elementary schools in 4 days, we managed to participate 4 times with each of us painting some part of one of the murals and with Luna herself being depicted on one of the most prominent. 

Half of the artists are local and half not, but they have all given their works deep roots in Springfield, from the sport invented here, basketball, to this community’s role in the Underground Railroad, and from our Dr Seuss, to our new identity as a Puerto Rican enclave. Not only do you need to be here to truly experience them, but being from here gives you special insight into their meaning. 

The energy in yesterday’s concluding block party, hosted by an honest to goodness local brewery, was near euphoric. As we wandered the environs we met a dozen friends who all just happened to be involved in one way or another in the festival. Luna not only ran into a friend from school, she was recognized as the title character in “Anansi” by a child from the Bowles Elementary school where she had performed just the day before, and then she was smothered by people from Skyview Towers who recognized her likeness from the mural pieces they had seen being painted in their community room.


What a day to celebrate art, artists, and the community which gives them inspiration. There has never been a better day to be here, nor anyplace better to be than here, at least on this particular day. 


The Utility of Beauty and the Beauty of Utility

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This question of beauty has stayed with me for weeks now. I believe wholeheartedly in the proposition that aesthetic quality is an enormously important characteristic for cities like Springfield to cultivate if they are to survive and thrive at this moment in time. As I wrote just a few weeks ago, however, there is an enormous obstacle, nearly impossible to overcome in its way, which is that, despite protests to the contrary, it is often success which gives places their beauty and not the other way around.

I won’t revisit the entire argument here, though in truth I have many times, that the reversal of cause and effect is the most common fallacy present in urbanism, place making, and planning. I’ve explored it with “Meds, Beds, and Eds”, and downtown marketplaces in particular, and in overall urban design in general. Just a glance at at the methodology of the study Richard Florida references in his post makes clear just how this reversal could work in the case of The Beauty Premium; it was done by looking at “tourist visits and photos of picturesque locations”. Sure, but people only visit as tourists places they regard as worthy of being toured, and that usually involves having been informed by some other source that such places exist.

This brings us to another topic which I have explored, from judgements regarding weather, to crime, the quality of restaurants, and the quality of architecture to just name a few, and that is how strongly and how deeply cultural pressures impact what people believe are individual taste and value judgements. The paradox here is that I believe that as hated as Springfield is by so many of the people who work in it and live in it, the most important thing the city can do, perhaps only exceeded by maintaining fiscal stability, is to foster beauty even if most of what is created will be undervalued or overlooked. 


The city is engaged right now in a grand experiment in that regard, refurbishing parks and public spaces in the downtown at an impressive clip, restoring building façades, enhancing the environments in which much urban activity takes place; but will it make a substantive difference in how people in the region, and even in the city itself, value the city and, even if it does, will it be enough to alter the city’s multi-generational trajectory downward?


The beauty of place can be allegorized to be similar to human beauty, but there are enormous differences as well. If I am a very handsome man, perhaps the second or third best looking in my social group, it stands to reason that I might easily be able to attract a mate. Not so for a city. If I am viewed as second or third in my particular cohort, all of our possible suitors may opt for “bachelor number one”; and by and large that’s what we see as happening from San Francisco, to Boston, to New York, and only when the cost of wedding themselves to “polygamist number one” becomes prohibitively expensive, or logistically impossible (or sometimes not even then) do people move on to bachelor number two, all the while bachelor number two or number three’s failures are agglomerating, causing well meaning (or conniving) busy bodies to offer advice on how to compete. Which brings us back to both the misunderstanding of cause and effect and the impact of success on the assessment of aesthetic quality.


As I’ve been mulling these ideas in my head I’ve happened upon some ideas from some of my favorite thinkers on all things urban which have given me a particular ephemeral insight I would like to share. Leon Krier speaks of beauty as the ultimate desire of power, and Kunstler of the ultimate importance of utility to the selecting of place, but also of the importance of beauty to its appreciation. I would posit that we are still living in an epoch when enormous numbers of people in the United States have the wherewithal to move essentially anywhere on a whim. This doesn’t include the Superstar cities, of course, where easy access is only afforded to Superstar people. This is happening at a time when the culture, specifically consumerist culture, has twisted and damaged the public’s ability to see beauty. This has created, at a time when any utility of place is often perceived as ugly, a desire on the part of many to live in places which are the least suited to human survival, for example: so much demand for housing in the desert that communities are fighting over diminishing water while places with a surplus of housing suffer because not enough water is being accessed through their systems.


I can attest that beauty is one of the last attributes most people in and around the city would associate with it. My boosterism often puts me in circumstances where I wax poetic on the aesthetic virtues of Springfield and those assertions are almost always met with bemused disbelief, confusion, or even with contempt. As a matter of fact this often happens while in beautiful places in the city which the contemptuous would admit are beautiful…and in Springfield…but whose connection still seems to them invalid. 


Putting even more resources into beautifying a beautiful place whose beauty isn’t appreciated wouldn’t seem to make sense. I suppose I believe that the currently distorted cultural signals regarding what makes a place beautiful will revert to an historic mean of some sort, where water, fertile soil, vernacular materials, and the traditional syntaxes, vocabularies, and grammars of urban design will reassert themselves as meaningful and beautiful. 


The city of Springfield, like so many other Rust Belt cities, was selected as a place because of its utility: At the confluence of three rivers, facilitating communication north, south, east, and west; at a location where, on one side of the Connecticut River, many streams fell hundreds of feet in a short distance and made harnessing water power easy, and on the other provided quality soil for growing food, and forests on both sides for multiple uses. Because of its utility, and its prosperity, its residents endowed it with parks, libraries, institutions, municipal edifices, and private buildings of the highest quality, enough, that is, for many of them to have survived for 100 years or more despite minimal interest from much of today’s citizenry. When utility, that is, the need to live in places and in ways which both minimize and produce the commodities we need to survive, Springfield, like dozens of other mostly forgotten places, will reintroduce its people to the beauty of utility.

Setting Your Watch

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I’m almost embarrassed for the host of the Capitol Watch podcast from the Hartford Courant. I mean, I wish Springfield and Masslive had anything even remotely similar with a focus on the city and urban issues. It is still the case that, even with the multi-million dollar headquarters and broadcasting center of New England Public Radio being located on Main Street in the heart of downtown Springfield, I haven’t heard of a single program devoted to the city in general, or the downtown in particular (Call me!). We will muddle on with “Idiots Discuss the News”, mornings on Rock 102.

Getting back to Capitol Watch; I listened for the first time yesterday. The presentation had that “This American Life” ennui with much higher production value than anything I’ve ever done at KTKK, WHYN, or on my own short-lived RationalUrbanism podcast. There was one teensy weensy little problem: the premise of this episode was based on a (common) misunderstanding regarding ranking data. 

The data being investigated related to the fact that the “Hartford Metropolitan Region” ranks #8 in the nation for % of Millennials with college degrees, and some follow up rankings involving measurements like job opportunities and salaries also being assessed by METRO AREA in which Hartford scored well. The question put to random passers by at a community market was clearly asking if Hartford, as in The City of Hartford full stop, “…is really one of the best places for Millennials to settle down?” What ensued was a ridiculous Hartford slam fest. Kudos I guess to the producers for not editing out all of the negativity, although that is almost all there was. 

As an aside, I’ve seen this same confusion in local Springfield media with rankings; Springfield was ranked number one for college campus quality of life. The survey included Smith, Amherst, Mt Holyoke; but it was interpreted as referring to Springfield College, A.I.C., and WNEU: The response was skeptical. I’ve written about it before.

Getting back to the podcast: The first respondent complained, again, assuming the question was about Hartford proper, that you could get more house for the money in the suburbs(!?): I’m not an expert on Hartford home prices but that seems unlikely to be true, although it seemed that what he was really trying to say is that suburban homes come with more land and are therefore, by default, superior. That the contrast which was being made was, according to the surveys in question, not germane because both Hartford and suburban Hartford are part of metro Hartford, never came up.

The second respondent, while admitting to “not having been a Millennial for a while”(sic) responded that many places have much more to offer than Hartford, taxes are too high in Connecticut, and Millennials would be better off going just about anywhere else. That response seemed to lump the city and its surrounding communities into one whole, and so may have actually been on point.

Respondent number three was a Hartford native and complained that, knowing “what’s really going on” he opined that “it is completely false” that Hartford is a good place for Millennials to settle down. The reasons: crime, poverty, gentrification, segregation: “Charging Manhattan and SoHo prices but ya’ll don’t have Manhattan and SoHo attractions.” He was just “bein’ real”. As he went on he seemed to make a different point. While, perhaps, accepting the idea that upwardly mobile Millennials might find Hartford, “greater” or “proper”, a reasonable place to live, for the not so well off Millennials who already lived there the arrival of the gentrifiers wouldn’t be helpful.

After going 0 for 3 with his “man on the street” interviews the host went “meta” and played some archival interviews which were perhaps more directly related to the question, which were then fiollowed by yet another conversation at the community market which was also both more on point and actually positive in its take. A final interview brought the tally of man on the street interviewees to 2 in favor, 3 against the idea of Hartford being a good place for Millennials to settle down with, honestly, perhaps something one might be able to piece together as “a meaningful idea” on the topic in and among the agglomeration of words.

I am going to presume quite a bit and reinterpret all 5 of the extemporaneous responses:

#1: Yes, suburban Hartford is awesome ’cause lawns. Cities are icky.

#2: Other places have lower taxes and better “culture”…museums, symphony orchestras, probably not his idea of “culture” I’m guessing though.

#3: Being Black and poor in Hartford isn’t any fun (unlike other places?). Rich White folks moving in makes it more expensive. Doesn’t care about amenities, and there aren’t enough of them.

#4: Smaller metros (sic) give people opportunities to be big fish in small ponds. Hartford has a lot going for it. It’s a good place to make a difference.

#5: Buy low, sell high. Greater Hartford is low, so buy, buy, buy!

Overall I understand the temptation to ask “Everyman” what he thinks, and a convincing argument can be made that most people make even enormous decisions in life without putting together a single coherent or more internally cohesive idea than any of the ideas expressed by these interviewees. For many people life works like this:

My brain sees: “Then a crisis happens” in all these formulae where others see miracles!

And yet I still want to disentangle the rest of the math.

Is the City of Hartford one of the best places for Millennials to settle down? I think it likely is, at the very least, better than average. Hartford gets more negative press than Springfield which means its real estate market is likely depressed (Everyman #5), that not only gives one a good chance of buying low, but the generally negative attitudes projected onto Hartford limits the pool of competition for good jobs. There are walkable neighborhoods, some healthy local agricultural concerns, both insurance and state government to provide stability, and improving regional public transit. The regional water system is robust. It is a hub of high culture. Unlike a Springfield, or Rochester, or Scranton, or Youngstown, it sits at the political center of a state which is unlikely to lose sight of its significance. Ask most people in Boston about Springfield and their thoughts turn to Abe Lincoln I’m sure!(Yes, wrong Springfield. Exactly.)

That said, I don’t think Hartford is as well prepared to exceed expectations as my hometown for precisely that final reason: too often Connecticut’s capital has been the subject of well meaning experiments which have eviscerated its neighborhoods and desiccated its downtown and these have served to leave it only more impoverished, segregated, and isolated. Springfield’s school system has been much healthier and more stable, the crime rate much lower, its White flight,not nearly as thorough, its industrial base both broader and deeper, its proximity to significant agriculture even greater, its share of owner occupied housing much higher, its park and library systems much larger.

If Hartford were to become a breakout superstar as cities go it would only be good news for Springfield. Neither of these ersatz Twin Cities have done the other any favors in the way a Worcester has been able to use Boston’s rise to re-energize itself, but we are stuck with each other, or at least near each other, mostly doing a good job of pretending the other doesn’t exist.

If you listened to the entire podcast you heard them discussing tourist slogans for the city and the state. hARTford or The H(arts)ford are the way to go: The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Stage, Mark Twain, and all the rest. The Simpsons used up our best idea already:

What puts the spring in Springfield?

Come find out!