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Syracuse, Crunched

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Read this:


Did you catch it? Read the excerpts of this one now:


There you go. You see? The Quality of Life ranking is for the METRO area, not just the city. People in Syracuse might miss that, despite the brief nod to “metro area” in the story, and walk away feeling good about their municipality. No such fears in Springfield: the headline makes clear the study refers to the entire “Pioneer Valley” and, well, the focus of the entire piece appears to be making sure that no one accidentally believes this has anything to do with Springfield the city.

On the other hand, a quality of life survey which uses “averages” in the Springfield metro will be heavily impacted by the  quality of life in the city of Springfield: quality of “life” generally being divided by the denominator of “lives” of which Springfield is one quarter or more. Educational attainment is measured, and more children go to public school in Springfield than there are people in Northampton. As far as weighting goes, more than twice as many lives are lived in Springfield than in the entirety  of Franklin County. Access to health care? Imagine if Springfield’s hospitals and medical offices were removed from the study.

I’d say this survey actually does say something about life in Springfield, so to the rest of the residents of the Valley I say “you’re welcome” on behalf of the residents of the city. Glad we helped make you look so good.

How Deep Does the Stupid Go?

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As I think about it this could be the blogpost version of the movie “Inception”, but if you enjoy urban design and have a fondness for anachronism it could be worth delving through the layers.

Worcester and Springfield (pronounced “Spring-Field”) are similar cities facing similar problems but all in all Worcester is ahead of Springfield. Worcester never fell as far as Springfield during the bad years, and it has taken advantage of the most recent movement toward urban Renaissance more quickly and more successfully. I think I’d like to explore that in depth in a separate post delving into how the two municipalities got where they are, why, and what their assets and liabilities are moving forward; it might be fun to get some input afterwards from the citizens of Worcester who read Rational Urbanism to get their perspective.

With that relationship between Springfield and Worcester in mind let us continue: Yesterday I was about to head down to Bueno y Sano’s Friday “burrito bar”; Worcester probably has a handful of local burrito places with the menu written out in chalk, clever burrito names, craft brews on tap, all that stuff; we just got one place to agree to opening under a tent for two hours a week at least during the summer! In any case, before leaving I glanced at my phone and, checking Masslive I read the headline of an editorial from The Republican, Springfield’s paper of record:


I’m intrigued, but I assume that the title is a reference to the “slots in a box” casino that Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods are planning to build on the site of an old movie theater to siphon off visitors to MGM’s Springfield casino. I’m sure this does have MGM pretty ticked off, but it was never their revenues that interested me: the movie theaters, the retail, the street improvements, the entertainment, the ice skating, the market rate housing, those are the things that matter to me as a neighbor. But the editorial has nothing to do with that at all.

The editorial is about Worcester. It makes some of the same points that I would about competition between similar cities struggling with similar problems and how Worcester does have some advantages but that Springfield is making enormous headway right now and, if we keep moving forward and don’t rest on our laurels, we can continue to compete. I might have added a few more words about this not necessarily being a zero sum game, but that to should be put aside as we continue down this rabbit hole.

What was the motivation, the concept, the idea, the development which spurred the Editorial Board to write their Knute Rockne speech? Was it news of Worcester’s expanding innovation center, more expansion in the canal district, another local entrepreneur expanding his or her business, yet another market rate housing development coming to the downtown? Nope. I had seen something in banner headlines earlier in the day but couldn’t bring myself to read the article; I’m not a masochist. I can be a bit shallow when it comes to my jealousy; it takes me a while to accept when perceived rivals leap ahead of my community.

Be patient, we’re almost there.

Earlier in the day my wife had asked me about this same Worcester development…it’s called “Sky…something or other” and she had asked me if it was some sort of airwalk or something and I said (remember, I didn’t read the article): “No, it’s some big development, I think it’s a big retail/residential thing. No one is building airwalks anymore. That’s stupid.” But as I read the editorial I clicked on the link and it took me to this:


Yup. It’s an airwalk. An airwalk which, to their credit, the city is only moving forward with because they are being forced to do so because some moron, I assume, promised the developer of a new hotel, obviously another idiot, that the city would do it more than a decade ago. An airwalk. To quote William Whyte: 
 “They have not worked very well. When you take a street away from street level you take away what makes it work. Remove the intricate mixture of people, the pedestrian bustle, the shops, and the traffic, and what you are left with is a corridor. It can be…very bleak…”
This is what the intersection looks like now:


Are these perfectly crafted pedestrian corridors? No, they are not. But way short of $10,000,000 the city could find a way to improve these crossings for pedestrians all the while NOT reverting to the oldestest or worstestest of 60’s and 70’s era gimmicks for revitalizing a downtown.

Here at home we have are own problems. Our local deep thinkers, with all the great things happening in Worcester, find out about the stupidest thing Worcester has done in a generation, and instead of giving us an inspirational exclamation akin to: “They’re  digging in the wrong place!” 


They tell us to keep our heads up because, in spite of this genius move, we can still get to the Well of Souls before our competition! It’s like your best friend sees the chief rival for your promotion shooting heroin in the bathroom and tells you that you still might have a shot at landing the position if you just nail the interview. 

I can’t believe that Worcester only argued that they shouldn’t be made to build the pedestrian bridge because they don’t have the money; they should have gone with the “Your Honor, I know my predecessor said I’d hit myself in the face with a hammer, but…” defense.

There is one last, divinely inspired exclamation point on this whole thing. Somewhere, at the Republican, at Masslive, someone chose a photograph to symbolize Springfield’s readiness to compete in this, the dawning era of the new city! And what photo did they choose? Is it the new Innovation Center? The Maker Space? Silverbrick Lofts? The Park Street Lofts? Some part of the new MGM complex? I know, the newly re-opened Union Station? Well, sort of. They chose this picture:

Yes. It’s a parking garage. Parking. The key to any urban resurgence! Build for the car, prioritize the car, make room for the car: People love it when you do that! I mean, weren’t the 60’s great for cities? What could go wrong?

Read it for the Articles

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Read these two articles (one and two)and peruse this list of car friendly cities. Take a moment or two. Synthesize the information. I start, if I’m being honest, with a tremendous, overwhelming feeling of schadenfreude lightly dusted with some righteous indignation and just a hint of despair. 

Changes in mortality by region due to climate change:


In the depths of the last recession people were obligated by circumstances to stay where they were, drive less, and live in cities. As the worst days of the last economic downturn recede in the collective memory people have resumed the behavior of business as usual. It’s not quite hypocritical of me to chide these people for their preferences, but I should acknowledge that my ability to live as I have lived so inexpensively over the three decades of my adulthood is due to the distaste people have for the environment that I prefer: If people had fled the South and Southwest en masse to live in walkable urban environments in the North and Northeast of the United States then my whole lifestyle model would have gone down the drain.

I’ve read that people feel a rush of endorphins, a kind of pure pleasure, when they reject facts which run contrary to their previously held beliefs; I know I’ve felt it…which of course means I’ve done it. As an evolutionary artifact then, it’s hard not to conclude that it has, paradoxically, some survival value for individuals; perhaps in the same way “faith” in a shaman’s healing ability engaging the placebo effect gave evidence free belief a survival advantage over skepticism in the days before scientific medicine. 

More people move to greater Phoenix in a day than move to Springfield in a year. Phoenix. 119 degree, no water Phoenix. It’s a great place to drive, not that driving is a bad thing…except for that it’s all the bad things: It spreads people out, makes our air unbreathable, it kills us directly and then indirectly, it makes the young, the old, the blind, the poor, many of the disabled, and the mentally impaired prisoners in their environments and even more dependent than they would otherwise be and it does all of this without, in the end, adding to our quality of life. And people not only want to move to places where driving is easier, they are willing to destroy the places they already live in order to make them more amenable to the automobile.


The analogy of cigarette smoking comes to mind. People get some kind of immediate gratification from doing it, but it costs them enormous sums of money, they know that it shortens their lives and makes what lives they do have worse. People move to the south where it’s hot and getting hotter to engage in a lifestyle that makes all the bad things worse instead of staying put, living in places where the costly behaviors of others can potentially improve your quality and length of life, live in ways that lessen your negative impact on the environment, and take advantage of the current potential undervaluation of those places in the short run as cheap to get into and in the long run as places with increasing relative value.

I’m not surprised by any of this. I’m convinced that we’ll change our behaviors precisely at the moment when we have no other choice but to change. When Phoenix and the Deep South literally become unlivable, people will stop living there, but not before. When people are forced to walk instead of drive they’ll choose to walk and not drive. My dad stopped smoking when he died; he was one of those guys who puffed on cigarettes with the oxygen tube wrapped around his head: “I smoked over Germany on a B-24 with an oxygen mask on”. To his credit, he never set fire to himself!

I enjoy walking, not having air conditioning, setting my thermostat to 60 in the winter, growing my own food, harvesting my own rain water…and feeling smug about it. If those things were destroying society and at the same time driving me to live in a place with a bleak climatological future I’m pretty sure I’d still do them and live “there”. How hard is it to not read The Atlantic and not believe in climate change?

Shocking!

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I understand that the overall concept for the new Union Station includes it being a “park n’ ride” hub for people working in Hartford, New Haven, or metro NYC . Very few may use it for daily commutes, but it may prove useful for the once or twice per week commuter and as such parking is a necessity. That said, that the brand new multi deck parking garage is completely empty is not at all surprising given that commuter trains won’t be running until January AND THERE IS ALREADY TOO MUCH PARKING downtown.

I happened to be in a downtown office tower earlier this summer and snapped this photo between 10-11 am:


Looks like there are a few spaces available.

We need to get beyond this obsession with parking. I’ve lived downtown for most of the last 30 years, most of that time with a car but without any dedicated parking. Maybe 8 times a year I have to park a block further from my house than usual; it’s still not as far as I had to walk JUST TODAY to renew my license at the RMV.

Most of the time my wife and I walk to our favorite restaurant: Panjabi Tadka. From the tables by the window we can see the new, nearly empty garage. Sometimes we do drive, but in the years we’ve spent going there we’ve never once had trouble finding a spot on Gridiron Street, on Lyman Street, or right in front on Main Street. 


Parking in the north blocks is not a problem. I’d know if it were. Honestly. Ain’t nothing getting between me, chat papri, and their lamb boti kebab masala!

The Hills Are Alive (’cause the cities subsidize them)

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I took a ride through Berkshire, Litchfield, and Putnam counties in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York, respectively, on the way to a family get together last weekend. As it was a holiday, we decided to avoid the interstates. The trip was breathtakingly beautiful, but more importantly, it shed light on some of the problems people are having when it comes to understanding our predicaments in the United States.

Leaving downtown Springfield, crossing the South End Bridge and heading toward Granville the transition from the apparently struggling, impoverished, and dirty city to the immaculate, green, and prosperous outlands is bewitching and bewildering. As my mind processed things I had read, heard, written, and thought, and my eyes viewed home after home after home; most post war in design, others, old farm houses, I began to notice what was missing: productivity. Apart from the all important yet all too few in number agricultural concerns there were no places of employ.

(Some suburban homes on our route in rural western mass)

My family had spent a day at a wonderful community fair in Granville a couple of years ago. What bones remained of the town’s former industrial past were used as backdrop for the food stands and carnival games, but there was nothing left in use. Recently the town’s last school closed and now the few dozen school age kids which remain will need to make daily round trips to Southwick by bus 180 times a year. Beyond Granville there is town after town after town, with the occasional farm or orchard, made up mostly of single family home after single family home, almost all painfully picturesque and giving off an air of everything from financial stability to downright affluence.

And therein lies the problem. Springfield, Chicopee, Holyoke and the other cities in the valley (Read Hartford, Bristol, and New Britain if coming from Connecticut, or Poughkeepsie, Albany, and Troy if coming from New York State) all appear much grittier, more uneven, and less prosperous than these rural hinterlands: but the appearance is deceptive and at that, insidiously so. The wealth one sees in the countryside resides there, but it is not created there. These residences are not the producers of wealth but the consumers thereof; they are not assets, they are liabilities.

Just as Hadrian’s Tivoli did not bring prosperity to Rome, but rather extracted it to consume on high living, most of these mini oases rely on productivity extracted from dirtier, grittier, less well manicured much more productive places. This, as the allusion to Tivoli implies, is not a recent phenomenon; of course the most prosperous…read “the most successful at wrangling wealth out of whatever process” as Caesar in Rome…would want to take their excess and consume it in more bucolic and peaceful places than the grinding metropolis. 

The problem is that our Tivolis have expanded beyond the capacity of our industrial and commercial processes to produce the excess necessary to maintain their existence. That is why $7 million for a tiny stretch of road that services 80 cars a day in a beautiful, if unproductive, hill town creates some severe cognitive dissonance. The area it winds through appears so much more prosperous, more well kept, more worthy of subsidy, than the litter strewn streets with the drug addled poor wandering aimlessly down them in the distant cities. But those streets are assets. Those cities provide the inexpensive housing and subsistence goods for the moiling poor who can survive on the meager wages they receive because their footprint is so small and they nearly cohabitate with the commercial and industrial enterprises which produce.

So the appearance deceives: Wealth implies productivity and productivity should be rewarded. Poverty implies indolence and indolence should be punished. For that reason the right decision seems to be to spare no expense on the infrastructure of the exurbs, but let the sidewalks of the cities dwindle into dust. It is an erroneous conclusion.

The White Whale

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Call me gentrifier. I don’t reject the appellation, but depending upon the route I take in describing myself the label could seem a bit odd: I have purchased an old townhouse near the center of the city which could have easily become 3 or even 4 apartments and converted it from an office/apartment combination back into a single family home; I earn 6x the median family income for the neighborhood and my wife and I together earn easily 9x that income; we have season tickets to the symphony; we eat at the expensive legacy restaurants of the downtown and the new ethnic ones too; we’re White. The city is putting a tremendous amount of time and effort, and attempting to leverage state, federal, and private dollars, to get more people like us to move here.

On the other hand: If I were to cross the street and walk one mile to the south I’d arrive at the hospital where I was born; on the way I’d pass 100 yards or so from the high school I attended and from which I graduated. The city I was born into was over 80% White and comfortably middle to working class. Of the handful of Black and Hispanic friends I have on this block, not one was born in Springfield or even New England, and yet all 5 of the White people I know were. 

I realize that this particular circumstance is not at all the one universally being called gentrification, but there are some interesting insights to be gained by looking closely at this particular circumstance. As I was reading Richard Florida’s New Urban Crisis the words of Spike Lee regarding the gentrification of Brooklyn leapt off the page at me:

He’s angry because the neighborhood has changed, and I understand it. But I’ve experienced something somewhat similar but I can’t get mad; if I do it can easily be interpreted as racist. I DON’T “hate” or even dislike what’s taken the place of what used to be in the neighborhood where I grew up though, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t miss what it replaced. 

To invert Mr Lee’s rant a bit as well; THIS city hasn’t STOPPED picking up the trash in Forest Park (my old neighborhood), the city HAS invested millions and millions of dollars to modernize the schools that I and my mostly White middle class counterparts attended in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s; only one of the four buildings I attended as a student in the Springfield Public Schools was even built in the 20th Century. Conversely, of the three my daughters attended from the poorer more central part of the city we’ve lived in now for 30 years, where nearly all of their classmates were poor students of color, all 3 buildings are new or have been completely renovated top to bottom in the last 15 years. The parks which my parents’ “Greatest Generation” left to rot for us have been renewed, restored, and recreated in the last 30 years to a level we never could have imagined in 1975.

So where is the pride of place? Where is the appreciation for the struggling city that’s put more investment into its poor neighborhoods as resources have dwindled than it ever did when resources were abundant? 

Now we get to an interesting conundrum in this discussion surrounding the concern over some potential future usurpation of the current residents of the city by the White middle class; I have NEVER met a Black person or a Hispanic person in my neighborhood who expressed any desire to stay here. Not one. Forget the brand new schools, the free museums, the abundant and inexpensive transit, every single Puerto Rican I meet wants to leave this neighborhood, if not the city, as soon as they possibly can. I wouldn’t make the claim that there are no people of color who want to stay here, and I can even understand the reasons for these desires to leave, but it makes fretting over their dislocation a little strange, doesn’t it?

Again, my city, this neighborhood, the neighborhood I grew up in, they’ve all been completely transformed not just in my lifetime, but in the last 30 years. Again, I not only don’t hate what the city has become, I’ve embraced it and become an active part of it. But it has displaced a culture which preceded it, and I can and do miss that as well. Wanting to see what remnants of that culture remain continue to thrive is no more or less understandable than Spike Lee wanting to see the Black culture he grew up with in Brooklyn persist. 

Springfield is no more at fault for the structural racism in our society than it is for the general trajectory of newcomers to a culture; yes, Puerto Ricans are NOT immigrants, but most of the Boriquas who move to Springfield do so as poor people looking for new opportunities. The city needs to become, once again, a truly diverse city where the poor, the middle class, and even the rich ALL live and not just a ghetto for the poor. Deep down in my leftist core I would love to see a classless society, but that’s not happening anytime soon; any city which hopes to survive and thrive must be the home of the workers, the managers, and the owners. The middle class and even the rich moving BACK into the parts of the city they abandoned in some cases a century ago should be no more surprising than it is necessary. Resources can only be used if they exist. A city cannot be preserved in amber: buildings, schools, parks, roadways and sidewalks, water mains and sewer pipes begin the inevitable process of decay the very moment they are constructed. Having only a population which, due to the realities of our society, does not have the resources to maintain, at the very least, its infrastructure makes the only possible future outcome annihilation.

There are studies that show that displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods occurs at the same or even at a lesser pace than in poor ones. The changes brought by gentrification may make the current residents more likely to want to stay, a richer neighborhood in some sense means a better neighborhood, and yet it may make it more difficult for them to do so: Let’s be honest, the poor may always be with “us”, but the rich do go out of their way to see to it that they are with “them” as infrequently as possible. Demanding that the city somehow reinvent itself while at the same time making the contradictory demand that it not change, however, is ridiculous. 

One of the benefits of the ridiculous patterns of development we’ve adopted in the last 75 years, however, is that there is plenty of vacant, un-utilized, and under-utilized space in places which are fully elaborated infrastructurally. We can easily invite many of our relatively well-to-do neighbors to come join us in Springfield without displacing a single soul…not that I believe in souls…but that is a topic for another day and another blog.

Congress for the New Springfield

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Like the really bad song you can’t stop singing I have to give some credit to a fairly corny and terribly lame story I heard told perhaps 40 years ago but which always springs to mind whenever prevention and remediation are discussed. It had something to do with a mountain town that had a windy road and cars were constantly careening off the edge into the valley down below and the townsfolk were debating whether to install a guardrail on the road or to station an ambulance in the valley. Of course, prevention won out and a fence was installed on the road.

(Photos of the Dragonboat Festival on the riverfront)

The metaphor is apt when I contemplate how badly we need to stop fighting battles against people who want to see Springfield experience fiscal stability and economic health but who remain ignorant regarding the perils and pitfalls of auto-oriented development. Knowing that we need some combination of locally focused Congress for the New Urbanism and/or a local chapter of Strong Towns I was elated to attend the first meeting of a nascent Western New England chapter of the CNU.
(Exterior doors of city hall)

In attendance were a remarkable combination of individuals: There were people who clearly had no idea regarding what the CNU was, did, or stood for; and there were others who could quote Andrés Duany chapter and verse. The main presenter was brought into the New Urbanism at the same time and by the same means which I had been, which is to say James Howard Kunstler’s seminal work The Geography of Nowhere. As a Vermonter he brought a nuance which differed from most of the presentations I’ve watched from the annual meetings in some ways which clearly align his concerns with the issues we are addressing here, but there were other differences, primarily relating to the urban/rural divide which clearly separate his focus from what we experience in Springfield.

(Dr Seuss parade)

If the CNU, as a national and even international organization, can overcome the fact that its members come from such different places who puzzle over such differing problems then I am sure that we in Western New England can gain from working together despite our varied challenges. I recall that a decade and a half ago I mentioned the CNU to a planner  employed by the City of Springfield and she could not have been less impressed; in her mind New Urbanism was only about green field development. I was shocked at her initial impression, no doubt connected to reality in the sense that as a nascent idea New Urbanism was implemented in places very different from stagnant and stodgy New England. New Urbanism did involve whole communities being developed from scratch, but it was a misunderstanding of New Urbanist principles to think that there was no interest in protecting the existing healthy fabric of pre-war American cities and towns. 

(Quadrangle tree lighting)

Which brings us to what it can do for us here and now: In two conversations just prior to the introductory presentation I had remarkably disparate experiences: one was with a realtor who lived within a few blocks of me and who was overseeing the lease or sale of a property I pass by every day but had no idea how harmful surface parking was to center cities; the other was with a cycling centered professional who had actually attended a national CNU meeting. Imagine creating awareness on the part of the ground troops, as it were, of real estate sales, even to a minimal degree, of some of the basic ideas of good urbanism, and then combining that with bringing together educated specialists with interested amateurs (like me) and generalists; having a few more people in the room, wherever that room is and whether the topic is transportation, development, architecture, or parks, who are aware of the knowledge base New Urbanists have “rescued from the dumpster” of history. It could keep us from having to fight battle after battle after designs have been sketched out and opinions, however ignorant, have been formed.

(A well known local celebrity with ‘Boomer, the T-Birds’ mascot)

These are not bad people, they just don’t know any better. Their experiences over the last 20, 30, 40 years have trained them to think that auto oriented stroad development is the way to go because it did make them money in the short run. The broader picture that the whole exercise has impoverished the nation and that the apparent prosperity was an illusion is not obvious without stepping back and looking at larger trends. I’ve said before, but it is important to remember, many people right here in Springfield did many of the “right things” 40 years ago; but they didn’t work. Creating, and restoring, housing in the center of the city, even of the highest quality, mostly failed and became problem areas populated almost exclusively by the poor. Storefronts on Main Street were cleaned up, opened up, and renovated…only to be boarded up or to become home to 2nd storey uses like dental and insurance offices. Meanwhile the strip malls and big box stores in the suburbs were filled with the contents of traditional neighborhood retail, even if that was with chain store after chain store instead of locally owned shops.

(An empty parking deck at 10 am on a weekday in the downtown)

Bad ideas sometimes give positive short term results: People lost weight with Fen-Phen; Lyle Alzedo became all pro with steroids; Some people made big money on Dutch tulips and on pets.com…for a while. Educating people to see that “parking” is not “the problem”, that density is not inherently bad, that design matters, that mixed use creates dynamism, these are the ideas which, once internalized will tend to make every new development improve our community instead of constantly moving two steps forward, but one step back.

Cognitive Dissonance 

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I’m suffering from a bit of cognitive dissonance as I write these words; my generally optimistic perspective and “rose colored glasses” view of my hometown contrasted with my apocalyptic outlook for the American Empire and industrial society. Apart from one obvious exception I see in Springfield a community moving in the right direction and making smart choices about where to invest and how, but doing so as part of a nation which is foundering fiscally, financially, and philosophically.

Today one local television station’s top 4 stories are all connected to the grand re-opening of Union Station after more than 4 decades:

Passenger rail connected improvements have been made from Springfield south to New Haven, and from Springfield north to Greenfield. Just one engine in service with the necessary number of cars circulating from Greenfield to Springfield daily could connect the Valley in ways we’ve literally never experienced before. In January, 12 trains a day will carry passengers from our new Union Station to New Haven, connecting it to the Metro North commuter line into New York City. A regional rail study recommends connecting Boston to Montreal with daily train service; doing so would require improvements to a small portion of the Springfield to Boston line which would not only make Union Station the connecting point for the trip to Montreal, but would also facilitate more frequent east-west service to Boston, an idea that many are seeking to have studied in depth.

For me the reopening of Union Station means that anyone arriving by “Metro North-North”, Amtrak, Peter Pan, or Greyhound to Springfield will be able to connect to the PVTA G-5 and be dropped off within 20′ of my front steps if the 10 minute walk is too much:

Despite my earlier doubts and disappointment over the location and design of the parking structure, I am now convinced that the Lyman Street entrance is not only, as I suggested, the ideal pedestrian access point to the station, but that it would have been even if the Main Street frontage had been designed by Andrés Duany himself.

Most people will exit the station and find themselves in one of the most walkable, dynamic, and interesting neighborhoods in the city with Develop Springfield and Mass Development working together with others on the Transformative Development Initiative district and its new restaurants, cafes, businesses, and non profits centered around one of the city’s most important public spaces. 

If the enormous MGM development were not rising a few blocks to the south then this combination of intermodal transportation and pedestrian centered development would be the most singularly important event in the city in the last quarter century.

Here in Massachusetts I hope we can avoid the temptation to take whatever federal money might be offered for expanding or elaborating even more ridiculously our auto centered transportation system. In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene the federal government paid $7 million to repair a tiny stretch of road in a Massachusetts town with fewer than one thousand residents. That’s a level of subsidy that would fund the entire budget of the City of Springfield for 20 years (including road repairs).There’s talk of creating a new exit on the Mass Turnpike for the “Hill Towns” between Westfield and Lee; doing so would only encourage the destruction of more agricultural land for exurban residential development that would not only never pay back the initial investment but furthermore, would continue to burden the various towns, the state, and the nation for decades with more people in places that simply don’t function in ways that add up to a prosperous or resilient society.

Preserving Urbanism

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I’ve already written a handful of pieces on historic preservation. In my earliest essay bearing directly on the topic I make the argument that economic vitality is the only guarantor of long term historic preservation. In retrospect, and after reading some thoughtful arguments regarding the relationship of growth and historic preservation, I must admit that my argument is only valid for places like Springfield where economic decline and abandonment are the primary drivers of destruction and demolition; in places like New York City or Portland, Oregon it is precisely economic vitality which drives demolition.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that two places experiencing such different, and in many cases, opposing realities would see such widely different impacts from historic preservation. The first issue which leaps from the page is the claim, no doubt true, that “historic preservation is an obstacle to increasing density in the city”. In Springfield the exact opposite is true: historic preservation is a tool for maintaining density. Apart from the MGM development I cannot think of a single proposal brought before the local historical commission on the demolition of an historic property, whether during the time I have been a member or during the years I spent as an observer, which didn’t propose a decrease in density. 

Every proposal has been for “open space”:


Parking:


Or a change from pedestrian oriented to auto oriented development:


Here, historic preservation is always the defender of density.

The claim is made that studies demonstrate an impact between governmental oversight and racial and economic division. In a place where the White middle class is shrinking, like Springfield, historic districts represent islands of true diversity. All of the city’s historic districts are located either at the core of the city or in the inner ring surrounding it. My district is populated overwhelmingly by the poor and racial minorities, but the White middle class population is much greater than in similar neighborhoods not given that denomination. The same is true for every district in the city; true diversity is much greater within than without. The Whitest of the White neighborhoods are not historic districts, and the most overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods are also not historic districts.

It seems that nearly everyone agrees that some historic preservation for the sake of historic preservation is necessary; so far so good. But after that, arguments which are at their core debates regarding values and aesthetics take over. 

Sometime after the 1930’s this gas station in the South End was torn down:


Now the nearest gas station looks like this:


The newer one can service more cars at once and provides space for convenience shopping. For me, now that I know what once existed a few blocks from my home for providing people with petrol, I can’t imagine doing so at the current one without weeping.

Looking through those same photos I saw that this parking lot behind my house:


Was once this:


Basically a larger and higher quality version of my own home:

When we hear the expression “the ends justify the means” most often we shudder. It brings to mind historical analogies of omelettes and broken eggs. From an urbanist perspective, from a “Strong Towns” perspective, historic preservation is the best tool we have for improving the city in this place and at this time. In other places, and perhaps here at sometime in the future it will become an obstacle to “better outcomes”. 

In the same way that I argued that in the debate over “chaotic and smart” versus “orderly but stupid” that the only real goal should be smart and that whether one used orderly or chaotic means to get to that end was of no particular importance, I would argue that, armed with the knowledge that we have regarding the outcomes which are most beneficial to a community in terms of long term prosperity, we should use arguments for historic preservation to bolster other arguments for the subjective goal of “better urbanism”; like, for example, not tearing down this historic building at the most important intersection of the city for a surface parking lot:



Years ago now I supported, along with the other members of the historical commission, the demolition of this historic school:



To build this parking structure:

To facilitate the development of all this:


I weighed the necessity, value, and location of the parking relative to the value, necessity and location of the development it was to facilitate while taking into account the historic value and condition of the historic structure and found that the destruction of the school was acceptable. It was a value judgement. Enough members of the board agreed to allow the plan to move forward with our support. 

In other cases homes which would have been razed for parking or development have instead been moved to vacant lots nearby because of the intervention of the historical commission. 

It may be that in a high growth environment that historic preservation can only be a drag on progress, but I think the issue may have almost as much to do with process as with circumstances. Here, unlike the circumstances mentioned in Joe Cortwright’s piece on Portland, the creation of a local historic district requires a very public and political process including the support of the city council. Our commission is made up of at least two representatives of preservationist groups, but there are also designated spaces for architects and realtors, as well as three open seats for any city resident the mayor views as qualified. Once their two year terms expire any commissioner can be removed by the mayor at will and replaced by a new nominee who must go through a city council approval process.

The balance between politics and preservation means that no one is ever 100% satisfied with the outcomes. It’s a messy and imperfect process. I’ve voted, many times now, for things I utterly detested because it was what clearly needed to be done. On the other hand I know that we have nudged neighborhoods in the right direction, provided an outlet for democratic action, and saved structures vital to the city’s long term viability.

Without it my city would be worse off. If the process isn’t doing that for your community, try changing the process.

The Chicken Building

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The concept of the invisible bike rider has been addressed in multiple venues over the past few months and it has opened my eyes to not just a larger reality but also to some of my own biases. Yesterday as I strolled past Court Square I saw a resplendent cyclist with the bright yellow garb of the commuter cyclist, aerodynamic helmet on top and thousand dollar bike beneath him, whooshing by just as an invisible bike rider, dressed in some cargo shorts and a tank top (no helmet to be seen) was placing his junk bike on the rack of a southbound PVTA bus. I saw a dozen or more people on bikes in the next hour, not one was wearing any combination of Lycra or a helmet. 

In the same way our current conversation on cycling infrastructure isn’t really meant for most of the people in the city who ride bikes, I’ve noticed that most of the conversation around the retail implosion of recent years doesn’t mention stores of the kind which are most prevalent in my neighborhood: invisible retail if you will. These stores sell the wrong items, at the wrong price point, and, most importantly, cater to the wrong people: the people who actually live here!


The point has been pounded into me by the fact that part of the obsession with the razing of the Shean Block clearly has as an undercurrent the offense that its primary tenant, Crown Fried Chicken, commits every minute of every day of its existence: it reminds the besuited and yet benighted blue bloods of the business community that their city is made up partly of poor people of color. Leaving aside that on inclement Thursday afternoons, when dining with us downtown was inconvenient for my aging mother her most common food request for her youngest son’s delivery service was fried chicken, it is the case that Crown Fried Chicken is one of the few food establishments downtown that one can count on being open almost anytime one is hungry.

I have experienced, and I have on good authority from insiders, that the Shean Block is most often referred to as the chicken building or the fried chicken building by the developer and his minions. When I tried to discuss the topic with the head of economic development and the local MGM chief they both responded to my query about the Shean Block with the clarifying question: “The Fried Chicken Building?” It’s pretty clear that doing so makes contemplating its elimination more palatable and provides subconscious reinforcement for the rightness of any decision which will remove this eyesore from its position of prominence.

I don’t think the highest, best, or most likely use of that building will be a low end fried chicken place once it begins serving as the primary connecting point between a billion dollar resort casino and the downtown of one of New England’s largest cities, but I think the market ought to determine that, and not the misguided notion that removing the markers of poverty will eliminate the poor. We shouldn’t just allow the city to be the best city it can be for the people who actually live here, we should do our best to ensure that that is the case. Seeing dollar stores, bodegas, check cashing places, and downscale pizza shops as blight because one would rather see coffee shops, bistros, banks, and bookstores doesn’t change the fact that those places are where they are because they serve a purpose for the people who walk and bike past them… though not so much for the people who drive past…with their doors locked and their windows up.

In the specific case of fried chicken it turns out that it is becoming retro chic! I can’t imagine that people overall ever really stopped liking fried chicken; one of local hockey’s most popular promotions involved fried chicken: “When the Indians get brave, you get chicken!” (“And a roll!”) 

I’ve been told by people in the know that demand for retail just outside the casino is enormous. Filling the space currently occupied by Crown Fried Chicken, a pawn shop, a convenience store, the nail place, and the second hand clothing boutique will not be hard, but I hope every single one reopens nearby. Their continued presence implies solid demand for the goods and services they provide for the people who already live, work, and ride their crappy bikes helmet-less right here in The City of Homes.