Category Archives: Rational Urbanism

I care deeply about ideas, concepts, and philosophies. I enjoy discussing things in abstract and perhaps even Platonic ways. But in the end I am a philosophical materialist in the sense that I view things as bound up with and constrained by reality; the ability to dream it does not confer the ability to do it. 

In sending my essay on the differences between a baseball stadium in Georgia and a casino in Springfield I was hoping to illicit from readers as well as from those who had written about the baseball stadium their thoughts on the differences between the two. Most of the readers gave their thoughts on a project that wasn’t; complaining about the governmental expenditures, and likely cost overruns, of a privately funded project which has already put millions into government coffers and which has committed to hundreds of millions more. 

What a great example of what I was trying to demonstrate; the knee jerk response which completely misses the point:

“Here’s that $50 I owe you”

“No, I’m not lending you any more money”

I read with interest the opinion of one reader who shared his experience with a casino in Windsor, Ontario. He talked about how the actual downtown and the casino were effectively distinct entities and how they seemed to have very little impact one upon the other. Here is a GoogleMaps image of what seems to be the pedestrian entrance to the property:

This is the face the casino presents to the street:

Does anyone see any difference between that and, say, this?

I do. Does it guarantee that the interface will work? No. Is there a risk that the quality of the MGM development will simply wipe out a lot of locally owned establishments? Yes, there is. Because, forgive my frankness, we suck. The customer service in Springfield often puts the “M” in mediocrity. There are exceptions: Red Rose, Panjabi Tadka, Frigo’s, the Student Prince; but I’ve had so many embarrassing experiences with visitors I’ve lost count. What kinds of experiences? Restaurants simply closed when their schedules say they’re open (too many times to recall), hostesses who ignore you until you give up and leave, and kitchens closing early just to name some restaurant related greatest hits. I love the place, but in terms of customer service, Springfield has a face only a mother could love. Our local enterprises will need to raise their game.

But I digress. 

The most interesting insight in response to my essay, apart from the one’s which echoed my ideas, was from the editor at Strong Towns who expressed a few concerns. One was the ceding of so much importance to one private entity, and another regarding the opportunity cost of the project; if we hadn’t built it, what would have come?

I’d like to address the last one first as I anticipated this question being asked years ago and wrote this blogpost: If they don’t build it, what will come? If you’d rather not click the link I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version: if past experience is any guide it would have become, in Strong Towns parlance, Taco John’s. Might some private developers, inspired by the Millenialls’ urge to live downtown and the Baby Boomer trend toward urbane downsizing have built a handful of new, small scale, walkable buildings which would come together to create the critical mass necessary for the tornado ravaged South End to re-emerge, LIKE A PHOENIX FROM ITS ASHES?!?!?! 

No. That’s ridiculous. That wasn’t going to happen, Jiminy Cricket. No amount of clapping was bringing Tinker Bell back to life, Peter Pan. Hell,the process of destroying walkability in the South End continues apace despite the MGM project!

On the other question, allow me to recount an experience which I find analogous. While working with the city’s tree warden we were discussing the placement of trees along a tree belt on Union Street. The funds for said trees from the state were only available for Union Street, but because utilities on Union Street had been moved from the street to the tree belt the tree warden felt it irresponsible to plant them there given that someday they might be damaged due to repairs the utilities might need. 

“So. We aren’t going to plant the trees we have, which we can’t plant anywhere else, because, if we do, they might get damaged someday…and then Union Street won’t have any trees…so we won’t plant them at all and then there’s no risk of them being damaged.”

MGM is going to dominate the entertainment side of things downtown, and if the project fails it will have a huge detrimental impact…roughly taking us back to the status quo ante. “Oh, no, if the project fails we’ll be back right where we started!” Remember, MGM is taking over the management of the Mass Mutual Center, Symphony Hall, and CityStage, but they didn’t build them. They’ve been there…each one struggling to survive, for decades. If their movie theaters close we’ll be back to the place we are today: a downtown without a movie theater. Ditto the bowling alley and the skating rink.

In another point made by the editor, but easily dismissed, he questions the “adaptability” of the “mega project”. If, however, he were to look at the actual design he would see that it has been built to be disaggregated: the hotel, movie theaters, retail spaces, restaurants, office spaces, and workshop areas are no more or less inseparable than any other urban block. At some point it looks as though my townhouse and the one next door were connected by a passage of some sort: 

Mega Project! Then the passageway was bricked up: incremental desegregation(?)! 

Doors and walls. We could do this.

The silence regarding the ACTUAL QUESTIONS is deafening: If secretive public financing of infrastructurally dubious auto oriented suburban mega projects is bad, does it follow that privately funded, infrastructurally sound walkable urban mega projects are also bad? If you think so, make your f-ing case!!!!!!!! 

I’m tired of this ideologically rigid pseudo-libertarian b.s.. I’ll take a stand, I’ll tell you what I think: Development which supports, enhances, or creates walkable environments which encourage less car dependency and smaller carbon footprints is good whether done by ma and pa developers to make Jesus smile, or whether done by horrible evil corporations in service to Satan in order to enslave all mankind…muuuuaaaahhahaha.

The recent Strong Towns’ series on Cobb County, Georgia touched upon many of the issues endemic to the American Post War development pattern and the Growth Ponzi Scheme, but the financing of a new stadium for the Atlanta Braves was mentioned repeatedly as emblematic and symptomatic of the mistakes communities fall into as they chase growth while falling further and further into the death spiral of debt described as the norm for the 3rd generation of suburban growth in the Curbside Chat.

I want to make some comparisons between the Sun Trust Park development and my own home town’s “Hail Mary, MegaProject, Silver Bullet”: the new MGM Springfield resort casino. My goal is to elicit responses from readers regarding these comparisons so as to flesh out whether, in truth, the general thumbs down for Mega Projects actually comes from the qualities, characteristics, and criticisms which in the first case the development fosters, or if the actual process is the reverse; there is an instinctual aversion to Silver Bullet projects and the rationales follow. I say that because in every instance the process, the funding, the fiscal impact, the location, the use of infrastructure, and the impacts on various segments of the community are reversed when comparing these two projects.

The Braves stadium process was, according to the posts on Strong Towns, rapid, undemocratic, and even secretive. The process for selecting a location and a developer for a casino in the western region of Massachusetts was first written, voted on, and approved by both houses of the Massachusetts legislature and signed by the governor. The mayor of Springfield had to opt in to the process on behalf of his constituents, the negotiated plan had to be approved by local voters, then the entire process was subject to an up or down statewide referendum.

Where the Atlanta Braves required that county government bond for hundreds of millions of dollars to build their stadium, MGM has committed, per the terms of its license, to pay to the city, surrounding cities and towns, and the state tens of millions of dollars yearly after having funded the construction of the entire $960 million dollar project privately.

While Sun Trust stadium was built in a suburban location and required not just new infrastructure, but infrastructure for its exclusive use paid for by Cobb County, MGM built its resort in the urban core of the region which had dozens of buildings lost to or damaged by an F-4 tornado just a few years earlier; there was infrastructure in the ground and underdeveloped land all around and what improvements, modernizations, and expansions were needed were funded by MGM and included upgrades to the surrounding area. MGM has also funded all new sidewalks and bicycle infrastructure throughout the downtown.

The debt burden of the new baseball park in Cobb County was blamed in part for the underfunding and/closure of parks and libraries, for cutbacks in police, and for a lack of support for public transit. MGM has taken over the maintenance of one existing park and, in partnership with the city, paid for improvements to two others. MGM is footing the bill for a free downtown “Loop” shuttle connecting to the city’s brand new intermodal transit station as well as committing a half a million dollars a year to the operations of Union Station. The city is using funds from MGM to expand police presence downtown and in the South End including two new substations and two 24 hour kiosks. 

Not much was made of the overall design of Sun Trust Park in the series, but it is clear that the stadium does very little to connect to (or perhaps to create!) nearby neighborhoods. Conversely the MGM plan not only was designed to connect to all of the surrounding areas: the South End, Main Street, Court Square; by taking over the management of the Mass Mutual Center arena, Symphony Hall, and CityStage MGM formally expands its presence throughout the downtown. One writer urges Cobb County to see the potential of Marietta to create and expand a traditional, walkable area which could give Cobb County its own identity rather than just being a suburb of Atlanta. By New England standards Western Massachusetts has always been too far from either New York City or Boston to be considered a suburb of either; for good or for ill we have always had a separate identity, but having at the heart of the region an urban core which people of the entire region would embrace as a center was only a reality of yesteryear…until now.

To conclude, please allow me an analogy. If a certain teenager asks mom and dad for permission to attend a party and they reply: “No. We don’t want you at Billy’s house, we don’t think he’s a very good influence on you.” And the teen responds that not only is the party not at Billy’s house, but Billy isn’t invited and the parents then come up with a different reason to withhold permission…then it was never really about Billy. Maybe they’re still justified in their decision, but the Billy thing was just cover. 

MGM is a Silver Bullet project if ever there was one, but I find it hard to find a single criticism of the Cobb County example which applies. Are all corporate enterprises from Trader Joe’s to Walmart extractive? Of course they are. Whether it’s Two Buck Chuck or Salad Shooters the point is to get the consumer’s money into the hand of investors while spending as little as possible in the local community to do so. Owners of Major League Baseball franchises and shareholders of MGM are no different. Is Strong Towns swearing off the corporate model entirely? We’ve got a handful headquartered here trying to extract as much as possible from other communities, it’d be pretty painful if we “unilaterally disarmed” if you take my meaning.

To sum up, two Mega Projects: The first done in secret, paid for by public money, in the suburbs, requiring new infrastructure, and having a negative impact on quality of life services. The other the result of a public process, privately funded, within the urban core, obligated to make payments to local government, renovating but not expanding the coverage of the infrastructure network, and funding quality of life services. Do the differences matter, or do you really just not trust your kid at a party?

To create an exhaustive list of everything just in the downtown which desperately needs rehabilitation would be exhausting, and I’m lazy. I don’t mean to imply that everything could or should look like Main Street, just that even the most basic and functional places and spaces can reflect the humanity which in some way they were intended to serve. The list breaks down into the “shooting fish in a barrel” type of fixes requiring few resources and even less imagination and the sort of transformations which will take generations if they ever manage to be achieved. 

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Easy, Small, Incremental

Court House Walk
The sidewalk, lampposts, and storefronts are already in place, the space already gives the impression that it is the sort of place that could have existed in some form in almost any outpost of human civilization in the last 10,000 years. In either direction the terminating vista is grand. Fill it with tiny shops and eateries and you have an instant asset any city would die for.

The esplanade of the original Museum of Natural History


Looks nice:

Back away a little:

A little creativity and you can keep the HVAC outbuilding and a few spaces for service vehicles, handicapped parking spaces, and regular parking for the library as well. Making the entryway to this temple of Athena nothing but a cyst on the upper thigh of the Quadrangle is a waste when connecting to the two bookends of active recreation in the downtown (The National Armory site and the Riverfront) is one of the things the city needs to become world class. 

The Apremont Triangle

Too much asphalt reduces to an island vignette what could easily be as active a plaza as any in the city. Perform either a Pearl or Bridge street-ectomy, widen the sidewalk on the remaining street and, ba-boom:a safe and beautiful place for children and adults to sit, relax, drink some coffee, or have a sandwich. These buildings were originally built as car dealerships of all things; the automobile may have done something positive for the city after all!

Chestnut Street

Narrow, tree lined, blessed with interesting topography, remarkable vistas, beautiful architecture, and still with a residue of uses from the late 19th and early 20th century for some of its passage through downtown Chestnut Street is just a handful of well run retail establishments, restaurants, or coffee shops from being a genuine rival to Main Street. With a new Willys-Overland complex already planned, an easily revitalized Apremont Triangle nearby, and renovations at Silverbrick Square the already perfect storefronts from Mattoon Street to Pearl just need positive energy. It’s easy to see this becoming Springfield’s bohemian center as MGM and Main Street become increasingly quotidian to artsy types. Infill could begin north of Willys-Overland and reach into the industrial-storage-homeless shelter wasteland and abomination of desolation which lies just  beyond.Even GoogleMaps just says “Here there be monsters.”

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Lots of Time, Big Gubmint, Big Business, or a Big Change in the Culture

The Gemini site and nearby vacant lots

A brown field turned into a green field that sits as nothing BUT a field a block from Main Street and within sight of the MGM Grand. To the north and south there are at least twenty more building lots just waiting to be transformed from pumpkin patches to castles for Cinderella by DPZ (no coaches needed, she can walk in this neighborhood). En serio, Andrés, ¿no buscas un reto nuevo, algo diferente? A guy can dream, right?

Union Street (My backyard)

Roughly a two block stretch from Main Street to Maple Street occupied by 4 buildings built to the sidewalk…and 12 parking lots. Two of those lots accommodate  the Ambassador apartments on Maple Street, the largest is for the Stockbridge Court Apartments, two are designed for the Park Street lofts, one is for the Radding building on Union Street, three for the Dakin Humane Society which was improperly allowed to be built set back on Union Street, one is for a mixed use building on Maple, one is what was left after the tornado of 2011 destroyed the Zorzi buildings on Main Street, and finally, one is the never used overflow lot for the Visiting Nurses and Hospice also on Maple.

Davenport development in association with MGM still intends to build something on Main Street but, despite the impressive vehicle and foot traffic which will only increase once MGM opens there are no plans to build anything on any of these lots. At any given time well over half of the spaces are available and even a minimal effort at coordinating residential and commercial uses would allow  1/3 of these spaces to beeliminated without any problem. The better long term plan would be to move any necessary parking to side streets and vacant lots on those side streets and develop some two or three story buildings from Main Street to Maple Street.

The New North

What can be said about the New North which hasn’t already been said about the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Ebola virus, cannibalism and pedophilia? Would that we could exhume Le Corbusier’s corpse and somehow have it subjected to all of the above! Lacking the sympathetic magic the aforementioned might provide I think that a plan to re-urbanize these streets should be adopted and that any infill (Hey, it could happen!) development conform to traditional forms and be encouraged to begin as close to Union Station as possible or along Main Street to connect with the North End.
I imagine something like this being built across from the redeveloped station in the next 10 years or so:

 and that by the time my youngest reader’s youngest great great grandchild passes away…or experiences the singularity…the New North will be more or less indistinguishable in design from the rest of downtown and that the influence of “he who shall not be named” will forever fade into outer darkness where there will be weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth…and the constant grinding of automobile traffic…and syphilis. 

Dwight Street

This is the M.O.A.F.U.S.: The Mother of all Fucked Up Streets…and it’s somehow still getting worse; there is ONE building that doesn’t present a blank face to the street from the old post office to State Street (which is the entire downtown length of the street) and it is set to be torn down at any time. The remainder of the 7 block stretch is made up entirely of parking lots, parking garages, and blank façades and, to make things even better, it’s a 3 or 4 lane one way urban drag strip as well. It also divides Main Street, Union Station, MGM, Court Square, and the Riverfront from the Quadrangle, the Armory and STCC, Chestnut Street, Mattoon Street, Armoury Commons, and Classical.

There isn’t enough Prozac in the world to make anyone feel good about walking down this street (copyright James Howard Kunstler, used without permission). In our walkability triage this place comes in dead last. Unfortunately it chokes off and brutally separates what we desperately need to bring together. The new Pynchon Park design may provide at least one link that could be both enjoyable and safe but, look at this photograph taken just this week:

I can think of no better representation of the futility of our efforts than this: an overturned vehicle IN THE CROSSWALK no less, in front of the new police substation adjoining Pynchon Plaza: If three LANES of cars going 45 mph in ONE DIRECTION, jockeying for space, changing lanes, and maneuvering to turn at State Street are still careening down this stretch of Dwight Street when the new and improved Pynchon Park/Plaza opens next year then I don’t hold out much hope for success. 

Dwight needs to revert to a two-way, and species of street trees which can grow quickly to give a sense of closure to this wasteland must be planted asap. If there is money to widen sidewalks then, by all means, do it. Special attention should be given to the State/Dwight and State Chestnut intersections to narrow the crossing, slow the cars and make the passage pleasurable. It would be ideal for the crossing at Worthington Street be given some TLC in order to connect the Apremont Triangle to Stearns Square. The idea should be for trees, paint, banners, planters, pop-up art, and any other trick imaginable be used to hide the hideousness of this street. Providing passage from Chestnut Street and Main Street; the Pynchon Plaza, State Street and Worthington Street crossings should be dressed up, dolled up, and made interesting enough for people to engage in the crossing of Dwight Street without fully realizing how unspeakably ugly it actually is.

35 years ago I met a guy from Redding, California. He and I were both living in Spain at the time; estadounidenses from very different parts of the Estados Unidos. It is really just for that reason that I’ve had some notion as to the sort of community Redding was. Was. In the intervening decades Redding has more than doubled in population. What strikes me about that is, of course, that in that same period my hometown has more or less maintained, at best, its population. 

I’m not interested in a “City Data City Comparison”, it’s hard to understand how one place, yes I’m sure it can be quite a wonderful place, can draw so many more people than another all other things being equal. No need to inform me of demographic trends in the U.S., I’ve quite literally dedicated a great deal of output to the topic, it’s just…here’s a place burning up in a region where huge forest fires just happen every year (there’s a “fire season”!) and temperatures over 100 are fairly commonplace; and increasing numbers of people choose to live there.

I spent the day today at the Quadrangle: Springfield’s collection of 5 museums plus the library. My step-daughter was reading in the young adult section of the place and I grabbed a book by Vargas Llosa from the Spanish language shelves and just read for an hour. At intervals I walked around and checked out the action on the Quad: Couples making out; kids eating lunch; women taking power walks. We grabbed lunch at the café and visited 4 of the 5 museums for 20-30 minutes each making two stops at the science museum and also stopping twice to play the piano in the colonnade of the George Walter Vincent Smith. 

30 years ago the interior of the Quadrangle was essentially a well landscaped parking lot; cars could drive through and park all around the green space. The art museums’ collections were just as impressive then, but the science and local history buildings were relics; stodgy and firmly anti-interactive. Now the cars are gone, and the grounds have been greatly improved and spruced up with public art which, in retrospect, was oddly missing way back when. The “Connecticut Valley Historical Museum” has had its role usurped by the Museum of Springfield History, and its building has been taken over by the new Amazing World of Dr Seuss Museum. They are both impressive. 

Let me try to bring these ideas together. I spent 5 hours in a handful of remarkable buildings with hundreds of people coming and going in a public space as beautiful as just about any. We saw priceless works of art, played with a replica of the Connecticut River watershed, searched for carnivorous, omnivorous, and herbivorous animals by their teeth, played some memory games, and sat and ate under the shade of the stately trees I parked my mom’s car underneath as a teen. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone anywhere having a better experience of that sort anywhere in the world today. 

Not every day here is so idyllic, not every place here is quite so wonderful, but there are lots of great places here. Sure, It sometimes rains (ergo no giant forest fires), and it sometimes gets cold (ergo no zika!), but it’s a beautiful place, with beautiful buildings, remarkable resources, plenty of jobs, great schools, and cheap houses (which often aren’t on fire), nowhere near an active volcano, or an earthquake fault, but very close to hills, mountains, beaches, rivers, lakes; and yet people manage to stay away in droves.

I am going to reveal my biases at the outset. Springfield is considered a “Gateway City” in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts because it is one of a dozen or so communities which tend to be the first home of immigrants in the Bay State. When you add to this the significance of the Puerto Rican community and the continued migration of those American citizens to the City of Homes and the continued out-migration of other residents then you have a city where newcomers are significant in terms of maintaining the population at around 150,000 residents.

I would say that there is an interesting equilibrium maintained here. Enough immigrants settle or are settled here to keep population numbers fairly steady as the generally low popularity of the place is balanced by the substantially large and high quality pool of single family homes and of high quality jobs which together keep quite a few people here who might otherwise leave. The upshot: without a steady flow of immigrants Springfield will suffer demographically especially compared with other regions of the U.S., and Springfield is not such a strong draw for newcomers that their flow will be sufficient unless immigration continues more or less as it has.

As far as legal and illegal immigration from Hispano America is concerned, my very personal view is that larger demographic trends in the Southwest mean that, from the perspective of people with strong views about maintaining Anglo American dominance, the war has been lost for some time. I have always rooted for Mexico in the World Cup (after Spain of course), I love Mexican food, and I don’t care if Mexico recoups its northern half. Building or not building a wall is not going to change the fact that, to paraphrase Gabriel García Márquez, it is demographic destiny that the Southwest of the U.S. becomes once again one with the rest of the Spanish speaking Western Hemisphere. 

Again. My biases. Not facts or ideas that I will pretend come from some unassailable moral high ground, just why I think I think what I think.

Safely, then, so far, I’m on the left hand side of the argument. Not so fast. I was as against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as anyone could have been. I joined anti-war organizations, I donated to anti-war campaigns, I supported anti war candidates, and I helped form and was advisor to a pro-peace group at the high school where I teach. I was against the Obama era interventions in Syria and Libya and against any support for inter-Arab aggression, AND I supported and support the “nuclear deal” with Iran. 

But I’m wary of immigration from all of the aforementioned. 

It is probably my bias, my belief that we have done a great evil to these people and that we may reap what we have sown in a sense. Can one draw as straight a line from our interventions in the Islamic world to ISIS as one could have drawn from the bombing of Cambodia to the coming to power of the Khmer Rouge? I think so, yes. I have no love for any religion, my biased view is that I’d just as soon see most of them disappear. I don’t fight for its eradication though either. All that said, the combination of specifically anti-Islamic sentiment in this country, combined with the development of an extremely violent and fundamentalist strain of Islam at its fringes, actual manifestations of non-state terrorism by groups and individuals influenced by said strains, and the tremendous devastation that the United States has wrought in the Muslim world require that immigration from that part of the world be carefully, thoughtfully, and deliberately implemented.

So the Right can hate me because I’m the worst sort of atheist “blame America first” peacenik, and the Left can hate me because I’m a weird sort of “Islamophobe”; anti-war, supported and support their right to defend their lands from all foreign invasion, support their right to free speech and to an absolute separation of all churches and the state, but, ya know; “racist”…’cause Islam, whatever Arabs, North Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans, Persians, Bosnians, and Indonesians might view as their distinct backgrounds, is a race don’t ya know.

What’s fun about this is I haven’t even really begun to address the topic. If any of my readers recall the article from CityLab I mentioned a few weeks ago, questions surrounding immigration appear to be completely unmentionable, on the left in particular, and those are the questions which need to be discussed in order to arrive at a consensus, at the very least on that about which we disagree.

Is any attempt by any state to control immigration in any way automatically racist, xenophobic and wrong?

I don’t intend this as a straw-man, some of the thoughts I’ve heard expressed do strongly imply that some people hold this view or something very close to it. It is certainly a view which is, or at least has been, well outside the mainstream. On the other hand I see its attraction in the current climate because without that view a number of uncomfortable questions with inevitable consequences obtain:

What are the criteria that nation-states may use to accept or reject immigrants including asylum seekers?

In democratic states should the people be allowed a voice in establishing those criteria?

In democratic states should the people be allowed to establish numerical limitations to immigration?

Do nation-states, or their populations, have the right to impose obligations on the immigrants regarding their assimilation into the existing culture or in any other ways?

Do nation-states have the right to control the movement, especially regarding domiciles, of immigrants within their borders once accepted?

What happens to those who still seek to immigrate against the established law of a nation?

Once you say that nations can limit whom they accept, and in what quantity then the very ugly but necessary process of deciding on winners and losers begins and furthermore, one must admit that the losers in the process who still seek admission will have to be deterred or there will be no de facto controls, and the effective answer to question #1 becomes “yes”.

To me, too many people on the “pro-immigration” side of the debate, the side on which I mostly fall, are unwilling to admit that anything short of a complete “open borders” policy demands that a lot of difficult decisions be made with lots of losers in the process, and quite a few ugly scenes at various borders. Many of the pictures used in memes to protest “Trump’s anti immigration policies” were taken while President Obama was in office, when he had record numbers of people who had entered this country illegally deported. The process as established required that tens of thousands of children be separated from their parents. Maybe Trump is an evil man who hates Mexicans and Obama was just doing his constitutionally mandated job, but, motivations aside, the primary difference was the point in the process at which children and parents were separated. 

I’ll admit that I believe that the United States as a nation can establish criteria for who gets in to this country and who doesn’t. Whether I agree or not with what the Trump administration has established as criteria for admittance to the United States under the rules of our constitution he won the election, he sets policy for the executive branch, and he was very clear on what those policies would be BEFORE he was elected.  

In a democratic state sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. If you look at my overall political beliefs…I lose A LOT. But I will take the rule of law over chaos. You want what you view as better outcomes for immigrants in the future? Don’t nominate such a terrible candidate for president that he or she can lose to Donald Trump. Make an honest case for legal immigration; which may have to include acknowledging to people in the wage class that corporations have used legal and illegal immigrant labor as well as many other policies to harm the interests and well-being of workers in this country.

Maybe the people aren’t deplorable, perhaps they’ve just been treated deplorably.

What amounts to virtue signaling, saying “no one is illegal”, may make you feel good, but it could very easily harm the people that mantra claims to defend. By all means, if you really believe that supporting a policy which sounds a lot like totally open borders is the only defensible moral path then call for it, but don’t be surprised if enough voters are uncomfortable with that concept that it ends up putting even more candidates into office whose views are 180 degrees from that. 

Yesterday. I saw a man dressed in a white shirt and dress pants with a coffee enter a mid-block crosswalk barely glancing left or right before crossing the street. Even more bizarrely, TWO cars, one traveling north, and the other south, had each ALREADY stopped, assuming the man would continue. Again, it was a mid block crosswalk.

Was I in Northampton yesterday? 

The guy didn’t even do that little half-run, half-walk that you normally see when mere pedestrians inconvenience the demigod. 

In the pictures I took yesterday I caught 5 bikes (and two unicycles…long story). Here’s just one I didn’t publish:

To elaborate a bit on the what I posted last week: The plaza in front of Monarch Place had always been a moderately pleasing albeit nearly unusable space at one of the downtown’s two most important intersections. It was almost always empty or, at best, might have had a handful of workers rushing through it. The fountain at the south edge of the plaza was grand, but was turned off as often as not, and when running would sometimes splash water on passers by. The planters were too low and too narrow to sit on comfortably and had those unsightly anti-skateboard clips at intervals because the dearth of occupants in the plaza encouraged use as a skate park.

Last year this the plaza was torn up and redesigned. What had been a giant retail space occupied by a large bank office was divided into a small bank branch and a Starbucks. Flower boxes have been placed in front of the fountain to give the café its own outdoor seating area and the fountain has been repaired and tamed. The permanent planters have been raised high enough to make them comfortable places to sit as well. All of a sudden the shade provided by Springfield’s tallest office tower is an asset at lunchtime. As colder months approach at least some seating will be bathed in sun as well. Maybe Starbucks will adjust its seating from October to November and from March through May.

1550 Main Street underwent a similar transformation a few years ago. The plaza in front went from landscape stunt; a series of unconnected grassy knolls with low slung edges unsuitable for sitting; to an area which provided multiple tables and chairs for relaxing and/or eating lunch along with multiple edges for sitting while waiting for the bus or people watching.

One Financial Plaza was transformed long ago from cold, unfriendly, stone vignette into the downtown’s finest public spaces by repairing the fountain, adding movable tables and chairs, picnic tables, a hot dog cart and now even a piano.

Recall if you can that it was just last year that a coffee shop owner just down the street was prohibited from placing some tables and chairs on a bump out because they were “obstructing the public way”. The city has since enacted an ordinance allowing for tables and chairs in public areas…for a modest fee. All of these plazas, however, are private property and so not controlled by the city.

The question of how MGM has impacted all of this is an interesting one. Would this have happened without MGM? Is this a reaction to an impending threat: an attempt to keep up with the Joneses? Is it “the magic feather” effect? The most important question of all is will it survive the arrival of Colossus? 

A non MGM related question is why would anyone locate a new enterprise anywhere else in the region? There’s the most and best transit coverage in a state-of-the-art intermodal station just a few blocks north; bars, restaurants, and coffee shops all over the place; all sorts of office space; top quality cultural offerings; and a variety of relatively low cost housing everywhere. Downtown Springfield has always been a place that only needed to flex its muscles a bit in order to dominate the region. As I will soon explain, all this only begins to hint at the area’s potential.