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Walking in not Memphis

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When we found out that we had about half the time we had been planning on for a long weekend getaway my wife and I felt compelled to switch our plans from Montreal to someplace a bit closer, so we found a cool hotel in the Hudson Valley and we started to make plans based on that. I’ve always had a thing for the late colonial period, stage coaches, and taverns and so Liz found a restaurant in a place we’d be passing through just around dinner time on Friday which brought together all of those interests and would provide a place for us to grab a bite to eat. 

As we were arriving we had a little trouble getting our bearings and so we had to drive around the block once. We weren’t very focused on exactly what we were seeing mind you, but it was clear that this part of Kingston, New York had some interesting places to explore. After dinner we decided to walk around a bit. It was amazing. I mean, it was a Friday night and most everything was closed but, it was amazing. There was building after building after building with great programming at the ground floor, interesting window dressing, and even a few people wandering here and there to visit the restaurants which were open, to pop in to visit a friend who lived in an apartment above one of the shops, or to listen to some live music. There was one angry homeless guy yelling indecipherable things which added “local color”, and it was all knitted together by colonnades on street after street.

The streets themselves were narrow and the colonnades together with on street parking made them feel even narrower. The shops, cafes, and restaurants extended around…oh, my god, around almost an entire block and every side street seemed to have either historic well designed houses, or perpetuated the excellent mixed use habit of the main streets. I hadn’t seen a better or more three dimensional example of good walkable urbanism outside of Manhattan ever in the United States. (I apologize for using photos from Google instead of taking them myself, but we were having such fun just wandering about I didn’t want to alter the mood by stopping to pull out my phone)

From an urbanist perspective my weekend would have been complete, but the next morning we ended up in Nyack, New York, just looking for a bite to eat and some panty hose. We found panty hose and even a garlic press at a real local pharmacy. We ended up walking around the place for hours. The views of the Hudson were lovely, but the center of the town itself was yet another example of really good walkable urbanism combined with beautiful residential architecture, although you could see that a little bit more damage had been done here and there than in the Stockade neighborhood in Kingston during the post war period before the community started to take advantage of the incredible bones it had inherited.

As I read my friend Johnny Sanphillipo’s essays on his experiences in Memphis some comparisons began in my head. He was invited to visit Memphis from San Francisco by people who are hoping for some insight on how to revitalize the inner core of Memphis. The two are major league cities in the South and West, the former growing in population but struggling economically, and socially, the latter having come through a period of decline but now seen as, arguably, one of the most vibrant and certainly one of the most prosperous cities in the world. Memphis, Johnny remarks, has a real chance to create a vibrant urban space even if only a tiny percentage of people in the region are looking for such places because there is nothing, according to him, to compete in that regard anywhere near Memphis.

Contrast that with Springfield’s challenge in the Northeast. So much high quality urbanism not just to choose from, but for others to use as yardsticks against which to be found wanting in a region with negative domestic migration patterns; you can do it right, just not quite right enough and certainly not well enough to attract the sort of people who can choose to live anywhere, like artists for example.

I wasn’t asked to visit these places, they neither needed nor wanted any advice from me, and they are certainly not the sort of places that anyone would confuse with major league cities like Memphis or San Francisco: Understand the spirit of what I am about to say. I realize that my hometown could disappear from off the face of the earth and most people without a direct connection to it wouldn’t ever notice. The same is true of Nyack and Kingston, two very different places which have managed to create enjoyable, livable communities for very different reasons; but if two such otherwise unremarked upon places just two hours from my home can be so remarkable it makes it that much more evident that success in this endeavor to make Springfield livable will have to be done with the people we have and the resources we can bring to bear ourselves. 

To become so exceptional that we will be sought after by anyone else is a pipe dream.

Watch Your Gimbals

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In his book The Long Emergency as well as in many of his “Clusterfuck Nation Chronicles” James Howard Kunstler has made reference to the fact that Americans will engage in heroic efforts to salvage what he describes as “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world”. In JHK’s conversation with K-MO on the latter’s C-Realm Podcast last week I was surprised not to hear that particular prediction, perhaps one of the few Kunstler has got spot-on, highlighted as an answer to the host’s query regarding the apparent delay of the Peak Oil Apocalypse.

Three local news and opinion items in particular jumped out at me this week displaying how, just in this one provincial community, these efforts might take shape. Rural communities in Western Massachusetts are dying. They survived and thrived during the initial stages of the deindustrialization and financialization of the regional economy by transitioning from centers of agriculture and small scale manufacturing into bedroom communities for the urban employment centers which remained nearby. The people who lived or still live in those locations are aging beyond the stage of life in which one has school age children and therefore school populations have collapsed. Economies of scale which existed at a certain level of population have disappeared and demand for exurban housing has weakened just enough that systems are wobbling.

Ideas are evolving into strategies, and strategies into legislation at the state level with proposals for increased funding for rural school districts, cash payments to remote workers willing to relocate, changes in infrastructure to promote demand for housing in rural areas, and incentives for creating jobs in sparsely populated areas all being actively discussed. From the outside it seems clear that the people promoting these initiatives are hoping to find a kind of Goldilocks Zone in which the policies attract just enough people to maintain a stable population with just the right amount of school age children to provide educational services with exactly the infrastructure that worked over the last 40 years while at the same time replacing lost businesses with precisely the sort of businesses that will provide a perfect level of employment; but not so much that their “rural character” is endangered. This is an Apollo 13 scenario.

Incidentally, I add the demand that all of this change not change anything the current residents don’t want changed ( i.e. everything but their home values, level of service, and the demographic make-up of their community) based on news items like this one in which the existence of a Dollar General isn’t permitted because it doesn’t conform to the vision these people have for their community, or this little item requesting that rural residents be exempted from any mileage taxes given that they would be disproportionately, and in their minds unfairly, burdened by such a tax; why should people who use the roads most have to pay so much in user fees after all?

I want more of what makes my city a city in my city. The only person I’ve heard complain about the increased traffic from MGM is a lawyer with a nearby office who wants to be able to get to his suburban home without the inconvenience that, I kid you not, occasionally having to sit through a light might bring. Everyone else wants the proposed new hotels to open, the contractually obligatory market rate housing to be built, the proposed new retail and restaurants to begin construction, and for infill development to begin; these things give us all more of what we came here for. 

You can criticize suburbanites for wanting their communities preserved in amber, but the “Hill People”; they want everyone and everything else to change in order to keep everything they love about living wild and free in the wilderness exactly as it is, but all the while demanding that everyone else pay to see to it that they not suffer any diminution of access to the aspects of civilization that they enjoy. I don’t hate the hinterlands, I actually love them for exactly what they are, if only the people who lived there felt the same way.

Orthodoxies Part I

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I was called an icon this week. After I expressed my hopes that the person nice enough to express such a thought was not an iconoclast it set me to thinking about orthodoxies. At 17 the orthodoxies which ruled my life, whether I knew it or not, were Mormonism and God belief, laissez faire Capitalism, American Exceptionalism, and an ignorant acceptance of what I would now call auto-oriented development. That there were, and are, other orthodoxies so deeply ingrained within my psyche that I am not even aware of how absolutely they control the bounds of my thought I have no doubt, but the aforementioned are the ones of which I became aware and have cast off.

My father worked nights at “Tapley Street”, a regional distribution center for the United States Postal Service. If you asked him what he did he would say that he “got the Wall Street Journal out”. Dow Jones and Company printed the WSJ and Barron’s and such in Chicopee and from there it was distributed throughout the Northeast…including Wall Street. When I started to show interest in economics he would occasionally take a copy of whichever publication was being shipped out that night and bring it home. I watched the PBS series “Free to Choose” and got a copy of the book with Milton Friedman holding a pencil on the cover. I took an Economics course at Classical High School which did its best to cover major themes in economic thought in a semester and I was off to Brigham Young University as an “Econ major” to take my first class under James Kearl, returning advisor to then President Ronald Reagan. 

(An old BYU Econ textbook “A History of Economic Theory and Method” which is still in my collection…Marx included:)

Not a whole lot there but Free Market Orthodoxy.

One of my first “13 Stake Firesides”, I think that’s what they were called, a filling up of the Marriott Center by perfectly groomed BYU students to listen to some speaker or other, was offered by former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson and focused on the evils of feeding the poor unless a church did it. It seemed weird at the time. I was in a giant room with 20,000 religious youth and the primary message was not one I could have imagined in the mouth of Jesus. I started to notice the messages apart from the theoretical models which had so captured my desire to be rational. I began to notice the paranoic level of anti Communist and anti Socialist rhetoric I was hearing every day despite the fact that no one was making any counter argument. It was responding to “Hey, honey, how was your day?” with “I am not fucking my secretary!”

The level of fear was obvious in that they never explained why anyone might think these crazy evil terrible stupid ideas could convince anyone. I became obsessed with studying “the other”. Nothing too radical, John Kenneth Galbraith is one I recall, and attending a meeting with a representative of the Nicaraguan Sandinista movement…OK, the 4 of us who were there, apart from the Sandinista representative and the watchers from BYU, must have seemed pretty radical: “Sure if greatly diminished infant mortality and increased literacy are good things!” I began to curve away from Laffer.

Being Mormon was what made me different. How many Mayflower descendants living in Massachusetts were LDS in 1970 or 1980? It gave me a small social network to thrive in, as opposed to my high school with 2,000 kids, and gave me a ready made excuse for being a social failure; I was too good, no smoking, no drinking and all the rest. Mormonism was tailor made to exist in American suburbs, but New England didn’t supply the type of growth that Mormonism needs to expand as it did in the rest of the United States; Mormon transplants establish themselves in numbers large enough to create a ward and locals are drawn not so much to the dogma as to the social cohesion and support. Here proselytizing looked much more like the way in which the LDS church works in the Third World: Pick off the losers, loners, and weirdos until it gives you a foothold and then try to establish type 1 wards. Ergo, my ward growing up, I would discover, wasn’t very orthodox. Beggars can’t be choosers and all. I heard very little about politics, just getting all these newbies on the same page with respect to Mormon theology was all that we could handle. 

I couldn’t wait to attend BYU, visit the temple, and go on “my mission”, in that order. All three would erode my trust in ol’ Joe Smith and my God belief. 

BYU had what was called “the old campus” which to me actually looked like a college campus. At the other extreme, literally and figuratively, was the newer Big Box Campus with all the parking lagoons and mediocre architecture that implies highlighted, at the time, by the N. Eldon Tanner building or “the box the temple came in”:

I soon learned that criticizing anything about BYU was indistinguishable from criticizing “the brethren” and therefore was as heretical as a fully caffeinated Coca Cola or a cup of Earl Grey. 
Next, the temple ceremony which I had been told for years would answer all my questions only made me wonder what the hell kind of cult I had been a member of my whole life. We were symbolically slaughtering ourselves to represent what we would suffer if we revealed that as part of the ceremony we were symbolically slaughtering ourselves, snakes really didn’t have legs ’cause they pissed off Elohim, and I was going to wear protective underwear with special emblematic stitching. 


 People were giving me knowing looks and saying cryptic things about what an eye opener the temple is, and how it really makes sense of things; Sure, I thought,like an LDS LSD. I was scheduled to enter the Missionary Training Center the next day: Geronimo!

In Spain I was bombarded by sensations. I might suggest what had the most lasting effect on my life was not necessarily the Spanish way of life, but how my fellow Mormon-Americans responded to it. So many things in cities like Jaén and San Fernando reminded me of home, most of my mates, from the west of the U.S. saw nothing reminiscent of home and very little of value. That irked me. The platitudes these same people would pronounce about loving Spain and its people were contradicted by their constant criticisms of everything Spanish. Theologically, though, they started me on the path which led, finally, to my atheism. 

One night, in a small apartment in Jaén two missionaries in particular started in on mocking the belief in the story of the Virgin of Fatima; Three kids go into the woods and see the Virgin Mary. Mary gives them messages to transmit to the world.

How stupid! Kids. In the woods. Getting messages from celestial beings. How can anyone believe that crap?! I pointed out, leaving aside the veracity of the claim, that the only difference from that story and the one we were carrying from door to door was the ratio of children to celestial beings:


They were not amused. 
It took me 17 more years to leave the church, but I had started down the highway to hell.

Olde Springfield Village

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Spending a few hours at Old Sturbridge Village on Friday evening definitely altered my perspective on all things urban, if only for a few hours. The rather large agglomeration of historic homes and buildings brought together in what they’ve now pinpointed as being a re-creation of the year 1838 immerses the visitor, especially during an evening tour illuminated only by candlelight and oil lamps, in a New England where rail travel and the industrial revolution are just beginning to change the lives of the villagers. 

This “Sturbridge” is located about half way between Springfield and Worcester in central Massachusetts. The War with Mexico is about to explode arms production at the Armory in Springfield and the city’s population is in the process of tripling over a period of 30 years, and its first train station is about to open. In Sturbridge women are spinning wool into yarn by candlelight, cobblers are stitching together shoes, and shopkeepers are selling Jamaican rum at 6 1/4 cents a cup. Chestnuts are gathered both to eat and to feed pigs. Children learn to participate in the domestic economy by the age of 5 or 6 by learning to sew and knit. Poorer residents in small homes extinguish their small fires, even in winter, once the afternoon meal is cooked, no matter how cold the air temperature as precious, and much rarer, firewood is for cooking, not home heating: 

“Your home is warm in the summer and cold in the winter, why wouldn’t it be?” Said the “resident” of the small house.

My older brother and sister would tell me that our grandmother refused to let the electric stove my grandfather purchased for her into her kitchen, it stayed on the porch as a permanent fixture. What’s the Arab saying? My grandfather rode a camel, my father, an automobile, my son, a jet, and my grandson will ride a camel…more or less that, but with a wood stove.

Certainly these people would find a Greek or Roman village from thousands of years past as more intelligible than the city of today; and it represents a reality from only 180 years ago. It would be 20 years until the Pennsylvania Oil Rush. The world of the post Industrial Revolution is the only one most of us know, and was the only one most of our parents and grandparents knew, but it’s barely more than a blip on the timeline of human civilization.

A reader is surprised, and given climate change, somewhat heartened by the idea that I believe that fossil energy will “run out soon.” I really don’t. And I think, as David Collum said, whatever its impacts on our environment, we will “run the experiment”of burning all we can. When the debate on drilling in ANWR was raging I used to say I supported those who were against it, but not because I thought we wouldn’t eventually drill there, I think we’ll put an oil derrick on Abe Lincoln’s head on Mt Rushmore eventually, but the lack of EROEI will, if it doesn’t already, drain our civilization of its vitality and its benefits won’t be distributed as widely as they are now.

Wandering and Wondering in Winter

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In winter I don’t get around the neighborhood as often on foot. The last week or so has been a pleasant exception to that rule and I found that each experience brought with it different insights regarding the state of the city.

Friday Night

I got down to the box office a little bit early to get T-birds tickets as last week’s Throwback Game had sold out, and that is starting to occur with wonderfully alarming frequency. I had the chance to thank the new general manager of the club for “saving hockey in Springfield”. I told him that I was a fan going back to the Coliseum days. He asked me my name and thanked me for the kind words.


My Baby Boomer self always arrives much too early to these things, and my Millenial friend arrived, as usual, neither early nor late. In the interim I saw an old high school acquaintance, a friend of a friend of a friend, waiting for his date to arrive. His demeanor and speech reminded me of my white working class roots. Nearly all of my friends from high school live in the inner ring of suburbs around the city, if they still live in the area, and that is where the culture in which I grew up still exists. Hockey is one of the things that can lure them back; at least for an evening.

My Millenial friend is a committed urbanist and brings the zeal of the convert to his efforts in the city. He describes himself as coming from a much more environmentalist starting point, but he has undergone a shift to more systematic green urbanism which includes everything from economics to transportation. He’s got the right mentality: it’s about fighting the fight, not about winning…at least in the near term.

Big crowd, big T-birds win, invigorating conversation, and more than a little nostalgia.

Monday night

After my Community Preservation Committee meeting I walked back through Court Square. As winter evenings go it was pleasant, and so there was something unnatural about how empty this most beautiful of public spaces was. Having spent so many years in Spain, the idea of such a space being so empty at eight thirty in the evening was disheartening, if predictable. 

Court House Walk, what should someday once again become the city’s most popular, as it is the city’s most authentic, pedestrian street was brightly illuminated and so I walked through that desolate pathway to the entrance of the MGM South End Market to use the facilities there. As starkly abandoned as was Court Square, so was this place surprisingly vibrant; dozens eating in the ersatz marketplace and hundreds more on the gaming floor. 

It has been a least a dozen months since we were told an announcement was coming regarding MGM, Peter Pan, and the Court Square Building. Perhaps no news is good news.

Wednesday Morning


My wife and I had a parent conference for Luna at her school. As I had taken a few hours of personal time during mid-term exams to attend, and none of my classes were scheduled for that day, we took a few minutes to have some breakfast and debrief.
It was 8:45 and so we decided on a breakfast panini and coffee at Hot Table. We hadn’t done that for a while and it turns out that the owners had acted on that behavior and were no longer serving breakfast. Strike one. 
My wife remembered a place on Market Street that was touting its breakfasts on social media; opening at nine. Strike two. 
Peeked around the corner; “Nosh” wasn’t open. Strike three.

Luckily, breakfast isn’t baseball; Palazzo was open “already”. We each got a coffee and a breakfast sandwich brought to our cute little table in a back room from which we could see the magnificent architecture of some of Springfield’s best 19th century buildings. Dozens of people were wandering through what has been made the most dynamic urban space in Springfield; C’mon Evan, you’re making everybody else look bad!

(From “Palazzo”…#metoo?)


I’m sure if these places don’t open until nine it must be that not enough people stop in on the way to work to grab coffee and a croissant. Evan’s is the largest building downtown without on site parking, perhaps his tenants don’t stop at the drive thru on the way in to work because they know they will walk by Palazzo. If someone works at Tower Square or Monarch Place on site or skywalk connected parking encourage different behavior. 

Thursday Night



The Student Prince. 5 times a year Springfield’s most famous eatery hosts a 6 course Beer Dinner. My wife and I attended the very first one just over a year ago and haven’t been able to go since either due to schedule conflicts or because they had sold out and we couldn’t get tickets. As odd as it may seem, neither one of us is a beer connoisseur, or even a beer aficionado, but the food has been spectacular, the company engaging, and the beers, interesting.

Last time we sat with some interesting people and spent much of the night discussing the food, the beer, and the absolute ridiculousness of much of modern art and architecture. One of our table mates was enamored of the avant-garde. He tried the old “you just don’t understand it” ploy; ah yes, “The Emperor’s New Blank Canvas”!

This time the primary topic was MGM, though we spent some time discussing drama as an outlet for adolescent creativity, Mayor Sarno, and, as the men seated near us were all suburbanites dining in downtown Springfield, the changing attitudes of people in suburbia towards the city. The two brothers and their step-father were headed to MGM after the meal. Their experiences had matched ours; the design and physical plant of the project were top-of-the-line, the quality of the food and customer service, not so much.


I expressed my view that I’m happy that it is so. I was concerned from the very beginning that MGM’s dining options might be of high enough quality, and low enough price, to siphon away customers from classic downtown and South End establishments but, honestly, anyone with any knowledge of the area knows you can get better food at a fraction of the cost if you walk a block or two; Red Rose being the prime example. I do wish the customer service at MGM would rise to the level of what I’ve heard one sees in Vegas, instead of sinking to Springfield’s less rigorous “oh, are you still here” standards.

Our table mates were passionate about this being Springfield’s shot; what we need is for local entrepreneurs to fill the vacant storefronts across the street from the casino. From an urbanist perspective the buildings are the best, nearly perfect in every way…except for the almost total lack of anything happening I mean.

Sunday Morning


My wife and I enjoy reliving one of our first great adventures from the early days of our relationship. On one of her first visits to Springfield she got snowed in and we wandered down Main Street in the aftermath of the storm, sometimes swimming through waist deep drifts of fine, powdery snow, until we made it to Panjabi Tadka. After yesterday’s storm then we wandered down to MGM, knowing that, while just the hotel restaurants are open on most Sunday mornings downtown, and we had eaten recently at La Fiorentina, the one place open on Sunday’s in the South End, and in the aftermath of the storm it might not be open.
The TAP sport’s bar at MGM had been advertising its weekend breakfast options and we knew it would be open. With Luna in tow we trudged through the sleet and made our way down to the resort casino. There was one very overwhelmed waitress in a half empty dining area, the table had either salt or sugar all over it, it took a while to get us our food (though we weren’t in a rush), and the food was average, which is to say aside from being in larger quantities, roughly on a par with Friendly’s…but at 3x the price.

On the other hand, it was actually open. One very deeply held Springfield tradition is to just not be open even when YOUR schedule says you WILL be. My wife and I got up early one Sunday, years ago, to have brunch at Chef Wayne’s Big Mamoo…their last brunch of the season…through June…and on that last Sunday in June on that bright Sunday morning…closed. Nadim’s went to great pains to push its New Brunch Tradition…a few weeks in, having purchased a Groupon…off we went…to find it closed, and Nadim’s no longer offering brunch.

As Woody Allen might have said, “90% of restauranting is just being open.”

Societal Dunning Kruger

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Characteristics and traits in individuals can and do manifest themselves more generally across societies but the outcomes they predict can be very different due to scale. I’ve witnessed the Dunning-Kruger effect in myself and in my career over the years, only coming to understand my behavior and the behavior of colleagues in the context of self-awareness and the lack thereof. I’ve become much more humble regarding my ability to teach as I’ve improved: I wasn’t very good for at least my first four or five years but only getting fired from my first full time teaching gig really woke me up to how great an impediment my weaknesses were. I’m still not a spectacular disciplinarian and I need to have a very precise idea of what I want to accomplish in a class period to allow my showmanship and content knowledge to engage the students in ways which highlight those strengths.

In my career I’ve been surrounded, mostly, by people like me with certain strengths and weaknesses who’ve managed over time to become very good at what they do. On the other hand I’ve witnessed some amazing outliers; I mean people with absolutely no self awareness, and gaping holes in their instructional practice who not only have no idea (really, none) of how bad they are but who honestly believe themselves to be among the elite. In a playful interaction with what I might call the Peter “Vice Principal” I’ve seen the self confidence of these types put them into positions of authority and supervision with absolutely no understanding of even the most basic principles of classroom teaching.

For these people there is not enough Kool Aid in the world when it comes to imbibing the educational fads and the dogma of “21st Century Learning”; Yeah, it’s 2019…even if we teach them to plow a field with oxen…it’s still a 21st century skill at this point! I always think to myself: Socrates was a better teacher than I am despite never having attended a single professional development seminar for continuing education credit; but the Kool Aid is where I’d like to shift the focus of this essay.

We were picking up Luna’s friend to come over the house and finish a science project; Luna had been out most of the week performing in the lead role of “Anansi the Spider” (Giving 8 performances in 4 schools over three days!). Her partner lives in an area where a local developer has used the combination of tax credits for historic preservation AND low income housing to revive an entire neighborhood. This developer does incredible work, but what ends up shining through is the quality of the streetscape. Just getting out of the car to walk over to the door of her building, even on a frigid winter morning was a delight; there were families walking home from a trip to the corner store, kids headed out to play, grown-ups hopping in their cars and off to do their Saturday afternoon thing. I wish I had taken a picture, but here are some Google street views:

The society that built this neighborhood was confident, but not grandiose. Overall it conforms to design principles and concepts which had been acquired and internalized over thousands of years while accommodating novelties like gas lines and electricity. I’m sure the developers and engineers understood the limitations of the city’s water and sewer systems and made sure that their future tenants could count on potable water coming in, and not so potable water being taken away by the existing system without any heroic interventions. They also knew that their tenants would be walking distance from the region’s primary industrial employers, and within a few minutes of a street railway line to the downtown. And it was beautiful, from the fluer de lis over the entryway to the elm trees along the streets.

Enter post World War II horizontal style auto-oriented American development; The Sum of All Kool Aids, (Kools Aid?), and a death spiral of societal Dunning-Kruger. What we’ve done is so obviously horrific, so clearly without redemption, so unmistakably ruinous, so patently ugly, but even at a time when the resources to continue the project are diminishing, the impacts of its effluent are multiplying, and the consequences of its limitations are manifest we plow on without the slightest hesitation. 

It doesn’t work. It’s ugly. It’s miserable. But people pay a premium for it. If you haven’t already, head over to Granola Shotgun and read Johnny’s two latest posts(Here, and here) and the comments: Homeless camps across from $1.2 million homes, home values of half that amount being viewed as “low”, zoning laws and regulations requiring that private condos look like Pruitt-Igoe, and people lining up to take out 50 year loans to buy units that might be lucky just to last that long. Johnny will comment something which ends with “shrug” or “meh”, and I see his perspective…at a societal level; it’s done, we’ll have to live with it. 

It’s the individual I don’t understand: Someone has to buy it I guess, but why would you? With my oft repeated caveat: there is very little distinction between being prematurely correct and just being wrong: This economy and many of its housing markets have been distorted for decades. If you think your house is really worth much more than $200,000 dollars whatever it is and wherever it is in a nation where the median household income is around $60,000 a year, you’re insane. Once the Ponzi scheme of financialization, extreme indebtedness, and artificially low interest rates breaks down home values will fall to and through the level that actual people can actually afford sustainably; my guess is that most will be well under that number in unhyperinflated dollars…including my own…which already is!

I have no idea how much longer the Titanic will remain afloat. I’m trying to arrange my life so that I can still hear the string quartet playing on deck while I ensconce myself in a lifeboat. I’ve written too many times already about my status as an urban prepper though, so I shan’t bore you more with that now…next week perhaps. 

Homemade Sourdough Bagels

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My stepdaughter has been listening to the Hamilton soundtrack obsessively over the last few weeks, in and of itself not so objectionable, but there’s a song tucked in there with an appallingly anachronistic, though seemingly obligatory, celebration of “The Greatest City in the World”! My first response was “…this is set in 1780 or so…why are they singing about (60x the size) London in this musical about the American Revolution set in New York?” Between that and the ridiculous claims about the pizza I’m fed up with NYC’s narcissism…but not so fed up that I won’t acknowledge the one area of culinary and cultural superiority New York has on New England: the bagel.

When we used to make weekly or bi-weekly trips into New York for LuLu to see her dad I would request a stop at a bagel place to get some real bagels. When LuLu’s dad moved here my wife started making her own bagels. At this very moment I am consuming a homemade sourdough bagel…grilled with butter and topped with cream cheese. Elizabeth hates the waste that most sourdough starters recipes entail and so she uses the theoretically discarded starter to make these:

I used to eat grocery store bagels; the onion ones are good for turkey sandwiches. There might even be some decent ones around here someplace, I’ve just never had one.

If we’re at someone’s house for brunch and they have typical bagged grocery store bagels I either slather them with cream cheese…and shut up, or I eat something else; I don’t share with them my agonizingly pretentious philosophy of the bagel; I save that for you, dear reader (No good deed goes unpunished).

Months ago I had taken these photos:

To respond to some articles I saw on CityLab complaining about “dollar stores”. I found the whole thing preposterous. It was the usual moaning and groaning about how the poor get stuck with shitty stuff while the rich get the nice stuff: Yeah, that’s what “rich” and “poor” mean, if you think about it. Unfortunately for my ego Strong Towns got to the subject before I did and Chuck said pretty much what I wanted to say: Dollar stores are a symptom, not the disease and people shop at them because they fill a need. Beyond that, the two closest dollar stores to my house A) don’t have on site parking and B)have repurposed existing buildings. I applaud them for both.

The end of the CityLab piece asked this vapid question:

I’ll answer it: Of course they don’t, and therefore it wouldn’t make any difference. Most of us don’t. Food science has spent billions engineering cheap foods that satisfy our cravings and AgriBiz marketing departments have spent billions in advertising to make us desire what they produce using the most subsidized crops.

I have the luxury of having a wife who is thoughtful about food, loves to cook, and works from home, and so she often arranges her day around cooking. Almost every evening includes a meal prepared from scratch. In the summer tomatoes from the garden are constantly being turned into homemade sauce, and hot peppers into salsa. In the fall grapes and peaches are turned into wine. In the wintertime we’ve paid for a CSA share of veggies.

We get the winter share from an organization here called “Gardening the Community”. My wife and I became acquainted with it years ago when we were shopping at a place, then called the reStore(great name), now called Eco Building Bargains (m’eh) where used and repurposed items are sold (At least one of my readers shops there, and I owe him a post about places to eat in Springfield, but I digress). The head of the organization was trying to transport a door for a shed in her Prius: We saw the problem and volunteered our Chevy S-10. When we dropped off the door we took a tour of the tiny community garden which has since become a large community garden, greenhouse, and neighborhood store.

I was at said store a few weeks ago picking up our “share” and commented on how wonderful the place was. I also mentioned the Domino’s Pizza which had just opened down the street. Leaving aside eating that pizza when there are some great local places nearby, we talked about the challenges which exist for people in this neighborhood regarding food choices. This great, inexpensive, community store is located at the heart of the neighborhood, but do people have time to cook, time to buy the food, kitchens in which to cook, utensils to cook with, the knowledge of how to prepare them, and the buffer in the budget to waste the money on food when the fresh stuff goes bad? This place has a kitchen and now offers lessons on how to cook; I’m sure they’d let people use their kitchen if they needed to. I can’t imagine a better or more thoughtful group of people doing what they are doing.

But most of the people in the neighborhood don’t take advantage of their services.

The bottom line is that they don’t see it as worth their time and effort.

On the other hand I was at a New Year’s Eve party in Springfield’s wealthiest suburb. I overheard people talking about “Hello, Fresh”, the make-it-yourself meal delivery service. The hostess of the party heard the conversation as well and commented to me, knowing of my wife’s Foody-ism, that we obviously didn’t need such a service. True. But these people, among the elite, at least geographically in our region, couldn’t be bothered to stop at a fresh food market, carefully select a suite of foods that could be combined for a meal, carry those foods home (probably in a huge SUV) and prepare them any more than the people in Six Corners.

That is what THEY were saying, in exactly those words, at this party.

How bizarre to expect that people who don’t have cars to haul the food, or enormous kitchens with wiz-bang gadgets to prepare the food, with schedules that don’t accommodate family meal times, and employment that not only leaves them with less money, but probably feeling less fulfilled at the end of the work day, WOULD be able to do so. Like it or not the dollar store, or Domino’s, gives them what they need.

I don’t eat better or healthier than anyone because I am a better person or because I have earned it. My life allows me the luxury to eat well, and I still sometimes go out of my way to eat crap. Yes, I’d like a little “Big Y” down the street, as I said a few weeks ago, and it annoys me that they don’t see the opportunity this area affords, but I don’t blame Dollar Tree or Family Dollar for opening up where Trader Joe’s and Big Y won’t.

Fava Beans and a Nice Chianti

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There’s no doubt in my mind that my Mormon upbringing nurtured a sense of apocalypticism. I remember being in a “Super Saturday” lesson sometime in the late 70’s or early 80’s in Bloomfield, Connecticut where the discussion turned to whether Jesus would return precisely in the year 2000 to usher in the sabbath-like Millennium, or whether, as in Third Nephi in the Book of Mormon the time might be pushed back for a while in order to test the faithfulness and resolve of the Saints. As I recall, the instructor from the church educational system leaned toward the latter. I never enjoyed musicals, but I knew the Lex de Acevedo play Saturday’s Warrior was meant as a depiction of the upcoming Mormon generation, saved for the final apocalyptic showdown with the forces of Satan. 

Today I am a 54 year old who is not really convinced there was a first coming of Jesus but, at the time, I remember being really bummed that my “normal” life on earth would end sometime before my 40th birthday. Still, it isn’t surprising that “end of days” commentary ticks a box in my brain and gets my attention. I’ve tried to turn this predilection into a strength by using it to help prepare myself and my family for the unexpected in terms of household expenses and destructive meteorological events: We have more than enough in savings to buy a new boiler, water heater, roof, automobile, etc; we’ve got more than enough food and water to last at least a few weeks without going to the store; we have small scale electrical Chargers, wind up flashlights and radios, oil lamps and candles; we can heat the house without natural gas or electricity with a wood stove and a solar furnace; we have places to meet in case of emergency, and people we can count on inside and outside the neighborhood if we are in need.

Our garden augments our food supply; apples, peaches, grapes, asparagus, and strawberries arrive in amounts varying from barely significant (strawberries) to more than we can possibly consume (peaches). Tomatoes, peppers, garlic, and a little lettuce, some potatoes, and a squash here and there round out what we harvest most years but we’d be hard pressed to survive for a month on what we produce.

None of this comes close to providing the sort of total independence that someone living off grid on a rural prepper compound might aspire to; because we don’t aspire to that. I don’t think we have either the abilities or the inclination to go that route. Knowing that things will break in a house, and having seen first hand in the last 10 years (more than in my entire life before that) that natural disasters can emerge out of nowhere to shake things up in life my wife and I have made a conscious decision to be thoughtful about the things we can do to be prepared.

Jim Kunstler was a huge influence on my thinking as my religious doomerism morphed into a more secular strain. How odd, then, to have the apocalyptic trigger in my brain tripped by a guest on the Kunstlercast who, when asked directly by Jim about the status of suburbia in the impending economic crisis instead diverted attention to “the worst place to be”: the city! Upon reading some essays by this guest from his own website I can see that he has, in his own words, a Mad Max view of the near term future in and around most major cities.

More perusing of websites publishing pieces as retrospectives on the year ending or making predictions for the year ahead led me to a really insightful essay on Chris Martenson’s Peak Prosperity blog. After reading that post I clicked over to the daily news digest, and on a link to this. Be warned, this is some out there stuff: It gets so detailed at certain points that I half expect him to say something like:

“There shall in that time be rumors of things going astray, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia-work base, that has an attachment. At that time, a friend shall lose his friend’s hammer, and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o’clock…”

In delving (scarily) deeper into what he calls a MUY (Minority Urban Youth) rebellion, it turns out that it will be sparked by any cutoff of ebt payments. The author is absolutely certain of the very specific details on which he elaborates and I will say that his is not the only postulation that the end of food stamps will bring with it the destruction of most major urban areas.

Getting back to Kunstler’s guest, he is it seems, a firm believer in the Pizza-gate hypothesis of the Podesta emails. Those emails which, I think, theoretically are at the core of the ongoing Russia-Trump collusion investigation. He says he thinks the Pizza-gate theory that references to cheese pizza and hot dogs in those emails were really about child exploitation is “100% true”. I remember a time, not so long ago when Kunstler incessantly described himself as “allergic to conspiracy theories”…back when the conspirators were the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower, what a nut job?!), but now that it’s pizza and hot dogs as pedophilic code it makes sense I suppose.

In reading and listening to these opinions I’m struck by how different they are from the more measured takes of John Michael Greer, David Collum, and even Johnny Sanphillippo. Comparing the two genres I can see how they fuse when taking into account the assertion that the future isn’t evenly distributed. If you lived in Paradise, CA in 2018 then you’ve already experienced your own personal Thunderdome. Ditto Puerto Rico in 2017. Will 2019 be my year, or your year to meet Mel Gibson (or Charlize Theron) on the road to dystopia, or will that privilege once again be reserved for someone else?
If the hordes of the ebt-less do alight upon my homestead and strip bare my larder and leave me and my family to die in the hulking ruin then I hope you’ll look upon this and my other missives as a cautionary tale of high mindedness and hubris gone horribly wrong. If, on the other hand, we live to see the dawn of 2020 may it find you well and full of hope for the year to come.

Time Keeps on Slippin’

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(LuLu skating on a weekday at MGM…weekends are packed so nobody skates there, it’s too crowded)

The end of the year brings out not only the Year in Review essays but also the Predictions 2019 pieces. I’m not someone who is afraid of being wrong so my reluctance to make an attempt at guessing what’s in store for us in the upcoming year isn’t out of fear of being inaccurate, it’s just that I can’t determine for myself what I really believe. I can make an argument in my head for a particular outcome; let’s say an economic crash on the order of a Great Depression, but I can also see how that, just as reasonably, not only might not happen, but that its opposite, a boom time for the economy, might somehow occur in its stead.

As relatively trivial as it might seem, it’s similar to how almost any great sporting victory could be erased by changing a tiny variable in one sequence of events in one game (Exactly where the thrill of watching comes from!); in the end the outcome was “evitable” whether or not 10,000 experts predicted it.

As far as the year in review goes, 2018 was as big a year for Springfield as I have witnessed in terms of potential game changers:

*The Hartford Line of CT/Rail connecting to, and Peter Pan opening its headquarters in Union Station.

*CRRC beginning production of rolling stock at its Springfield plant including the delivery of the first cars to the MBTA and contracts to build cars for transit systems in Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

*The opening of the MGM resort/casino in downtown Springfield.

On a smaller scale new businesses have opened…and stayed open in the downtown, and there were too many sidewalk, park, and bike infrastructure improvements to identify individually in a single, concise blog post.
(A new-ish shop in the Marketplace)

A look ahead? What I see, or perhaps what I don’t see which concerns me is how little immediate follow on from these developments I see coming on-line in the immediate future. There are perhaps a dozen developments proposed in the perfectly nebulous “middle term” to make one downright Pollyannish; that is unless that “one” can think of perhaps 3 score similar plans which not only were never completed but which were in fact never even truly begun! My “Downtown of the Middle Term” has condominiums and golf on the riverfront…along with a new marina, various high rises for businesses and residences, art spaces, pedestrian only streets, movie theaters, grocery stores, restaurants, at least two baseball stadiums (stadia), a “NOT a parking garage” bus station on Main Street and so, so much more.

(The opening of Naismith’s Pub and Pretzel)

Right now, located mostly in the penumbra of the middle distance, we’ve got three more hotels, a renovated vaudeville theater, one transformed industrial/apartment building, and 50+ units of market rate housing owned by, managed by, or named for MGM, a new Wahlburgers, some kind of museum themed storefront retail, and a new Main Street commercial development. Opening this spring, on the other hand, we have…nothing. Government is coming through with the completion of two more newly renovated parks, and the addition of two trains a day out of Springfield north to Greenfield passing through Northampton and Holyoke. On the horizon I see government expanding commuter rail both north-south and east-west and, perhaps, a new county courthouse located somewhere around Union Station but those outcomes pertain as well to the middle distance.

The question is, in the midst of this retail apocalypse will local entrepreneurs open up storefront shops across or down the street from MGM? Will restauranteurs see the enormous success of Red Rose, offering good food at reasonable prices just outside the MGM footprint, and copy that model with food offerings not otherwise available downtown: Crazy, exotic, nearly unheard of cuisines like “Mexican”, “Japanese”, “Thai” or even a real diner?

Seriously. 15,000 people a day coming to MGM, many more thousands of employees and residents…and ZERO places to buy a burrito.

“Why don’t you do it, Steve?”

Because, honestly, I’m closing in on a six figure salary doing what I do in a very low risk sitch-a-migation. I think the burrito place will need customers once it opens anyway, and I am prepared to be their #1 customer. Sounds like a great opportunity for an immigrant…perhaps from (¡)Mexico(!) or, as with most “Mexican” places around here, someone from El Salvador or Nicaragua: Shred some chicken, season some beans, throw in some cheese and whatever and…”pum”…burritos.

(My nephew in the ballon parade)

The big things have been done; big things which did a fairly good job of handling the “little things” like improved pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, better signage, and a generally even more attractive Main Street. There are people: The Thunderbirds are well on track to setting a franchise record for home attendance at 4,500 per game. There are more concerts than we’ve seen in decades, and a new MGM comedy club opening next month. There are already 4 proposals for recreational marijuana shops in the downtown, at least one looks almost ready to open. 

There are instances where mega-projects use up all the available oxygen and everything else around them dies: Baystate West was an excellent example of this. For this neighborhood I’ll gladly assert that this is not the case; the people I see at MGM are mostly new blood, many of them first time visitors, and they are leaving the footprint to go at least as far as Red Rose and perhaps to a hockey game. This is the moment, if we locals don’t seize it we’ll have no one but ourselves to blame.

Who’s With Me!?

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In the same spirit as my last post I’d like to change the focus from local individuals to local corporations. There are two in particular I’ll be focusing on, but the treatment the city gets is more or less the same from all of its corporate citizens.

When the tornado ripped through my neighborhood in 2011 it devastated, and then over zealous municipal officials destroyed, a series of 19th century buildings impeccably restored by architect Peter Zorzi in the South End. I took a picture just a week or two before the tornado hit because the sidewalks, signage, and plantings had just been reconstructed and I wanted my bride to be to see just how lovely her new community was.

A few days later it looked like this:

And today it looks like this:

My belief is that Davenport, a Boston real estate concern which has partnered with MGM in putting together its new resort, has been holding on to this empty block so as to provide MGM with a get out of jail free card if their negotiations with economic development officials and a local developer don’t bear fruit regarding their commitment to market rate apartment construction. My guess is that the parties concerned are finalizing those plans and so Davenport is now free to market the block for retail.

Block plans for the Zorzi property have been published:

And there is a depiction of what future structure might occupy the lot hanging on the fence which surrounds the lot.

Any resident will tell you, any charrette will determine, and every master plan will attest that what this section of the city needs more than anything else is some kind of grocery store. Luckily for us, one of New England’s largest grocery store chains has its headquarters right here in Springfield AND they’ve recently announced plans for a huge expansion of their warehouse space in the city demonstrating their intent to grow way beyond their current 77 stores. They’ve also shown a willingness to experiment with new modalities like smaller convenience style shops, smaller yet more upscale markets, and even gas stations!

So this is a match made in heaven: a pressing need; right across the street from the region’s newest resort attraction; marketing your products to people from the same geographical area where your stores are located; a hop, skip, and a jump from corporate HQ!!

Yeah, not happening. You can guarantee it’s going to be a Walgreen’s or a CVS. With a grocery aisle!!!! Ummm, I can taste the Dinty Moore Beef Stew now. And there was much rejoicing.

Another enormous gap in our downtown is a diner. Springfield has never been replete with diners because, well, the region’s diner chain was, and is, headquartered here and so Friendly’s has always eaten up that space. When I was a kid there were 5 Friendly’s within a 5 minute drive of my house, there were two downtown as well. Deciding to eat at Friendly’s was easier than deciding at which Friendly’s to eat.

Springfield is down to one Friendly’s now, located on a stroad just at the very edge of the city just inches beyond which the corporate headquarters are located. Friendly’s, somehow, still has 250 some odd locations all over the northeast, but just the one in the town where it all began, and that one as far as possible from the city’s core.

Many of the original drawings of the MGM property had a Friendly’s within the footprint. I can imagine that MGM’s rents were a bit pricey for a restaurant chain struggling to find a niche in today’s world but, being honest, there are a dozen buildings and lots located all around the casino and its facilities that could easily house a Friendly’s, perhaps a nod-to-the-original “Soda Shop Friendly’s” that could really make a killing when I look at the make up of the families that always seem to be wandering around the MGM property.
Just as with the difficulties in getting well to do locals to live downtown, it seems impossible to get any local corporation apart from the Peter Pan Bus Lines to put their money into the downtown. Mass Mutual has retreated up State Street, Baystate Medical into the North End, except for STCC, which has no on campus housing, the colleges are too far removed to enliven the downtown, and so it seems development is up to the same pool of local entrepreneurs who, in 2018, are unable to open even ONE local brewery when there are dozens and dozens popping up all over the region in every town imaginable…except in the most populous city in all of western New England! 

That leaves us with the out of town corporations once again. It reminds me of the scene from Jurassic Park where John Hammond realizes the only one on his side is the blood sucking lawyer! Well, at least that turned out ok.