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Not Letting this Crisis go to Waste

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There’s a dictum I heard for the very first time, and then multiple times, over the last few days which applies to how I feel at the moment; before a crisis most preparation seems excessive and yet during the crisis feels inadequate.

In terms of food nearly everyone who saw our pantry made a comment or a quip about pasta and beans or the like. If they noticed our two kitchens had two refrigerators with two freezers packed with food the jests would only be magnified. If you’ve read any of Johnny Sanphillippo’s posts on food storage, and shame on you if you haven’t, it won’t surprise you to hear that in comparison we are absolute pikers and this pandemic is giving us time to see and understand what we need to do take our preparation to the next level.

In this particular emergency electricity hasn’t been an issue but if it had been it’s easy to see that our stores of protein and other things would have been inadequate. Liz does a great job of canning tomatoes and relishes and things which don’t require pressure canning but when she makes a bit too much Hungarian goulash or pumpkin soup we freeze it. That has worked fine, but it’s easy to see any number of circumstances in which having her beef stew sitting on a shelf would be preferable to it taking up more space in a freezer.


Our gardening has intensified every year now for a decade, and given the fact that we seem to be inextricably caught up in this aging process, we’ve tried to move more and more toward perennials or near perennials like fruit trees, strawberries, grapes, asparagus, blueberries, and (a so far failed experiment in) hazelnuts. There is some nutrition in that distribution, as well as some seasonal variation but there’s not a lot in the way of calories. We don’t ever expect to be able to satisfy all of our nutritional needs from our little urban garden plot; La Granja. However adding some beans and potatoes to our usual mix of tomatoes, peppers, pumpkin, cucumbers, and lettuce is probably a good idea.


I’m happy with our water storage situation. As soon as the forecast showed an all clear regarding solidly below freezing temperatures, which is to say last weekend, I hooked up the rain barrels: they filled up in one rainstorm. The next day I hooked up the tote and…voilà: hundreds of gallons of water to keep our plants thriving. Liz has really taken to worm-farming and so our composting has really improved. The worms make some truly fine soil for planting, leaves and coffee grounds in one compost barrel give us some slightly less refined soil, and we use the kitchen waste compost at the base of any new beds or planters. The “worm tea” gives us liquid fertilizer, and I’ve spread the ash from the wood stove around liberally in the “orchard”.


(Now full!)


Our relationship with Copper Hill Farm has given us real peace of mind. The farm is thriving more than ever in the current circumstance and they find themselves selling nearly all the produce they have available, with eggs being truly “a box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid”! I recommend you…yes you…do the same. Find a local farmer, figure out some way to go above and beyond to help them survive economically with an understanding that at some future time they’ll be there for you. Greg shares our views on many, many things and our relationship is personal and meaningful. Use your social networks, I guarantee that somewhere nearby there’s a small scale farmer that could use some back-up.

I think that food price inflation is inevitable given the current circumstances. To stay ahead of it our plan is to do more dry storage of grains, beans, and legumes that we use all the time anyway, and to slowly over time use pressure canning to store the excess of what Liz makes us for lunch and dinner all the time anyway. We plan to continue to scale up our growing while we add more seed saving, indoor growing, and cold framing of lettuces and greens.

The lesson from my parents’ basement stays with us however: my parents level jumped from having some extra cans of soup and such along with some powdered milk in the basement to buying hundreds of pounds of soy product which they stored in barrels which, surprise surprise, after 40 years were only disposed of by leaving them out in the backyard for deer to feed on. It was nasty.

Lesson: Don’t go too far too fast.

I hope where ever you are preparation wise this experience is useful in helping you plan for the next, inevitable, discontinuity.

10538 Overture

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My apologies for delivering a less than fully conceptualized essay this week as I find myself much more in the mode of hypothesizing than pontificating. If any of you wish to squeeze into a Rational Urbanism rabbit hole I recommend this post at The Sun. It gives some of my ideas prominence. The author was kind enough to reach out to me with a link to the piece. As he currently resides in the area of the Quad cities it reminded me of the kind Mormon family which took me in for a handful of days when my Corolla wagon broke down on the way from Springfield, Massachusetts to Provo.

Despite my best efforts I find myself following into a Kunstlerian interest in economics above and beyond my normal studies related to “urbanism”. Economics was my first private intellectual interest. Dow Jones actually used to publish the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s in Chicopee, Massachusetts and it was from the USPS Tapley Street annex that those publications were distributed throughout the northeast; including Wall Street itself. My dad was the overnight supervisor at Tapley Street, if asked he said his job was, in essence, “getting out the Wall Street Journal”. He would grab an extra paper from time to time, and I always got a copy of Barron’s.

In any case, economics went from a private interest to my major at BYU. Those three years focused on macroeconomics and being introduced to the ideas of everyone from Malthus and Ricardo to Adam Smith (it was BYU!) and John Maynard Keynes always informed my reading of the news, especially as it related to the changes that were taking place in Springfield from the loss of every single one of our local and regional banks’ headquarters to the closing of factory after factory after factory.

A recent conversation on the “Quoth the Raven” podcast between the host and economist George Gammon not only brought together two voices I’ve recently come to see as both informative and insightful, but also veered into a combining of my dual interests; urbanism and economics. Starting around minute 41 Mr. Gammon begins to discuss where he sees the impact of what he sees, as do I, as a major economic downturn even after the direct impacts of the coronavirus begin to dissipate.

As you will hear, what he foresees is a generalized flight from center cities to more rural areas. He reasons that many city dwellers will have experienced what he is now experiencing in Medellin, Colombia: a long term quarantine in a downtown apartment with no access to nature and no ability to grow food or even exercise outdoors in a private space. George and the QTR host Chris Irons briefly opine with respect to exurban living on “acres” of land and a “linked in” lifestyle which allows for both connection to the modern world and great independence regarding things like food production and home repairs.

I wouldn’t doubt for a minute that many, many people who in general terms enjoy an urbane city way of life are contemplating wistfully what sheltering in place might be like on an idyllic homestead upstate and in the aftermath of the current crisis the United States my well continue to see the flight of all who can to places with wide open spaces. On the other hand there are quite a few caveats that ought to be taken into account before moving forward.

First and foremost is the fact the we are still in the early stages of this catastrophe. I’m not going to engage in special pleading relative to density and lifestyle and cities and pretend that in the way of viral transmission people living closer to one another might not be at increased risk, but there are other significant characteristics endemic to urbanity and rural life respectively which might alter our understanding once the dust or the viral particulates have cleared.

As I wrote years ago, I am not at all antagonistic to rural life, but a cursory Strong Towns analysis of the way most Americans actually inhabit exurbia, with their actual lifestyles and infrastructural expectations are the furthest thing from resilient. Leaving aside the recognized advantages of actual face to face contact in the world of innovation, actually turning a rural homestead into a particularly different lifeboat from the one I have always maintained in a fairly urban neighborhood during a crisis like the one we face at present would require much more focus and dedication to the project than either of these erudite prognosticators have imagined.

(I wish to soften my critique by saying; this was one riff during a very long conversation and was presented as nothing more than a working hypothesis.)

Take coronavirus expert and recently oft mentioned resiliency expert Chris Martenson for example. He recently moved to a 180 acre property 20 miles or so west of downtown Springfield. More than a decade ago he purchased a different property 30 miles north of my current location. There he and his now ex wife created an incredible rural homestead far beyond anything I’ve ever put together: solar photovoltaics, solar hot water, vegetable gardens, orchards, berries and who knows what else. But having moved to this new place, in winter, in New England, I’m sure he has years to go before he could even dream of “living off the land”. 

He was perhaps among the very first to realize just how serious Covid-19 might be, and as a very wealthy man who prioritizes preparation I’m sure he has months of food and supplies. Tough timing though. This sort of discontinuity can pop up at any time. If stock traders on Wall Street also wish to be gentlemen farmers they just might have to grow years and years and years of crops before having Whole Foods just deliver the stuff would cease to be easier and even more affordable; and that’s assuming that the skills and knowledge one needs to homestead can be acquired quickly and easily.

Along with that here are some interesting details from the crisis in my area: the Springfield Public Schools are providing 6,000 meals a day at no charge to city families; Meals on Wheels is delivering 50,000 meals in the region. PeaPod and Instacart are still delivering; I saw a neighbor walking back from the Pride store today with bread and milk (but without a mask!). As with all of this, no doubt, it’s early days, but I’d bet on the public school and the Big Y food distribution networks holding out longer than the root cellars of 99.999% of hill town residents.

The podcast conversation went on to discuss “herd immunity”. They guessed that perhaps 190 million Americans would need to get Covid-19 before that was established. Hard to imagine that wouldn’t include a fair number of rural folk, who live much further from hospitals, and whose hospitals are known to have even fewer resources and a very limited number of healthcare professionals and which will most likely not be the focus of National Guard and Reserve attention. Understandably we’ve seen quite a lot about Wuhan, Milan, Madrid, and Queens, but I think that might not be because people in the hinterlands have been completely spared.

If you have the time, I recommend listening to Jim Kunstler’s Big Slide; it addresses, in very Kunsteresque fashion, how city folk might fare in a crisis when they look to their rural vacation homes as areas of refuge in a crisis. 

My working hypothesis is that after a brief burst of joy, optimism, and even apparent economic prosperity in the immediate aftermath of Covid-19, the always inevitable evaporation of the mirage that was the Shale Miracle and today’s “everything must go” oil and gas contango will usher in a period of Stagflation that will change lifestyles and corporations forever.

Garden-19(20)

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For some reason my gardening activities have been a bit more focused this year.

We planted hundreds of garlic bulbs last fall because the weather and availability made it impossible for us to plant at Copper Hill Farm:

The asparagus bed is due for its first year of full production:


We’ll see.

We’ve got four beds of onions and other such things:

The peas are in:


We planted lettuce and spinach last week:

The strawberry plants and the lone blueberry bush may give us a few berries here and there as usual:


We’ve got seedlings going out to the mini-greenhouse on sunny days, and sitting on little heating pads the rest of the time. We over wintered some pepper plants which worked well last year:


We’ll get grapes for sure. Peaches, probably. Apples? Doubt it. We’ve started growing potatoes in pots.

My neighbor has a plot almost the same size as ours that he allows to fill with weeds every summer. As soon as we go into lockdown I plan to ask him if we can plant some veggies there; it gets more sun than our space:

We’ve got the seeds. We could grow a lot of food on that lot of land.

Mocked, Opposed, Accepted

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I wrote these two essays for StrongTowns almost two years ago:

The Elements of a Resilient Life

In the Face of an Uncertain Future

I don’t suppose I need to convince anyone whose been reading my blog for more than a few months that my overall outlook is apocalyptic. I’ve often softened that perspective by explaining that having been raised “Latter Day Saint” it was not surprising that my neural pathways would contain deep ruts connecting events and scenarios for the End of Days. That said, I think the primary motivator of my apocalypticism has been the fact that I live in a society that has been in overshoot relative to its resource base for most of my adult lifetime and things that can’t go on forever generally don’t.

Regarding the current trigger event for what certainly seems to be the inflection point of discontinuity for industrial society I have to give Chris Martenson at Peak Prosperity 100% of the credit for sounding the alarm and giving Elizabeth and me time to become at least a little bit more logistically and emotionally prepared for what was to come. In late January we started to discuss at our morning conversations over coffee and our evening conversations, sometimes over a small glass of wine, what we ought to do to be able to spend an extended period of time at home. Being natural born preppers, and with helpful tips from Johnny Sanphillippo at GranolaShotgun and some of my wife’s family members, we looked around and thought that what we really needed to do was make sure we had what we thought we had and…”steady as she goes”.

On February first my wife sent a text to a family member in Westchester County who is a “first responder” in both his full time and part time careers. His wife has a very significant position in a portion of the health care system which is at the front line of pandemic response. My wife listed some things that we had done and were doing to be ready for what was clearly headed this way regarding what is now called Covid-19 and this is the response she got quoting a local leader:


It is ironic of course that their community is now the location of one of the first clusters of the coronavirus here in the United States. 

Is this just a long, drawn out, “I told you so”? 

A little bit, sure.

Mostly however, it’s about improving my understanding regarding what I should expect in terms of the responses to what comes after.

There has been, at least in my experience, a weirdly political component to the acceptance and therefore a rational response to Covid-19 among the people connected to me via Facebook. I pretty much quit that social networking platform 2 years ago or more as far as posting my perspective, (or even photographs of my dinner time ravioli) but I do enjoy lurking from time to time to assess the zeitgeist. Among my former students who had joined the military, and the conservative Mormons of my youth there was truly aggressive and pointed mocking of those who were sounding the alarm regarding what was happening first in China, and later in Italy.

One case in particular, a former missionary acquaintance of mine who was also a physician was posting all about this being much less serious than the flu and that panic and hysteria were the only real problems connected with Covid-19. 

What has followed has been “radio silence”. 

The military people have transitioned from mocking those who were getting prepared to threats, always involving firearms, relative to (Wait for it!) the inevitable breakdown of cities at their cores and the ensuing bands of marauding savages:

Weeks before:

With the economic downturn/Greater Depression I think the expectation should be the same. Most people will mock anyone who presents a viewpoint that energy, environmental, and economic realities are going to obligate most of us to change our expectations regarding the future in terms of what we view as normal. As reality becomes impossible to deny there won’t be any cathartic acknowledgement that they were wrong in any way, but rather an understandable fear followed by anger will likely cause them to leapfrog over rational responses right into aggressive threats towards people who more quickly assimilated the new reality and so prepared for it.

The transformation of prepping into hoarding in the vernacular has been interesting. My wife and I haven’t been out of the house for over a week; we haven’t taken any toilet paper from any store shelves; we haven’t been filling our shopping carts with canned goods: Because we always maintain a pantry, we’ve practiced storing food and preparing meals from scratch for years and years. That means that we’ve left space for others who were less willing or less able to do so now to obtain what they need. I imagine communities with large numbers of Mormons, who put great focus on preparedness, have seen a little less chaos in terms of filling pantries with the basics.

 Beyond that we informed our friends and family weeks and weeks ago that perhaps THIS was an important time to take stock of your household and contemplate what a week or a month at home might signify. I think we can point to at least four families that weren’t out during what has been a trying time in the world looking to purchase basic necessities. The problem isn’t so much with those of us who have engaged in preparing for the unexpected as it is with those who’ve had the wherewithal to do so and haven’t.

Do everything you can to stay out of debt, have some money in reserve, have some food and water set aside for emergencies, learn to garden, get to know your neighbors, make yourself more resilient in every way you can. The more of us who can do this who follow through and do it the more focus can be placed on helping people who lack the resources to be prepared. My wife and I have had friends, colleagues, and family members who have asked us for advice on these things but who have completely rejected it as impractical: Instead of setting a price point for a home and finding an acceptable one within those constraints they’ve committed themselves to thousands and thousands of dollars a month in mortgage payments for homes valued in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars with property taxes of a thousand dollars a month. Add to that two monthly car payments and correspondingly high insurance payments, and a comfort level with consumer debt that boggles the mind and, like the economy these behaviors rest on, in a crisis there is almost no resilience. 

In all the things I’ve written over the last 8 years I never once mentioned global pandemic as a concern, and I assume there are a whole handful of crises I’ve never contemplated which may become realities. What I have done is listened to people whom I respect regarding general preparedness. I know that I’m not prepared for everything, but even that awareness is of itself of incredible value. It keeps me in a constant state of auto-evaluation. Even this week I’ve reached out to people (mostly Johnny at GS) for not just advice, but an honest critique of where I am and what I’ve done. 

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s never too late to start, but the sooner the better for all of us.

Hello from the Other Side

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Coming out the other side of this we will be a different world. Globalism as we have known it will have turned out to be a “temporary set of circumstances” just as JHK said it would and the relocalization of supply chains and of production will begin. I’ve watched a generation of wonderful, curious, intelligent children bent on consumption show no interest whatsoever in the process of making what is consumed. We would read “El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha” and the episode of the “Escudero” in “Lazarillo de Tormes” and the revulsion for productive work of Spain’s “decadencia” was always mirrored in the faces of my students in contemporary America.

John Michael Greer counters the “materialistic American” convention with his hypothesis that we are least materialistic of any people who have ever lived in that the inauthentic and the virtual are sufficient for us, from our food to our houses, and from our sexual encounters to our communities. I think JMG would have preferred that we had collectively rejected the virtual for the authentic voluntarily, but the insufficiency of the inauthentic will only become obvious when the toil and trouble necessary to create real tangible goods becomes a part of our daily existence again.


Money will be the other concept that we will be forced to reassess. The lack of value in markers and chits for goods and services when the former are widely distributed but the latter are in extremely short supply will alter our attitude toward the currencies most of us have never questioned. We have never questioned them for good reason of course; most of us have never experienced a circumstance where a handful of paper bills, or a validated check, or a credit card wasn’t sufficient to receive in return a commensurate distribution of whatever product or service we desired. 

The time frame on this transition of course will be decades long. Most of us (surviving) older people, including myself, will seek out pockets in space and interaction where the old paradigms will still seem to apply, but the initially shell shocked younger generation will adapt much more quickly and become the novel makers in a world perhaps not totally made by hand, but yes made closer to home. The abilities to do, make, shape, and repair will rise up from the slag heap to take their rightful place at the forefront of civilization. 


As Johnny Sanphillippo has often reminded us, we will use the world we’ve made in the state that we now find it to carry forward the project of civilization. Cul de sacs (Culs de sac probably!)and big box power centers might not be the ideal launch pad for what comes next but they will have to do for most of us in North America.

 “Ayuh, if I was a goin’ the’a, I wouldn’t sta’t from he’a.” 

Those of us with an inheritance of more in the way of pockets of traditional urbanism might find the transitional period less awkward, but that will in no way guarantee whatever it is that might be defined as success will be achieved; the skill sets of people in a particular region, their values, their ethics, their unity or lack thereof, the distribution of age cohorts, water, weather, topography, and that capricious bastard “chance” will have a lot to say in what places wither and which survive.

I’m home now for at least the next few weeks. I’ll be experiencing this apocalypse from the urban hell scape I long ago selected as my watchtower for the end of all things. I must credit Chris Martenson for alerting me and my family members, on two continents no less, to the dislocations that this novel coronavirus has brought forth. He actually lives in greater Springfield now, but on a few hundred acres of woodland and farmland tucked way up in what we call “The Hilltowns”. 

Only once in his dozens of videos addressing Covid-19 did he single out cities as particularly bad places to be in the wake of this pandemic. In the past I’ve been quick to point out that my lived experience has shown the city to be by far the best place to be in the aftermath of disaster. The various stages of this crisis will put that to the test. Density plays a role in contagion, but Asian cities with huge concentrations of people have successfully minimized the impacts of this pandemic. My daughters in Bucheon, South Korea, however, are living in a much more orderly and regimented place than Springfield could ever hope to be. From Westchester County to Kirkland, Washington, relatively suburban places have been at the forefront of the North American experience, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that were to change given that it would make sense that wealthier “jet setters” would be the first to bring the illness, but how it progresses through the population is yet to be seen.


Will potential shortages, or fears of such, regarding food and other necessities create disorder disproportionately in North American cities, or will police and National Guard presence be more effective among denser populations? How will public transit and the car function in moving people when contact with the other is to be avoided? This may be a new talking point for Randal O’Toole in the “city versus suburb” debate. 

There’s a lot to be learned that’s for sure, and I will keep you up to date with my experiences here as we hunker down and try to “flatten the curve” of Covid-19 in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Build It! (somewhere else)

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I was at the Bernie 2020 rally in Springfield on Friday evening (a week ago) and it was an enlightening experience. My wife and her family were all over the event volunteering; which was the only way I was able to get in. The main arena of the MassMutual Center was occupied by the AHL Thunderbirds and so the event was limited to 4-5 thousand people. When I made my way down a half an hour before the rally the convention center exhibition hall was already filled to capacity and the line still stretched, literally, all around the building and was obligated to snake its way up and down Court Street.

(I removed my Tulsi 2020 pin when I was given entrance to the “Invited Guests” area.)

I was disappointed that, apart from some references to the military-industrial complex, Senator Sanders never once even mention the 5…6…is it 7 wars the military is now fighting? I’m still voting for Tulsi on Super Tuesday. From an urbanist standpoint ending the War on Drugs, rebuilding our infrastructure, better funding poorer school districts, and affordable housing were the major elements of his entertaining and impassioned speech.

In 2016 Springfield went heavily for Hillary in the Democratic primary. Yes, the former Goldwater Republican crushed the candidate who actually marched for civil rights; such are machine politics. Springfield was chosen for the non-Boston Massachusetts rally site in part, I’m sure, to reach out to Black and Hispanic voters; there weren’t too many people of color in the audience however.( “Joe 30330” took Springfield this time around. “What do we want? Nothing! When do we want it? When it’s convenient for the donor class!”)

For me what always makes the cheers (and there were thunderous ovations) for tackling the homeless crisis and for building “10 million units of affordable housing” somewhat irritating is that almost none of the people cheering live in places that the poor could even begin to find affordable:

I applauded, but I did add not completely inaudibly: “Yeah, no worries, none of it will go anywhere near where ‘you’ live!” Of course, I’m not against affordable housing either, I’m surrounded by it and, if one takes the term more literally than intended, I live in it: <$30 a square foot. As I’ve expressed before, I don’t think we’d do the poor any favors by randomly plopping “affordable housing” in suburban areas with no public transit, no walkable access to food or services and, even if they could access them, products which have been bid up in price by their wealthy neighbors. (Corollary: a really smart, wealthy suburban friend of mine buys all his furniture at the Raymour and Flanagan in Springfield in order to pay less!)

I still find the enthusiasm hypocritical, much like the claims of disgust with our “Divided America” made by the granola-crunching left living above the Tofu Curtain, where their demands for social justice can be made at a safe distance from the actual struggle.  “Create affordable housing, but not near my enclave.”

Yes, I presume to know this because these people could live near the poor now if they wanted to, with all that entails, but they choose not to.

I have no idea if there is a solution to the problem of affordable housing but while we’re outspending the rest of the planet on armaments I’m not listening to claims that “we can’t afford” to build affordable housing. (Even if it’s by attaching 18 “worker housing” units to a $50 million market rate housing development on Court Square.)

I don’t think there are actual solutions to many socio-economic problems; there are only rational responses. If there is a problem it is the idea that there is “a solution”. The poor have trouble affording housing for the same reason they have trouble affording everything; not being able to afford things is what being poor means. Beyond that each of us make choices and trade-offs in order to afford what we can afford; as individuals we sacrifice on this in order to afford that, and at a societal level we have to decide what, if anything, we are willing to forego in order that others might have expanded affordability options. All of the options have consequences; it’s not hard to see how today section 8 rental guarantees and subsidies push up rents on those who don’t receive subsidies but who are still far from well-off. Giving renters “more rights” protects a vulnerable class of people but makes potential landlords…like me…reluctant to put units on the market: I have a perfectly good one bedroom apartment in my townhouse which sits empty because I don’t need the money badly enough to either do the hard work to avoid, or to deal with, a potential nightmare tenant. I know I’d be more likely to rent my space for less money if I thought I could have an easy time booting someone that wasn’t working out. I’m not saying that’s right morally or ethically; it’s just a fact.

I could see it going for $650 a month all utilities included. Maybe even $450. That’s fairly affordable.

I almost never hear the affordability question put in a Springfield context though, it’s usually looked at from a San Francisco or Cambridge perspective. They are so different that I can’t imagine the best response in each case would be identical…

(That is where last week’s post ended. I generally like to wrap up my essays with some sort of coherent message. My mind is elsewhere, there is a great deal more to contemplate regarding affordable housing for Springfield but for a relatively wealthy metro area housing costs are actually very low here but as I wrote weeks and weeks ago, events are in control now and there are other things to focus on.)

I Voted

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(My weekly post is delayed so as a ñapa for my patient readers I’m posting this.)

These are some photos I took on the way down to vote on Super Tuesday:


And this is my polling place:



It’s enough to make you think this might be a place worth fighting for.

Promise Keepers

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Right on cue two of the biggest projects I called out in my Promises, Promises post got upgraded in terms of their life support level and appear to be moving forward. MGM got a one month extension from the Massachusetts Gaming Commission to get the project “across the goal line”, which was later revealed to consist mostly of convincing the city to throw in $4 million towards clean up and the like. It’s amazing how you can take a building like this through its chain of custody, generally being owned by remarkably well-to-do people, and yet there’s always a lot of hand waiving around deterioration and site clean-up; “Let’s not bicker and argue over who killed who”. I can’t imagine the city not kicking in the cash, $4 million of a $50 million project, but I get why it might annoy people.

If that project moves forward then the MGM “safety school”:


Would be turned back to the city for redevelopment. It was announced years ago that this had already happened, but, not surprisingly, MGM is unwilling to let that property go unless the Court Square thing is definitely happening.

The other project moving forward is what was the MassDevelopment building on Stearns Square.

It was announced that it has been turned over to the downtown Business Improvement District to begin a million dollar renovation of the interior for an as yet unnamed tenant. I have absolutely no idea who that might be but given that the whole MassDev concept was to create a dining district and the building is enormous I would imagine we are talking about a huge national chain which is unrepresented in the region or Boston/New York enterprise moving into Springfield. If it is a local establishment only the Picknelly-Yee partnership would seem to have the wherewithal to take on such a giant facility.

On the other hand it could be split in half with a full build out on one side and a speculative refurbishment for another concept being done on the other side.

An announcement regarding another project, the one I referenced at the end of my prior post, muddied the prospects of how and where it might move forward. The Red Lion Inn people had previously committed to building a boutique hotel at the old Paramount Theater in the Massasoit House building, it was then announced that they were moving ahead with talks with MGM on putting another boutique hotel on the old Mass Mutual building now owned by MGM.

Initial reports stated that it was not unusual for a hotel management group to run two properties in one city, but later reports implied that the project might be “moving”.

The most exciting news related to the Mass Mutual building announcement was that the local cable access team would move from their ground floor location at the corner of State and Main to the otherwise semi-abandoned CityStage property which might well leverage improvements which could once again make that venue viable for concerts and such not big enough for Symphony Hall and the MassMutual arena.

I’d be more excited about all of this if it weren’t for what seems to me like the specter of an approaching recession which I can’t help but believe would make 2008 look like the 1950’s. To me the world economy, much like the supply chains of world manufacturing, is efficient but not resilient; when you add to that a federal budget running a trillion dollars in the red during what is being called a boom period with a surging stock market and low unemployment and I can’t help but think that a downturn will be confronted with very little “dry powder” and no tools left in the tool box to turn things around.

Mixed metaphors aside, having asked questions in my blog about these projects so recently I would be remiss not to mention that there appears to be progress being made. Let’s hope they’re not undertaken to the strains of Songe d’Atomne.

Not Alike in Dignity

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The heuristic for my philosophy of art is that it must have some value in at least one of the three categories of beauty, meaning, or difficulty. I’m not making an attempt to universalize this framework as I realize the subjective nature of, at the very least, two out of the three, but it does give me a rubric for a critique which protects me from the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome of post 19th century art. I find it works quite well at detecting hackery and charlatanism: duct taped bananas and discarded t-shirts pinned to walls tend to score very low.

Let’s be honest, there have been horrible writers, terrible painters, insipid sculptors, and talentless composers from the time those forms began, but the rigors and technical demands of the rules of, for example, the sonnet would weed out the people who couldn’t “word good”.

Architecture is special in that it adds a layer of practical function to art in such a way that it is, in my opinion, the weakest link in so called Modern Art. Little things like keeping the elements out, not collapsing, indicating where the entrances and exits are, not endangering environs with excessive heat and light, not popping out windows, and being a library that can withstand the weight of books are all challenges that must be met or “you didn’t architecture so good.”

Here in Springfield we have the two structures which make up the state court system. One of them is well over a hundred years old and absolutely no one makes any complaints about it. It was designed by H.H. Richardson:

The other is less than one third the age of the first and by all accounts it suffers from various structural problems and a huge effort is underway to replace it with a building that perhaps isn’t also the bullseye of a rare illness.

Can you tell where the entrance is?

Nope, it’s to the right of what looks like a cantilevered portico. And you can’t use most of the stairs in winter, they’re just too dangerous so if it snows they add temporary rails and close off a section or two. If you’ve read my blog for a while, you’ve seen this building before:

The two courthouses sit perpendicularly to each other:

And I don’t hate the newer one. Turns out Eduardo Catalano, the architect of the courthouse, was a much bigger part of my Bildungsroman than I ever would have imagined. You see, he designed all three of Springfield’s most significant 1970’s megastructures: the civic center, Baystate West, and the aforementioned courthouse. While I never spent anytime in the courthouse, I spent hours and hours in the other two. Hockey and shows from the Harlem Globetrotters to Disney programs were part of my formative years:

Baystate West was the downtown mall where my mom worked part time and I would hang out and buy imported records from The Move or Violinski, eat a California Pizza Dog from Orange Julius and then wander around the surrounding streets and in so doing fall in love with what I would now call “urbanism”.

There are two ways to judge those buildings. On the one hand they have stood the test of time much better than the courthouse and continue to serve the community quite well; on the other they have required major remodeling and even reconstruction to minimize the deadening effects of their stark Brutalism on the surrounding streets.

In the case of the civic center it had to be hidden by another building to frame Court Square in a dignified way and hide its monotonous soul crushing expanse of concrete:



As Baystate West was transformed into Tower Square windows have been added on the first two floors on the Main Street and Harrison Avenue façades, splashes of form and color were slapped on to help people find entrances, and an enormous airwalk was removed:


This is among my favorite Main Street photos, it includes  a side view of “Tower Square”:


As Catalano buildings go, they’ve fared well. The “masterpiece” which put him on the Modernist Map had to be torn down as it couldn’t stand the test of even a few decades of time withstanding the elements in the harsh climes of Raleigh, North Carolina!


Here’s a Richardson train station, none too well maintained and standing up to the somewhat harsher weather of New England for over 150 years:


There’s talk of putting it back into service once again as the Holyoke Station.

I read on apologia for modernism which claimed that it is poor maintenance that has let modernist buildings down: In the case of the two courthouses it’s the exact same entity that maintained them since they’ve been in existence but only one of them has been able to stand up to that malign neglect…and for over a century longer.

The truth is I don’t hate these buildings, I mean, I’m not dying of ALS so maybe that’s easy for me to say, but they are a part of the fabric of the city I love. If Eduardo Catalano ever becomes an El Greco of architecture, his genius rediscovered centuries later, then Springfield will be his Toledo and all of the fixes will need to be undone and savants will wonder at the callous treatment his works were given. Short of that, these structures will continue to serve whatever purpose they’re put to to the best of their ability which, with the possible exception of the courthouse, I have little doubt will extend long beyond my time on this planet.

Overstimulated

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Way back in 1978 or thereabouts Springfield representative Ed Boland, yes, he of the Boland Amendment, got money for building a new federal courthouse in Springfield. As a broad redevelopment of the downtown was very much underway it was decided to place the new courthouse right on Main Street and to use the attached parking facility to wedge in a new home for a local professional theater group.

The federal building was gray, drab, and lifeless. Its plaza was unwelcoming and cold. Post Office Alley, which cuts between the two structures and was intended to be a continuation of an attractive alleyway on Fort Street, was the most urbanistically successful portion of the design, but the failure of downtown retail to rebound from what was hoped to be only a temporary lull never allowed the space to reach its full potential.

Within 15 years of its opening the federal building was viewed as having inadequate facilities within the building in terms of keeping jurors, judges, and defendants appropriately separated; it also failed from a post Oklahoma City security standpoint, and it was too small to provide adequate space for the agencies it was intended to house. Add to that the fact that nobody liked it, especially the staff of the local congressman, and a push began to build yet another courthouse and federal building, and the old building was handed over to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. As a footnote, the state has turned the building into a gem and the plaza into a real winner.

I was very involved in the process of bringing the new courthouse to Springfield. I not only lived right across the street from where it was to be located on State Street, but I was also working as the community liaison for the Armoury-Quadrangle Civic Association which was the neighborhood group which worked with the GSA to ensure that all of the guidelines for community input were followed. In the early 1990’s there was a recognition that a lot of federal money had been spent to design and build structures which hadn’t done cities any favors in terms of beauty, livability, and economic development and so a Design Excellence Program was created in hopes of ensuring better outcomes.

At the first few meeting with the GSA representative we were given photographs of some courthouses which had been built under this new program. Some were really beautiful. One or two were hideous. The location where the courthouse was to be built sits on a corridor with multiple impressive historic buildings:


There was a fear that the new courthouse would either be a bland sort of black hole in that trajectory, or worse, that it would be a modernist piece-of-shit middle finger to everything around it. Everyone at the neighborhood level was ready for a pitched battle. In the middle of all this the city forester determined that there were two inviolate trees on the selected property, one of which was possibly over 500 years old, and the design of the new structures needed to preserve them.

Springfield is pretty small potatoes as federal buildings go so getting a design which did the job of being a courthouse and federal building, preserved the stately elegance of the corridor, and preserved the two historic trees seemed like a big ask of the architects who might be expected to bid on such a financially modest project. Springfield got lucky in that one of today’s most celebrated architects had a collaborator who was not only from the city, but had gotten wind of the development and urged Moshe Safde to create a design for the project.

If memory serves there were three design finalists. Despite its thoroughly contemporary style the Moshe Safde design was far and away the most popular among the members of the community. I can’t recall the style of the other designs, I believe they were all more or less “non-traditional”, but I’m not sure of that. I am certain that the overall concern about the impact of the building on the streetscape disappeared.

This essay is not a random historical sketch about courthouses in the city of Springfield. The debate regarding federal buildings and design styles has erupted over the last few weeks and it was what prompted me to excavate these events from my memory. Arguing about taste and preferences is about as close to a useless endeavor as I can think of. I happened to visit my old high school last weekend for an open house, it’s now a condominium where I actually lived for 12 years. I took these pictures of the central library:

And the Moshe Safde courthouse:

I can’t imagine not being more inspired by the library.


But I also can’t imagine liking fish; that doesn’t mean that I think that other people are lying when they say they do like fish, but it also doesn’t make fish taste any less nasty and disgusting to me. That said, some contemporary architecture, like the new courthouse or the Basketball Hall of Fame, are like swordfish, they’re not too fishy, which is to say they are not too “whatever it is I hate about some modern buildings”.

But this needs to be deconstructed a little bit. They are less offensive for somewhat different reasons. The courthouse does a good job of maintaining the warm feel of the elegant boulevard on which it sits both for the pedestrian and the motorist: a pretty amazing achievement. Day and night it really enhances its surroundings.


The Hall of Fame has no streetscape. The roadway it sits on is essentially a service road and an access corridor to an interstate. That this agglomeration of roadways severs the city from the waterfront is not the fault of the architects of this one structure, that decision was made decades ago. The hoophall is intended to be both an iconic structure creating an impression for people zooming by at 65 mph, and a modern sculpture representing  both the sphere of the actual ball and the arc on which it travels. (And it’s a strip mall!)

There’s a difference between urbanism and architecture. I snapped this picture in Westfield a few weeks ago, long before I had even thought of writing this post, because it so well illustrates that significant point:

One of the four buildings is a fine example of prewar architecture. Of the other three the one with the closest thing to what one might call “design” is as vacant as the most beautifully designed building; it’s the two total pieces of crap, architecturally, which actually have tenants! As we walked along that side of the road, before we crossed and I took the picture, I hadn’t even noticed the disparity. Within a core neighborhood urbanism trumps architecture: Does it frame the street? Is it permeable? Does it perpetuate whatever syntaxes and grammars surround it?

I’m on the local historical commission, I live in an 1870 French Second Empire townhouse, I prefer traditional architecture, overall, to the International style, Deconstructivism, and Brutalism, but I do enjoy, from a distance and as sculpture, for example, the works of Santiago Calatrava, but I think they’d be a disaster on most downtown streets and in almost any walkable place.

To me, my most under-appreciated essay was the piece I wrote comparing Chuck Marohn and Michael Pollan. In essence they arrive at the same conclusions for the same reasons about two contemporary disasters in our society despite the fact that there might appear to be no connection between them. While the most entertaining critique of modern architecture I’ve seen, from Leon Krier, takes a very different extremely polemical tack; a less impassioned, alternative critique, also ends up aligning with the Marohn-Pollan assessment of development/food: In breaking down and atomizing what we did and could understand of the elements of building buildings we then used our fossil fuel engorged modern capacities to produce a completely new formulation which failed to integrate the more numinous, and ephemeral qualities which our limited knowledge overlooked.

We didn’t know what we didn’t know and so, much like industrial food pleases but doesn’t nourish, and sprawl facilitates but doesn’t fulfill, modern architecture stimulates, but it often alienates; individuals from the environment and itself from its surroundings. Like fast food and big box power centers we can survive a little bit here and there, any more than that is mortally dangerous.