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Chicfieldyoke

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So here’s the comment that got this brain train rollin’:

September 16, 2019 at 5:35 pm



Steve,


I’ve been reading the blog for about a year now; I found it somehow, not totally sure, but I am glad I did. I just moved (begrudgingly) to Windsor CT as my girlfriend works in Hartford and I in Springfield still. Previously I was on Mattoon for a year, before that in East Forest Park, and originally in Sixteen Acres when I first moved to Springfield just over 4 years ago for graduate school. Springfield became my home and I loved it, especially my time on Mattoon.

Anyway, I’ve noticed you accurately refer to this part of New England in regional terms. That is, New Haven-Hartford-Springfield make up a densely populated region rather than 3 separate cities and their own suburbs. I’m curious, then, as to your thoughts on annexation, what it would mean to each independent city, and to the region as a whole. It seems to me that if Hartford incorporated West Hartford, East Hartford, and possibly some other bordering towns (Bloomfield, Windsor, Newington, Glastonbury, Wethersfield) it would reach more than 300,000 people within its city lines, with considerably more corporations considered to be headquartered in Hartford (i.e. Cigna, Colt Firearms, Pratt & Whitney) and therefore offering massive tax dollars to the region. It would also now contribute enormous tax dollars of the high earners (who benefit from being next to Hartford proper) in West Hartford, Glastonbury, etc. to Hartford’s base, while also consolidating the amount of town costs (each has their own fire dept & chief, police, etc.).




I mean, for Hartford to annex this handful of towns would probably put its geographic size close to that of Atlanta (134 sq miles, ~500,000 population). To put it further, Hartford County is about 750 sq miles with close to a million people in it. By comparison Allegheny is about the same geographic size and 1.2 million citizens, with Pittsburgh as its county seat. The narratives on Pittsburgh and Atlanta are much different than Hartford-Springfield-New Haven, I think mostly due to the nature of the cities land base. Because they are larger, they have more residential areas and neighborhoods, which stabilizes the perceived “crime” rate, and their city services are condensed coherently with opportunity to create public projects with the regions interests in mind. Perhaps that’s another reason they get more attention from journalists and we don’t. We are completely misrepresented as a region.


My point is this: doesn’t it seem that this region, with cities technically using a small amount of space in comparison to the region, is structured so that the cities are destined to fail? With each suburb competing against the city, pulling tax dollars (both corporate and income) away from the traditional areas of business, the city proper is left with nothing, and is then blamed for its problems. Hartford is tiny, only about 18 sq miles. Springfield is a bit bigger (33 sq miles) with about 30K more residents. New Haven is in the middle, about 20 sq miles and about as dense as Hartford.


Why are we not talking about regional cooperation? It seems your calls for regional prosperity are on point, but how can we ever get there if our cities are not major metro areas that benefit from occupying larger space? Nowhere else in the country does this issues really exist (and I recognize that New England towns have their own identity and would likely resist this process).


It seems, from a macro perspective, that merging our regional cities with its suburbs, is the first step to a rational urbanist agenda.






The claims made in this comment are not just accurate, but incredibly insightful from the city side of the discussion. I agree with every word. With so many of the topics that bubble to the surface at Rational Urbanism the fact is that perception is the reality that must be dealt with, and annexation does change the way data is tossed around and the judgements which are made from it about Springfield and about so many other places like it. It puts me in mind of the end of an interview I did on the Strong Towns podcast about my Death Race 2016 feature. At the close of the interview Chuck asked me what I would have the media do differently, and I, haltingly and choppily, gave a response; why was my response so unsatisfactory I wondered afterword? 

Because it wasn’t the media I was interested in at all, it was the public which was consuming it whose interpretation I wanted to change.

To confront the question of going metropolitan: actually doing it wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hell, at least in Springfield, if it were to be attempted overtly with any of our suburban neighbors. Hartford is similarly looked down upon, I think, by the communities surrounding it, and so it is equally a non-starter. Massachusetts already has created the next best thing with a sort of de facto annexation by using what is mostly state income tax revenue to subsidize half of Springfield’s budget. 

As I have commented here repeatedly, I find that 100% justifiable as the incomes taxed are nearly all EARNED in Springfield. As I wrote in this essay, the argument that the community where the income earner lives is more productive than the place the earner works is like ascribing the value of a farm to the farmhouse and not the fields that surround it. 

There is no doubt that annexation can drive a narrative of a growing, thriving city: look at Columbus, Ohio. In a state of dying cities it is considered perhaps the sole survivor. The fact that most of the growth narrative has been perpetuated by forcing surrounding communities who need access to its water district to join (or die) isn’t mentioned when the lists of America’s Growing Cities are released…and positivity begets positivity; my guess is that some real growth and an actual increase in prosperity has taken place because a good story is the best medicine for what ails most cities. 

Going from 35 square miles to well over 200 square miles is a significant part of the real story, but you have to know to look for it. Read the Wikipedia entry on the demographics of Columbus and you’ll only find that the population of the city has skyrocketed at a time when so many other Ohio cities have declined. I talked to people who’ve lived in Columbus who had no idea about the whole annexation thing, they just know that the narrative is “onward and upward!”

As often happens with issues like this, I want to flip the argument, at least a little bit. I’m a true believer in the Strong Towns case for suburbia being screwed in the long run. I want nothing to do with them. Right now we have the most functional places filled disproportionately with the least functional people. To clarify, I would agree with ALL of the arguments that in the case of race, their disfunction is due to a society which has disproportionately created their disfunction, but for this argument that is neither here nor there: the places best suited for human habitation in the region are those which were created before World War II, those are mostly in our urban cores of Springfield, Holyoke, Chicopee, West Springfield, and Westfield, and those are disproportionately filled with the poor; or in other words those people who have been less successful in our economic system.

These functional places filled mostly with less functional people, by this definition, are surrounded by much, much larger swaths of territory built in an experimental form which has been conclusively demonstrated to be so unproductive as to be unsustainable without siphoning off productivity from productive areas (i.e. The Strong Towns argument). These places are destined to fail. Whether or not they will bring down the productive places around them is the operative question and I think the looser and more fragile the bonds which connect them, the better. 

It may happen long after I am laid to rest, but someday the productive places will again be filled with the productive people, and nearly all of the productive non agricultural work will once again occur in those places. A few, a very few currently “unproductive” places at the near periphery of the productive cores will be reworked to join those cores, but the rest will be let loose to become either productive farmland, or to be a sort of banlieue with little in the way of city services.

So if I could I’d jettison a fair chunk of East Forest Park and 16 Acres, I’d encourage Indian Orchard to hook up with the center of Ludlow, and I’d annex what was left of Springfield with Holyoke, Chicopee,the center of West Springfield, and the part South Hadley just across from Holyoke. It would put the population of my New Springfield at around 250,000. It would unify all of the walkable places, it would have the hydropower of the Holyoke dam and the Cobble Mountain Reservoir…along with its water supply, and it would be easily connected by existing rail and bus public transit.

It would unify all of the places that no one wants now anyway; all of the shit-holes. “It” would be the only place with any value in our manmade landscape. It would be this region’s lifeboat. The real question is whether to fill it with life preservers or harpoons.

Ethnography

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The first story I ever read by Jorge Luis Borges was El etnógrafo. (English version) It’s the story of a man named Fred Murdock and his discovery of the secret of life. If you’re at all familiar with Borges you’ll not be surprised to learn that the story ends in a way which leaves the reader reinterpreting the meaning of the story over and over. The last line explains that, after becoming the only White man to possess the secret after spending years living with a tribe of native Americans and deciding not to publish it, he gets married, gets divorced, and is a librarian at Yale University.

Get it? The secret isn’t what you think it is, or doesn’t do what you think it should. His romantic life fails, his professional life is unremarkable. If knowing THE SECRET doesn’t even help you with those things, or doesn’t cause you to drop out completely and be completely satisfied without them, to what realm of life does the secret pertain? What is its function?

Exactly.

In what I think was Chuck Marohn’s first interview related to the publication of the new Strong Towns book he interviews none other than James Howard Kunstler. The connection is that JHK’s The Long Emergency was a seminal work in the formulation and the direction of what became the Strong Towns movement. In the interview Chuck prefaces a comment by stating that the American landscape gets less and less coherent as one travels west. In a later interview Chuck specifies Boston as a city which in its development pattern adheres to Strong Towns concepts.

Chuck would be the first to say that the east-west continuum idea is at most a heuristic. Boston ran highways through its core neighborhoods, Boston has built mega-projects, torn down buildings for surface parking, and neglected many of its public amenities even for generations. But there’s still enough there there to be a model for most of what Strong Towns is trying to elaborate. That said, as I have expressed many times including in my most popular post ever, Springfield is not Boston.

And yet. As the week has gone on and in interview after interview Chuck describes the rational responses to the predicaments we face on the American landscape I see how, in case after case, Springfield is already there. How can that be in a Strong Towns universe where Springfield’s claim to fame is its disregard for its citizens relative to the juxtaposition of one amazing City Beautiful Carnegie library, and its parking lot? There’s more to a town than one parking lot and the one, really the only thoroughfare in the city which turns into an out and out stroad.

Start with housing. Chuck describes a healthy income to home value ratio of 1-2 or perhaps 1-3. If you look at the median family income in the metro, and the average home price in Springfield that’s about where we are. For my wife and me it’s a little more like 1-1 or even 1.5-1.

Maintenance. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard commentators at Strong Towns claim that the problem with building maintenance and road maintenance is that there is no ribbon cutting, there is no “photo-op”, it isn’t glamorous or glitzy. Here it is. I can link to dozens of articles and news reports on roof repairs in public buildings, new windows in schools, sidewalk repairs, and new boilers, and insulation…

I have to add here: Patrick Sullivan. In my mind absolutely the most important man in the history of Springfield after William Pynchon. From the moment he took over the parks department, and was given increasingly more and more responsibility as it became clear that he could take the resources he was given and get done what he needed to get done, the legacy that his “Greatest Generation” predecessors was willing to watch decay and rot was nurtured and preserved. Patrick saw the “good bones” with which the city was endowed and was unwilling to let them grow brittle. How he has done it I have no idea. How Springfield has kept him? I can’t understand.

Back to the Strong Towns message: Where to focus these reinvestments? Which neighborhoods get the sidewalks, the libraries, the parks, the schools? I’d call it the Kevin Garnett strategy, but with Chuck being from Minnesota that seems cruel; in a way you take your biggest weakness and make it your greatest strength. Of course, it’s not exactly that as in case after case after case, as Chuck describes it, the poorest neighborhoods in struggling cities have the best bones and give cities the best return on investment. With the caveat that there was no way the city could rebuild and renovate every school in every neighborhood in a school system with more students than any other in all of New England outside Boston itself in 10, 20, or even 30 years, it is remarkable how many schools have been built, rebuilt, renovated, or repurposed in the last 35 years: All four high schools; dozens of elementary schools, magnet schools, Chestnut Middle, and Forest Park Middle School.

That last one makes an interesting case study. There was a push to cast that old shell of a building aside and build new inside King Phillips Stockade, a place about as isolated from anywhere a student might live as humanly possible. FPMS, or FPJH as it was when I attended, remains where it was, all new, all up to date, but still the anchor of the neighborhood and a middle school a tremendous number of children can walk to not only safely, but surrounded by some of the most beautiful streets in the city.

Look at all of the mini downtowns of all of the neighborhoods that were the poorest, most run down, and least regarded when I was a young man: Mason Square, the South End, the North End, and Six Corners. Which one doesn’t have new sidewalks, new parks, new schools? Which one doesn’t have decorative street lights, a more pedestrian friendly core, and a strip of well maintained local shops?

Back to Borges. So we’re done then. Fix one library parking lot deal and we’re all set? Not at all. The Strong Towns message isn’t what you think it is. It doesn’t do what you want it to do. It’s still the single most important message out there to tackle all of the most pressing issues of the 21st century from environmental degradation to the opioid crisis and all points in between. But, as Fred Murdock explains to his professor, the secret is not nearly as valuable as the roads that lead to it. How literally true in this case.

Being strong, perhaps by accident, has allowed Springfield to survive when many others really haven’t. Springfield, like the thousands of cities that came before is an experiment. Whether or not it is an experiment that will earn the right to continue for another century or two, or a millennia, will be determined by forces larger and more complex than anything I could hope to ever comprehend; but focusing on people and their struggles, and finding ways to confront those struggles as nimbly and as adroitly as possible will improve the odds.

Success is survival. Success, by the way, is still having people who have problems that need to be confronted. That’s as good as it gets. If you don’t have problems to confront that means you’re already dead and buried!

We were lucky enough here to be nearly frozen in time when the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world produced what we’ve come to see as normal in our post war automobile oriented development pattern. We have less cancer. Yup. That is a good thing. Yup. But we still have cancer. And other things can kill you apart from cancer you know. And all of the cancer that’s grown up all around us at the regional and national level doesn’t help us. Being a slightly healthier organism surrounded by a dying ecosystem does not signify inevitable success. In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king…of a bunch of blind people…which can make getting on with this experiment in civilization that much harder.

Gentrification Versus Decline

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I found myself awake at an early hour this morning. With the plans my wife and I still have to attend the Big E I thought I might take advantage of the time and write another post this weekend. As I waited for water to boil for coffee and for Liz’s homemade bread to toast I stared out the back window; toward my garden, toward Main Street, toward the tower of the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, toward the Basketball Hall of Fame, and toward Six Flags New England.

I was contemplating the theme of my post which was to be, which is to be, on the signs of gentrification in the neighborhood. At that moment a small car, a hatchback I think, went rolling down Union Street toward Main Street. There is more early morning traffic on Sundays than there used to be before the opening of MGM, but not so much that I didn’t particularly notice this automobile. It’s an interesting thing that our mind will make every effort to connect what our senses perceive at a given moment whether or not they are connected for at the moment the car passed I heard, seemingly emanating from the vehicle I was watching, a loud pop; almost a bang.

Within perhaps 5 minutes there were two police cars looking, I assume, for shell casings in the parking lot behind the Ambassador and along Union Street. A gunshot then, and not a backfire. I’m the furthest thing from an expert on identifying gunshots, or car backfires for that matter but my guess is that the Shotspotter system the city has in place is able to distinguish one from another. The police cars have left. There is no apparent damage from whatever it was that transpired so, gentrification.

Two mutually confounding questions invade my mind. Is it possible to gentrify a neighborhood where an event like this is even moderately commonplace? How could anyone be against a process to transform a neighborhood where an event like this is even moderately commonplace?

For me the second question jumps out first. There are signs of improvement all around. Even the much belittled development of the new CVS is actually looking quite good, quite contemporary, which is to say not at all like a CVS. At least 4 multi-family properties within shouting (or shooting!) distance of my house (two more police cruisers drive by and a drunk carefully leaves the contents of his brown paper bag carefully against a tree in front of the Solomon Merrick building) are being rehabilitated, renovated and improved. Two of them look to be getting funds from the CPC for historic preservation and affordable housing, another historic building is getting some final infusions of cash from the same source before a multi-million dollar co-working project is continued. 

It is the smallest of these changes which interests me in this post. The Mapleview building has been sold twice in the last few years without much change taking place. At least three families we have known for years were still living there, and a family we have come to know in the last two years was the closest neighbor to our garden. That has changed now, fairly suddenly. I have been inside a number of the apartments for varying reasons; apart from their size I was not impressed. They were run down, grimy, and everything from the floors to the appliances and the fixtures looked out of date. (Another cruiser with its lights flashing and some random shouting)

At just about the same time two of our neighbors announced they were moving out because the rent was going up, and this info with these photographs appeared on Zillow:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/93-E-Park-St-APT-12-Springfield-MA-01105/2083605295_zpid/

We had noticed the new windows getting installed primarily because one of the old ones had fallen from its position and crashed onto East Park Street. The 5 story drop made quite an impression.

Our neighbors from the first floor had been quite unique. The children were clearly intellectually disabled and the mother as well. The father seemed to function at a higher level. Collectively they were the most community minded family we had ever had here. They helped clear the ice away on East Park Street in the winter. They picked up trash around the block. They kept an eye on our garden. When we shared our cucumbers, our peppers, our lettuce, and our peaches with them the wife gave us tiny pots with scallions in them to transplant in our garden. They told us they were moving to the North End at the start of September. Their old appliances are out on the fire escape as I write these words; being replaced with stainless steel models eventually, but cleared out now to re-do the hardwood floors. 

At least two other landings have old appliances on them.

Mapleview was deteriorating. This investment will only continue if people are willing to pay the $1,200 a month rent that’s being asked. Not crazy for a three bedroom apartment with heat and hot water included despite the lack of parking and the 5 story walk-up. Will a first floor unit fetch even more?

The father and I had a handful of long conversations. He wanted a garden like the one I had. He didn’t hate the neighborhood, but he wanted a more convivial atmosphere. He didn’t understand why people would complain that he would place a giant speaker on the fire escape hooked up by Bluetooth to a computer that would blast Christmas music in July (his daughter loved it), reggaetón classics, and, when we were out and about, classic rock from the 70’s and 80’s. We never complained despite the fact that at times I didn’t want to be serenaded with The Eye of the Tiger while watering the Swiss chard. My guess is others in the building complained, and not about the reggaetón!

They had lived in Puerto Rico, Bridgeport, and New Haven I think before moving here. Their remaining family moved in after Hurricane Maria. The grandfather was in a wheelchair and would shout abuse until he got his coffee, or his dinner, or whatever he might have dropped picked up. They let homeless people store their clothes on the fire escape and they would offer them coffee and tea when they came to change their clothes. They complained about people living under their deck, in the stairwell to the basement. They were good at drawing lines regarding acceptable and unacceptable behavior. They will be missed.

They certainly wouldn’t have been the first people I’d have removed from the block. Their past, however, would indicate that they weren’t long for this place in any case. If the new owners get renters willing to pay more than $1000 to rent an apartment in downtown Springfield it could mean that dozens and dozens of buildings which are currently undergoing demolition by neglect just might be saved. In a walkable neighborhood well served by transit. That could bring businesses to cater to residents with enough income to sustain them. That could bring infill development which would multiply all of these effects geometrically. 

The alternative is no place left for anyone to live anywhere here, all of the resources used to develop these very productive places are wasted, and, given the otherwise dominant development pattern, more people will live in automobile oriented, sprawling horizontal developments.

It isn’t a zero sum game, but there can be net winners and losers. Government has funded and is funding the rehabilitation of thousands of affordable units within a 5 minute walk from my house. Now the market is engaged in doing the same thing, but with what could become so called market rate housing. Success is far from assured. $1,200 is a lot of money around here. There are lots of jobs, and lots of amenities, and the best public transportation in the region. Of course I have mixed feelings, but this process is a necessary one, at least from my perspective.

I wonder if the new neighbors will like peaches?

Riding a Dead Horse

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If you are growing tired of my recent obsession with transportation then I’m afraid I have horrible news for you. While I am easily 10 essays behind in terms of ideas on my list of blogposts to inflict upon you I feel compelled to focus my attention this week on Springfield being listed as the third best mid sized metro in which to be car-free. The results apart from the inclusion of my hometown seem to check out with reality and so the methodology seems solid, but the essay written to accompany the study left me amused and has caused me to ponder some much more ephemeral things.

In that essay Richard Florida opines that on that list of mid sized metros Honolulu is an outlier, hard to argue given the unique nature of its location and the impact that alone would have on car use, but he goes on to say that “most” of the remaining top five being “college towns” demonstrates the impact of higher education as a cultural driver for people being car-free. He then lists every other city in the top 5 except Springfield. Of course, what is funny about that is that a case could be made for metro Springfield being among the most higher education intensive mid sized metro areas in the United States; what differentiates Springfield from, say, Madison or New Haven is that of the largest and/or most highly regarded colleges in greater Springfield, none of them are in the city. 

Amherst, Smith, and Mt Holyoke have the strongest academic reputations, and they are in Amherst, Northampton, and South Hadley, and the enormous flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts is, of course, also in Amherst. Of the other 8 colleges and Universities clustered in this relatively tiny metro area, only 4 are in the city of Springfield. None of those are household names, unless you are obsessed enough with the history of basketball to know that the YMCA college where the sport was invented is now Springfield College, or you’re into politics enough to know that the current Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee went to American International College, or if you want to know what law school does a better job of preparing students for the Massachusetts Bar Exam than any other; that would be the Western New England University School of Law.

All kidding aside, the final decision to locate what became the University of Massachusetts came down to Springfield and Amherst; it would be interesting to see how the city and the region would be different had Springfield been selected. My guess is at the time it was an afterthought given the wealth and industrial prowess the city then possessed. As with so many things, the fact that Springfield doesn’t exist as a more powerful and prosperous central node of the region seems to diminish the luster of the region as a whole.

Returning to the theme of auto-dependence or lack thereof, I can’t help but think that the aforementioned study is indicative of some real strength in the area. The beautiful clusters of walkable neighborhoods in each of the larger cities in greater Springfield, with people oriented downtowns like Easthampton, and West Springfield, and Holyoke create a healthy network of nodes which can be stitched together fairly easily into a coherent network of public transportation. 

And it is with that idea that I return again to the north south rail corridor as a spine. Not once have I heard a single commentator or politician who advocates for improved rail service in the valley highlight how it can be used WITHIN the valley itself; all of the cheerleading is for better connecting us to Boston, or to New Haven and New York City. 

It needs to be viewed as a way to better connect us to ourselves! Going car-free can be such a relief, and not just in terms of finances. Not just while I lived in Spain, but when I worked downtown, and took the bus to college I relished the fact that I didn’t need to think about oil changes, or alternatives to the car if it needed repairs. My feet got me where I needed to be without fail and traffic was never an issue, and I loved taking the bus not least for the people watching and the time it afforded me to unwind in a schedule which at the time saw me out the door by 7 a.m., and not back home until 11 or 12 at night.

I’m surprised, but not shocked, at the fact that Springfield is among the least car dependent places in the United States. I continue to marvel at how little impact that has on the region’s popularity. I read at least three articles just this week on how (to me) horrible, unwalkable places, places without even enough water to sustain life, and with no jobs to offer residents anywhere within a 100 mile radius are in the process of building literally tens of thousands of homes “to meet the demand for housing”! 

“So, this place has no infrastructure, no available water, no jobs unless I drive for over an hour and the shitty new homes you’re building will cost, at a minimum, $500,000? Fuck, at least it’s not western Massachusetts! Where do I sign?”

To say “I don’t get it” is the understatement of all time, but I do get that I’m an outlier. I’m like there was just one guy to whom cilantro tastes like the fucking magic that is cilantro and everyone else just tastes soap. I’ve thought about the places I’d live if I had to leave Springfield: Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Albany, or Troy, New York, Middletown, or Winsted, Connecticut and a whole host of other places, and who knows how many places I’ve heard about but never really gotten to know like Rochester, Portland, Maine, Providence, Worcester and the like. None of them are in the desert, or would require a car, or be exclusively White (except maybe Portland!), or be devoid of seasonal changes in the weather; but those really do seem to be the common denominators/driving forces behind the population growth and shifts in the United States apart from the economic powerhouse Super Cities.

I’ve said many times, and it continues to hold true, that people will alter their behavior only when obligated to do so by circumstances. Maybe, but I reserve the right to complain about it. Repeatedly. Probably again next week. 

Off the Pedestal

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In general my writing is the furthest thing from cryptic, with perhaps too much invective directed at individuals and responsible parties; but I am not a journalist by trade. I write what I write because I think it needs to be read by people with an interest in making our places better for the people who live in them. Only rarely do I find it difficult to speak as clearly as I might about my experiences because, to be honest, I fear the consequences of my speech. I find myself in such a place right now.

What I will say is that my darkest suspicions have been confirmed regarding so called bottom-up processes; as Jim Kunstler once observed about American flags, the appearance of having used a bottom-up process is used primarily to give cover to the organization or department executing whatever plan was foreordained. Like most of us I had experienced this type of sham in the workplace; as a typical contrarian I would occasionally sense the fact that the fix was in for something or other and offer that we simply not do “X” or “Y” at all, but tackle some issue, or ignore it, by some other means. The facilitators veto would make all present aware that the fix was in. Which is fine. When I’m paid to be there and I’m not in charge. I’d prefer a good old fashioned “because I’m the boss and I say so” when that is, in fact, why we’re doing something.

Of course that would mean that the people at the top would have to acknowledge their total responsibility for the course of action. 

What has shocked me is that in my recent experiences, and if your memory of my writings and your interest in my thoughts is greater than my own you might be able to discern of what and whom I speak, I have discovered that arguably the most prominent and perhaps the oldest name in the realm of creating bottom-up engagement for improving public spaces runs as top-down a process as any old school American corporation or bureaucracy. In retrospect I get it. People are idiots. Roughly half are of below average intelligence and, if you’ve ever been to a public meeting, even smart people can’t stick to the task at hand or understand, for example, that a discussion about planting flowers by a neighborhood group isn’t going to culminate in a more equitable dispersion of education funds by the state; true story. (“Why are we wasting money on beautification when kids in schools don’t have enough books!”)

A language teacher friend of mine once observed that he was asked why he didn’t just have his French language learners just “speak French?” You know, day one, French I:

“Bonjour, les enfants: l’environnement. Allez!”

It’s all Duning-Kruger, it’s all “Flowers for Algernon” and everyone is too stupid to know that they’re stupid. I get it.

But this was the one organization that was different, I mean this is all they did. In theory their expertise wasn’t in designing places, it was in focusing neighborhood participation in order to create the design. Except. Nope. The public is Millie Vanilli.

It’s actually more like the monkey randomly typing Hamlet: They get enough people in a room shouting out ideas and writing them on giant Post-it Notes and they’ll  have something close to whatever it was they were going to do anyway. 

Regarding a different project I overheard a conversation yesterday where a friend was told that a process involving a public hearing at the “25%” point to completion was really at the “90%” point. The idea that even the last 10% will be overly influenced by public input is Pollyannish at best. The damage here is that I think people may really believe that we can show up at a public meeting or write a few letters and create change. Change is happening, but it’s happening on the inside. Here in Springfield the most important decision makers have gone from a 50’s mentality regarding people and automobiles to a 90’s mentality. In its own way it’s pretty impressive; 40 years of progress in 10 years! But still 30 years behind.

In the first case, the I think the experts will do an incredible job, the space will be better than it has ever been, and they will graciously thank us, the members of the public “who envisioned the whole thing”. Then they’ll take the pictures of the walk-arounds and the charrettes and go on to the next River City: 

“Play for me, Linus.”

“That’s my Davey!”

With respect to the 90% project; the day the project is finished people will notice that it is an improvement on what was there before. And a few months later people will realize how insufficient to our needs the changes are. I’m not a believer in process. Traditional, people oriented design is the only option we have to create resilient places. I don’t care how we get there. Faux populism will probably do a great job in some cases, that’s cool. Just ticking the boxes of public input for a street redesign won’t; we’ll need to storm the Bastille. 

I think it’s interesting that just maybe, a redesign in a nearby poorer neighborhood, which services a smaller percentage of wealthy commuters, is much more avant garde. I’ve read that planners and engineers have always been much more willing to experiment on minorities and the poor. I do think we’re headed back in the right direction after all. Imagine if the experiments actually work this time!

Some people think that setting up the right process will eliminate the risk that comes with the consequences of human frailty. It’s logical that would be the response to a generation of horrendous decision making by fallible humans, but I’m afraid the places best suited to survive whatever comes next will be those which go boldly in the direction of making every place a people centered place, and a beautiful place worthy of human affection by any means possible whether it’s top down or bottom up. Those which don’t will be ghost towns worthy only of being the salvage yards of the future.

My street is a traffic sewer with beautiful homes on it. Here’s hoping Springfield has advanced to at least the 2010’s by the time anyone gets around to messing with it. 

Your Search Yielded No Results

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I ended last week’s post with a snarky comment about Asheville and Grand Forks. Right on cue, as I’m doing some Saturday afternoon light reading in preparation for today’s contribution to my ouevre, I see this:

It’s too perfect: A.R.T.. And it doesn’t mean what you think it means. It’s “Asheville Redefines Transit”. Wow, The oh, so important story at the heart of this article summarized and linked to on this website which caters to city planners all over the world? Asheville is buying seven 30′ long diesel-hybrid buses instead of 50′ long electric buses. And spending some cash to renovate this:

a.r.t.’s sole transit station.

Spectacular. That really is great news for Asheville’s transit patrons who count on “art” for over a million transit rides a year:

What does this have to do with Rational Urbanism?

I started this blog just over 7 years ago because I couldn’t find anything with an urbanist’s perspective written about Springfield or cities like Springfield. There was (and is) always plenty to read about the superstar cities, and trendy cities, and even a fair amount about rapidly declining cities, but almost nothing about the places in the middle; so I decided to do it myself. It hasn’t caught fire, or even gone viral very often which perhaps explains why Planetizen and CityLab continue to ignore Springfield and places like it.

But for anyone who is interested in, let’s say, public transportation, there are some pretty interesting things going on in this northeast provincial backwater. For comparison, here are some numbers:

Yes, Springfield’s PVTA (Yes, that’s Pioneer Valley Transit Authority, think of the “V” as a “U” and remind yourself that 1) most of the PVTA’s riders are Hispanic, 2) “The Pioneer Valley” was just a name given to this region by marketing experts hoping to get vacationers to stop here on their way to the Berkshires, and 3) apparently anything is better than putting “Springfield” in your name!) has ten times the ridership of a.r.t..

And apart from these two ancillary stations in Holyoke and Westfield:

Both somewhat recently opened, the PVTA has only been using this little ol’ place as its primary hub for two years:

And just opened this new facility:

And the Union Station hub has added at 14 daily trains on two new services going north and south, and creating increased east-west service appears to be on the front burner in Boston.

I mean, it’s not 7 whole new buses or anything, but it seems like a tiny little revolution in transit for a region of 3/4 of a million people.

This goes for the MGM development too, by the way. A corporation with a name perhaps second only to Disney in entertainment plops down a billion dollar development in the heart of a struggling formerly industrial city in New England and…I haven’t seen any in depth coverage on it show up anywhere but in local news outlets. Leaving aside that the world’s largest rail car manufacturer decided to place its North American headquarters here as it produces rolling stock for Boston, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, (maybe that belongs in the transit story?), or the redevelopment of one of the oldest hotels in the United States along with an amazing baroque style theater, just the MGM story has about 10 angles to it. Which I’m trying to get to, by the way, but it’s almost like my job as a Spanish teacher gets in the way.

It seems that what’s happening, and what’s not happening here doesn’t hold any interest for the editors at CityLab or even those who mostly link to the content of local media (like Planetizen). 

I’ll take this to the bank, though. There is no better place to be in the month of September in the entire world than Springfield, Massachusetts. It’s not just the Basketball Hall of Fame and its yearly induction of the greatest players and coaches ever in the world’s second most popular sport, it’s the Mattoon Street Arts festival, Glendi, and JamFest, and, of course, the largest fair in the east, New England’s great state fair, The Eastern States Exposition. I can literally look out my back window and see Six Flags New England, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and MGM Springfield, and I can walk out my front door and be at “The Big E”, on foot, in a few minutes. 

Next month the symphony starts its new season, the Thunderbirds are back in the nest at the Mass Mutual Center, and it will be time to settle in and watch the leaves change along the longest navigable river in New England and up and down the foothills of the Berkshires. Sure, we don’t have more craft breweries per capita than anyplace else in the world, but maybe dulling your senses in the Pioneer Valley in autumn would be a pretty stupid thing to do.

Take a Flyer

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The pilot program Valley Flyer train service began last week bringing something like commuter service to the communities north of Springfield. I say “something like” commuter rail service because, perhaps as a pilot program should, it only expands two way travel options to a very small subset of potential users of the corridor north of the newly reopened Union Station.

In searching for news and opinion on the Valley Flyer I happened upon an incredibly nerdy but rather informative old fashioned message board devoted to the “Amtrak Northeast Corridor, Springfield Shuttle, Regional, and Greenfield Route”; over 100 pages of experts and rail enthusiasts opining on everything imaginable and quite a few perhaps unimaginable things. As often happens, having access to the back and forth of people who are highly focused on a particular topic helped at the very least to expand my awareness of my ignorance on topics like the interplay between freight and passenger service, equipment adaptability and storage, and crew accommodation.

Turns out you can’t just make more trains appear wherever, whenever and have them go any which way at any time! Who knew?

So with a nod to the realities of expanding service on a busy rail corridor I want to lay out what this new service facilitates, what it doesn’t, and what I would love to see it turn into if the rate of use of the new service appears to warrant it.

When CTRail began its New Haven to Hartford, then Springfield, service it became possible to get to New York City reliably on a daily basis in the morning. For people leaving from Union Station in Springfield that also meant that commuting to a job in Hartford or New Haven by rail became a legitimate possibility assuming that said employment was situated either near a handful of train stations or was connected, reasonably, by other transit. Given the number of employers in downtown Hartford and New Haven and the close economic ties which have been shown to exist along the I-91 corridor this wouldn’t be an altogether unusual circumstance. 

I would add that, despite the existence of “Super-commuters”, I can’t imagine someone living in Western Massachusetts commuting every day of the week to a job in New York. For someone who travels to the city say once or twice a week, however, I imagine this service is highly useful.

What this service has never done is allowed people from Connecticut to get to jobs in Springfield before 10 a.m.. Obviously Springfield’s downtown doesn’t have the density of employment of Hartford, but Union Station does offer excellent service on the PVTA’s two primary axes of service to Mass Mutual, Baystate Medical Center, Mercy Medical Center, American International College, and Springfield Technical Community College to name just the most prominent institutions.

Unfortunately, this expansion of service not only does nothing to remediate that, it perpetuates it.

Using the Valley Flyer will give people in Greenfield the chance to go by rail round trip to NYC in a single day. It could also provide transportation to and from a morning meeting anywhere from Northampton south to New Haven provided you were done and ready to return by early afternoon. If, however, you wanted to commute daily anywhere along that same NoHo-NHvn stretch you wouldn’t be able to return until after 9 p.m.; hardly a reasonable option.

So, putting CTRail and the Valley Flyer together: you can commute from Springfield to points south on a daily basis; you can get to Springfield after 10 a.m. from Connecticut and return in the early evening; and you can get to New York City in the early morning from Greenfield, Northampton, and Holyoke and return that same evening. What you can’t do is commute into Springfield, Holyoke, or Northampton from any direction. From the south there is no morning service which extends north of Springfield and what service exists to Springfield arrives after the start of normal business hours. If you leave from anyplace north of Springfield then you cannot commute to Springfield or any points south because the only service after mid-afternoon doesn’t depart New Haven until almost 8 o’clock in the evening, departing even later then from any other location.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is subsidizing the Valley Flyer service, and the stated goal was to provide service for people north of Springfield to get to New York and back in a single day. This does that. Maintaining and expanding the service beyond the two year window the state has funded will require that ridership reach 24,000 trips a year. When you add up the number of trains each way given 4 trains on weekdays and 2 on weekends and holidays that means an average of around 20 passengers per train. That’s certainly not a ridiculously high bar, and while the populations they service might be very different, overall demand for this current service isn’t an unreasonable barometer to use when trying to get a sense of the other.

For me, the end goal of this process is a transformation of land use in the valley. If a convenient, reasonably priced, trustworthy fixed transit corridor becomes available then it is reasonable to assume that businesses, for the convenience of employees and customers, will want to locate along that corridor; there is no dearth of commercial, manufacturing, and retail space from Northampton to Springfield which is a reasonable distance from their respective train stations. If employment begins to aggregate along the corridor not only will demand, and therefore level of service increase, but demand for housing along the corridor will increase and a critical mass of all of the above will transform the region into an even more vibrant and resilient ecosystem. 

I was reading an article about the concept of the mega-region. In it the author mused on the supposed Washington-Boston megaplex, but opined that the Hartford and Springfield links in that chain were dubious because they lacked institutions of higher learning. Sure, apart from the University of Connecticut, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, Elms, Westfield State, Springfield College, American International College, Western New England College, the University of Hartford, Saint Joseph’s, Trinity College, Albertus Magnus, Wesleyan, and a few others there aren’t any colleges around here. It is true that unlike Harvard, Brown, and Yale they are not Ivy League and mostly are not within the walkable footprint of the city.

Making Springfield and Hartford more obviously connected to the institutions of higher learning in their corresponding, geographically very small, metropolitan areas could change facile assessments like this. Not all of the colleges and universities associated with Boston are walking distance to city hall, but they feel as though they all form part of a whole. In the Knowledge Corridor they don’t yet seem at all connected to their closest urban center. 

As a final note, I saw on CityLab and at Planetizen articles on the expansion of bus service in Birmingham, Alabama. Birmingham is one of those cities and metros which is theoretically “bigger” than Springfield and so gets more attention. It has a population of 100,000 more people…spread out over literally 10x the area! I checked the numbers, the Birmingham-Jefferson County bus system has 1/3 the ridership of Springfield’s PVTA. In just over a year Springfield has seen the reopening of a spectacular intermodal transportation center with now two expansions of train service and a significant relocation of its local bus maintenance and operations headquarters, and the introduction of a (poorly designed and nearly unused) free downtown “Loop” service and…not a mention in any of the usual online sources. 

Being wedged in between Boston and New York makes being taken seriously as an urban area very difficult. As I’ve mentioned ad nauseam the Springfield to New Haven corridor taken together has a larger population than Denver but in half the area; I’d say that makes this place kind of urban. Massachusetts and Connecticut, together, are making some really intelligent relatively low cost experiments designed to expand transportation options in this area. It seems like the kind of thing that might spark interest in people who publish stuff on walkability in Asheville and Rail Trails in Grand Forks.

Slum Lords

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Most of the discussion I hear regarding affordable housing is so foreign to my personal experience here in inland New England that I realize that I have very little to offer in the way of helpful input. People in this region can spend ridiculous amounts of money on housing if they choose, but many people use the Springfield Strategy or its variants: the Holyoke Strategy, the Chicopee Strategy, or even the Ware/Warren Strategy if they want more of the feel of Appalachia in their life. 

As far as the poor are concerned, the aforementioned cities are nowhere near their peak populations and housing options exist in what appear to be ever growing numbers. One Springfield developer in particular, Gordon Pulsipher, has already created a handful of entire neighborhoods of gorgeous apartment buildings by combining tax credits for both historic preservation and affordable housing. In doing so he has given the city these streetscapes which look for all the world like affluent locations in Manhattan or Brooklyn. As an aside I sometimes wonder if he has a secret plan to corner the market on these places and when the “affordable” restrictions time out he’ll be left with thousands and thousands of units of market rate housing at a time when, in this fantasy of mine, walkable urbanism becomes all the rage in western New England. 

That one example aside, problems regarding housing for the poor in this region strike me as being very similar to the claim that Springfield is a food desert; being poor stinks. Everything is more difficult when you’re poor because it is definitionally having fewer resources to bring to bear to do things. With that firmly understood I would say that this region is one in which being poor makes finding housing less onerous than in many other regions of the country.

With that far too extensive preface out of the way, I was struck this summer by a weirdly inverted situation regarding the passing of housing from one economic and social class to another. Often I have heard in the conversation of affordable housing that one should not build housing for the poor intentionally. The more natural process is to construct housing for the middle and upper classes, who have the resources to create demand, and allow those homes, apartments, and condominiums to slowly work their way down to the poor once their style and condition are less suited to those with more resources.

I live in a townhouse which began its life as a domicile for the upper class; the deed to my home includes an easement (I believe is the term) which allows my servants to access Union Street from the rear of my property by passing through the back of the townhouses at 82 and 84 Maple Street. My house became a rooming house in the early 20th century, a single family home again in the 70’s, and was a law office from 1980-2008. 

What I saw in Cold Spring, New York was altogether different; this was housing for the working classes, the moiling and toiling factory workers of the West Point Foundry. Today these are smallish unassuming houses, some of which are valued at over a half a million dollars. These are homes on small lots which were built out of necessity with minimal artistry or pretense:

The property taxes on these homes are over $7,000 a year with Zillow estimated mortgage payments of $2,000 a month.


I have no idea what this means, if indeed it means anything. I suppose it might teach a little humility; who knows what things in the built environment and beyond future generations might view as of great worth? 

MGM Year One: Retail

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It’s been a year since MGM Springfield first opened its doors and, given that, it is entirely appropriate to assess the impact it has had on the neighborhood. This isn’t about a global critique of casinos, the political decisions that legalized the gaming industry in Massachusetts, or the process which brought a $960 million resort to downtown Springfield; I’ve covered those topics before. It is about what I’ve seen compared to what I expected and what was promised. 

As the concept transitioned from proposal to projects a number of enormous differences became apparent. The one most often cited is the transformation of the MGM Grand hotel from a modern glass tower to a more modest looking series of 5 story façades along Main Street. This faux eclectic strip was originally to be the site of MGM’s market rate housing, instead it is now hoped that MGM will fulfill that commitment by investing in the rehabilitation of the Court Square building. Much less remembered is that the very first plan included an enormous retail footprint which continues to shrink, that the old armory building was to be the centerpiece of the development, that there was to be no ticketed entertainment within the MGM footprint, and that the boxes of cops’es were to be occupied 24/7/365.
Given the enormity of the resort, and MGM’s commitments my hope is to create loose categories and assess them. I have no doubt that some of my judgements will prove to be mistaken over time. It may be that my misjudgments become the most valuable of judgments over time as perhaps I and others may learn to better understand what we see after learning from my misperceptions. These assessments come from an interest in downtown revitalization that goes back to collecting magazines about the topic in junior high school…which may explain why I was still a virgin on my wedding night 10 years later. Nearly all of the years since I have lived no more than a 5 minute walk from what is now MGM Springfield, and so by dint of interest and experience I believe that what I have to share may be of some value.

Beginning in no particular order, topic #1:

Retail

The original plan made available as a model for viewing at the MGM offices on Main Street included an enormous enclosed mall and also promised up to 40 shops and restaurants in tens of thousands of square feet of retail space, then shrank to perhaps 1/4 of that, and now is made up of a hotel gift shop, a clothing store, a candle shop, and a jeweler; both the number of retail establishments and the square footage dedicated to retail have greatly diminished.

This blueprint is post “mall concept” but still shows 19 separate retail outlets not including food and beverage:


Later that dropped to 14:

The final project has 8 if you also include a tv station mini-studio, a spa, and the wine store in the Italian restaurant AND…

… the Starbucks (food and beverage but, potentially at least, a retail outlet) on Main Street, which has already disappeared to be replaced by another VIP bar:

Another never opened retail space on the south plaza has become an outdoor bar:

This storefront has remained empty since day one:

What were first envisioned as multiple free standing shops may now become a single Wahlburgers:

I can’t imagine that the Indian Motorcycle store will last another year, and closing of the Kringle Candle store would leave a huge crater in a very visible location; either they will be encouraged to stay by very generous terms moving forward, or MGM will have a plan in place to try to make the departure look insignificant.

My take is that, while the lack of retail energy on the property, and the ubiquitous empty storefronts all around the project are not a good thing, the removal of the mall from the plan, and the changes in quantity and location of the in-footprint retail are net pluses for downtown. Even before the onset of the retail apocalypse Main Street had an abundance of high quality storefronts, and at least three downtown retail malls (Tower Square, The Marketplace, and the old SIS mall) but still suffered from a lack of anything anyone would call an attractive retail environment. 

The shops which were here long before MGM arrived and have continued to succeed are the ones which cater to the people who live in Springfield. 

The Shean Block and the much maligned Crown Fried Chicken:

Like them or hate them, and many of the suits do not like them at all, they clearly create a core that the city needs to build on. As I mentioned in my essay on invisible retail, there is an ecosystem of healthy local entrepreneurial retail establishments which mostly caters to a very different demographic from the one to which I belong; bodegas, phone stores, nail salons, barber shops, take out places, laundromats, clothing stores, pawn shops, beauty supply stores, and so on. There is enough space these to coexist with shops designed to attract visitors and tourists.

There have been changes, and some expansion, of retail perhaps due to MGM. CVS is moving out of the Main Street frontage of Tower Square and into a building on Main Street just the other side of MGM, Lorilil Jewelers has kept its store in Tower Square and added an outlet directly across from MGM. A store which was proposed as an outlet for recreational marijuana is now a CBD shop, and a fine menswear store has opened (and moved once already).

It has been said that the landlords who control the best storefronts across from MGM do not inspire confidence as partners, and are asking for fairly high rents given the risky nature of downtown retail. I have no knowledge one way or another. Whatever the reason, there they sit:



I have already expressed my disappointment that the retail development we were promised as the capstone of Davenport Square turned out to be a CVS, although I must admit that it brings “our pharmacy” to within a block of the house and I am sure as a family we will end up making more purchases at that establishment than we would have at the notional shops which were floated as a possibility:

Red Rose has shown that food outlets in particular can easily attract casino patrons. I was surprised to learn that the lower end food offerings at MGM were both, relative to the South End, high in price and low in quality. So far all of the locally owned restaurants near the casino are still open, not just Red Rose, but City Pizza, Milano’s, Raices, Mom and Rico’s, La Fiorentina, Frigo’s, Ciro’s, Crown Fried Chicken, Sun Kim Bop, and Sol Karibe. MGM is claiming that a contract is in place and that a Wahlburgers franchise will break ground within a month at the corner of Main and Union streets. The “coming soon” bunting has been up for almost a year at this point, so I will believe it when I see it.

As a resident all of this represents at the very least a small step forward. Let me explain why. A friend expressed surprise the other day when I revealed that I had just eaten for the very first time at the downtown’s hottest new lunch place. I thought about it for a while and realized that as a resident and not a downtown worker it was almost never open when I was looking for a place to eat. When my wife first moved here we found that on weekends the only lunch options available were the lower budget places like Crown Fried Chicken. Sometimes we’d have to wander down to some franchise place at the Hall of Fame if we were looking for a sit down place; the downtown doesn’t have enough middle/high income residents to justify staying open to sell $12 meals or even $8 sandwiches. It is also still standard practice for some downtown restaurants to alter their hours of operation without notice especially and weekend afternoons.

As far as non food retail is concerned I have to express ambivalence. I was dismayed to find out that a Main Street Northampton retailer which at first closed, and then announced a move to a nearby mall was owned by the same people who own the jeweler inside MGM. In the media at least those owners expressed that they were not sure whether or not to reopen and, if they did reopen, where to reopen. Was that not a perfect opportunity for MGM to work with people they already had a relationship with to bring them either to one of their empty retail spaces, or to arrange a lease with a nearby landlord? As a resident I’d like to be able to buy groceries, clothes, books, and hardware in my neighborhood, but I know that is very unrealistic; I’m lucky to have two local hardware stores a 5 minute DRIVE from my home and only a bookstore and a clothing store might dovetail with the desires of the occasional gambler.

My verdict would be that the retail situation we see in and around the casino isn’t particularly different from what existed in the downtown before MGM’s grand opening but the real lack of energy and entrepreneurial endeavor is mostly on the part of local businessman who have, at best, decided to take a wait and see approach or who, as appears most likely, are hoping not to take any risks but would rather sell or rent to a person who does. 

Still to come: Security, Entertainment, Infrastructure, Transportation, and Perception.

Afternoons in the Garden of Guilt

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Earlier in the summer I came very close to writing a post about a Catch 22 connected to my backyard. For many of my neighbors the only semi-private outdoor area they have access to is a glorified fire escape. When the weather starts to warm they start spending a great deal of time outside. On a given summer evening it isn’t unheard of for two or three families to be hosting friends and neighbors in their limited deck space. 

Although humble by suburban standards, for our block we have an enormous outdoor space which we have spent some time, effort, and money to transform into an area with a variety of spaces to sit, relax, eat, drink, and socialize. Apart from the family, we generally host 3 or 4 people 3 or 4 times a summer; and that’s being generous. The emotion I’ve felt quite often in the past is guilt. Guilt when having friends over and having such a large and, again, while modest by some standards, relatively opulent space to entertain. Often though, I’ve felt even worse when we haven’t been using the space and our neighbors have been hosting huge parties on their humble fire escape.

(I took these picture with the essay on guilt in mind earlier in the year)



As this year has gone on things have changed. I’ve dedicated myself much more to maintaining the social spaces in the back; more weeding, more raking, and more frequent straightening up. With that we’ve used it much more as a family; to read, to sleep, to relax, and to unwind. The garden has always inspired the creation of friendships around here, and that has expanded with its more frequent use. We’ve always shared the product of our garden with neighbors, invited them over for food and drink (though not often), and given advice for growing things like tomatoes and peppers downtown. Some friends have known for years that they can sit and enjoy our backyard anytime.

What is new is our increased care, and that has completely washed away the guilt. Perhaps the guilt was never about use or lack thereof, but was strictly about the lack of appreciation I afforded the place. There have been years when I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that 90-95% of the time I spent in the garden was working it with only the remaining 5-10% dedicated to just experiencing it. That started to change last year when I read all of Moby Dick back there. This year I read The Stand and spent a good deal more time just enjoying what our efforts have wrought.

To highlight some of the progress we’ve made and things we’ve learned this year:

Some newspaper and mulch has eliminated the need to weed almost completely and reduced watering to the point that even after going almost 30 days without rain there was plenty in my rain barrels and tote to get us through without using any city water. I actually learned that I had overwatered the beds which we had mulched. What an energy saver it has been.

With winemaking being an enterprise we enjoy we decided last year to move our combination dining table/arbor to a new location so as to maximize grape production. The new vines actually produced a modest number of grapes this year, and the older vines look ready to produce a bumper crop; we still need to do much better at pruning, and I’m sure our grapes fall far below any sommelier’s standards for excellence but my motto is always that the perfect is the enemy of the good. We got 13 bottles last year between the grapes and the excess peaches:


We sowed lettuce, Swiss chard, and kale after we harvested the garlic. It went against everything we’d been told about planting in the heat of mid July. The same shade from the growing fruit trees that made our garlic miniature has made this the best season for leafy greens we’ve had since year one:

This year was the best ever for blueberries and strawberries, and our “ever-bearers” are still producing a handful or two a week:


We left the asparagus bed alone. Next year will be year three and I think then we’ll have some to harvest:


At the risk of sounding redundant, we’ve also had the best year ever for hot peppers, and by leaps and bounds the best ever for sweet peppers:

Cool aside; we gave away some seedlings but still had a few extra. Rather than toss them we stuffed them into a very narrow window box container to keep in case some we planted in the beds died off. I kept watering them. They seem to enjoy density!


As usual we get more cucumbers than we could ever eat from the one plant, but the zucchini and eggplant are less productive:

Despite my horrible pruning both the early and late peaches seem to be doing really well:


Now for the bad news.

Most of the tomato plants seem sick. At first I thought it was just the early season overwatering given my ignorance regarding the amazing impact of the mulch, but it has continued. It may be that it was the overwatering but there just isn’t any way back, or it’s something else. Either way, most of the plants have produced plenty of fruit but I’m concerned that we won’t get the usual October-November harvest we usually get.


I was hoping that last year’s two apples would mark a turning point in apple production but this year we’re down to one lonely fruit and trees that look terribly bare. It might be a magnesium and iron deficiency in the soil. I’ve used some spikes to add some nutrients to the soil and spread some ash from the wood stove around the trees in hopes that next year might be better. If not we may have to consider taking them out and going in a different direction.


My wife does most of the work on the plants themselves but she doesn’t have the summer off. We’ve divided up our composting between a worm farm Liz manages in the basement, and just leaves and coffee grounds in the old compost barrels. Next year we hope to add a tiny outdoor kitchen where the grill is now, and we hope to use this idea we stole from Boscobel to make the grapes along the back fence easier to care for and harvest.

Feel free to share any tips! We love it, we can see that things are progressing, but we also know that there’s a lot we don’t know.