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When Your Lover Is an Idiot

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Peter Picknelly, Victor Bruno, and Chris Cignoli, they love the city and want it to succeed more than anything in the world, but they fail to understand that it is their obsession with cars, traffic, and parking that is what is making the times tougher and our future ever more grim. Moving more cars more quickly is the problem, not the solution: Rapidly moving giant metal machines are scary to people. Tearing down perfectly designed finely crafted buildings for surface parking is like removing vital organs in hopes that air might enter the lungs more easily through the newly opened yawning cavity.

Have enough confidence in your menu, in your business model, in the beauty of your city, in your vision for our success that you don’t eradicate the very fabric that makes you unique. The restaurant patrons who prioritize ease of parking are going to go to Applebee’s or Chili’s or Ruby Tuesday’s not Worthington Street! They’re not your market, or if they are MOVE YOUR BUSINESS TO MEMORIAL AVENUE OR BOSTON ROAD.  

(A building slated to be razed for surface parking)


You can’t out “ease of parking” stroad world, don’t you get it? That’s their game, it’s their only game! It’s mud wrestling with a pig! It’s trading insults with Don Rickles! It’s arm wrestling over the check with Mr Universe!

Our game is places near places with stuff and nice buildings in between THAT PEOPLE WALK TO. No one goes to New York or Boston or Provincetown or Paris or Northampton because the parking is good. Look at the “dining district” in downtown Springfield from the air:

Plenty of parking, not enough people. More parking lots means less places with stuff for people to do and fewer businesses where people can work. That means fewer people walking by your restaurant, fewer customers, and fewer people around making other people feel like this is the type of place people like to be.

I’m begging all of you: READ ABOUT WHAT IS MAKING SUCCESSFUL PLACES SUCCEED TODAY. Hint: It’s not wide streets and ample parking; it’s place making, walkability, prioritizing the pedestrian, and slowing the cars.

People don’t go places because they’re easy to get to, they go places because there is something there worth going to. Focus on that. Just try it. Just this once, don’t tear down the building, program it with something that might bring in just a few more people.

Find ONE, just ONE city which has bulldozed its way to prosperity! Want to know which city it was that first said: “Let’s put the car first, make that our focus, and see how that works”? 

Detroit. You know, cars…Detroit. How’d that work out? 

Look at Hartford…next time you drive by it on the highway. Have you ever seen so many parking garages? There’s more parking than there is stuff to park for…still harder to park there than WestFarms Mall…but loads of parking. Hmm, weird that they might need to file for bankruptcy soon. 

Every parking lot, every parking garage, and for that matter, every extra wide street robs the municipality of valuable land. The taxes the city won’t get from those desiccated places must be extracted from the remaining parcels which add real value, creating a headwind urban businesses and urban entrepreneurs don’t need.

Wake up. The car is your enemy, people are your friends. Make your places people friendly spaces and the rest will take care of itself.

The Other Side of Resilience

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The real point of living a resilient life is making that life worth living. Whatever resilience I may have created begins with the life I want to live. I realized early on that it was the hustle and bustle of the city that I most enjoyed and so my resilient life must flow from that beginning. If the country, the wilderness, or even suburbia are what call to you then make your life there as resilient as you can; or don’t. For some the idea of constraining the here and now for some unknown and potentially non-existent future does nothing but make the everlasting present nothing but a misery; live for today, prepare for nothing, and die gracefully, or not, when the time comes.

Life gives us moments challenging enough that just surviving them is an accomplishment. There are other times when the world seems to echo perfection; where love and beauty, joy and pleasure come effortlessly and seem as though they will last and last. Balancing these, and remembering in each that that other has existed in the past and will likely appear once again keeps me balanced.

By all means put some money aside for a rainy day; but go to the neighborhood festival:


Or walk the grounds of an old mill:


Insulate your attic, but take the time to take a stroll and get to know a new place:


Or go to a hockey game:

I work in the garden, but too infrequently I just sit in it to enjoy the contrast with the surrounding streets.


Sometimes I sit down and talk with my wife about disasters, financial preparedness, and resilience. And at other times we just sip our coffee on a Sunday morning and discuss our favorite things: music, art, family, friends, stories from the past and hopes for the future. What resilience we’ve established exists to perpetuate our ability to appreciate those things, and my only real recommendation to anyone would be to find the things that make their lives worth living and contemplate ways to continue to enjoy them.

 

Living a Resilient Life

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(My feature from Strong Towns with its original quirks and a few different photos)
I lower the bar, making success easier to achieve, I stay away from the edge, so small mistakes don’t become catastrophes, and I focus my investments on multi-utility outcomes. These strategies have worked for me. 
I could make more money than I do. Lots of teachers coach, work as advisors for clubs, teach summer school, or have jobs on the side. I like my free time. My mindset is that my desires will need to conform to the income I can earn at the effort level I choose to give. The house I bought 9 years ago had to conform to the price point I was willing to commit to as a divorced guy with two daughters nearing college age. It had to be cheaper than renting with an upside for my dotage. 


Before I remarried most of our home improvements were DIY; not that my daughters and I were great at home remodeling but what work we could do had to be good enough. By the way, “good enough” ALWAYS is, it’s a tautology. I focused on insulation and weather stripping, and lots of deep cleaning, the girls did the painting and carpentry. One of my priorities was that the house be in a walkable neighborhood with good transit: I was not buying another car and paying for gas and insurance, nor was I prepared to schlep the girls everywhere.


When I did get re-married my wife was a kindred spirit. Having a partner who also enjoys NOT maximizing today’s purchasing power, who enjoys pinching a penny or two, and who will engage in long conversations about planning for potential setbacks goes a long way toward putting a plan for increased resilience in place. First, we agreed that not cranking up our lifestyle to correspond to the efficiencies that unifying our lives would allow was the smartest path; in truth we used the change to re-think a tremendous number of our expenses. 

What we’ve saved in not maintaining two cars, or going on fancy vacations, or upgrading to a fancier walkable neighborhood we’ve put into savings, more energy efficiency, greater food security, and redundancies for critical systems. 

And it’s a good thing we did.

The last 18 months have been an emotional and financial nightmare. While I was sitting beside my mother’s deathbed I was informed that the city’s work on modernizing the XIX century sewer lines had collapsed a shared pipe with a neighbor and that my share would come to a few thousand dollars. I had to pay for that while writing the check to bury my mother and to pay for the attorney to begin probate of my mother’s estate. My mother’s house, whose minimal value was reduced to effectively zero by some systemic flaws and code issues, also required a fair amount of time and effort for clean up. My parents’ midlife conversion to Mormonism left me a basement filled with long neglected food storage; a tremendously important object lesson for food related resilience to which I shall return. In the intervening months it became clear that my own home needed a new roof, our 36 year old boiler cracked, and some electrical outlets mysteriously started to go dead.

It would be reasonable to estimate that these and other expenses have had us unexpectedly pay out over $50,000 in cash in the last year. The result has been, as if Zeus had been our dinner guest, we are exactly where we were a year ago with our savings and we’ve still made extra payments on our mortgage, continued our food security payments to a local farmer, put in 14 new storm windows, and expanded our garden. 

Living so far from the limits of our means has made what could have been a crisis merely a frustrating time when progress on many fronts has been delayed.

There is much more to resilience than just money: there’s what you can do with money when you don’t need money. I mentioned our connection to a local farmer. We have an account with him where we have prepaid for whatever products he can supply, but we’ve gone beyond that with regular payments to him during the slowest months of the year with an understanding that if some circumstance of exceptional need were to occur, that we will be helped proportionately. Also in the area of food we have a larder with a few months to a year’s supply that we assiduously rotate(thanks mom and dad for the lesson!), and we’ve expanded our 45′ by 45′ urban farm to produce as much food and beauty as we can squeeze out of it.


We’ve also found that resilience breeds resilience. Our boiler cracked on January 1st. That’s just about when a boiler is going to give up the ghost in New England as that’s when winter shifts into high gear. But the new one we had the means to lay out for in cash never actually worked right all winter. The defect wasn’t discovered until August, even in Massachusetts not a prime time for heating, so that left us in the heart of winter without a central heating system and without the wood stove we had purchased as back up because our wood stove guy hates cities (but that’s another story). 

It turns out that miserliness regarding energy had made all of us less sensitive to temperature fluctuations, and the enormous investments in insulation, weather stripping, and new and refurbished windows allowed for the entire house to be kept adequately warm by merely turning on the heat in the basement apartment and letting the heat waft upward!


There’s so much more to it of course. I have 500 gallons of rain water storage to irrigate the garden when it gets dry, and we have emergency drinking water stored inside the house. My wife cans food, she and LuLu enjoy sewing, we keep loads of extra blankets and bedding in the house in case people need to come here (again) as a place of refuge; central Springfield has underground utilities so we’ve never lost electricity, even after Snowmaggeddon and a tornado. Our neighborhood includes most of the region’s emergency service headquarters, some power generation, and the region’s most important medical facility, with in house capacity for a month of independent function, is a 30 minute walk away.

Looking forward, we’re spending less and less on energy because of our investments in efficiency, and getting more and more food from our garden. If we ever needed a little money we could rent out the basement or do an AirB&B thing;if we ever needed a lot more money we could live in the apartment and rent out the other 3,000 square feet as residential or commercial space. Apart from the many bus lines and the regional rail service they connect to, our place has a Walkscore of 87 and rising so I envision a carfree retirement. I can see my doctor’s office from my living room window, and the Springfield cemetery from my front stoop: that pretty much covers all the bases.

Most importantly, we love our lives today, in the here and now. I like walking, my daughters and my wife love the garden. We feel good about using less, and about producing at least some of our own food. Nothing is better than watching the snow fall and knowing that we’ve already got the bread and milk and we can focus on alley sledding, snowball fights, and building snowmen. Seeing what we’ve already been able to get through fills us all with peace of mind as we march toward what has always been an uncertain future. 

Hola y Adiós

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There are signs. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company is selling one of its major holdings in the downtown. The head of the non profit development corporation of which MassMutual is the primary funder has decided to move on. Some subsidiaries are already being shifted to other regions. 

GE is moving to Boston, Aetna is moving its top brass to New York City. MassMutual will move its top executives and people involved with markets and investing to Boston, New York, or some other major hub. It will be emotionally devastating for a while, especially with the optimism that’s been growing with CRRC, MGM, and the reopening of Union Station. The real economic impact will be less significant as the overwhelming majority of the jobs, and of the salaries that were ever really spent within the region, will stay here. How often did the CEO dine at Red Rose or pick up a rotisserie chicken at Big Y anyway? 

The charities and non-profits which depend on MassMutual’s largesse will no doubt experience a diminution of commitment over the long haul but that may not be a bad thing. Perhaps another kick in the teeth is what we need. For Springfield, MassMutual has become a “too big to fail” institution, and that isn’t healthy. 
We need a greater variety of healthy businesses. The fundamentals are here: housing stock, population, solid infrastructure, educational institutions. We need smaller, more agile home grown enterprises, small enough to fail without devastating the region to put some oxygen back into the economy, to create space for growth for people who might be committed to the area, who might actually live here and spend here. 

Of course, I’d much rather be completely wrong about this. I’d love to see a doubling down by MassMutual of its commitment to the city, I’d love to see its executives walking through instead of flying over the city. But that doesn’t jibe with what has been happening in the broader world for years and years now. The winners are self aggregating and isolating themselves in a handful of superstar cities and the rest of us are losers; yes, the losers from which the winners hope to continue to express all of their future winnings, but losers none the less.

The only option for the losers is to close ranks and make one another winners in our own internal game. I can see it starting right here in Springfield in our North End. The streets and the sidewalks look better than they ever have, numerous buildings have been restored to a grandeur not seen since before World War I and yet there are still empty lots and vacant buildings ready to be improved upon and built on in order to welcome hundreds, maybe thousands fleeing a devastated island in the Caribbean.

We’ve survived the closing of the Armory, the elimination of the Farm Bank, the disappearance of Monarch Life, Uniroyal, Westinghouse, American Bosch and a dozen more factories, and we can survive this as well, but it is going to take individuals starting with very little and growing small scale enterprises right here and people from the community supporting them in return.

Being the Divide

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I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst a few weeks ago because someone had heard a commentary I had done for New England Public Radio. I had no idea what I was getting into, what the format would be, or who would be present at the event. I was invited a month before and was told that more information would be forthcoming. When the day before the event arrived and I hadn’t heard anything more I sent an email communicating that I was assuming the event was cancelled. They quickly returned that email communicating that the event was still on(!) but still without telling me what the event was!

Regardless, I went. The program, it turns out, was the first public event in a nationwide journalistic exercise (See here and here) designed to explore the issues dividing America. (For the best treatment of this topic I recommend this piece by John Michael Greer) Once my fellow panelists and I were invited to the stage we were each given a chance to introduce ourselves and our topic. First was deindustrialization. Yes, indeed, the working class has been devastated here in the Northeast by the flight of industry first to the South, and then overseas. Next was immigration. We were joined by a Dreamer who told us her story. 

After that the moderator shifted to the last two panelists who were to speak on education. I was joined by a newcomer to Springfield who was happy with his choice of living in Springfield and sending his children to Springfield schools. You can watch the event here.

If I could add anything to what I said about schools it would be not just that the people in the audience were the problem, having fled from Springfield above the Tofu curtain to send their children to de facto segregated schools, but that this desire to divide America which they have is obviously deep and abiding because they pay a huge premium to do it! The poor kids in Springfield and Holyoke or, better stated, their parents, can’t move to wealthy Happy Valley towns to “undivide” America, but these people could save tens of thousands of dollars every year by living in Springfield or Holyoke. 

The answer to the question: “Who is dividing us?” 

“You are.” How many people in that room at UMass or watching the program on Northampton Community Television couldn’t move to Springfield or Holyoke and send their kids to the schools in question? As usual what the people looking for “solutions to the issues of a divided America” are really looking for are things that other people can do in response to the issue so that they can continue to do what they’ve been doing. 

Call me crazy, be the solution. Segregated neighborhoods and schools bother you? Live in a place that allows your kids to make the schools more integrated. Decaying historic buildings bother you? If you can, buy one and fix it up. Think agriculture should be more local? Buy locally produced food. Climate Change is a problem? Make decisions to reduce your carbon footprint. 

As part of his introduction to the event the moderator discusses a chance meeting at the General Store in his hometown of Harvard, Massachusetts where the idea for this project to understand what is dividing America began to germinate. Yeah, that’s a real head scratcher that is. Here in a town with 6,500 people, 92% of whom are White, with an average household income of $139,000 a year. A real puzzler. Someone should get on that.

The Call is Coming from Inside the House

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It’s funny. So much energy expended in the discussion of building a wall to keep out the Spanish speaking hordes from Mexico, but an island famous for its walls is already inside “Fortress America” and the savage category 4 hurricane named María seems destined to bring hundreds of thousands if not a million of those Gringo Hispanos to the mainland. Already citizens, they can’t be stopped. No one can prove that the elaborate Chinese Global Warming Hoax played a role in the rapid strengthening of María to a Category 5 hurricane as it passed from Cape Verde to the Lesser Antilles, but I wouldn’t put it past those inscrutable bastards!

The data I’ve seen says that roughly 50% of Puerto Ricans who leave the island come to the Northeast, and roughly 10% of them choose Massachusetts. Springfield, according to some sources, has the 4th highest Puerto Rican population of any city on the mainland United States and Holyoke, part of the Springfield msa, has the highest percentage Puerto Rican population. In talking to my neighbors those numbers are about to increase. Of the 3.4 million people living in Puerto Rico today, an island already in the throes of a bankruptcy process and where out-migration was accelerating, how many will leave in the coming days, weeks, and months is anyone’s guess, but as full American citizens it is hard to imagine that many will not avail themselves of the option to ride or fly northward.

Their most popular destinations in the past include also storm ravaged Florida and Texas along with equally financially troubled Illinois and Connecticut. Some analyses show greater Springfield as having one of the most solid economies in the country…except in the area of growth where it stands in the “Lower 20”:


 

Prosperity though…”Upper 20″:

And what they deem the most important category, Inclusion, “Top 20”:

The growth in question here is economic growth not population growth, but if 5,000 or 10,000 people move to the area over the next few years looking for housing, excellent schools, and employment it could create some real growth in the overall economy.

As I compared the Silver Bullet development that is the MGM resort in the South End to the small scale infrastructural improvements in the North End the one thing both neighborhoods have in common is their dominant ethnic culture: Puerto Rican. Both have Boriqua owned businesses. Both have vacant lots and abandoned buildings. Both could easily accommodate an influx of hundreds of newcomers if given time to do so. 

Schools might be the weakest link in terms of immediate accommodation; the Springfield Public Schools are already the second largest in New England with a population at or near its all-time high. The city has aggressively built, acquired, and renovated schools in the last three decades all while experiencing middle class flight to the suburbs. Families with school age children might very well be the first to leave the island if schools and medical facilities can’t be brought back online quickly.

The weeks ahead could tell an interesting tale. I’ve always found it interesting, even perhaps slightly ironic that at the entrance to Springfield’s most Puerto Rican neighborhood there is a statue honoring the soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American war of 1898. In Spain the Generación del ’98 grappled with the decline of their country, its loss of empire, and conflicts between tradition and progress. The nation which inflicted upon them the defeat which created such bitter awareness of their circumstances is now engaged in the same process, and once again Puerto Ricans, willing or not, are participants.

Train in Vain

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The river did us a real favor. As problematic as the so called “100 year flood” is going to be for north-south rail travel in the valley, the alignment of tracks from Springfield to Greenfield through Holyoke and Northampton makes for a short trip which connects the rider to 4 unique places. Taking the idea of regionalism and contemplating it more broadly it becomes clear that the keys to improved connectivity in the valley both internally and with Boston are Vermont and Montreal.

Vermont may have a smaller population than greater Springfield, but its two senators and north-south orientation comprise a relatively powerful united front for improving connectivity to Montreal: their true regional economic powerhouse. If Vermont wants to relieve its isolation, and it does, then improved Boston-Montreal links are the carrot for Canada’s eastern economic powerhouse to work with Vermont in doing so. 

This makes Springfield the north-south to east-west inflection point for the Boston to Montreal rail link, and the weakness of the Palmer to Worcester section of track a potential focus for improvement not just for western Massachusetts (Who cares about us?) but for Montreal, Boston, and Vermont. Paying hundreds of millions for adding the second track and improving the existing track will seem much more cost effective if it’s placed in that context as well as the context of creating an alternative for the Boston to New York coastal route, which can make Worcester and greater Hartford allies as well.

So instead of the fight for improved Boston to Springfield rail service being an in state battle where Boston doesn’t care and the most important local dollars are dead set against the plan, you have a regional and even international coalition within which Peter Pan Bus Lines is an insignificant player. Boston and Montreal connect to New York and Toronto respectively, but both play second fiddle to their national economic centers. Montreal cares as much about Vermont as Boston does about Springfield, but I could see each coveting a cozier relationship with the other to feel less dependent on their giant in house rivals. 

The impressions left by the first leg of the Greenfield to Springfield trip by rail are that the train really flies into Northampton, I couldn’t say for sure if we were going 75 or 85 mph, but it certainly seemed as though it was by far the fastest the train had gone since departing Essex Junction. Greenfield and Northampton both have their station, or in the case of Northampton, their platform, in close proximity to their city centers and I could foresee a day when more frequent service could foment a real boost to each through transit oriented development.

It is a beautiful trip as well, with lots in the way of agricultural and solar endeavors on display:

Between Northampton and Holyoke the train slows to a crawl, and the area around the platform is as empty and underutilized as any in the city. Keep in mind that Holyoke has, in my opinion, by far the best prospects in the region for thriving in the “whatever comes next” economy: water power, water transport, a huge supply of solid industrial buildings, proximity to farm land. 

Pretty much everything but the confidence of anyone who matters. Look at this stunning building (right)only feet from the platform just begging to be redeveloped:

And this vacant Richardson train station on the wrong side of the tracks:


Holyoke is the gem of the region and Springfield would do well to be seen as a partner and benefactor. Someday we’ll be glad we did.

The train really picked up speed through Chicopee where we saw more waterways just begging to be utilized to their potential once again:


In scale, everything from Essex Junction, Vermont to Holyoke is more or less comparable, but Springfield, for good and for ill, is at a completely different level. The bridges, the highway interchanges, the density, and the rapidity of changes in typology were all revelatory. It was surprising to see how well maintained the North End appears from the train:

Without any outside information the overall impression would be that this place, more than any other on this journey, is making use of its older infrastructure and has its act together…whether that is in fact the case, we shall see.

This was Labor Day weekend and, while we were among a very few people getting off the train at the new Union Station, it seemed as though a hundred people were getting ready to board. The platforms are much less impressive than the station itself, though work continues on that part of the project. Downtown was not surprisingly, but saddeningly dead on a holiday afternoon, and the idea of scale once again leapt to mind. Holyoke could see its rail district, let’s call it, transformed by just a few small players and less than a handful of small developments. Springfield needs that and so much more to make the Union Station project and its environs an example of a successful TOD: Amazon wants a new HQ, we could play the lottery, or move the state capital. See, there are opportunities everywhere.

Street Theater

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I’ve written and talked about the two very distinct faces of my little part of the world: Heaven and Hell I’ve called it. Nothing quite tells the tale of this Jekyll and Hyde situation like photographs. From prostitutes seeking out Johns in the snow to sex workers shoveling my sidewalk:


A Seuss parade:


Followed closely by Potsquatch:


Deadly accidents:


Toxic spills:


Clean up thereof:

Some public urination:

And more prostitutes:


Unplanned manmade geysers: 


And more prostitutes:


A Black Lives Matter protest:

And more prostitutes:


Horse racing:

Incidents and Accidents:

The CSA delivery parade!


A police helicopter in search of…


A BMW delivering “pizza”…with Red Rose a block away!


More prostitutes:


Gymnastics on my porch rail…until the bus arrives:


Mustering emergency vehicles:


Seeking shelter:


And, every now and again…peace and quiet all around:

Just Thinking About the Weather

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It is a strange time of year to live in New England. It’s a place that people leave, ostensibly, because of the weather, but in September it’s hard to imagine anyplace having a better mix of enjoyable climactic conditions. It’s cool at night, warm during the day, it rains now and again, and some of the leaves are just starting to turn orange and red. 

There are other seasons of course, but I’m amazed at how temperate the environment here really is year round, even in a home without modern climate control. To explain: it’s not just that this summer is our fourth without air conditioning, but circumstances obliged us to go without central heat since the beginning of the year as well.

The air conditioning was a choice. The attorneys who sold me this townhouse left me 9 air conditioners. I used as many as 5 of them, but after first painting the roof membrane white, and then getting a new reflective roof, I decided to try blowing cooler air into the house at night and closing up the house and keeping the sun out during the day. It has worked wonderfully well: even on the occasional 90 degree day the house rarely gets above 75.

It isn’t just the roof and the strategic use of curtains: of our four walls one is shared and the other three have been super-insulated along with the cathedral ceiling. This ended up being as helpful for going without heat as for going without cooling. On January 1st the 36 year old Utica steam boiler we inherited when we bought the place cracked. It’s replacement had a tiny defect in a small part which was not discovered and repaired until August…meaning that we went from January through the remainder of the winter without central heat.

Having foreseen the demise of the old boiler my wife and I had purchased a wood stove to act as a back-up system. Unfortunately the complexities of our 6 flue chimney scared our wood stove dealer into giving the installation responsibilities to a subcontractor they felt was better able to do the job. He arrived at our home and casually remarked that he hated Springfield, hated our neighborhood, and hated having to drive here. He took a down payment of $150 to start the work. And never returned. Yeah, cities suck. Filled with so many dishonest jerks. You know, the types who take your money but don’t actually do the work they’ve promised to do. I’m sure rural folk never behave in that manner.

Luckily our basement has a small forced hot air system designed to keep the 600 square feet in that apartment warm. By cranking that furnace up to 70 and opening the doors to the upstairs the house stayed at 58-60 degrees…with a little help from a space heater in the bathroom now and again, and making sure we captured every ray of sunlight possible from our south facing windows. In response we’re getting a much smaller wood stove (from a different contractor who loves Springfield’s old neighborhoods).

Back to the weather, there have been enough sunny days for our peach, tomato, and pepper crops to be among the best ever, and there has been enough rain to keep the rain barrels full for when the sunny days start to pile up.


Yup, people leave here for Texas, Florida, and California. For the weather. It’s true, I had to shovel snow a dozen times last winter, and wear a jacket, but that’s hardly the end of the world. When I finish shoveling, my house is still there. Every time.

Essex Junction

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Essex Junction is something of a puzzler: the Amtrak station is horrid both architecturally and functionally:

It’s hard to imagine how passengers could be treated any worse without it turning into a Monty Python sketch about freemasonry!

Across the street is some lovely fine grained small town urbanism:


Around the corner what seems to be the center of town is clearly attempting recovery from 20th century auto-centrism with this new building:


From what I can see from GoogleMaps it replaced a building almost as hideous as this remaining one:


But with a suburban setback that the new building has remedied.

We weren’t able to find a hotel in this section of town and so we were forced to the satellite belt of suburban detritus a few miles away. The setting is almost as bad as it looks from this satellite view, although somehow even Vermont stroads seem to be quaint, but the pool had a slide, so LuLu was happy.

As the Vermonter once again becomes the Montrealer I expect TOD to replace some gas stations with mixed use structures and for the Nomad Café to be forced to change its name:

We didn’t have the time on this trip to take the bus into Burlington. I look forward to doing so next time, and to eating at the Nepali Kitchen in Essex itself. It’s great to know that we’re always just a train ride away.