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Who’s With Me!?

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

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

A few days later it looked like this:

And today it looks like this:

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

Block plans for the Zorzi property have been published:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never Enough

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The headline of Richard Florida’s most recent essay on City Lab could just as easily read: “People Who Can Live Anywhere Like Living Near Cool Stuff” or “Rich People Like to Have Stuff to Spend Their Money On Nearby” or even “Poor People Can’t Afford to Live in the Same Places Rich People Want to Live”. I suppose there’s some nuance there when you start to break it down but that is the gist of the article.

When I teach young people about my experiences in Spain I have to start by explaining to them that the well-to-do often live in the center of Spanish cities because they want easy access to all of the things that the center city provides. At some point I say “think New York City and Manhattan” and they kinda sorta get it. If I transition to a more local example; like me and Springfield, the concept usually gets lost because it runs counter to fact.

There’s some irony imbedded in the reasons for that.


Even if someone of my income could afford to live in the trendier parts of Manhattan near all of the amenities that make it special, I couldn’t afford to see Broadway shows or dine at the trendiest places on a daily or weekly basis. The City Lab piece uses the Metropolitan Opera as its example of a cultural destination which lures the rich into living in the center city; at even $100 a ticket(i.e. cheap seats) my wife and I are not going on a regular basis unless that is our only focus because it wouldn’t leave a whole lot extra in the budget to do any of the other things available for me to do in Manhattan. So even if the working class and middle class live surrounded by all of the culture of superstar cities, access to biggest and best would be limited anyway, if not by proximity then by cost.

By contrast not only are urban centers in places like Springfield actually inexpensive places to live, the cultural amenities like concerts, sporting events, and even restaurants are priced at much more reasonable levels meaning that, if people wished to do so, the easy access provided by proximity could really be taken advantage of, even by those not in the 1% or the 10%.

I don’t want to be misunderstood here, having lived in Madrid, for example, I know that cultural capitals also provide interesting yet inexpensive experiences as well, but those are not the types of amenities that the article is addressing. In my experience both in Spain and here in New England there are always cultural experiences to be had which are both wonderful and cheap.

That said, the New York Philharmonic is better than the Springfield Symphony, the Rangers would destroy the Thunderbirds, and of course New York dining has a variety and excellence that a third tier city could never match (New York pizza on the other hand is way overrated…Sicilian>NY slice), but the Springfield Symphony experience is much better than not being able to go to the symphony, the Thunderbirds provide a greater opportunity to cheer for the home team and feel the rush that comes with a goal being scored than sitting at home in front of the tv, and interesting and unique gastronomical experiences can only be had when one can afford to pay the bill.

None of this touches on the most interesting question the essay leaves unmentioned however; why is the magnetic affect of cultural institutions in non-superstar cities so much less discernible? Within a 15 walk of my house there is an arena which houses the region’s sole professional sports franchise, the auditorium where the only professional symphony orchestra performs over a dozen concerts a year, a world famous sports museum celebrating the second most popular team sport in the world, a national Historic site and museum which are part of the National Park system, a fine arts museum with works from the medieval era through the 20th century with works from many of  history’s best known artists, another museum with one of the largest collections of Asian Art in North America, a brand new children’s museum celebrating, arguably, the most famous American children’s author of all time, a science museum, a local history museum, one of the nation’s most impressive libraries, dozens of restaurants, bars, and clubs, and, now, a brand new resort-casino operated by the most famous casino brand in the United States. 


But not only is no one moving here from Longmeadow or Wilbraham, but not even one of the city’s biggest boosters lives downtown. Not one. This essay is not about chiding them, (I’ve already written that one with the impact being the one who did live here quit his job and moved away: Go me!) it’s about contemplating why it is as it is.


Is it just too easy in a smaller city to get to any event, experience any amenity, and scurry back home? Are the suburban communities and rural towns of such high quality that our urban amenities can’t compete with what they provide at their scale? 


It isn’t availability of high quality housing of any type in the center city; I sometimes call this place where I live a “mansion”, but apart from the basement apartment it has barely 3,000 sq ft of living space, there are homes 3x that size a five minute walk from here available for the same cost as a colonial in Longmeadow. Apart from that there are housing types of every sort in the core neighborhoods. It isn’t the schools either; the wealthy have private schools aplenty to send their kids to, and most of the big players don’t have school age kids.

A really good church friend of mine from back in my teen years told me once that he and his friends in the rural areas between Springfield and Worcester MUCH preferred the latter because Springfield was an “Orb” town. “What do you mean Orb?” I asked. 

It’s “Bro” backwards. 

Does the heavy presence of racial minorities, or even just the lack of Whites in the core of the city present too great a psychological barrier? 

Is the downtown even close to attracting anyone but the urban pioneer types and the occasional adventurous member of the middle class?

The question at the heart of it all is, are we in any way close to a change in the zeitgeist? Are we one restaurant, one club, or even one dollar per gallon in the price of gas away from seeing the effect amenities have on who resides in the core of the superstar cities visit an average city like this one? 

Richard Florida laments that quality cultural experiences cause people to want to live near them because of his fear of gentrification. I reject that notion completely. Given the extant buildings and the empty plots of land available in Springfield’s core neighborhoods we could house every resident of Longmeadow and Wilbraham without displacing a single current resident; yet I would hasten to point out that I still have never met a poor minority resident of this neighborhood who wanted to stay here anyway; as I have stated before I cannot fathom fighting against the displacement of people who not only aren’t being displaced, but would like to be!

A successful downtown needs a mix of demographics certainly, and the most under-represented here are the well off. The art is here, the food is here, the buildings are here. It’s interesting that those can be enough to attract people in one place, but not at all in another.

But Father, I Love Him!

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I spent a few hours watching and re-watching a debate between Modernists and Traditionalists in the realm of architecture. I found it both enlightening and frustrating. The arguments that the three supporters of Modernism gave were compelling and well-reasoned with the only caveat being, well, this:

Architecture doesn’t only exist in the world of theories one posits, but rather it actually constructs the reality in which most of us exist. Modernist cityscapes make great backgrounds for Sci-Fi films and car commercials, they’re cool off in the distance acting as giant sculptures, but they are miserable places to inhabit which, in the end, is the reason buildings are built. (To inhabit, not to be miserable) I could be convinced by the arguments perhaps, if I hadn’t just walked a quarter mile down Chestnut Street in Springfield, strolling by example after example of traditional architecture which, even in a continuum of states ranging from pristine to dilapidated, was consistently beautiful, contrasted with the few examples of Modernism which sit like concrete and steel carbuncles on the face of the neighborhood, darkening the street and weakening the spirit.

(These are some other pictures of Chestnut Street I took this summer)

I’m sure you’ve noticed how futuristic films have nearly all of humanity wearing one piece jumpsuits. If actual individuals were required to buy them, in the way we’ve had Modernist architecture imposed upon us, I could imagine this panel of experts explaining why the jumpsuit is so good for us; we would hear more or less the same compelling arguments for the shiny metallic jumpsuit that we hear for Modernism in architecture. This would include explaining why certain particular shiny metallic jumpsuits aren’t really indicative of the beauty and comfort of some illusory, theoretically possible super comfortable and humane…shiny metallic jumpsuit. Of course all three of the experts would be wearing cotton shirts, cashmere sweaters, and tweed jackets…just as in the actual example they live in traditionally designed historic homes!

The jumpsuit thing hasn’t ever caught on because, as hot as Erin Gray looked as Buck Rogers’ love interest, very few people want to wear Lycra jumpsuits. In the real world, they suck. They’re not comfortable, not versatile, and they usually look like crap.

In my world it’s easy to see which of these two schools wins the day if what you’re interested in is an architecture that fills people’s lives with beauty, meaning, and wonder at humanity’s sublime skill.

Given an entire section of the city as a clean slate, thanks to the bulldozers of urban renewal, Modernism gave us this:

Whatever this or that genius in Geneva or New York City WOULD have done, that is what was done. 

Traditional architecture, in the same provincial place, has given us all this and so much more:


As much as I love my hometown I know that when people make decisions about where to inhabit, it’s pretty low on most people’s list. The sole exceptions are the places gifted with concentrations of traditionally designed buildings and streets. I can’t think of a single example Modernist architecture here which does the same. The Modernists in the debate, in the end, are trying to convince us through reason and logic, to love them. Any of my readers who have ever been in love will know that it doesn’t work that way. We love what we love and whom we love because we love them, not because we should. No one loves Springfield’s “New North”, no one ever has, and no one ever will. Perhaps we should be over McKnight and Mattoon, the Cozy Corner, Olmsted Drive, and Court Square, but we’re not. 

“Keep your shiny towers in the park(ing lot), we’re staying with our dirty little gridded streets, we love them, we’ve always loved them, and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

Burning Hedges

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As I’ve exposed myself more consistently to conservative and right wing media I’ve been amused by just how much there is an open distaste for cities. It doesn’t just take the guise of articles detailing how violent and unlivable urban nodes like Baltimore and Chicago have become, but also in immediate responses to any apparent positive news involving any city anywhere. It puts me in mind of the attitude I felt when my parents took me through the Deep South where, as northerners we realized that there were people who woke up loathing us because we existed in places which, truth be told, we only contemplated as existing when obligated to do so.

As time has moved on the two concepts have conflated, that is to say that loving what the South represents and hating cities do seem to go hand in hand with some brands of conservatism; which brings me back to my experiences with right leaning media; the zeal with which all cities are attacked is amusing to say the least. If I read an article on a website which brands itself as “city loving” like, for example, City Lab, they might find the nuances in a report about Millennialls and whether or not they are more given to living in cities than Gen Xers or Boomers, the same report at ZeroHedge will read, without too much exaggeration, “Millenialls leaving cities as urban hell-scapes drive them back to suburban life.”

There’s an enormous racial component in all this, to be sure, but almost as much opprobrium is unleashed on hipsters, tech wizards, and gentrifiers of all sorts. The narrative is that all cities are shitholes, but sometimes the shithole takes the guise of really nice restaurants, quaint cafes, loft apartments, and well used bike lanes and the White people who live in urban areas now will regret their choice when the zombie apocalypse occurs and their big stupid brains are the main course.

It was, in retrospect, one of the finest and most nuanced pieces I’d read, from a truly reactionary website, which set me to writing this present essay. It talked about the dis-ease in our society; how the programming of gadgets, pop culture, and social media turns us into zombies, people going about the functions of daily life but without any underlying meaning or joy to give them significance. It put me in mind of the idea that in a sick enough society the truly sane can only feel an alienated sadness. 

What I found interesting was how the article sets all of this alienation and despair in an urban milieu not just in his contemplation of the Gary Jules cover of a Tears for Fears song which gave title to his essay, but in his entire analysis of the various crises confronting the United States. In terms of the video he describes these scenes, these buildings, and this neighborhood as “decaying, decrepit, and bleak”, the architecture as nondescript, and the apartments as gray and cookie cutter:


In his descriptions of the people I see what can only be described as the projection of his own world’s ennui to a cityscape where it has no place. I live in a neighborhood not totally unlike the one in these images, but the people here are not the ones who spend their time with their faces trapped in the screens of their iPhones, the children in this neighborhood, just as in the neighborhood in the video, are outside playing; by themselves, not on play-dates, not in structured activities. He avoids using screenshots of the automobile and the suburban home which accompany the “worn out faces” in the images which the children create on the sidewalk.

Listen to today’s adults bemoan the circumstances of “the children of today”, and they are the children of today who live in just this type of home:


And are transported in by this mode of conveyance:


Contrast that with the children in this image:


As part of the video it’s clearly meant to be in contrast to the sadness of the poetic voice expressing his existential angst. The original Tears for Fears video even has the singer trapped alone inside a suburban home.

Chris Hedges points out in a recent speech that the enormous spike in suicides in the United States is propelled mostly by White men of about my age. These are people who fully believed in and trusted the American Dream and have been crushed by its disappearance. In contrast, Black men have always known that it was nothing but a myth for them, and so there is no increased angst in its revelation as a hoax. Surely this is a condition which holds true for the cities of the Rust Belt as well. As has been said, the future is here already, it just isn’t evenly distributed. My people, like the children in this video, aren’t unaware of the challenges they face, but the descriptions of people running around in circles engaging in meaningless interactions are not those that they see; they see people with a keen awareness that necessities like food and shelter are not guaranteed, not imagining that they will somehow someday manage to keep up with the Joneses…or the Kardashians.

Situating the unease of the age and referencing specific aspects thereof like school shootings, for example, which occur almost exclusively in White, middle class, suburban schools, in cities demonstrates an awareness that there is a crisis, but an inability to recognize that the crisis is one’s own.

Not Picturesque

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Carol Coletta was, quite literally, one of the first urbanist voices I ever heard. I was an early adopter of the Internet, using it for research for a weekend radio program I hosted and produced; a friend hooked me up to do research using an old Mac and a modem (“Whatever that is”) and the next thing I knew I was using the University of Minnesota “Gopher” to find news stories I could use. They came mostly from the San José Mercury News. As access to live and archived radio programs became more common in the early 2000’s, Smart City Radio with Carol Coletta became the first I found with a focus on cities and urban issues.

The program was insightful, but the context, given that the show originated from Memphis, was so different in every way from my situation and lived experiences here in New England that it served more to whet my appetite city centered dialog than to satisfy it. That was one of the experiences which led to the creation of Rational Urbanism. Strong Towns recently reposted one of her essays entitled You Can’t See ’em, if You Can’t Feel ’em. It addressed how our car oriented living arrangement keeps the various economic and social classes from interacting and, therefore, knowing one another. 

I wouldn’t argue against that idea, it seems well rooted in fact. I’ve written about how topography and demography combine to deceive, at least in this region; so much land is occupied by the well-to-do, and the poorest of the poor are concentrated in such small spaces that it gives a false impression of their relative numbers. This leads to many other misunderstandings. As a teacher I earn well over 1.5 times the median household income for the U.S., and yet many teachers I know honestly believe that they are underpaid. I remember a discussion with a colleague whose spouse was a lawyer in which I learned that their combined income of over a quarter of a million dollars a year did not make them rich because “they couldn’t buy everything they wanted”; with a few minutes of research I pointed out that, numerically speaking, if families earning that much above the median were in the middle of the distribution, then families earning less than $300 a month were also “middle class”.

Again, however, we hear this exhortation to mingle with the poor. I do, albeit usually on my own terms. As with the wealthy, they can be very nice, very engaging people. But they are living on the edge. Good manners, another colleague recently commented, are a privilege of the comfortable. It’s easier to defer and delay when you believe yourself to be absolutely certain of your next meal, and your place of rest. You can see that being in that mode can carry over to other, less fundamental, situations and circumstances. On the other hand there are those who clearly enjoy a sojourn amongst the middle class in order to forget how precarious their existence may be.

As I have earlier stated, I wouldn’t argue that a larger problem in this country isn’t that the we do not see how the other half lives, but I do not think increased interaction will lead only to net positives. When I think of issues of race as opposed to class for example, often the least racist people I meet have had either no interactions or constant somewhat thoroughgoing interactions with people of other races. The most fervent racists I know became such while inhabiting a space of some frequent contact but which did not go very deep and were not affirming. In much the same way the poor are often not picturesque, having some insight into their behaviors requires a better understanding of their circumstances. They often are not grateful to intermingle with those of us in the wealthier classes. They are not always kind, not polite, and not always deferential.

By all means let’s have a clearer picture of our reality, but let’s not be surprised by the fact that much of what we see may shock us, sadden us, and make us wish that we didn’t know how ugly living on the edge can be.

Grinding my Gears

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Criticism of the way in which local media covers various topics in Springfield in particular, and regarding urban places more broadly has diminished here because, for the most part, I’ve had my say and gotten it out of my system. Death Race 2016 was an enormous part of that; actually documenting as it happened just how much more dangerous the human-automobile interface is than whatever minimal carnage and mayhem occurs on even the toughest streets of a city like Springfield for an entire year both sated my thirst for urban exoneration and filled me with sadness that comes with the narrating the constant premature loss of life we insist upon inflicting on ourselves through our obsession with and worship of the car.

In other ways the coverage has noticeably improved. I wouldn’t ascribe much of the improvements in local coverage to my critique, for the most part I would guess that the pulse of development in the downtown from MGM to Union Station has given people in the media a more positive perspective on the city just as the generalized “magic feather effect” has permeated the zeitgeist more broadly among outsiders. These improvements have included less focus on ordinal numbers where murders are concerned, some slight awareness of road design and automobile speed in connection to pedestrian fatalities, and fewer scare stories on non-events like “shootings” with no witnesses, victims, or evidence.

On the other hand there are areas where I question not so much the motives, as the judgement of local media. Just last week a story, like many stories, was posted to the WWLP 22 News website tagged as Local News which actually covered a horrible, violent crime in Atlanta, Georgia:

The headline was enough to tell the gruesome story. I guarantee that many “local” media consumers assumed the event occurred either in Springfield or Holyoke. Both local television news outlets do this; tagging particularly unusual stories with some prurient or violent angle as local news. I assume it’s done not as an effort to slander Springfield, but to distinguish those stories from “National” or “World” news, which in their view would be stories which have an impact on the national or worldwide level. Thus a panel at UMass discussing climate change might be tagged as world news, but an 8 year old killing a 3 year old sibling in Birmingham, Alabama would be tagged as “local”. Whatever the motive, it obscures rather than clarifies and so I warn my readers to take note.

In a similar way the local newspaper of record will key every report about any crime which is being adjudicated in any of Springfield’s courtrooms to Springfield News,whether or not the crime occurred in the city or involved anyone from the city, and yet will often not tag stories about business and cultural events which occur in the city as relating to Springfield even when the events take place in the city with entities from the city. 

I’m terrible at tagging my own essays on Rational Urbanism, and so I understand that this also does not likely come from any ill will on the part of the reporters, but if a crime story can be placed in multiple news feeds, including “Springfield”, then so can a charitable event, or a concert.

Small things. Things are going in the right direction when these are among the strongest criticisms I can raise.

Dead Shopping

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Malls had begun to kill downtown before I was conscious of either. As I wandered through the streets and alleys of Springfield’s core as a “tween” I couldn’t see the evidence of decline because I had never seen what it had been like when it was truly healthy. In retrospect I was witness to the transition of retail dominance alternating visits to the Eastfield Mall and Baystate West but not knowing that the Woolworth’s at the former was the reason for the vacant building near the latter; I purchased my Rolling Stone 

T-shirt just the same.

There may have been a toy store downtown, in later years there was one inside Johnson’s Bookstore, but I bought all my HO toy train stuff at the Kay Bee Toy and Hobby at the mall. 

What did I buy downtown? Records at Belmont Records, “food” at the Orange Julius, Friendly’s, or at the deli in the food court. I enjoyed being downtown more, but I spent more of my paper route money at the mall. 

By the time I was living downtown with my wife and, eventually, two daughters 10 years later I could wait for Christmas Eve to do all of my shopping at a mildly bustling, but not too busy Steiger’s and the aforementioned Johnson’s. They would both be gone before my daughters could shop in them as tweens. 

I remember a glorious trip to a short lived would be replacement for those two venerable stores with my oldest, Xela: We wandered from the Classical Condominium down to whatever that pseudo-TJ/Marshalls/K-mart/ seconds shop was called and bought two arms full of art-work, pillows, lamps and assorted crap for her “new” bedroom; we were giving the girls separate rooms for the first time. On the way down we heard people speaking English, Spanish, Russian, and Vietnamese. On the way back we had a burger at a little diner in the SIS building. 

The crappy, pseudo department store has since been replaced by a storefront college. The burger place is a print shop.

On Thursday 12 year old LuLu and I got a chai tea (her) and a hot chocolate at Kringle Candle as the early snow made us both feel as though we had given Thanksgiving a miss and had jumped right in to Christmas time. We bought her mom two little gifts. We saw workers just starting the job of getting the outdoor skating rink ready. 

Downtown is on its umpteenth iteration of creating a new storefront paradigm. It never ends. What was a family owned furniture store becomes a Family Dollar on one side, and a little family owned department store on the other. The small building next door was razed for parking but the lot sits completely empty except for the owner’s SUV 100% of the time; anyone with a car can get to a better place to shop. I bet they regret not having more space for inventory now, especially since they wouldn’t need to pay anyone to plow their shelves of excess inventory when it snows.

Eastfield Mall is dead. I haven’t been there in years. The owners have widely published a plan to make the area which was the mall a “town center”. It’s far enough from downtown to become the center of its own pseudo neighborhood I suppose. Is there demand enough for living in that sort of place in such a slow growing region as western New England? Perhaps, it is moderately well serviced by public transit and is surrounded by healthy Springfield neighborhoods as well as other thriving towns. On the other hand Springfield’s “other Main Street”, Main Street in Indian Orchard, has great bones, a nice layout, and could be (and for my money should be) the center of that same area miles to the east of downtown Springfield. I’m not sure there’s energy enough for both of them.

Another mall just across the Connecticut line, just as close to downtown Springfield as Eastfield Mall but to the south, is all but dead; it was valued at close to 300 million dollars just over a decade ago but is up for sale for just about a penny on the dollar today.

What this all portends for downtown I don’t think anyone can say for sure; the decline of the old nemesis does not guarantee a return to health. Having witnessed so much of this one particular rivalry play out all of my financial and emotional investment is for the traditional downtown to continue to survive somehow by making itself at least somewhat useful to someone in some way at least some of the time.

Meeting-up with Chris

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Until last Tuesday I had never met Chris Martenson nor had I ever met anyone in the area who knew of him; A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country after all. When I contemplate the different forms of resilience capital, as Chris and Adam Taggart explain it, the most ephemeral is spiritual and perhaps the most difficult to assess is social. For those reasons I chose to attend both a concert by Stephen Jenkinson recommended by Mr Martenson, and the meet-up which immediately preceded it.

I’ve mentioned Chris and Peak Prosperity in at least a handful of posts here at Rational Urbanism. I find his Crash Course to be the clearest and best laid out explanation of what we’re facing as a civilization in the near future and his website is a great resource for preparing for impending discontinuities. I place him with Jim Kunstler, John Michael Greer, and Chuck Marohn as thinkers whose messages resonate with me because they do not see the future as being the same as the present, only more so.

Johnny Sanphillippo had written that his experience in meeting with Peak Prosperity members involved mostly alpha-male types involved in the world of investment and high finance. The 8 of us who met Chris and his companion at a local Indian restaurant were of a very different sort; mostly women, no discussion whatsoever of money and finance, with perhaps the only topic of conversation which might have seemed unusual for any random group of people just getting to know one another was firearms related. 

When Chris made his way down to our end of the table we had an interesting, but all too brief, conversation. I started by thanking him for his work on the Crash Course and at Peak Prosperity. I mentioned that I chose to attend the Nights of Grief and Mystery concert because, as a philosophical materialist, the idea of spiritual capital was difficult for me but important, I think, to understand. Chris talked about how Stephen Jenkinson’s performance would be interesting for someone coming from that perspective.

This is when things got really interesting.

My wife and I later discussed that the idea of having a meet-up with Chris and Peak Prosperity members was uncomfortable because, like me, she was raised in a very insular religion which centered around a cult of personality; she has no interest in becoming an acolyte of anyone or anything…excepting me perhaps. Chris is clearly the prophet type, and his ideas are meant to encourage a transformation of life and of self. The message, like the apocalyptic message of my former Mormon faith, is one of exceptionalism; of being among the special few who hear the call, understand the message, and follow Him.

What followed in the interaction between Chris and me was nuanced, but spoke volumes. Whether he asked or I volunteered I cannot recall, but I told him that we lived in Springfield. Up to that moment I hadn’t expressed anything but praise for an orthodox reading of the Peak Prosperity message, despite erring in saying there were “7 forms of resilience capital” when there are 8. In an effort to help me feel as though I was still among the chosen people he responded that, regarding living in Springfield, what really mattered was where in the city of Springfield one lived.

He didn’t have to say any more; I knew what he meant. There are spaces, like my parents’ home: in the woods, away from the densely populated center, with access to land, wood, and water, and with neighbors like, well, like us where a person could live in the way envisioned by Chris’ Peak Prosperity model. When I told him in the clearest terms possible that I not only did NOT live in one of those areas, but rather, I lived in the heart of the beast, the center of the city, surrounded by the poor, desperate teeming masses I saw a flicker of realization take place; I was lost.

I went on to mention that we had a small garden, that our garden had helped us to create social capital in our neighborhood, and that my neighbors weren’t at all worried about the state of the markets or any such thing; they had all taken John Michael Greer’s advice, if involuntarily, to crash now and avoid the rush. Chris was very polite, demurred, and went back to his end of the table to eat. He had made a calculation; this was not the time or place to dissuade me from living in an urban center. We’ve all done it: quietly listened to a poor, misguided soul explain why they believe something that we find utterly ridiculous.

I know that I have no idea how the Long Emergency will play out. I believe it will play out, but I don’t think I could say with any precision where, when, or even why it will reach its most critical junctures. Could I be wrong altogether in even thinking the progress of human civilization could stop? Yes, although I can’t conceive of how.

Where Chris and I differ is, I suppose, in just where and how the first throes of obvious dysfunction will occur and in our individual abilities to respond to them. My money, figuratively, is on the center holding for a relatively extended period of time due to societal inertia. I harbor no illusions that I can scratch an independent life from the soil, nor would I want to. The infrastructure of America is weak at its periphery, but, in the words of Nassim Taleb, things which have been around for a long time are likely to be around for a long time, and this place has been a functioning community for 400 years, a city by anyone’s reckoning for 200. 

I stand a better chance of living a life I’d want to live; provided with water, power, and sanitation, right here, where I have planted myself. 

If the near future turns into the apocalypse Chris foresees in terms of all urban places becoming Wild, Wild, West worlds of festering violence and lawlessness then, yes, I’m screwed; but at this point in life I’d be just as screwed trying to eek out a living on a homestead in the hinterlands under the same societal conditions. 

As always I’m balancing the here and now with my prepping for the future. Some people have the problem of not placing enough value in the future; as Chuck Marohn says, that’s why we smoke, or eat ice cream instead of exercising at the end of a hard day. It’s possible to do the opposite, however, and live too much for tomorrow, especially since, in fact, it is always today and none of us will ever exist in any tomorrow, even if we’re lucky enough to successfully divine what that tomorrow will be like.

Fittingly, that’s just what the Nights of Grief and Mystery performance left us with; an understanding that we will all soon cease to be whatever the state of the world, and our task is to create meaning in and from whatever remains.

Not Unsafe

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As I read the story of the Wisconsin Girl Scouts murdered by a pickup truck careening off the road and into a ditch where the girls were picking up trash I was startled by this quote:

Not an unsafe area.

Hard to imagine anywhere less safe if you are a human not clothed in an automobile. Because of tragedies we’ve experienced in this area I’ve looked up data on things like people hit by motor vehicles while getting the mail on a suburban or rural street, or on children run over by cars while playing in a driveway; anyplace cars move is a dangerous place.

One Walk, Two Walk, Straight Walk, Gay Walk

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In Springfield you can play a game called “count the sidewalks”, and the number you get from 0-2 tells you when that street was developed. Two sidewalks narrows it down to a nearly 300 year window from 1636 to the early 1900’s* one sidewalk is from that time into the early post war period, and you can guess the rest. I didn’t notice that until I was pretty far along in my amateur urbanist ways, but even back when my “aesthetic” regarding everything else; food, friends, sports teams, hygiene, television, movies, clothing, music was pretty terrible I could see that in Springfield, with few exceptions, the poor people lived in the nicest houses, and the relatively wealthy (and the whitest) lived in the homeliest homes.

*(Obviously NO sidewalks were built contemporaneously for most of that first 300 years)

There is a weird algorithm, I’m sure, that could explain how one or two beautiful and classic neighborhoods retained their middle class and how the rest became ghettos for African Americans and, as the decades wore on, metamorphosing ethnic groups of the “not yet White”. Proximity to park land was clearly a factor, distance from heavy industry another, but what other factors were at play, apart from the perceived encroachment of the “non-White” in commercial or public interactions, I can’t say. What I can say is that it means that even a relatively geographically small city like Springfield, which covers only 30 square miles, contains its own inner and outer ring of suburbs at least as you travel from west to east. 

I live on the property originally deeded to Rowland Stebbins in 1636, on what would have then been toward the extreme end of the tillable land** the Agawam were willing to allow the English settlers to farm on the eastern side of the Connecticut River:

Looking out my back windows to the north and west I can see the elongated undular grid which William Pynchon drew following the contours of the river itself. What exists for a few miles to the southwest and west is a series of streets radiating outward which were later connected by what the contours of the terrain would allow as closely as possible approximating a grid. 

That pattern is only deviated from after around 1950 when the cul de sac appears in all its glory in just a handful of locations:

Springfield had surprisingly robust mid century development. It outpaced that of neighboring cities until school integration meant that “your kids had to go to school with their kids”…but only if your kids lived in the same town as their kids! Up until then homes in the city had higher value than others because the city provided better services (and still does) from water and sewer to trash collection, libraries, easier commutes, walkable neighborhood schools, more and better parks and libraries…you get the idea. Somehow the specter of melanin infested classrooms made a bi-weekly trip to the dump and a septic tank less onerous options.

In any case, all of this divides Springfield in very different areas where very different people live. My wife, having grown up in and around Westchester County was surprised at how diverse this community was; our non-family social life consists mostly of interactions with gay couples and artists, most of our neighbors are Black and Hispanic, the neighborhood restaurants are owned by Mexican, Pakistani, Puerto Rican, and old world Italian entrepreneurs. 

In the last few years LuLu’s Drama Studio involvement has introduced us to different elements in the region: home schoolers, suburbanites, and families from Springfield’s no sidewalk suburbs. For the first time in decades I’ve found myself among fellow Classical High School graduates and we’ve interacted with people who, put frankly, are more similar to the families in which we were raised than the ones by which we are surrounded.

 In one particularly memorable interaction my wife mentioned how most of the people we socialize with regularly are gay; and our new friends were shocked. They had no idea that Springfield had such a significant gay community. As I contemplated their response I realized that our new friends were from “no sidewalk” Springfield and nearly all of our gay friends were from “two sidewalk” Springfield with one of the few outliers being a couple living in the “one sidewalk” zone. They’ve taken a traditional Levittown house and turned it into this:

As the Long Emergency plays out in the region I wonder if the current, sometimes typologically ambiguous, town borders will have any meaning given how different the populations can be within each community or if typologically similar places, like the more urban portions of the somewhat contiguous areas of Springfield, West Springfield, Chicopee, Holyoke, Westfield, and even Northampton and South Hadley, will form confederations, as the “no sidewalk” spaces will identify similar interests and concerns. 

As always, my interests sit comfortably within the most urbanized areas in the region and I’m reminded that two lines of a fairly simple t shaped transit system could connect Westfield-West Springfield-Springfield from west to east, and Springfield-Chicopee-Holyoke-Northampton from south to north. Even in an energy starved post peak fossil fuel future I could envision a region where people could experience a high level of mobility at a reasonable price. People living outside those centers might find that their world has greatly diminished in size as far as the variety of places they are able to experience on a daily basis are concerned. The good news is that homes in most of those centers and along most of the lines of connection are among the most reasonable in a reasonably priced region; any takers?

** I arrived at the conclusion that my property was, perhaps, at the far edge of the fields from some books I had previously read but this map makes clear that the current 80 Maple Street is located in what was the wood lot. I had thought that the “wet meadow” was on the flat plain above my home and the wood lot was on the promentory above the 30′ shelf of land on which my house now sits.