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Syracuse, Crunched

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Read this:


Did you catch it? Read the excerpts of this one now:


There you go. You see? The Quality of Life ranking is for the METRO area, not just the city. People in Syracuse might miss that, despite the brief nod to “metro area” in the story, and walk away feeling good about their municipality. No such fears in Springfield: the headline makes clear the study refers to the entire “Pioneer Valley” and, well, the focus of the entire piece appears to be making sure that no one accidentally believes this has anything to do with Springfield the city.

On the other hand, a quality of life survey which uses “averages” in the Springfield metro will be heavily impacted by the  quality of life in the city of Springfield: quality of “life” generally being divided by the denominator of “lives” of which Springfield is one quarter or more. Educational attainment is measured, and more children go to public school in Springfield than there are people in Northampton. As far as weighting goes, more than twice as many lives are lived in Springfield than in the entirety  of Franklin County. Access to health care? Imagine if Springfield’s hospitals and medical offices were removed from the study.

I’d say this survey actually does say something about life in Springfield, so to the rest of the residents of the Valley I say “you’re welcome” on behalf of the residents of the city. Glad we helped make you look so good.

How Deep Does the Stupid Go?

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As I think about it this could be the blogpost version of the movie “Inception”, but if you enjoy urban design and have a fondness for anachronism it could be worth delving through the layers.

Worcester and Springfield (pronounced “Spring-Field”) are similar cities facing similar problems but all in all Worcester is ahead of Springfield. Worcester never fell as far as Springfield during the bad years, and it has taken advantage of the most recent movement toward urban Renaissance more quickly and more successfully. I think I’d like to explore that in depth in a separate post delving into how the two municipalities got where they are, why, and what their assets and liabilities are moving forward; it might be fun to get some input afterwards from the citizens of Worcester who read Rational Urbanism to get their perspective.

With that relationship between Springfield and Worcester in mind let us continue: Yesterday I was about to head down to Bueno y Sano’s Friday “burrito bar”; Worcester probably has a handful of local burrito places with the menu written out in chalk, clever burrito names, craft brews on tap, all that stuff; we just got one place to agree to opening under a tent for two hours a week at least during the summer! In any case, before leaving I glanced at my phone and, checking Masslive I read the headline of an editorial from The Republican, Springfield’s paper of record:


I’m intrigued, but I assume that the title is a reference to the “slots in a box” casino that Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods are planning to build on the site of an old movie theater to siphon off visitors to MGM’s Springfield casino. I’m sure this does have MGM pretty ticked off, but it was never their revenues that interested me: the movie theaters, the retail, the street improvements, the entertainment, the ice skating, the market rate housing, those are the things that matter to me as a neighbor. But the editorial has nothing to do with that at all.

The editorial is about Worcester. It makes some of the same points that I would about competition between similar cities struggling with similar problems and how Worcester does have some advantages but that Springfield is making enormous headway right now and, if we keep moving forward and don’t rest on our laurels, we can continue to compete. I might have added a few more words about this not necessarily being a zero sum game, but that to should be put aside as we continue down this rabbit hole.

What was the motivation, the concept, the idea, the development which spurred the Editorial Board to write their Knute Rockne speech? Was it news of Worcester’s expanding innovation center, more expansion in the canal district, another local entrepreneur expanding his or her business, yet another market rate housing development coming to the downtown? Nope. I had seen something in banner headlines earlier in the day but couldn’t bring myself to read the article; I’m not a masochist. I can be a bit shallow when it comes to my jealousy; it takes me a while to accept when perceived rivals leap ahead of my community.

Be patient, we’re almost there.

Earlier in the day my wife had asked me about this same Worcester development…it’s called “Sky…something or other” and she had asked me if it was some sort of airwalk or something and I said (remember, I didn’t read the article): “No, it’s some big development, I think it’s a big retail/residential thing. No one is building airwalks anymore. That’s stupid.” But as I read the editorial I clicked on the link and it took me to this:


Yup. It’s an airwalk. An airwalk which, to their credit, the city is only moving forward with because they are being forced to do so because some moron, I assume, promised the developer of a new hotel, obviously another idiot, that the city would do it more than a decade ago. An airwalk. To quote William Whyte: 
 “They have not worked very well. When you take a street away from street level you take away what makes it work. Remove the intricate mixture of people, the pedestrian bustle, the shops, and the traffic, and what you are left with is a corridor. It can be…very bleak…”
This is what the intersection looks like now:


Are these perfectly crafted pedestrian corridors? No, they are not. But way short of $10,000,000 the city could find a way to improve these crossings for pedestrians all the while NOT reverting to the oldestest or worstestest of 60’s and 70’s era gimmicks for revitalizing a downtown.

Here at home we have are own problems. Our local deep thinkers, with all the great things happening in Worcester, find out about the stupidest thing Worcester has done in a generation, and instead of giving us an inspirational exclamation akin to: “They’re  digging in the wrong place!” 


They tell us to keep our heads up because, in spite of this genius move, we can still get to the Well of Souls before our competition! It’s like your best friend sees the chief rival for your promotion shooting heroin in the bathroom and tells you that you still might have a shot at landing the position if you just nail the interview. 

I can’t believe that Worcester only argued that they shouldn’t be made to build the pedestrian bridge because they don’t have the money; they should have gone with the “Your Honor, I know my predecessor said I’d hit myself in the face with a hammer, but…” defense.

There is one last, divinely inspired exclamation point on this whole thing. Somewhere, at the Republican, at Masslive, someone chose a photograph to symbolize Springfield’s readiness to compete in this, the dawning era of the new city! And what photo did they choose? Is it the new Innovation Center? The Maker Space? Silverbrick Lofts? The Park Street Lofts? Some part of the new MGM complex? I know, the newly re-opened Union Station? Well, sort of. They chose this picture:

Yes. It’s a parking garage. Parking. The key to any urban resurgence! Build for the car, prioritize the car, make room for the car: People love it when you do that! I mean, weren’t the 60’s great for cities? What could go wrong?

Worth Defending

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The MGM resort casino was the focus of a news feature on Connecticut Public Radio last week. As one would expect from a CPB production it was generally fair, thoughtful, and well produced; it also took very few risks and generally trod the pathways one would expect. 

There were two glaringly contradictory “fear pairs”, each brought up multiple times but without ever acknowledging their mutual exclusivity. My favorite goes back to the original anti-casino campaign in the city and it goes like this: NO ONE is going to come to a resort casino in downtown Springfield…and the traffic is going to be horrific! Coming in a close second to that is: “All the jobs created by the casino are going to be crap…and Connecticut is going to fight tooth and nail to keep those crappy jobs in Connecticut where they belong!”

On a much more important note, especially with the release of Richard Florida’s new book which he says takes an honest look at some of the flaws in his original “creative class” hypothesis, there was the introduction to the piece which showed some marked incredulity at the idea of anyone voluntarily attempting to enjoy themselves in Springfield. Florida’s work tends to be data driven, but I hope he casts an eye on the culture we’ve created which doesn’t allow for love of place unless that place is at some cultural extreme. 

Rather than try to detail how that works in this essay I’d rather take you on a thought experiment. Be patient, this is going to take a few bullet points, but it is precisely that fact which makes the point.

Imagine a friend tells you about a little neighborhood in New York City, or maybe Boston or San Francisco:
It has an art museum with works by Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Gilbert Stuart, Daniel Chester French in its American collection and Tiepolo, Titian, Picasso, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Gauguin, and more in its European collection with a smattering of O’Keefe and Calder to boot. 

Across a little plaza there’s a classic little Victorian museum with a huge collection of armor and weapons from Asia along with a huge room filled with American landscapes and other pieces from the XIX century.

Nearby there’s a brand new children’s museum dedicated to the work of Dr Seuss and an interactive sculpture garden inspired by his work in the aforementioned plaza. Before you wander off check out the quirky little science museum and the statue by Augustus St Gaudens just outside the park.

On the other side of this cluster of museums is an industrial history museum with a handful of classic cars, including some of the oldest American cars ever produced and a huge collection of classic motorcycles.

On the way up to the nearby National Park there’s a brand new starchitectural wonder designed by Moshe Safde, and inside the park there’s a museum with an enormous collection of firearms. The park provides a beautiful view of the area below.
If you head the other direction from the plaza where the museums are clustered there’s an amazing historic district with a church designed by H.H. Richardson and some really impressively restored French Second Empire row houses. 

Walk a block from there and there’s a Main Street with some cool buildings and every thing from grab and go food to some really nice sit down restaurants: There’s German, Indian, Cajun, Italian, Barbecue, Lebanese, Puerto Rican, and Chinese to name a few. If you go north there’s a newly refurbished train station from the golden age of the American railroad, if you go south there’s another Richardson building in the region’s oldest park.

The church in that park is neoclassical, the governmental complex is among the finest City Beautiful monuments in the United States (as is the library you passed on the way to the National Park). 

If you look north you’ll see two hotels, in case you want to stay the night, but walking south you’ll start walking past the new MGM complex: movie theaters, retail shops, a wiz bang bowling alley, a food court, some restaurants on the Main Street, an open air plaza for entertainment and a spot for farmer’s markets and craft fairs in nice weather, and ice skating in the winter. They’ll be taking over management of the performance venues I forgot to mention. There are symphony and theatrical productions during the season as well as AHL hockey, MGM promises to bring pop music concerts as well as events like cirque de soleil.


Once you get beyond MGM there’s a little Italian neighborhood with multiple delis, cafes, restaurants, and even a little florist shop and a bakery. That’s where I spend most of my time.

Yes, obviously this is my neighborhood, and I don’t mean to imply for a second that it’s nothing but sweetness and light here but I want to highlight how ridiculous it is that a news outlet would show any incredulity regarding the potential viability of the place as a tourist destination. The only explanation is that even an enterprise like public radio which prides itself on broad based objectivity (except regarding America’s right to bomb…but that’s for a different blog) is infested with the American invective for small (American) cities.

There has always been a cultural pull toward the biggest cities and the greatest capitals of culture of course, that I understand, but even George Bailey had people try to argue him out of leaving Bedford Falls, today it seems everyone, even family, would not only be telling him to leave but would be packing up to leave with him. With so many of our communities having been hollowed out to the point that a young man’s dying thought of his hometown might be “the curb cut between the Chuck E. Cheese and the Wal-Mart” it makes sense that everyone would yearn to be someplace authentic, but then why do so many of our most genuine places receive more opprobrium than affection?

For me the answer rests somewhere in the culture which can only see black and white: There is one champion and all the rest must be losers. It’s an almost Manichaean worldview where small cities are somehow both the opposite of nature and the opposite of real cities. In this area people claim Boston (somehow) as a relevant cultural marker, but skip on any allegiance to the closer municipalities which in fact provide the economic base on which they exist. In Spain people take pride in their community of origin no matter how humble; to not is like hating your own mother or father. In the United States to love your hometown and to stay there is only indicative of a lack of ambition; you must leave the tribe and your family to show independence.

I’ve always had the opposite view: Any idiot can move to trendy place. The iconoclast sees the uniqueness of the place where he or she is and revels in it. My fellow Massachusetts natives Emerson and Thoreau each expressed this same idea if in somewhat different ways. I have been to 3 continents, 10 nations, 46 states, and countless cities. I’ve lived in Europe and the Mountain West as well as Massachusetts, I’ve travelled with students a dozen times and seen hundreds of historic places; my hometown has no need to be embarrassed by what it has to offer, it has a significance, a value, an attraction all its own as do so many cities its size, and treating with disdain the idea that people might want to experience it for the sake of enjoyment, enrichment, and even enlightenment from time to time is ridiculous.

Micronutrient Pornography

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The unusually heavy sudden mid-March snowfall forced me to change my walking patterns around the neighborhood this week and reminded me of one thing: I live in an astonishingly beautiful place. The buildings, constructed of natural materials at a time when construction and decoration still viewed coherence and integrity as a primary aim, created a cityscape and the snow covered up the shortcomings in landscaping and maintenance (not to mention the trash) and the combination reminded me of what is so special about this place.


My wife is fond of saying that so much of what is discussed and debated comes down to aesthetics. As innate and personal as our individual tastes may seem, they are all molded and mediated by the society in which we live and the experiences that we have. Growing up in Springfield I happened to notice that many of the most beautiful homes were in some of the poorest neighborhoods, and that nearly all of the homeliest homes were in the wealthiest. Whether it was because I recognized the beauty before I understood poverty or because the delineation was particularly clear along the pathways of my daily comings and goings I will never know, but for as long as I can remember my appreciation of what I would now call urbanism and architecture was disconnected from the qualities and conditions more closely tied to wealth.


In Andalusia I had a hard time understanding why the Americans with whom I worked, nearly all of whom were from the suburbs of the West and Southwest of the United States, were filled with such harsh judgements regarding places which I thought were beautiful. I remember the excitement in the crowd when a car was available to drive us to Hipercor, a sort of Spanish version of a Walmart in a Spanish version of suburban sprawl; I hated it. It seemed so antiseptic and banal and required such a tedious journey while the city in which we could walk around every day and fulfill our needs as we went about our proselytizing was gracious and solid, and conveyed unfathomable depth.

I remember standing in a small park on the grand central artery of Jaén and my compañero of the moment expressing his sadness at the lack of grandeur…in the cars going by! They were all small by American standards, and the closest thing to a pickup truck was a sort of bloated tricycle thingy which could turn on a dime but looked to be made of corrugated aluminum. 

It strikes me that auto centered post war development is the pornography of human settlement. Outwardly it facilitates gratification but doesn’t demand enough to provide a complete experience. It does to society and community what food supplements do to nutrients; it isolates the elements which are more easily understood to be necessary for function, but fails in every way to understand just how other elements, perhaps not as easily identified or understood, enhance, promote, mediate, or control the effects of all the others. As with both industrial food and erotica, the experience of living in the car centered environment provides for the most basic outward needs, but fails to satisfy at a deeper level.
Just as with food and sex, however, if all someone has ever known is the artificial and the inorganic, then there is no way to know that the experience is incomplete, and even upon being given an opportunity for a more fulfilling experience the uninitiated may balk at the heavier burdens that accrue to more complete realities. Thus having to “find” a parking space and having to walk along sidewalks and across streets to arrive at a place where the menu is unique and the logistics are unfamiliar is orders of magnitude more frustrating than pulling into the McDonalds and ordering a Big Mac, but it also holds out the promise of a much higher level of satisfaction and of human connection. 

In my conversations with colleagues or even students at my suburban school any mention to the beauty of Springfield is assumed to be tongue in cheek. I have to become exceedingly earnest in order to convince people that I am being serious when I say things complimentary to the aesthetic value of the city; which is not to say that doing so alters the hearer’s perspective on the city. To them it is an ugly and sordid place to such an extreme that they no more entertain the notion of changing their views thereon than they would do so in connection to feces or mucus.

There are things we never really see for the first time because we have been disciplined as to how to see them before we mastered the art of seeing; the Mona Lisa comes to mind, or the Statue of Liberty, or the Eiffel Tower. In America many of our cities are in this category but the disciple is taught to fear or disdain them. In a very real way the markers of poverty are the elements which ring the Pavlovian bell to categorize a place as ugly and only as those things recede will Americans accept cities as potentially beautiful, and even then for most it will be the markers of wealth and not the deeper grammars and syntaxes of traditional urban design that will stimulate their appreciation.

A Little Swagger(t)

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  I picked up on some interesting, and previously acknowledged, contradictions in my work this week. For some my piece on Ian Rasmussen was too personal, and I accept the criticism. I would not deny for a second that there was at least a touch of passive aggression in what I wrote, but at the core of the essay was an honest query: if devout urbanists won’t colonize your city, who will? 

As the Strong Towns dialog continued though, I was directed to an essay by Gracen Johnson about putting down roots. I not only commented, I linked to an essay I wrote in 2012 about how I feel about the issue of transience versus permanence. It’s how I feel. I should have also linked to a recent kunstlercast where the guest expressed a very similar sentiment.  

What I remember from the writing of the 2012 essay, and what jumped out at me again, was how my own personal feelings of place so contradicted my objective relative to my hometown. From the first moment I left Springfield I knew I wanted to come back. I hated the mountain west, but Europe was a dreamscape to me…and still I wanted nothing more than to return to my home and experience what I could of its remaining residual European style urbanity. To preserve it, and bring to it a renaissance, I wanted, I still want, thousands of people to abandon their “places” and come here. I don’t apologize for it. This is how I feel about my place and my life. Springfielders who feel the same way, all 12 of them, are still here. 

Yes, I seek you, place traitors, to come and see the wonders of this brave old city. 

Sederick and May

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(This is the piece I wrote for Strongtowns about concentrated poverty for their “housing week”)

  

Springfield, Massachusetts is a poor city and the neighborhood where I currently live is poorer still. My wife and I earn a solidly middle class income. I’d lived in a different part of the neighborhood for most of the last 20 years. When I moved into the townhouse at 80 Maple Street the first two people I met were Sederick and May.

Sederick wanted to know if I was the new owner of the place. I didn’t know who this unfamiliar black man was, asking me about a closing that had taken place not four hours earlier; so I lied and said that I wasn’t. A few days later he didn’t ask me, he told me that he knew I was the new owner. I couldn’t imagine how he knew or why he would care, but it seemed ominous. It turned out he lived in the basement of the townhouse two doors down and had an agreement with the lawyers whose offices had been at 80 Maple Street to clear the snow from their steps and from the 30 feet of sidewalk that was the responsibility of “Coolidge and Lauro”: $200 a season and free the following year if we didn’t get 5 shovel-able snowfalls! It was a good deal.

May saw my youngest daughter walk down the hill from Commerce High School on the Tuesday that this became our home. May was the spirited crossing guard at the corner of Maple and Union Streets. Any driver not showing due deference to her or the children got an earful of high-pitched black southern colloquialisms from the full 5 feet and 100 lbs. of her frame. I watched her watch my daughter, Mckenzie, cross the street, walk up the steps to the door, unlock the front door, and enter into her new home. May sought me out to tell me that Mckenzie would be safe under her watchful eye and that, if any creeps tried to follow her home, May would give ’em what for.

Both Sederick and May were dead within three years. Neither was yet 60 years of age. Both looked over 70 to me. Both died of cancers which were too far along for any hope of treatment by the time they were discovered. May’s second job was on the night cleaning crew at a local hospital. I never asked which one. I wondered if she died in a room she had often cleaned but never accessed as a patient until it was too late. 

It’s a hard thing for me. My presence in the neighborhood is something of a curiosity to the neighbors, but their presence is what makes my ridiculous lifestyle possible. Don’t worry, I’m not about to go off on a Marxist rant; it’s just that as a practical matter the $14,000 a year median household income of my neighbors, among other things, keeps my expenses low.

I remember when I was negotiating to buy the house one of the owners mistook me for a contractor and told me that “the guy who’s looking to buy this place has two daughters. He’s a lunatic, this place is the Wild, Wild West after dark.” When we sat down at the conference table to discuss terms it was, perhaps “priceless” is the wrong word, to see the look on his face when he recognized me; there goes another $10,000 off the asking price! I’m sure the numerous shopping carts and the tinkle of their returnable bottles and cans is part of what keeps housing demand from the middle class, and therefore my home value and property taxes, extremely low.
  

At school my daughters in prior decades were, and now my step-daughter is, offered free breakfast and lunch despite not qualifying for “free or reduced price lunch”; so few students aren’t eligible that it’s not worthwhile to maintain a system of collection. The millions of dollars the Commonwealth of Massachusetts throws at the school due to the underperformance of the impoverished school population puts my stepdaughter in a classroom with 15 other students and with a full time paraprofessional. Funds for a music program gave her a chance to perform in an important role in a school produced play, the only second grader to do so. My oldest earned a scholarship from Smith College as part of a Smith/Springfield partnership; I have a feeling she does NOT represent the intended demographic target of the school’s largesse, but she was the most qualified candidate.
Being poor is hard. Whether the poor living here think so or not, in many ways this is a great neighborhood in which to be poor. Whatever the general state of public transit, living where I do gives people a tremendous mobility that no other location in the region does. Just about every governmental body and institution has a branch or outlet here. Living in an urban center gives the poor access to many of the services which cater to their needs. Residing near the region’s hospitality industry (7 hotels now, 11 by 2018 with thousands of guest rooms), universities, and medical centers makes access to thousands of entry level jobs possible. 
But these are mostly not actually benefits of the concentration of poverty, they are the benefits of living in a city center. One problem of the concentration of poverty is how it normalizes dysfunction. I see the dysfunction every day. Some gentrification is what the neighborhood needs. Concerns that it could go so far as to displace tremendous numbers of people here are misguided in my view. That is not to say that it wouldn’t create new challenges for the people living here–far from it, of course it would. But in many cases what these people need is a buffer of “function” between themselves and their neighbor’s dysfunction. Someone needs to call the police. Someone needs to care enough to pick up the nips bottles, the used condoms, and the dog poop. Someone needs to be at the city council meeting, and the PTO meeting.
Looking back to my childhood, I can see that poverty was concentrated in a few neighborhoods in the city, but the city also contained large pockets of great wealth. With school desegregation, white flight created a vacuum which has (in a paradoxical turn of phrase) given concentrated poverty a chance to expand. With the middle class and the wealthy having fled to the suburbs and the exurbs, one result is that many of the rich not only do not ever see poverty, they also have a very warped sense of their own disproportionate wealth. That is to say: I know families with incomes a quarter of a million dollars a year that think that they are middle class.
The concentration of poverty does not just isolate the poor in their behaviors, attitudes, and dysfunctions, it does the same to the middle and upper classes. The recent epidemic of opioid overdose deaths in more suburban and rural parts of the country has led to a spate of articles acknowledging that “we can’t just incarcerate our way out of this problem.” Funny how that same realization never occurred to people when most of those being locked up over drug problems were from “that place, that class, and that race.” When “that place” is your place, and people of that class and that race are your neighbors, that realization might well come sooner.
A fact became clear to me a short time back, it is now almost something of a mantra: Were I to find a billion dollars, my dream would be to stay here. Were most of my neighbors to find a thousand, their dream would be to get out. It isn’t the place so much as it is the people around them. When you have resources you can be in this world, but not of it, so to speak. The poor do not have that luxury; the poor are always with them.

A Weekend Close to Home

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Tragedies like September 11th or Columbine act as Rorschach blots revealing people’s most deeply held beliefs or fears. In the wake of Columbine I remember thinking about what a nowhere place Littleton, Colorado seemed to be. Sure enough neither the Harris nor Klebold family had any roots there, and both families had ended up there for employment. I’m sure these lines from “The Geography of Nowhere” were rattling around deep in my subconscious:



I’ve made it a priority to be someplace and to give my children a someplace to live: a place with a past, a place with cultural roots and traditions. Finding out that we had much more time to spend together as a family this weekend than we had originally thought my wife and I put together a plan to take advantage of as much time as we could. 

On Friday night we went and saw the Falcons play at “The Nest”. Luna got a Zamboni Box of popcorn and a hot dog (Elizabeth lowered her normal standards for her daughter’s nutrition in order to let her have the full hockey night experience). So there we were with a bunch of funny, rowdy (drunk) young guys sitting behind us shouting things like “I’m yelling because I’m very confused” and apologizing for saying “kick his ass” while quickly rephrasing the verbal taunt to “kick his butt”. As the game ended one of them screamed “Our team may have lost, but we got to sit behind the ‘Friendly’s Facebook Fan of the Game’.Yeah!” All in all a fun night out.



As Saturday dawned we knew that in the evening we would be taking Luna to her first full fledged symphony concert. Last year she came with us to a viewing of the 1931 version of Frankenstein accompanied by the symphony, but she sat with her friends from DREAM Studios and so all in all it wasn’t as daunting. Tonight would be Beethoven and Bernstein. (On a side note, thank you 20th century for really making me appreciate the artistry and humanity of the 19th) We dressed up and walked down to Panjabi Tadka for a nice pre-symphony dinner. Luna had Chat Papri, Chicken Tikka, Mango Lassi, and Gulab Jamun for dessert. She ate up some of her mom’s Malai Kofta, and even tried the spicy sauce of my Lamb Boti Kebab Masala. Quite a change from the Zamboni Box. 





We arrived at the symphony with time to spare and no longer needing our umbrellas. Luna sat through “Beethoven’s 6th Symphony” and really did beam at times as she recognized tiny bits of the musical games being played. She began to fidget as the final movement came to a close and looked a little downcast. Later she said she was amused by me closing my eyes and appearing to fall asleep. We had told her that staying past intermission would be up to her since symphonic music can be quite demanding. She insisted on staying. At intermission she saw Ms Margot, the principal from the Community Music School preschool. That cheered Luna up immensely. She seemed to enjoy the raucous chaos of the “Age of Anxiety” even more than Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in the same way children are more wowed by Disneyworld than a real American Main Street.



One other task we have set ourselves is to help Luna prepare her cultural roots project. Luna is Italian on her father’s side and we happen to live on the edge of a traditional Italian neighborhood. We’ve been toying with a few ideas including walking down to Main Street and taking pictures of her in front of Milano’s, Mom and Rico’s, Frigo’s, Zonin’s, Langone’s, and La Fiorentina, or going to the Fine Arts Museum at the Quadrangle and taking a picture of her in front of her favorite Italian painting. She is leaning toward drawing an Italian flag. 

We’ll see. In the end there’s a lot of cultural inertia in this country pulling people towards forgetting their local roots and just being generic Americans. I care much more about being from Springfield than I do about being an American, right or wrong. Whether any of that trickles down to my offspring, or stepdaughter, only time will tell.

Go Falcons.

Teflon Towne

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The Amy Lord murder in South Boston is the quintessential “small town girl in the big city” horror story. It is what every suburban parent fears when their child takes up residence in an urban location. Though stranger murders make up only 2% of all murders of women, and someone is in more “stranger danger” in places without sidewalks and on high speed undivided roadways, for Amy, others like her, and their families, these tragedies are a grim reality.

I’ve reread some of the news reports on Amy’s murder and, more significantly for this essay, read the comments. Now Boston’s murder and violent crime rates hover in the same range as that of Springfield and I can’t remember the last time there was a stranger murder of this sort here. (I’m sure there have been cases like this, just none in recent memory and certainly not since I began this blog.) What I haven’t seen in any of the comments to any of the stories are generalized venomous attacks on Boston. There are criticisms of the media, of the blogosphere, of the police, of the assailant, but not one of the city.

When I was a teen, Boston was thought of as a cesspool. Read the chapter on Boston in Jim Kunstler’s book “The City in Mind” and you’ll get a sense of what I mean. Boston was a cesspool, New York was a cesspool, Washington D.C. was a cesspool. They were targets. Seemingly every story about Boston mentioned “The Combat Zone”, racial strife, unemployment, decay, decline, and violence. The Amy Lord story would have been the cherry on top of the Boston-hater sundae in 1979.

Fast forward to the present and my hometown of Springfield has actually had a run of upbeat news. An iconic restaurant slated to close has been revamped and will reopen as an updated version of itself, a Chinese railroad car manufacturer will locate its North American headquarters here and has been awarded the contract to assemble hundreds of subway cars for Boston’s Red Line and Green Line over the next 10 years, voters appear ready to allow an $850,000,000 MGM resort casino to move ahead in the heart of the city’s South End, and north-south commuter rail service is about to become a reality in a restored Union Station.

When I saw that the Springfield connected CNR Corporation had received the MBTA contract for subway cars I went to the Berkshire Eagle newspaper (The paper of record for Berkshire County) to read what the response was there, as several Berkshire locations were also in the running for foreign manufacturers to set up assembly plants. In what turned out to be merely a wire-service article on the decision to award the contract to CNR this line appeared:

“Springfield is western Massachusetts’ economic and cultural hub, but it also has among the highest unemployment rates in the state.”

In retrospect, this being a news wire piece, it makes sense that the reporter would contextualize the decision for readers who might not know the difference between Springfield, Mass., and Springfield, Vermont. What I was astounded to see was that, in the comments beneath the article someone had taken the time to write this:

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It’s not that I’m shocked by the uninformed, vituperative nature of the comment; that’s what trolls do. It’s that the “Hate-Springfield” meme has traversed the Berkshires. I wrote a polite, lengthy, though incomplete, response to the erroneous claim that Springfield is not the cultural hub of western Massachusetts(which I’ll link to here), but what interests me is the contrast between these two stories. In one, a small town girl moves to the city and is strangled, stabbed, and murdered, and not one critical word is uttered about South Boston. In another, a down-on-its-luck community gets some good news for a change, and comments on an article published at least one region removed respond venomously to a balanced and completely accurate statement made within the body of the news report.

My hope is that, just as Boston has gone from being a shit-hole to being a town whose “shit don’t stink”, Springfield can flip the switch, change the narrative, and start getting a fair shake in the media and in the opinion of the general public.

Beauty Is In the Eye of an Outsider

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I experienced a moment of dread at the Springfield Symphony’s Beatles tribute concert last night. Not when a random audience member threatened two John and Yoko look-a-likes with physical violence, that just added an interesting ironic twist to “A Day in the Life”. It was, rather, the two times the lead singer of Jeans ‘n Classics made reference to the beauty of the city in general, and the beauty of the concert’s location in particular. I have been to two comedy shows at the same Symphony Hall in the last year and on both occasions every reference to the city elicited howls of derision from the audience which, given my love for my hometown, made me uncomfortable, embarrassed, angry, sad…

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Fortunately, on this occasion Jean Meilleur’s assertions that the city and its concert hall were to be admired were met mostly with stunned silence. Very few places can match Springfield’s lack of pride of place, as I have written before, we simply do not feel as though we have leave to admire anything about ourselves. The constant condemnation of “ex-pats”, the media, and suburbanites, along with 70 years of movement from north to south, east to west, and city to suburb has left the city reeling. So much so, in fact, that the city’s own residents are blind to the city’s unique culture, history, and beauty.

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In October, New England can easily rival anyplace on Earth for natural beauty, and the Connecticut Valley represents perhaps the finest combination of that topography and foliage with architecture, and no city in the valley surpasses Springfield’s cityscapes. Given that, we’ll know when the city has really turned a corner, has really started on the comeback trail, when a visitor to the city, whether on stage or in private conversation, can make reference to the city’s natural and man-made allure and receive nothing but whole hearted confirmation from its residents.

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The Facts Don't Enter Into It

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No, the facts don’t enter into it.

Read these comments:

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These comments came as a result of a man from a neighboring community, not Springfield, shooting his estranged wife in that neighboring community and, in an apparent display of remorse, deciding to bring her to the region’s best emergency-trauma center which happens to be located in Springfield. Having done that he sat in his car outside the hospital and threatened to take his own life with the same gun he had used to wound his wife. Neither individual involved in the incident was from Springfield, the attack took place in another municipality, and Springfield’s only role was providing the medical facility which provided care for the victim, and the police who attempted to control and manage the aftermath outside the hospital.

What is particularly irksome is that this comes at a time where Springfield is actually experiencing a purple patch at least as far as murders are concerned. I am familiar with the relationship between probability and relatively small numbers in the compilation of statistics, so far be it from me to claim that the fact that the city has gone nearly two months into the new year without a murder is definitive proof of an overall decline in violence, but when the reverse is true and the city experiences a burst of violence resulting in multiple deaths in a short period of time, people desirous to show Springfield in the poorest possible light are full throated in their misguided analysis. At this moment Springfield is one of only two major cities in New England to have not had a single murder in 2014.

Worcester, Providence, New Haven, and Hartford have each had at least one murder in 2014, and Boston has had ten. If Springfield were to have three murders in the next week that would still leave Boston with a higher per capita rate than the City of Homes, and each of the other cities save Worcester is smaller in population. What amazes me is how untouchable Boston is, how invulnerable the sheen of that city is to its urban violence. If the current rate of homicides in Boston were equaled by Springfield it would be unprecedented, and would certainly be used by the city’s critics, once again, to pronounce the city’s final, long awaited demise.

If only Springfield’s schools, sports teams, universities, cultural institutions, and commercial enterprises were as Teflon coated as those of Beantown.