Vol. 5

TOP

Northampton’s Streetscape

Store Exhibit Highlights Downtown Uglies

By Edward Shanahan

As a work of social commentary, the window display at Faces on Main Street over the last month, which has now run its course and gets ready for the Halloween season, could not have been more biting or accurate.

Even though Steve Vogel at Faces declines to speak on the record about the display, it is apparent what the point was to those of us who stopped to take a close look at the artistic representation of Main Street drowning in carelessly tossed trash.

All manner of debris is being scattered from one end of Main Street to the other, with hardly anyone bothering to pick up after themselves. Eat it, drink it, smoke it, and then drop it, pitch it or chuck it on the sidewalk or curb. That seems to be the message associated with the accumulated litter that clogged the storefront-long space at Faces which carries the admonition to pick it up.

I’ve been a downtown observer for a very long time – going back to 1971 when we first moved to Northampton – and I can’t recall more unpleasantness, just plain ugliness, as I perambulate the downtown sidewalks.

Particularly uninviting is the area around the polished stainless steel kiosk in front of the former Heritage Bank building which has become a favored gathering spot for idle visitors to town and their dogs, cats, sleeping bags, coolers, blankets, food and drink, cigarettes and pot, and who knows what else

During the Notre Dame Design week activities recently, I chatted with Mary Kasper, who was involved some years ago as head of the Northampton Arts Council with the design and construction of the kiosk and surrounding benches.

Looking across Main Street to the assembled multitude hanging out at kiosk central, she just shook her head in seeming despair at the debris and litter was scattered on the surrounding sidewalks.

One can imagine that the folks preparing for opening their Urban Outfitters store in the long-abandoned bank building are more than a little worried about what is going on right in front of their upscale shop.

Bold red “No Trespassing” signs have already been tacked to trees warning against intruding on Urban Outfitters property. It looks like this could be merely the opening salvo in a troubled relationship between the retailer and the street people.

While the physical appearance of the downtown has never looked worse in my view – dirty streets and sidewalks, dead trees, graffiti and ultimately empty storefronts – there is hardly a consensus on how to address the tired, shabby feel of the downtown.

You can’t corral the street people and chase them out of town. The city lacks the resources for a downtown clean-up and fix-up, and most of the business people don’t even care enough to sweep the sidewalk in front of their stores. (Although maybe the slowly developing BID project—Business Development District— will help.)

So maybe it takes a major educational effort that reaches out to the whole community and to visitors as well, which is what the Faces exhibit was all about. The message was simple: We‘re wallowing in dirt and filth as is the country as a whole as a consequence of a throwaway, consume-and-dispose mentality.

And a principal victim is the historic, much admired and formerly praised Northampton’s Main Street, which now seems very much at risk. So Pick it Up, folks.

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Where’s The Diversity?

For These Boston Bland Sox,

Their Color Is Mainly White

By Edward Shanahan

More than a few hours this summer squandered in tracking the Red Sox on television yields up a few thoughts, that are more socio-economic than sports-based.

Any viewer of capacity crowd after capacity crowd – until a record of 450 plus games was set a few weeks ago - comes away with the sense that almost without exception Sox fans are apparently corporate, suburban and seemingly well off financially given the prices of tickets. The fans are also young, the women blonde and most apparent of all is that the crowds are very white.

In addition, except for those upwardly mobile singles, Sox fans have lots of cute children and despite the cost of tickets parents are easily able to spring for pricey seats for children as young as 2 and 3 and keep them at night games sometimes as late as midnight, even as the kids struggle to stay awake. Much of this night baseball for young families is a consequence of the lack of day games, even on weekends, driven by the demands of television and the club’s lust for increased revenue.

What also is striking about the televised view of the games is that in many ways the face of the audiences, at least in Boston’s Fenway Park, is mirrored by the increasingly white and Anglo face of the home team itself.

While Latino and black players dominate the lineups of most of the teams around the Major Leagues, Boston’s team seems to be going in just the opposite direction. If Coco Crisp does not get the call in centerfield and Alex Cora at shortstop, the Sox more often than not will field an all-white team.

This would be a team that looks very much like the Red Sox players of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when it was believed that Boston fans would much prefer to see white players perform on the hallowed Fenway turf. And at that time, there was some political pressure exerted on Sox ownership and management to introduce a little diversity into the composition of the team.

The fan pressure to diversify was not so much based on humanitarian or civil rights sentiments, but on the recognition that the team was doing poorly because it was not aggressive enough in signing better players because they might be a different color or speak a different language.

There was a hint that hiring policies of many of the Boston sports teams were traditionally dictated to some degree by the perceived racist views of local sports fans, maybe an unfair charge but one that persists even today.

Over time, more African-American and Latino players wore Boston uniforms, but still only in token numbers, and only if they were superstars, such as Luis Tiant, Jim Rice, Pedro Martinez, or Manny. Not many minority players stayed with the team for any length of time, but were replaced by other minority players. As the number of African American players in the Major Leagues has declined, the increase in the Latino players has exploded, but not to any measurable degree in Boston, except at shortstop where four or five different Latino players have been rotated through for only a season at a time.

Of course, despite the lack of player diversity, the Sox record of baseball success in the last few years has been impressive, unlike the barren years of the 1950s and 1960s and beyond. But, it should also be noted that it was the performances of Martinez, Ramirez and David Ortiz in recent years that had a huge impact on the overall team results.

As the playoffs begin, there is not much vitality to the bland, virtually all-white Red Sox team that will compete for the prize, but that, apparently, is the way the management of the team seems to like it, and maybe that satisfies the well-heeled suburbanites and corporate seat holders who fill up the park game after game, year after year. So why worry about diversity, because most of those who do can’t afford the price of a ticket anyway.

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Imagining Tomorrow's City

Notre Dame Design Students Envision Northampton's Future

By Edward Shanahan
Listening to the intelligent presentation of the possible future look of Northampton by the Notre Dame Urban Design team last week, I recalled recent bruising planning battles that set the stage for this new debate.

Remember the fight to Save Old Main on Hospital Hill? City officials win. Old Main comes down to pave the way for Village Hill.

Remember the Battle for West Street by neighborhood residents who wanted to scale back Smith College’s plans for the humongous $60 million engineering building at the expense of dozens of living units and community loyalties? Smith and city officials carry the day, not only are housing units lost to allow for the center’s construction, but the college ends with long-term campus-wide zoning concessions to boot.

Remember the effort by those worried about the impact of the proposed new Hilton Hotel adjacent to Pulaski Park in the Roundhouse lot and its unfeeling, uncaring size and design? City officials win another round as hotel plans, only slightly altered, move ahead.

Remember the subsequent and related redesign and reuse plan for Pulaski Park? This time the critics gathered the strength in numbers and blocked the park redesign, but only for the time being.

Yet, finally, in the wake of all of these defeats and setbacks, a movement developed, driven in large part by those who talk to each other via the Internet on the Paradise City Forum. They proposed bringing in some planners and designers from outside the city to look at Northampton and turn a professional eye toward its current challenges and its possible future opportunities. The mayor and the planning board staff don’t have all the answers, these critics conclude, after so many frustrating encounters.

But, city officials, with some few exceptions (Councilor Michael Bardsley and Bob Reckman come to mind), are cool to outside help, and offer no financial or moral support for the proposed planning project, which is spearheaded by Joel Russell, Gordon Thorne and others who join forces and actively brainstorm on-line and, we assume, in person.

Money is raised privately and arraignments are made to bring the youthful student planners and future architects from Notre Dame University and their professor, Philip Bess, to spend a week getting to know the city and to make some tentative judgments about what steps might be taken through planning, zoning and development.

At working sessions during the week and in public discussions, the students begin to shape their “interventions” as Prof. Bess described them.

Other than Aaron Helfand, an exceptional young man who grew up here, all of the students were unfamiliar with the city, its history, geography, demographics and, most importantly, its politics, but it was clear at the final session on Saturday that they are quick studies.

Breaking the city into discrete subjects of focus—Main Street and downtown, upper King Street, Pleasant Street, Florence and the Hospital Hill/Village Hill area development—the students appeared to quickly identify problems and needs and to begin to outline planning and design remedies and their potential benefits.

Much of their analysis had to do with moving beyond the idea of zoning as limiting uses to fixed areas and, instead, encouraging mixed uses that foster walkability and livability, downplaying the automobile and parking lots, seeing housing as compatible with retail activities and promoting density in order to curb sprawl and underutilization of space, especially along King Street.

Of course, much of their specific renderings of proposed changes could be seen as pie in the sky, unmindful of the forces of the market place and the ‘sanctity’ of private property, but the planners and designers pressed ahead. They gave the challenge their best shot and for those of us who were on hand for the final presentation, many where struck by the optimism and intelligence of the presentation.

It was so easy to become discouraged during those endless hearings over Smith College’s intentions, and the totally unremarkable design of the inevitable construction of the new downtown hotel. But students, by their youthful nature, can take the long view, as the Notre Dame team did in its look into Northampton’s urban future.

This animating optimism was apparent by the expressions of appreciation by members of the audience who spoke glowingly about the students’ contributions.

The early outlines of some long-term needs have come into focus as have various choices for addressing those needs, which might not always be those favored by the established planners and reigning city officials. They have charted the current direction of the city in major physical ways in recent months, not always successfully, but happily other ideas and directions have begun to emerge.

The planning genie is out of the previously tightly stoppered municipal bottle.

The students have gone back to South Bend, and will continue to work on the Northampton project. They’ll be back with their finished work in December. We await it with growing interest, even though we might not be around for the dawning of tomorrow’s Northampton.

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Boxed In

An Invitation from the Postal Service?

By Edward Shanahan

One of the reasons it’s tempting to write about the passing scene is that so much of everyday life comes under the heading of “I don’t believe it.”

For example, within the last month of I have received no less than two invitations from the U.S. Postal Service to apply for a Post Office box, even though we have had a box since 1990. That’s hard to believe.

Well, actually it’s not an invitation, because what the Post Office wants is updated personal information to verify where I live physically on a permanent basis. To satisfy the Post Office of my true status, I need to submit two forms of identification: a valid driver’s license, or vehicle insurance policy, a passport or a copy of current lease or mortgage, a voter registration card or a military, university or government identification card.

What about a Social Security card, the principal means of personal identification that is accepted and valid throughout the country the best form of identify verification” No good, at least for the Post Office. That, too, is unbelievable. Further, the identification offered must be current. Sternly, the Post Office warns: “It must contain sufficient information to confirm that the applicant is who he or she claims to be and must be traceable to the bearer.”

Wow, this sounds like serious stuff when all we are talking about is a mail box. I’m not applying for the position at the CIA or FBI or to be named ambassador to Venezuela.

And what if I don’t yield up this information? Well, maybe the Postal Service will take away my current PO box, as if it is a prized possession or rare status symbol.

In fact, there is something a little odd about paying $59 a year for a Post Office box so I can drive or walk to the post office and deliver my mail to myself. I’m saving the Post Office time and money, not to mention gasoline, by doing their work, yet paying it for the privilege.

So after discussing these several points with Annie and Donna at the Florence substation, I got in touch with Lauryn B. Levesque, the postmaster. She is based in the Easthampton branch from which she manages the Florence office, an anomalous situation, it would seem, when we have a full-fledged Post Office right in downtown Northampton. This, too, has always seemed a little unbelievable.

According to Levesque, the heightened security measures for the Post Office are a consequence of the renewed concern in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and rules embedded in legislation known as the Patriot Act.

The Florence post office should have been updating personal information about box holders on a regular basis, according to Levesque. “It was a huge loophole,” she said. It was only when an audit was done in recent months, that it was determined the Florence office had been lax in its procedures. “They should have been doing that every year, but we won’t get into that.”

In the course of our conversation, Levesque, who has been the postmaster for almost three years, implied that there had been other deficiencies at the Florence office, which she has tried to address. Among those were the need to get the mail delivered by truck to the Florence from Springfield by way of Easthampton sooner each day. She has also taken steps to extend hours daily and on weekends so that box holders can gain access to the post office lobby and to their mail boxes.

She has also authorized the installation of parcel lockers in the lobby so customers don’t have to wait in line at the counter to retrieve packages too large for their boxes. Although long periods of waiting in line is still a major feature of the Florence postal experience.

The postmaster acknowledged that she had heard from others who were surprised by their need to apply or rather reapply for their mail boxes.

Yet, she defused me fairly easily by her willingness to listen and her apparent recognition that the Postal Service sometimes behaves in confusing, even unbelievable, ways.

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Beware of the marketers!

Florence Savings Bank ‘Rewards’

Actually Require Very Big Outlay

By Edward Shanahan

The Florence Savings Bank ad in the Gazette the other day caught my eye for a couple of reasons – the lithe and self-satisfied woman with a text bubble telling us how much interest she earned on her Rewards Checking account seemed pretty hip.

I mean she earned $287.26 in interest last month on her account. How hip is that? And to look so attractive and seem so perky at the same time.

Dopey me. When I examined my FSB statement the other day I had bagged all of $.13 in interest on my checking account. That would be 13 cents compared to almost $300 for the young woman in the ad.

That’s not fair, I said to myself, even though I am not nearly as comely as the women in the ad. And I opened this particular joint account some 18 years ago, and have been doing business with the Florence bank since 1971 when we first came to town. So we are pretty old fashioned in that sense.

I called the bank’s customer service department, or call center as it is known, and talked to one Angela Ieng, who was pleasant and, best of all, informative.

She explained that there are special features associated with the Rewards Checking account, which provides the higher interest rate. Right now the interest rate is 4.07 percent, but started out at 6 percent when the new service was initiated.

She rattled off the various requirements – you must make at least two electronic deposits a month in the account, use your debit card for at least 12 purchases a month, even if they are only for a cup of coffee or postage stamps, and receive your bank statements on line.

My old-time, white bread account, and now obviously unloved by the bank, pays an interest rate of .05 percent or one-half percent, even though, according to Angela, it is called an interest checking account.

Thanks Mr. Heaps and you boasting in your expensive newspaper ads about the explosive growth of the bank. “A few months ago, our bank quietly crossed a major milestone,” he wrote in the ad, “one billion dollars in total assets” compared to the $826.75 at the end of the first day of business in 1873. With a billion dollars in assets and for the use of my money, you pay me 13 cents a month. I’m humiliated.

Still, as I talked to Angela, I wanted a little more information. Specifically, how much money would the bright-looking professional woman in the ad need to have on deposit at the end of the month to earn $287.26 in interest?

As I am not very good at math, she did some calculations and came up with an average figure of about $97,000. I was surprised the customer in the ad had that large a checking account. Most people are up to their eyeballs in credit card debt these days, unable to keep up with principal payments, not to mention mounting interest obligations. This savvy woman had managed to wind up the month with $97,000 in her checking account.

Good for her, if she did, but it did not seem plausible to me. I shared that thought with Angela, who said she’d pass it along to the bank’s marketing department.

I ended my last monthly account cycle with a balance of $1,746, after startng with $4,791 and earned 13 cents. If I had a Rewards account, I would have earned $5.93 in interest, according to Angela’s figures.

Still the $97,000 figure bothered me so I later did my own calculations of 4 percent annual interest, divided by 12 months and got an average balance closer to $86.000 for the woman, who obviously is fictitious, in the ad, still a hefty amount to carry in a checking account.

Despite the warm and fuzzy, community-first image that the Florence Savings Bank projects in all its advertising, I’m thinking the Rewards Account ad is deliberately misleading the typical customer. The average checking account customer is not going to do the math to figure out how huge an account balance you would need in order to earn anything remotely close to $287.26 in monthly interest.

Furthermore, as I talked more to Angela, I found that on most scores I met the requirements of the Rewards Account (without getting the reward). We have funds deposited electronically each month into our account, I get a statement on line, and we use our debit card selectively at the local supermarkets. But I find it easier to keep track of spending when I mainly rely on cash, rather than plastic/electronic banking for small, discretionary purchases.

I just can’t commit to using my debit card at least 12 times a month, and thus I’ll have to make do the old fashioned way which might, in the long run, have its own rewards.

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EDITOR'S NOTE:

Go to our archives to read recent stories about a weekend of celebration, politics and opera, the victim of a housing squeeze, the decoupling of news and paper, and the Northampton CPA's debut disbursements.

Or, you may read all of our previous commentary—a rumination on the Pleasant Street Theater vs. the Academy of Music, an update on Forbes Library privacy issues and other notes and comments from the downstreet.net editor—in the archives.

downstreet.net archives

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