Bookends, Florence

A few months ago, I was roped into submitting to a video-taped interview conducted by Donna Kenny of Clio Associates in Florence as part of the city’s 350th anniversary celebration next year.

As a relative newcomer, I tried as best I could to summon up my own reflections of Northampton then and now.

We came to town in 1971, but as recently as that seems the changes in the community have been nothing less than extraordinary.

Northampton Schools Florence Grammar School

Kennedy Middle School (fomerly JFK Junior High School)

Leeds Elementary School

Northampton High School

Just in terms of affordability: we bought our house on North Main Street in Florence from Ann and Ted Foley for $18,500, and worried whether we had paid too much.

Northampton was a city of homeowners - tidy homes - many of them clustered around Florence and developed 20 years earlier off Ryan Road. It was a city of tight neighborhoods - held together by the glue of the neighborhood schools - Williams Street, Vernon Street, Feiker, South Street, Bridge Street, Ryan Road, Jackson Street, Florence Grammar, and Leeds School.

Florence was place where Ann could walk over to see principal Jack Rockett early in the summer to arrange for the teachers the boys would have for classes in the fall; Jean Curran was always demanded for the sixth grade.

Pro Brush was still a large employer in Florence and Multi-Color was still operating its large plant off North Maple Street. Jobs were plentiful at the VA Medical Center, and the State Hospital, while housing a reduced patient population, was still a major factor in the city economy.

Major Employers of the Past Pro Brush (now Arts and Industry building)

Veterans Administration Medical Center

Former Northampton State Hospital

In retrospect Northampton seemed to the newcomer an unremarkable, manageable, and altogether comfortable small town - middle class in almost all respects except for the large presence of Smith College. Yet, Northampton had no great pretensions about itself.

From the vantage point of a journalist, Northampton seemed to me quite conservative in its politics and its expectations as a community.

Many of its citizens had very close, entangling and overlapping relationships among politicians, lawyers and business people - most were second and third generation residents. There was a buddy system where favors were extended and accepted. Newcomers were conspicuous for their uniqueness, and it was not always easy for the newcomer to penetrate or negotiate the close-knit fabric of Northampton culture.

Nepotism was a well-accepted fact of life in such workplaces as city government, the school system, and the courts and the rest of the legal system.

Sheriff John Boyle and his wife and their 14 cats ran the Union Street jail as a kind of foster home for wayward children, not prisoners.

Much about the nuts and bolts of running the city seemed less than professional - things were done in a certain odd way because that’s how they were always done.

At that time, many of us looked to Amherst as a more sophisticated alternative to Northampton - it had an active student population and outspoken civilians. It had good shops, decent restaurants and it benefited from the mystique of being the hometown of Emily Dickinson, the Belle of Amherst.

Recent social and cultural changes in the city led to the recognition of ex-slave and one-time Florence resident Sojourner Truth

By contrast, Northampton’s downtown was drab, largely not doing well economically, and boring to boot, except for Gerald Newell’s quirky Vermont Store on Main Street.

The former McCallum’s department store, then operated as a branch of Forbes and Wallace of Springfield, was soon to close, leaving a huge void on Main Street and a blighting effect on its neighboring storefronts.

The choice of downtown restaurants was decidedly limited - Jack August on lower Main Street, Wiggins Tavern in the Hotel Northampton, the St. Regis in Pleasant Street, Carlo’s on State Street and Alexander’s in Florence.

Downtown Northampton Today Thornes Market

Michelson's Gallery

Silverscape Designs

Former Union St. Jail

Hotel Northampton

In fact, the economic travail of downtown was such a concern to civic and business leaders that they organized a bus trip to North Adams to learn more about how that city was trying to revive its downtown through the use of federal urban renewal funds. This program first entailed widespread demolition and clearance to create new space for new uses. I went along for the ride. Thirty years later North Adams still struggles to fill in the land cleared by renewal.

That was then ...

Today the face of Northampton, only 30 years later, is vastly changed, as has its opinion of itself. Northampton is about the most interesting community of its size in the Commonwealth, if not the Northeast, its many virtues written about and celebrated far and wide.

Its downtown is the envy of every small to medium size city in the country - a lively mix of good restaurants offering wide range of cuisines, small shops and art galleries, and all functioning in a sophisticated and civilized environment. This is how a city should work and how it should look, its admirers say.

It is now a magnet for newcomers who flood into town and spend time and more importantly money with abandon, enjoying the many pleasures of the city. Thorne’s Marketplace, the successor to McCallum’s’ is virtually a small city within the city. Bank buildings have been turned into art galleries and high-end jewelry emporiums. Former schoolhouses and the aged Union Street jail were condominiumized(if there is such a word) and home to well-heeled professionals.

Impressed with the quality of life and the amenities of Northampton, other newcomers are buying homes here - some prices topping the $600,000 mark - which is fueling a real estate boom and driving up all housing costs. New developments of $350,000 to $400,000 homes and others on the drawing board dwarf the scale of homes built 30 or 40 years ago and alter the physical face of residential Northampton.

As the traditional population ages and moves away in retirement or dies off, the newcomers are remaking Northampton into a community with a heavy emphasis on the arts and the creative life.

Manufacturing jobs continue to decline, but the upbeat retail sector and the ever burgeoning arts-driven economy - represented by such live music venues as the Iron Horse, Calvin Theater, Pearl Street and complemented by talented and productive painters and sculptors, actors and writers - have helped to offset the shrinking wage base. Then there are the legion of therapists and New Agers and alternative lifestyle businesses which along with the web designers, bookbinders, jewelry makers and weavers add another dimension to the economic mix.

Northampton Venues Calvin Theatre

Academy of Music

Smith College Museum of Art

In the process, Northampton politics has undergone a sea change from conservative Democratic principles to liberal, progressive goals.

The women’s movement, which emerged in the 1970s with the Valley Women’s Center office above Crafts Avenue, played a huge role in the changes that have occurred in Northampton, opening up the community to new ideas and different approaches and sensitivities.

Northampton has a reputation for being hospitable for lesbians and gays that has further altered the cultural and political landscape - the city has its second successive woman mayor, a lesbian, and a gay man is president of the City Council.

And while Northampton still looks mostly all-white, increasingly there are more people of color and newcomers from ethnic backgrounds very different from the Irish and Polish population that was so dominant here 30 years ago.

In some ways, what is most impressive about the pace and scope of the changing face of Northampton is the relative speed with which it took place.

The evolution of a downtown of empty storefronts to Mecca or a kind of urban theme park was incremental, but steady, once the process began.

Not all of these changes have been enthusiastically welcomed or embraced by many natives or long-time residents of the community, who rarely venture downtown.

Northampton City Hall

Accommodations have been made, however, and today’s Northampton is a community mostly free of the tensions and antagonisms that change often produces.

There is an acceptance now of what we were then and a recognition and tolerance of how the city and its population have changed in the last three decades.

Northampton has a long and storied history and during its 350 years it has gone through successive stages of renewal and reinvention.

Today’s Northampton is only the latest version - it is likely that in a similar video 50 years from now on its 400th anniversary the city will once more revert to being an unremarkable small town, but somehow I doubt it.