Kirby on the Loose

Maybe. Maybe Not.

2009-11-02T20:25:00.008-05:00

Yesterday there was an ad in the paper about an open house for a new condo, and we went and gave it a look-over. Someone had bought a three-decker Victorian close to downtown and converted it to condos. The one we saw was a one-bedroom, a little too small for us. We also got a sneak peek at a bigger two-bedroom unit still in the construction phase.

The one bedroom was nice. It had all the usual amenities, the granite counters, all the energy–rated appliances, the shiny freshly urethaned floors, the weatherized porch morphed into an attractive office, and probably a high-efficiency Buderus boiler in the cellar with forced hot water. Everything you would want. It’s not a big secret that Kirby and Stone have been thinking about downsizing and buying a condominium in the downtown area. All last year I looked around this old house saying to myself, geez, can I keep this old monolith together much longer?

Perfection is okay, but it leaves the old man with little to do besides gather dust, take his meds and work on his crossword puzzles. There’s nothing to fix. I remember, as if it was yesterday, a private duty case I had looking after this old doctor and his wife living in one of these new planned retirement communities. Everything was perfect up there too, tons of skylights, -all everything kitchens, and an unearthly quiet that was only broken every Friday when the guys and their big machines mowed the lawns and trimmed the bushes. And that couple, once life-sized, sat there like shrunken mummies, lost in the vastness, he just home from the hospital. And they had little to say to each other that wasn’t solicitous and polite when the help was around, but I sensed a certain glacial tension in the air. Let me out of here, I said to myself.

All that granite is nice, but what good is a showpiece when you’ve left behind all the people you know to live in it? It's just a reservation for old people instead of indians. The memories that I get from looking at our Formica counter that stepson David and I wedged into place nearly twenty years ago are nicer. And where is the place for the garden? Where do we hang up the laundry? Who are the people that live in this new shiny upscale street now? Will there be any gossip worth hearing?

So we have our doubts. More thoughts about this later.

Late-breaking News: Straw poll at Kevin’s predicts Bardsley by two votes

I was in Kevin’s haircutting shop the other morning and he asked me who was going to win the Mayoral contest. “Dunno,” I said, “I’m afraid she’s going to squeak back in yet one more time. “

“The Hell you say,” came the growl from one barber chair, “Never if I can help it.” said the other customer.

So there you are. A squeaker, friends. Bardsley by two votes. I remember I won my second contest for city councilor by four votes.

Mike Mulligan and his steam boiler

2009-10-25T09:02:00.012-04:00

Maybe Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel was a guy kind of book for kids. It was my favorite, and I think I still have a copy of it somewhere in a dusty corner of the attic. Mike and his perpetually smiling anthropomorphic steam shovel, lost in a cloud of dust, digging frantically away to finish the cellar hall for the new Pottersville town hall. Mulligan and I were alike, long on energy and a little short on organization. Mulligan and his old shovel won the bet and the contract and finished the job before sundown, but they found themselves stranded in the bottom of a very deep cellar hole with no way out. They had forgotten to dig a ramp. But the day is saved by a little kid who has a bright idea of leaving the steam shovel in place, making it the new boiler for the school, and giving Mike, who isn't getting any younger, the job as custodian. The final frame shows Mike in his rocking chair next to his trackless steam shovel, enjoying his twilight years.

This morning I went down to the cellar and admired our brand new bright red H.B. Smith boiler. It was warm and toasty in the cellar because all the pipes are temporarily without insulation, and if I had had a rocking chair handy I would have dragged it downstairs, got a cup of coffee and a crossword puzzle and whiled away a lazy Sunday morning, listening to its quiet roar. I admit it, we had neglected our steam boiler, and missed the last two yearly cleanings, and this year the repairman threw down his tools in disgust, and said no, it's got to go. Frozen and rusted bolts, a buckling clean-out door, and bondoed junctions. A machine all ready to gas us one night with a carbon monoxide leak.

And if the old boiler had to go, the asbestos had to go, and now everything is gone, and our bank account is a lot lighter. But the new boiler is a beaut, and they left behind the real prize, the rusty old boiler that I am busy dismantling. Now it is wrench work, later on it will be sledgehammer work. And when I get tired out and in need of a change in strategy, I can always sit down next to my new boiler whose builder's plate still says Westfield but is made in Ohio and have a cup of coffee and think about what I am doing.

This was the old boiler this morning first thing, after I stripped the housing and controls off it and started hitting it with a sledge hammer. Hit number five there was a dent, hit number six a piece of the wall dropped away. The wall is thin, and cast iron is brittle. More brittle than people, thank god. Now its in little pieces ready to go to Locust Street. Demolishing it ourselves saved us $200.

We need a mid-course correction on Village Hill

2009-10-07T20:35:00.001-04:00

A confession: In the days that Hospital Hill still had a hospital on it, and design aspects seemed as if they could be talked about at public hearings, I got over-involved fighting to save Old Main. Too many meetings. Ask my wife. But even in the thick of it, I wondered if I and other people were being obstructionist: was I involved just because Pat Goggins was the kingpin of the thing and getting about 98% of the commissions on property transfers? MassDevelopment is not a bunch of goons; maybe with Old Main gone and its so-called stigma gone and the old fountain safely crated up in some warehouse, people and industries would flood in, and the city would be better for it.

But it is now 2009, and Old Main is long gone, and many, many millions of state and federal dollars have been put into infrastructure up there. On December 10, 2002 MassDevelopment split up the bulk of the land north of Prince Street into lots for resale. 34 lots, constituting about 34 acres. There are streets up there, but most of them are empty of life. Phase two, which was the area adjacent to Paradise Pond and the Smith playing fields was left undivided. That was the area they were going to build big houses on big lots with views of Paradise Pond.

Six years has gone by, and the developer has had a chance to do his stuff untroubled by pesky community activists. The houses that we saw in all the many plans MassDevelopment has circulated over the years at CAC meetings are now here. Three of them.

Us community activists can relax, I think. Enough time has gone by so that the city can ask, well how is it going? Not very well. Village Hill looks like a classic taxpayer-funded boondoggle. The original architect that drew up the plans, Calthorpe, wanted to keep part of Old Main, and put a hotel up at the crest of the hill. Those plans all disappeared because the downtown business people didn't want anything up on the hill that would compete with downtown. The small shopping center that was to go into Prince Street also disappeared to accomodate Kollmorgen. People and industries are not flooding in.

I went down today to talk to the tax collector's office and to see Joan Sarafin at the Assessors office. Because MassDevelopment is a nonprofit, it doesn't pay taxes on land until it goes to private owners. So you got this huge swath of Northampton north of Prince Street, about 60-odd acres close to Smith College and downtown. Prime location. Because the private homes planned for this area aren't selling for one reason or another, no money is coming in. The townhouses, most of them subsidized are up and mostly occupied, but the 64 and 72 Musante Drive owned by the Village at Hospital Hill LLC haven't paid their taxes for this fiscal year. I count 36 lots north of Prince and only 4 of them are on the tax rolls, totalling about 6.5 acres.

So the new industry isn't coming in to beef up the tax rolls, the high end houses are not selling. We're keeping Kollmorgen, but there is no vital center to this new community. The overall strategy doesn't seem to be working. The development all along has been Pat Goggins's baby. When he is working on a small canvas, his developments work well, when he gets ambitious, there is disaster. His last big development was Cummington Farms, which bankrupted people and lost Heritage Bank millions. But Pines Edge worked, Ice Pond worked. He and his construction people at Wright builders made a bundle of money at Ice Pond. Wright and Goggins have a virtual monopoly on residential development on the hill and make big contributions to the Mayor's war chest every time she runs, but Hospital Hill is starting to look like a venture that eats development and construction money. 100% of nothing is nothing.

The initial residential activity on Village Hill proper were Cummunity Builders buildings, which were subsidized and half low income. Village Hill has worked a small wonder for low and moderate income renters. The private homes are right next door on truly tiny lots. I think the builder is trying to emulate the homes on Massasoit Street or other upscale Northampton streets. But Massasoit Street is not Olander Drive. Its closest neighbors are subsidized units. And with no stores in the plan, low income housing next door, the houses are not selling. And the truly tiny lots on Olander are nothing short of bizarre. If you're going to pay $700,000 for a house, you want some set-back, some side yard. Pat Goggins thought, like most realtors, that it was location, location location, stupid. Right next to Smith College and walking distance from downtown.

But a refurbished Old Main would have had real views. Take a look at that painting in the Smith Art museum done from the vantage point of the roof of Old Main. Ok, 51 Olander Drive has an ok view from upstairs, but not much else for its selling price of $637,855. It’s a modest 3 bedroom 2 ½ bath house on a truly tiny lot.

51 Olander is the model home in Morningside, the first installation of 11 what were slated to be market-rate homes for sale by Goggins Real Estate and Wright Builders. Right now there are three homes built, one has been sold to a private owner, and this one was sold to an LLC controlled by the realtor. They have been on the market since April of 2008. While there is frenetic activity next door in the complex of attached townhouses , it’s awfully quiet on Olander Drive where an expanse of very expensive dirt is awaiting the bulldozer. MassDevelopment has spent a lot of state money and its own money on infrastructure development, including razing more than a half million square feet of buildings, many of them historic, and building roads. A lot of their land is also under conservation restrictions. It is trying to recoup their investment. They sold Wright Builders the land under the first three homes, about six-tenths of an acre. Their land costs were about $420,000 an acre, if my math is right.

So now that the real estate market is cool, it's hard to imagine that these homes are going to move. The plan mixes market rate with supported housing, there's no corner market or 7-11 in the plans, and the homes are not custom built, it is a subdivision with a A-B-A-B look, and usually for this kind of money you get a big lawn and space to put in a swimming pool.

For more pictures of the area click here . At some point the Planning Board has to blow a whistle and ask what is going on. Ask MassDevelopment how this development is working out for the taxpayers of Northampton. Maybe in twenty years, the hill is going to fill up. But maybe another developer will have the land by then. And I will be dead and buried. Well, not buried. Maybe my wife can give the urn to Garson Fields and ask him to buzz the hill and dump the ashes out. Take that, MassDevelopment.

"2 and 2 makes 4, not 44

2009-09-24T11:05:00.006-04:00

"or 88," said Captain Patenaude of the Northampton Police to me this morning. Responding to rumors fed by a story in the Hampshire Gazette, I called him to ask if the second instance of graffiti they reported was outside the Mayor's campaign office at Old School Commons. He told me that the graffiti was on the glass wall outside the offices of Northampton Physical Associates, which does nothing more controversial than helping people work out. Lida is a major donor to the Higgins campaign, and wondered if the graffiti and the disappearance of her Higgins sign could be related. "Does it stop at annoying, or is there more to come?" she was quoted as saying.

In some people's minds, the Steve Susco incident at City Council, the graffiti and the missing lawn signs are seen as frightening signs of the fraying of civility in our community. And God knows there are good reasons for fears in this regard, particularly on the national scene. Is there some kind of link between skinheads (Bardsley being bald) and Bardsley's campaign? I would tend to doubt it. And Susco has never been an organization man. He was raising hell about city government when I was city councilor nearly twenty years ago. And it is my experience that every year we have elections, someone's political signs get pulled down. They are great targets of opportunity for fun-loving late night adventurers. So we should take a deep breath and calm down.

Bill Dwight's house vandalized

2009-09-22T11:31:00.005-04:00

In our neighborhood some time between sundown on Sunday, September 20 and yesterday, September 21, a person or persons unknown painted a yellow and red "88" on the front door of former city councilor Bill Dwight and Alida Lewis. According to Bill, the young policeman responded said, "Oh look. Someone painted your house number on your door." A close look at the brush strokes in the numerals reveal the intent of the vandal, however. Not "39" but "88". "88" is neo-Nazi code for Heil Hitler. "H" is the eighth letter of the alphabet and Neo-nazi songs and groups have 88 in their name, like Code 88, an Australian neo-Nazi group.

Its a bit unsettling, and both Bill and Alida are shook up. Bill, of course, both on WHMP and when he was on city council, was a forceful spokesman for gay rights and other controversial causes. Was this vandalism a warning?

An uphill slog

2009-09-13T12:39:00.005-04:00

Fighting the landfill expansion
is not going to be easy.

I was at Stop & Shop collecting signatures for the drive to put the question about the landfill on the ballot. It was a chilly morning, and drizzle was fogging up my glasses. Most people were friendly and receptive to signing onto this venture, but some were not. I remember this one man in particular rushing for the door that accused me of being “aggressive” when I never said a word to him. It’s just that I was there with a clipboard, and I was obviously going to try to slow him down by talking to him.

There are a lot of people who don’t want to think about the landfill and the questions that putting a new one into the Glendale Road area raises. They yearn to keep the good old days when the bags were a buck, and the city ran it quietly and efficiently, and the cash coming in helped support many departments. There’s a lot of festering anger against the neighbor who kept calling to complain about the landfill. Northampton has served for many years as a kind of surrogate mother. Pay us and we will take your trash. We shushed the neighbors when they complained about the trucks roaring by, day after day. Lurking behind the scenes are many big-time carters who make big money off our landfill. We haven’t heard from them yet, but we will.

On August 31, there was a column in the Times by Paul Krugman entitled “Missing Richard Nixon”. The column really wasn’t about missing Nixon, it was about missing an earlier time when lobbyists weren’t so entrenched in Washington, and rational talk about health care was possible. Ditto for our town and the landfill issue. City councilors are drafting their own question for the ballot. It purports to talk for the opposition, but doesn’t do a very good job. It proffers straw men with weak-kneed arguments. Now the planning department wants to do away with the need of a city to have a permit. You and I need one for all kinds of minor improvements, but the city makes the rules, and the rules seem to change as the needs of administrators dictate.

I have been involved in two local efforts that went down to defeat: putting two non-binding questions on the ballot about the future of Hospital Hill, and fighting the rezoning of the land around Smith College as an educational overlay district. The questions about the state hospital project went down to a 60/40 defeat after paid ads supported by Mass Development and principals in the redevelopment effort flooded the city, and the Gazette and the radio station editorialized against it. The Smith College expansion? The planning department pulled some shenanigans and petitions were invalidated, why I forget.

Powerful forces are working for this new landfill, and they really won’t show their hand until the weeks before the election, when the airwaves and the papers will be flooded with editorials and paid ads. The landfill benefits many entrenched interests. There are the firms that use the landfill, and the surrounding communities that depend on it. There is the DPW itself, whose director draws a significant part of his salary from the landfill.

It’s the site, I think, that continues to be the major problem. When they bought the land in 1988 this area of the city was relatively empty. The town has grown up around it. Back in the eighties there weren’t any fancy homes on Park Hill road, which was dirt for much of its length. It’s become, today, a monster of a non-conforming use on the king of flag lots encompassing hundreds of acres behind the back yards of many homes. Today’s entry is an alleyway between two modest ranch houses. First one landfill was here, then another, and now there will be another. They decided to expand here because it was next door, and it was for sale. Like the original dump, it will be built on a sand and gravel base. The entire burden will be on the technology working as designed. If you get a tear in the plastic liner or the clay layer that has been trucked in decays or cracks, the leachate and chemicals will be off traveling toward the water supply. 60 mil plastic can tear, and has torn in the past. Ten or fifteen minutes Googling this technology turned up warnings from specialists about the potentially very short effective life of our technologies compared to the long life of the bad stuff that we put in our landfills.

There are potential sites here in Northampton that would make a much better place to put a dump. Off Easthampton road, around Searles’ auto recycling yard, there is 18 feet of clay under the ground. Deep clay put there by Mother Nature, not a thin trucked-in layer, is the best defense against seepage. Their junkyard has been in operation a long time, and to my knowledge there never has been any problems with contamination.

The political strength and the deep pockets of this group dictates why it’s hard to look at this issue dispassionately. They know that the public can be manipulated, and because they can be manipulated, they will try. Lobbying works, public relations works, money works just splendidly to push the electorate and its representatives around. The Mayor won the last referendum issue by encouraging people to throw lots of money into it. MassDevelopment and other people ran big ads almost every day. This time the city has hired Stantec to do public education about the issue. Stantec will probably be first in line to do the engineering for the landfill. The group has put two influential members of the DPW on the city council, they have a joint DPW/City Council committee that is writing an alternative question to put on the ballot: they won’t have to come out on a cold rainy morning to get signatures for their measure. They hired attorney Mike Pill to intimidate councilors who represent the neighborhood. They have the Mayor and her machine, they will have the Gazette, who will probably editorialize fiercely for the landfill, and fight against the “red herring talk” about the aquifer. Money talks, and advertisers have a lot of power.

We need to educate people on this issue. Ultimately, it’s a moral question; it’s a public health question. It comes down to the immorality of Northampton opting for yesterday’s strategies, for the cheap and easy and risky, rather than adopt tougher long term answers to reduce our waste stream, restrict who uses the existing landfill in its final years, and tell the commercial carting people to go elsewhere. If the existing landfill just serves Northampton in its last years, it will last us long enough to come up with alternatives. The first thing we should do is to gradually raise the per price of bags up from a buck to some figure that has some realistic relationship to how much it costs the city to dispose of it.

“I married the landfill.”

2009-08-16T15:43:00.021-04:00

I first saw Bob Moriarity at the last City Council meeting, when a lot of us turned out for the public comment session to vent our views about the landfill. Sticking to three minutes when you are facing the Mayor and her gavel is not easy. I sensed that Bob, who has worked in the waste disposal business for many years and now lives near the landfill, was just starting to warm up when he had to shut down. He was still talking as he was headed for the door.

A couple days ago, I arranged to meet him at the Blue Bonnet for lunch. He told me that he and his wife, Nancy, live on Route 66 and that their back lot line adjoins the dump. Six years ago, when he married Nancy, who owned the house, he was also married to the dump as an issue. “But, we have the woods between us and the landfill, unlike the poor souls that live next to it.”

His wife wanted to sell the house and land when she retired this year and move to the Cape house that Bob owns, but fate stepped in. Nancy's house has been on the market for six months, but she's had no offers.

“I mean, usually you get the low-ballers,” Bob said. “The guys who aren’t really interested in buying your house but want to see how desperate you are by offering some outlandish amount. But no, not a nibble.”It seems that there is a chill on property transactions in the Glendale road area.

Bob looks cheerful in the photo here, but don’t try to shake his hand. He did something to his right arm, perhaps, at the job where he was de-leading a bridge beam. Bob has a fair amount of experience on the front lines of landfill management and nuclear reactor work. He’s one of the guys in coveralls and a respirator doing HazMat work. This fall, he plans to be working at Seabrook. He helped clean up a private landfill gone bad up in Wendell. Tons of highly toxic material from Boston’s Big Dig are buried there. It got so bad, he told me, that the Department of Environmental Protection took it over, and the owner left the country to escape liability and maybe, jail time. According to Bob, the ex-owner now has an Arab name, married an Arab woman, and lives in Bahrain. Later, the people who worked at the landfill had to wear respirators.

So, what did Bob say? He’s not critical of the people running our landfill. He said, though, that people run landfills, not robots, and with humans there is a learning curve. There have been screw-ups. Humans try to hide their mistakes. Mistakes have been made, and when your city government starts shredding documents, he wonders, what is going on. There will be three areas in our landfill, past, present and future. He says it’s the first landfill that is the real problem. It was a gravel pit before it was a landfill. He says that there is MEK there, and the city knows it and the DEP knows it. Methyl ethyl ketone was the universal cleaning solvent up until the 1970s. It is terrifically volatile and dangerous: It dissolves shoes, and does in your liver. When I was in the Navy we used it by the barrel to clean parts. So did machine shops, so did shops like Multi-Color Graphics, which was in downtown Florence. Without a solid clay underlayment, chemicals will migrate in a so-called plume. Bob has a hunch there is a plume headed toward Easthampton, and a well on his land would come up clean.

But no one knows what is going on, and with homes being bought up by the city, existing homes are not moving. He says the present landfill is well designed, and the DEP, to its credit, did a good job by testing the clay layer under the landfill. Clay is the real impermeable barrier, not the 60 mil polyethelene, which can be punctured.

He says private landfills are well regulated. There is a good strong institutional barrier between the state and the private guys. But between the DEP and a city running a regional landfill? He doubts that a private operator like Waste Management would have ever got a waiver to build a dump over the Barnes aquifer. What worries him is what will happen if the city goes ahead with its plan and screws up and the DEP takes over, like they did in Wendell. DEP dumps can take a lot of stuff like mercury-tainted waste that private dumps can’t.

After talking to him, and to people out at the recycling station where I was gathering signatures Saturday morning, I think the tragedy of this mess is that everyone has good intentions. The landfill has been a phenomenal cash cow for the city, but the times they are changing. People have lawyers and the Enterprise fund has to be shrinking. The DPW and City Hall is trying to keep costs down for the average person. But, they are not facing the fact that Northampton is changing, and the landfill is wearing out its welcome in the western part of the city. Its landfill is now in an area where expensive homes are being built. Its new neighbors are not the old working people, the Hampsters who put up with the smells and the noise. It is time to be conservative, and get out of the landfill business when the present area is full.

The Truck-Eating Bridge

2009-08-11T14:02:00.015-04:00

I remember back at the dawn of time, maybe 1993, driving into Boston for a conference being sponsored by the Massachusetts Municipal Association. Don’t ask me what it was all about. I was on the city council, and Mary Ford had just been elected Mayor. She was really excited at the changes she was going to make. Going under the truck-eating railroad bridge, she pointed up at the battered and twisted ironwork and said, as I remember, “If I become Mayor, there’ll never be another truck stuck under than damn bridge.”

“We’ll put up warning cables like they have on Storrow Drive.” Two hours later, when we got to Boston, we got onto Storrow Drive: a car-only parkway that parallels Charles River.

“There they are!” she pointed up at the overhead steelwork with the network of dangling cables that create a harmless racket if a U-Haul truck should forget and head for the tunnel under the Feidler bandstand and park.

And now, fifteen or sixteen years later, and trucks continue to get stuck under our railroad bridges. Mary Ford has come and gone, and we’ve had two or three terms of Mary Clare Higgins. Tired-out Canadian truckers don’t see the signs and blunder into danger: big mobile homes come to a jarring halt on North Street and a police officer has to go down and stop traffic and let them back up. Ask about the problem up at DPW and police department, and you will be assured that nothing can be done. Warning devices mean liability of some sort.

But what we have done is to make accidents very expensive to the truckers and their insurance firms. The fine is $500 for hitting the bridge, and Harold’s Towing, I’m sure, earns big bucks for every time a truck gets wedged under the underpass. Northampton and its bridge, Goshen and its Route 9 speed trap, traps for the unwary.

I thought of this in relation to the still-evolving mess over the landfill. Once upon a time good Mayors wanted to shake up this town, but they have had to learn to live with diminished expectations. This won’t work, that won’t work. Our mayor has become the weary defender of the old boy network at the Department of Public Works and the police department. Somewhere tonight a Quebecois trucker is short of sleep and has lost his way. Watch out.

When firemen have to watch buildings burn down: a second posting on the Meadowbrook fire

2009-07-28T10:27:00.013-04:00

The Stairway to Nowhere: Building 21 today

If you look at this Youtube video of the Meadowbrook fire on April 13th, one is struck by the strange narcolepsy affecting the fire fighters. CLICK HERE

Look at minute 1:15. They walk slowly, wearily. “They seemed like they were lost people,” said a maintenance man at the project. They stood in small groups and watched as building 21 burned in front of them.

Today the building is gone; only an empty foundation remains. 22 people were homeless and have since been rehoused. The fire happened at mid afternoon on a clear day. The automatic alarms in the building triggered a call in fire headquarters. Miguel Candelaria lived in a third floor apartment with his wife and 10-year daughter. He went downstairs, and saw that the fire was in a second floor apartment. The door was open. The fire he saw and told the Daily Hampshire Gazette about was the size of “a small campfire.” He thought the firemen would make short work of it.

For a second he hesitated. Could he or should he try to put it out himself? A fire extinguisher with an up-to-date tag was there on the wall of the corridor. He called 911, and shut the door.

Read the complete article here.

Mike Smith, fix my warning lights!

2009-06-21T08:08:00.009-04:00

According to the papers, Mike Smith was now managing an auto shop, earning about $250 a week and living up over the garage. An innocent juror or newspaper reader like me would probably think that this new career of his reflected credit on him. Bank executive starts life over again managing a garage. Puts past behind him, goes straight. Shows contrition for his sins, gets back to his working class roots. The story, however, was a cover story that his prosecutors bought into or developed. Mike Smith's big borrowers were running a witness protection program. Read part 6 of The Heritage Bank Story

No nap for the weary: The Override Vote

2009-06-07T18:23:00.005-04:00

I guess everyone is tired of the pictures of the beaver lodge, so here goes nothing. Being the old gaffer that I am, I can take an hour nap every now and then, well almost every afternoon, if the truth be known. This afternoon after I dared sudden death by cleaning the gutters, I went up to bed, finished my crossword puzzle, cranked up the kitchen timer I keep by the bed, and settled down, cleared my mind, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, I thought about Mary Clare Higgins and the override. And the more I thought about the override the angrier I got, and that was it for nap-time. I got up.

Tonight I am going out to the garage and fashion a very unelegant “NO” sign for my lawn. This is how I feel, and it's really too bad that a Mayor who rubs me the wrong way would make me vote against a very modest override that would keep teachers and other public servants working. But that’s how it is. I am terminally fed up with the corner office at 210 Main Street. I’m putting up the “NO” sign, but I could vote “yes” when I go in the booth on June 16. Kids shouldn’t sit in these huge classes that the “Yes” people say are coming. But I don’t trust our Mayor, and I don’t like the manipulative way that these cuts are being made. Wheels are turning, specific constituencies are being turned out. I’m not a happy camper.

It’s how the city does things around here. People aren’t respected. Things are bulldozed through. A city council who caves in to everything she wants. Pick an issue, and more often than not you will find committees weakened by mayoral appointees who go along, things done by fiat behind closed doors by a Mayor who is a master at getting her way, from destroying history on Hospital Hill to ignoring Meadowbrook once she’s saved it. The dump? Full speed ahead for a brick wall. When city councilors from the west threaten a “no” vote, bring in a lawyer to muzzle them. Drive us into the poor house with legal costs. Pay people off to go away when you have to. Ambulance? We’ve had a very effective private ambulance service staffed by very experienced people, and now, without any public hearings, we are replacing it with a city-run service staffed mainly by new hires. Tree preservation? A lot of good work went into the new package of tree measures, and now we have an ineffective committee that says yes to every barbarity. Conservation and wetlands? The now famous 10 foot rule. I could go on, but I won’t. But maybe I will. Next post on Kirbyontheloose: the case of the missing report on the fire department.

The Beavers are Back!

2009-04-23T11:33:00.005-04:00

The Dam

The Home

On my way over to Meadowbrook Apartments this morning, I was going down Barrett Street and I caught a glimpse of a major public works project. Defying past trapping operations, stay-away orders and city attempts to tunnel in and destroy their dams, the beavers have returned to the marsh and have built a truly impressive dam across Barrett Brook less than a hundred feet upstream from Barrett Street. Nearby is a large lodge five or six feet high. The dam has created a fairly extensive lake.
Radically mixed feelings, of course. If I lived in Coachlight Condominiums, I wouldn't love this development, but you gotta admire these hard-working wily guys doing all this without any tax payer dollars or property deeds, defying the Conservation Commission, Wayne Feiden and the Department of Public Works.

The Pond

Tuning Out

2009-03-15T21:17:00.001-04:00

Last night it was the prime part of prime time, and Lu was in the living room reading a book about the Bloomsbury clique and I was in the kitchen assembling the loading dock for the Furlow Freight and Transfer house. I am relearning the patience it takes to let the glue set before you do something else. It was Day Number Six since we pulled the plug on our $59.69 a month Comcast coverage. We're now on "Basic" coverage, which is really pretty basic. But we are saving money. Our cable is less than $6.00 a month, and the house is quiet, for a change. Hobby projects are getting dusted off, New Yorkers read in a timely fashion, and board games dug out of the attic. Old time fun, when people knitted, invited neighbors in for coffee and did things like that, is back.

And all these people have left the house that we do not miss. All the cable people. Chris Matthews and his non-stop harangues, obnoxious bloviators like Buchanan, that chirpy woman on House Hunters and her toxic cheerfulness as yet another young couple complain about smallish bathrooms and get into another house they won't be able to afford. No more irritable chefs, housewives of NYC, and no more Rachel Maddow, who has grown a little wearisome now that she has to smile so much. Good bye to you all, and good riddance.

Still, we're feeling a bit deprived, even though there's more and more to watch on the computer, 90 percent of it for free. The true test will come when we go a whole season without the Red Sox and Sundays nights without "Mad Men." For a long time we all thought more was better. More is less.

Looking for Danny Constance

2009-03-15T20:28:00.007-04:00

Beardsleys restaurant today

I called Danny Constance in 1999, but he didn’t want to talk to me. “Do you want to talk about the 80s, Danny?” I asked, and there was a long pause. He was thinking about it. “No,” he finally said in this gravelly voice, “I don’t think I do.” He was polite, but firm. I never met the man..

There were all kinds of tantalizing references in federal records to the man that ran Beardsleys, the French restaurant on Main Street that become the symbol of Northampton in the eighties. A FBI tape recording that disappeared. Subpoenas that never got served. And a great deal of Heritage commercial paper on his restaurant and other joint ventures. It was intriguing that the area’s leading bank was financing someone who was a kingpin in the Valley’s numbers racket, someone who had links to organized crime, someone who was eventually arrested for money laundering and sentenced to federal prison.Click here to read full story

Breaking Hearts

2009-02-21T20:57:00.000-05:00

It’s another snowy day in February, and once I had got over gloomily wondering why it was that bears could hibernate for three months or so and humans start to fall apart after a couple days in bed, I got to work. The first order of things, as usual,
is to go to the computer and smash the hearts and hopes of that throng of people who wrote me last night. Lively people, strangers with intriguing names and offers of help and companionship, people that might be old lovers or friends, or might not. This morning Buddy Lane offered us hope for all, Lenora Eldridge, who sounds as if she might be a jazz singer, wants to open minds to the world, Martin Haywood (who probably lives in West Hollywood and drives an old Porche) tells me erections are still possible, and Carmela Smith tells me that she is looking for me. I’m right here, as usual. About to be ruthless and hit the empty switch on my spam file. And with it comes a whole tide of regrets, about what it was that Carmela was trying to tell me and what Buddy’s message of hope was. Maybe he’s the guy that has been studying bears, and has the secret. I could use the rest.

Progress of a sort? An update on 98 King Street

2009-02-21T20:54:00.001-05:00

In December, we carried a story on 98 King and the proposal the Valley CDC made for the Community Preservation Awards (CPA) program to convert this derelict building to a 8-unit SRO. Since then, the proposal for seed money has been approved, the building has changed hands, and the CDC has been "buttoned up" with an initial $5,000.00. Completion of this conversion to SROs is scheduled for a long way off—2011. I wonder if it's going to stay like it is today for two years? Here's hoping it
doesn't take that long.

Read the full earlier article here

Crack is Back Part Three : The Death of a Dealer

2009-02-21T19:53:00.009-05:00

A crack pipe purchased for 99 cents at Pop's Liquor

The first article I wrote for Kirbyontheloose was “Crack is Back” in March of 2008.read it here. It was a two-part story of a young woman who was beat up at a local rooming house and thrown out of the window by her boyfriend, a drug user. I interviewed her, and she put me on to the story about how available crack pipes were in local convenience stores and liquor stores. In the process of writing the story, I learned who supplied the crack cocaine to her boyfriend. “Jim” lived a short distance away from the rooming house in subsidized housing on Michaelman Avenue. He ran crack parties, the landlord knew he was there and knew that dealing was going on; they called the police, but never managed to get witnesses to testify in support of an eviction order, and the police never raided the place or made an arrest. The tenants suffered. Evidently he was a small fish. On June 8, 2008, he died of an overdose.

There was no notice in either the Gazette or the Union of his death. It’s a pattern around here. Drug deaths go unreported. I ordered up what I could get, a medical examiners report, and a police report. At first I thought I would just print the reports as is, but professionals are hamstrung by the requirements of the form: they rarely are compelling reading, but they did start me thinking and talking to people. And visiting the spartan medical examiners office in Holyoke was a sobering experience. You don’t want to end up in one of their drawers or be another file folder in their files. Read the full article

Bad week at Kirbyontheloose

2009-02-06T21:12:00.006-05:00

Why we need two ambulance services in Northampton

It was the way bad ghost stories always start, a dark stormy night. It had snowed all day, the storm was winding down, and everything was freezing solid. I was looking over my wife’s shoulder when she was making some changes in a family newsletter when I began to feel dizzy and upset to my stomach. I have felt this way before. So I asked her to help me get upstairs and in bed, and get the blood pressure machine. Two sets of error readings, a third reading of 55 over 28. A new world’s record. As my doctor later said, “These numbers are not compatible with life.”

I called 911, and about five minutes later, the fire department ambulance arrived. My wife looked out the window and said they were shoveling our driveway. A minute later they were in the house. One of the guys slipped a cuff on me, and asked me some questions to see how I was doing. I think they had to do with how oriented I was, like who’s the president and who are you and what’s your address and so on. I don’t know how I scored. They said the AmB-Care was a couple minutes away, and was better equipped to handle me. A few minutes later there were a whole crowd of people in my bedroom and I was answering more questions. Then I went down the front stairs in a chair, and pretty soon I was staring at the overhead lights in the ambulance. As my wife left the house to ride with me, one of the firemen asked her if she had locked the door. She had, but many people in emergencies like this go off and leave their houses open and pots on the stove. The story ended happily, and we were back home before midnight. When it was all over I had three liters of saline in me, and the command to see my doctor ASAP.

About three months ago someone was complaining to me that our fire department ambulance service was a frill and competing with AmB-Care. I’m always ready to savage the establishment, but I thought I would check it out. I started out over at Dunkin' Donuts talking to AmB-Care people, who are frequently there refueling. Was the Fire Department taking away their business? Evidently not. One of them suggested I talk to the owner of AmB-Care, who is in Connecticut, and he said no, it’s an ideal situation, that the two services can back each other up. So there it was, and the story never got written, until now. Thank you, Fire Department, and thank you, AmB-Care. We are fortunate, hell, I am fortunate to have you both on the job.

Bottom falls out under blogger

I was sitting down at the keyboard early this week when there was a tremendous crash and I found myself lying on the floor. Our office chair, which I think we bought at Danco many years ago, had finally collapsed without giving written notice. One of the four spars that hold the casters had broken off. For two days the wreck lay in jumble while we thought about buying a new one. $99.00 for a piece of Chinese-made junk? Today I called Amherst welding and described the problem, couching it a bit apologetically as a job too small for them. "Not at all," said the cheerful voice at the other end of the line. "This is our bread and butter. Bring it over."

Amherst Welding, formerly Fran’s Welding. is almost in Pelham, but not quite. Enter their shop and you are back in the glory days of American machinery, Big blue Millermatic welders, a huge South Bend lathe, industrial drills and grinders. No unnecessary lighting, the Butler building grimy and romantic, a working man’s paradise. The boss analyzes the problem, asked where I was from.

“Northampton?” he said. “Well, let’s see if we can keep you from making two trips." Five minutes later there was the sound of a grinder, then the hiss and flash of blue light from the welder; a couple minutes later he was back with our chair in one piece, a nice clean weld securing the missing caster. $15.00.

This is the new age, everybody. We’re not rich any more, if we ever were. Repair, don’t replace. Put your money in the pocket of American craftspeople. It has always bothered me how average Americans became corrupted by low-cost imports. They ditch everything old, buy Chinese and are indifferent to the world of sweatshops that grew when American industries moved their equipment overseas. BUY AMERICAN friends, the jobs and equipment will come back.

Chair All Repaired

The Great Cummington Farms Disaster (more tales from the eighties)

2009-01-16T12:29:00.013-05:00

In the ski business, we call projects like Cummington

Farms "monuments", because to make money, you

can't spend too much on the building.

All the floors and windows at Cummington Farms

had to be replaced. If the Rockefellers or Donald

Trump were funding the place, the work would have

been perfect. The big horseshoe shaped building was

completely rebuilt almost from the ground up. The

system of trails they built were one of the nicest

cross-country trails in the United States when they

were completed. Craftsmanship run wild.

The design was stunning. Ski people from all over

the Northeast came in to see Cummington Farms.”

Tom Beggs

Partner

Cummington Farms

1.

Cummington is an idyllic small town about twenty miles northwest of Northampton up in the foothills of the Berkshires. You take Route 9 to get there. You leave citified liberals behind and get into old Yankee territory, where men are still men and know how to keep their chain saws running without running to the dealer all the time.

The principals in Cummington Farms were mostly "suits" as they are called up there. Real estate people, architects, insurance people, all of them professionals backed up and impeded by consultants. They came from Northampton, Amherst, and Hatfield, places that are not bothered with ledge. You can usually dig a cellar in Northampton without blasting powder. But up in the high bogs and meadows of Cummington it was a different matter. The garden that flourishes in Northampton perishes up in these bony hills. The Northampton and Amherst planning boards were loaded with friends of developers and people who earned their living from development. Up in Plainfield they eat developers for breakfast. Read the full story here.

Dishonor Court

2009-01-15T21:22:00.004-05:00

Lately I have been reading nostalgic stuff about Honor Court; reading how the town was nice and clean and there was no graffiti in the old days when the guys from Honor Court and their push-broom brigades kept the town clean. Older Italians are nostalgic for Mussolini, who made the trains run on time. Some older Germans probably are nostalgic for Hitler and his slave labor brigades.

The program was founded in 1970 by the late Bill Nagle, an ex-alcoholic who was a powerhouse politically and a force to be reckoned with in the probation department. Several years after Nagle died in 1993, the organization came under fire amid questions about its finances and oversight of its programs. In 2002, the organization closed its residential programs in the city, though it continued Thanksgiving and Christmas meals, and a scaled-back street-cleaning program. In December of 2000, there was no Christmas meal, and Honor Court, for all practical purposes, ceased operations.

All the years I saw the guys sweeping the streets for old Billy Nagle and the Chamber of Commerce I never saw any of them smiling. Not one. It was about as public kind of humiliation as you can get, cleaning up the garbage every morning, as the so-called solid citizens came and went. The town and the merchants got free or almost free labor from this slave labor brigade drafted by judges who gave guys with facing DWI or public drunkenness charges, alternative sentences. For some men and women, maybe the most vulnerable, Honor Court was a life sentence living in crummy dormitories and being yelled at by old Billy, who called his methods tough love, and held his AA-Synanon type meetings down at the courthouse, and ran a rein of terror. Cross Billy, don’t show up for a job, and you went back to jail. He loved to yell at people. He had doctors who would say that you were eligible for SSI, and then he would hold your check every month, deduct room and board, and dole you out expense money. And everyone was afraid of Billy, even the head of the Chamber of Commerce, who crossed to the other side of the street so he wouldn’t get yelled at. When they wanted something from the city that the Mayor wouldn’t give them, he marched his boys into the City Council meetings and they would all fill up the back of the chamber and glower at us.

A long time ago I went into their old headquarters behind the Shea block up in Florence to talk with Billy, and here he was, working the phone. That morning he was calling probation officers at jails all across the state looking for a plumber. If you were a skilled tradesman with alcoholism or a drug problem you got to work on one of his projects. He pulled in a lot of people out of poor neighborhoods of Springfield and greater Boston to keep our streets clean. After the old man died, other “recovered” people took his place, and the program spiraled down-hill. Following a heroin death in their Florence headquarters, police moved and cracked down, and after drug and alcohol testing, half of the program’s residents were asked to leave.

Ask our head of our parking department about Honor Court if you want to get an earful. He tried, for quite awhile, to get a signed contract out of them to do work for the city. Work programs are fine, but they have to be professionally and compassionately administered. People have to get paid for their work. Yes, I was walking around town the other day, and the graffiti doesn’t look good, but bringing back the Honor Court is not the answer. We have to remember that people with alcoholism or drug addiction problems need firm but respectful help and real rehabilitation.

Note: Read the following comments from Anonymous: she/he seems to have a great deal of information about Honor Court and Prevent Inc.

Flood at Meadowbrook caused by blocked city sewer line?

2008-12-16T16:34:00.017-05:00

Stand in the backyards of Meadowbrook and you look up to Straw Avenue and the backyards of Florence. The complex was built in a low-lying swampy area. A number of small streams feed its pond, and under the ground flows another kind of river in a pipe. A regional supervisor for POAH (Preservation Of Affordable Housing, Inc.), the owner of Meadowbrook Apartments, told me today that “All indications are that the blockage was not in the private lines.” He said that the lines owned by the housing complex were free and clear. Indeed, a tenant in building four told me that a firm hired by management had rodded out and flushed the line only one week before the incident, which displaced seven families.

Building Four is the lowest building in Meadowbrook, there has been some sinking of buildings over the years, and the basement apartments are, obviously, the lowest habitable point. It is here the toilets turned into fountains. Right now the carpets have been stripped out of the apartments, exhaust fans are running and the seven apartments are going to remain empty for some time, until the problem is fixed. Although relationships are amiable between the city and POAH, I have this feeling that lawyers may be involved in this problem sooner or later. The costs to POAH for the last incident in 2005 were considerable, because most of the apartments were vacant until quite recently. They had to strip out the whole basement area, put in new carpets, refrigerators, drywall, and appliances. The sounds of construction have been an annoyance to residents living upstairs for many months. Many of the tenants who had moved into the building just recently lost everything, including clothing, presents and furniture.

Building Four

This is the second time there has been a serious flood, and both times it hit the basement apartments in building 4, the lowest point in the system. The head of the Northampton's sewer department, John Young, told me that the city feels that a factor in the blockage was grease originating in the Meadowbrook lines. He says that that the city line was flowing at the time of the blockage but it is too early to give a definitive answer . He plans to put a television camera down into the sewer line and find out what is going on.

The last time the flood happened because the city line was in "terrible shape", according to Alexandra Dailey, asset manager with POAH, as quoted in the Gazette on December 12. "I believe the incident last time was more serious because there was a blockage in the city line. . . " said Dailey. "They did a major cleaning of that line and so we thought that was the cause, because cleaning it hadn't been on the regular list of preventative maintenance.

I understood a lot more about the problem when I went over to the DPW and looked at the map of the system. The sewer line is a trunk line built in the 1970s, and Meadowbrook is the last stop on this 12" line that serves a large residential area of Florence off Bridge Road. After Meadowbrook, it crosses into the forest, goes under the old railroad embankment,crosses Locust Street near the DPW offices, and heads toward Hockanum Road. Where there is a forest there are roots, and where there are roots there can be danger to older sewer lines.

"A 12 inch line to serve that whole neighborhood and a complex of 250-odd apartments?" said my friend the other morning. He has worked in public housing for about fifteen years. "That's not big enough. When did Meadowbrook get approved?"

"1972 I think."

"Who was the building inspector back then?"

"Cecil Clark, I think. "

"Nuff said." he commented.

We need a mid-course correction on Village Hill

2008-11-20T07:06:00.034-05:00

Condo project off North St. files for permits

2008-11-19T11:12:00.005-05:00

Last Friday, November 14, developer Doug Kohl dba Tofino Associates, filed for a special permit and site plan approval for the controversial condominium project he plans near the bike trail and wetlands off North Street.

He is asking for permission to build 25 units; one duplex and 23 townhouses on 5.9 acres. The final plans show that backyards, patios and walls will come within 12 feet of the bordered vegetative wetland. This will be the first so-called in-fill project to take advantage of the changes in our zoning in many commercially-oriented zoning districts. Permitted now is reducing the "no-encroachment zone" around wetlands from 35 feet to 10 feet. As far as I know, no planning board or conservation commission meetings have been scheduled. The area is heavily wooded, wet, and has an intermittent stream flowing through it. A legal challenge to the project by neighbors challenging his ownership is pending.

Part III: The Roof Falls In on Heritage Bank

2008-11-15T21:04:00.021-05:00

“You know, I worked with Dick Covell and my impression was
that he was a much more effective administrator when he was
here in Northampton with NIS than he was at Holyoke. You see,
he was very much of a ‘hands-on’ type of guy. When he was at 109
Main Street his office was right there, in the back of the lobby.

It’s when he got up there in his Taj Mahal that he lost his connection

with the bank. I wasn’t on any of the loan committees. I felt my
knowledge was kind of tangential to the making of loans. I was on the
executive committee, and I don’t know, we never really dealt with
really substantive matters.”

Kurt Hertzfeld

Former Board Member

Heritage Bank

Heritage moved to their great marble-sided ultra-modern boat-shaped tower in Holyoke in June, 1989, at long last consolidating all their offices in one place. Dick Covell wrote a preface to the 1989 annual report comparing the creation of his new bank to the founding of the United States. He compared the amalgamation of the seven banks to the more "perfect union" of the 13 original states. He saw the “strength and vision of the resulting entity“ in the "bold distinctive design of our new corporate headquarters." He hailed the opening of full-service offices in Worcester. The landlord, thrilled to get Heritage as his prime tenant, had put 1.4 million of his own money into outfitting the executive offices. These digs were meant to be the crowning touch that would make Heritage Bank a truly first-class acquisition for one of the big New York banks. read here

Part II: The Fall Guys

2008-09-15T22:29:00.019-04:00

The Plotters

Northampton is a small town, and there is very little you can get away with without people noticing, and talking about it. The commercial and legal and political world is pretty well focused in about four or five city blocks in the downtown area. You can’t have an affair in Northampton, or if you have it, it will become a choice tidbit passed around and elaborated on. People will see the two of you together, and even if there is nothing going on, they probably think it is.

One night developer Mike Sissman saw the three men who ended up being key players in the secret partnerships that did so much to ruin the bank having dinner one night at the Inn at Northampton. He realized right away that something was terribly wrong at Heritage Bank.

"Well here they were at their table plotting" Mike said. "There’s Donald Todrin, Irving Labovitz, and Mike Smith. A lawyer already renowned in our town for his shady dealings, the bank’s counsel, and its chief lending officer, all buddy-buddy. Something was happening."
Read part two of my book on the
Heritage Bank scandal.

read it here.