Maybe. Maybe Not.

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

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

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

"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

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

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.”

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

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.