Friday, January 16, 2009

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


                                         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.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

it appears this is a dead link. Is the rest of the story still alive somewhere on the inerwebs?