Block Tuesday

No, I don’t think that Claire Higgins is going to become the Registry of Probate now that David Sullivan has been elected District Attorney. If she gets the job, I shall move to northern Sweden and resign myself to a life of wholesome isolation. Where has Kirby been hiding these past weeks? Back working for a living for awhile and coping with incoming mortar fire. Tonight I finally sat down at the computer and said, let’s get going. But first lets clean this computer keyboard which is a little dirty. Lets find that bottle of denatured alcohol I saw somewhere. Lets get a cup of coffee and a piece of bread and butter. Lets kill some time. Lets clean all the fingerprints off the computer screen.



“Block Tuesday” at the Registry of Deeds/Probate Court building on King Street has to be seen to be believed. I experienced it two weeks ago, and it was horrific. The employees that work upstairs in Probate know to brace themselves when they see every parking space full and long lines of stressed-out people lining up at the metal detector to go upstairs and wait for their cases to be heard.

Anyone who doubts that the economic nosedive is hurting us need only see the crowds of people clogging the corridors of probate court seeking divorces, annulments, changes in custody, or changes in child support. They are there to defend themselves against eviction, or ask the judge to evict. Little children are dragged up there for tense settlement conferences where who gets what and who gets worked out. There’s conferences going on everywhere there is a stretch of wall to lean against. While I was looking up a probate matter, a poor guy was starting to shout at a clerk, and the clerk was sweating bullets trying to cool down someone who was wearing out her nerve-endings. He was slated to go to court to be evicted and he didn’t know what his family would do. He had lost his job. He wasn’t a bum; see him on the street and you’d think hey, another man on the street, young and kind of capable looking.

Upstairs in the registry building its a state of chaos; downstairs it’s unearthly quiet. Upstairs is probate, downstairs is the place where real estate transfers are entered. During the boom years every monitor had a real estate person in front of it; someone looking up deeds, doing due diligence, or filing some kind of instrument. Now the place is empty: the monitors get switched on in the morning, and off in the afternoon, and no one looks at them. There are probably lawyers and title people all over town killing time in their offices waiting for someone to come in and say hello.

Right by the entrance is one monitor thats the ticker, more or less. Anyone who wants to see what is happening in real estate right now can look at it. As a sale or a mortgage is registered, it appears there. Then when they get enough documents they bind them in a book and put them on the shelf. In the boomtimes when everyone was into speculation, they couldn’t build shelves fast enough.

Well, it was noontime on Tuesday and there were only three sales to report. There was a day last week when there were only three for the whole day. The last day I checked was a little better, eleven. And this office handles the traffic for 20 towns with a population of 152,000. There were 58,644 buildings here in the 2000 census. So what does this mean? Brace yourself, boys and girls.

I went into see David Sullivan and asked him what was going on with all the people outside his upstairs office, and a downstairs office space that was empty. He spun about and worked at the computer getting me facts and figures. This is why so many of us voted for him yesterday. He works hard for his money.

“Oh by the way”, I said, “There seems to be an organized whispering campaign about you”

Before the election quite a few people told me, in confidence, that there was a deal in the works that Claire Higgins would get his job if Dave was elected District Attorney. This was supposedly a done deal. He said stories like that didn’t bother him, that it just wasn’t true, and he hadn’t talked with the Mayor in a long time, and never about that subject. I believe him. But rumors like this just proliferate and are believed because we are prone to think that politicians are only interested in feathering their nests, or getting a better class of nest.

Dave got me some figures.


Click here to see the figures my home-made charts are mine.

Our empty buses

The case for de-regulating public transportation





A recent posting by Adam Cohen on a local website started me thinking about the PVTA and our system of public transit around here. We see the buses go by every day, going up King toward Greenfield and Florence Heights, and out toward Williamsburg and the jail. And from time to time, like every year or so, I ride one. And always the buses, which are huge, run almost empty. The motivation for the routes they run, a lot of the time, are political and humanistic. They serve the poor, the people who live in housing complexes, and the elderly, who have given up their cars. The Mayors of our towns pack a lot of clock with PVTA and when they say we need a bus, they get a bus. Light ridership? One size (big) fits all. My wife and I saw the same thing when we spent last winter in California, these huge buses running up and down the Coast Highway through affluent beach communities. Often they had no more than four or five people riding in them, most of them hispanic domestic employees on their way to work or going home in distant communities where housing is cheaper. You just think five minutes about these buses and their carbon imprint and huge engines and their unionized drivers and their administrational expenses and you might think, hey, there's got to be a better way.

I think of Peru and their collectivos. If you want to get around Peru and you don't mind a little excitement, you go down to the corner of the nearest main street and look for a collectivo. Hold up your hand and there will be a shriek of brakes, and you jump in. They were usually Datsuns when I was there in the seventies. They ran on no particular schedule: they leave their destinations when full, will leave their passengers off anywhere along the route, and pick up anywhere. And yes, they are anarchic, but thats not necessarily a bad thing. You get a good driver, and you might get a bad driver. But God gave you a mouth and you can yell and tell the guy to slow down, and organize your fellow passengers to yell at him too. Public transportation by ten guys with ten cars and dues and a couple people hustling passengers in the bigger cities. A little more anarchism in our over-organized over regulated world might be nice. There is a good posting on jitneys in Wikipedia, which are mainly popular in the undeveloped world. Since we are heading toward being an post-industrial economy, maybe its time to break the back of the public transit monopoly and license and lightly regulate jitneys. A Boston-Amherst-Northampton route would flourish and drive down Peter Pan prices. And the efficiencies are obvious. Cars that operate full or nearly full burn a lot less gas that these big heavy buses with their Cummins diesels.

Asbestos discovered in Cahill and Forsander

< Northampton Housing Authority promises to remediate


A certain heroic tenant down at Cahill Apartments who shall remain nameless, had long wondered about this white heating pipe in his closet. The covering didn’t look like modern fiberglass insulation. This insulating material was grey; it looked like asbestos, and its protective wrapping had gaps in it.



So he complained to the DEP (the State Department of Environmental Protection) An asbestos inspector came to the public housing project on Fruit Street,examined heating pipes in two apartments, and left materials describing the hazards of asbestos with the tenants.

I went down to Cahill and then went over to Forsander Apartments to follow up on a phone call. The complex looks fine from the road, with all the flowers and all, but toward the back, the place gets ugly in places.

I walked into one apartment and then another and the one problem started into morph into many. There was also 1960s era floor tile in the corridor that could be vinyl asbestos, there was bad ventilation in the apartments, mold, bad stoves, flaking paint and a general air of decay about Cahill. Oh, and fear. You sense the fear in the voices of tenants, who don’t want to complain, don’t want you to use their names, don’t want to get evicted. It’s easy to tell these people they have rights, but a lot of them have had close brushes with being homeless.

I talked with a couple that shared this tiny apartment in the rear of Cahill. The walls outside their apartment are grey with mold, ditto for the porch. The area is in perpetual shade from the forest, which is owned by Smith College. Before Cahill, there was a skating rink there, which is oddly relevant to today’s drainage problems in the rear of the complex. The property line cuts right under the corner of building “X” and there is only about twelve feet of NHA property between the buildings and the forest, and no retaining wall. Behind Cahill
Stagnant water in cellar wells

“Marilyn” and “Sam” (not their real names) are both in their twenties. Marilyn is a student at Holyoke Community College.
They have been there for six years. The first sign that the apartment had its problems came right away. Sam tried to use the nearly forty year old oven and smoke came boiling out. He almost set the smoke alarms off in the building. His neighbors warned him: “Don’t use the stove, no matter what you do.” The surface units smoked too,and the hood over the stove didn’t work. He was at a loss as to what to do. “There was a stove there. Wasn’t it supposed to be okay to cook on it?”

“ The first time I tried to cook here,” said his wife, ” I tried frying some eggs. I noticed that the moisture was building up under the hood, and the paint was peeling on the hood. Flecks of paint in the pan. Ugh. I gave up. It is a bigger issue for him, not so much for me. I can adapt. I’m ok with using the microwave, but Sam likes to cook. “

Over the years he has purchased a portable oven, an electrical roaster,an electric frying pan, and a microwave. All the gear fills up their shelf space and the stove sits there, a place to hang towels on and shelf space for spices and a little turntable.

“I was upset with the apartment.” said his wife, “ I talked with my instructor at Holyoke Community College, and she called the Authority and talked with a woman in maintenance. The next day that woman in maintenance called me at home. She was furious.

“ Don’t ever talk to anyone about your apartment outside the Northampton Housing Authority again.” she said. “We were really afraid that we would be evicted if we complained. So we didn't. ”

The apartment is clean, but small. I looked at the closet piping; it had been replaced with fiberglass, but there was a suspicious-looking packing around heating pipes where they came up out of the floor. They both have asthma, and her asthma has gotten steadily worse in the years they have been there. There is mold in the apartment; The writer got up on the tub and looked at the ventilator in the bathroom. It was clogged with dust. A screwdriver and a little prying took off the face plate, revealing much more dust. It looked as if the vents had never been cleaned since the sixties. It also looked as if the tiny ventilator didn’t come close to meeting the current code requirements.

Clogged Ventilator

“For a long time,” said Sam, “We were afraid to be evicted. But now we feel like we are ready to talk to people and demand some action. As we have advanced in our education, we have discovered that we have rights. We can withhold our rent if the apartment does not meet code.”

I called DEP the next day and got a cautious acknowledgement that contact had been made with NHA and the problem, if there was a problem, was being discussed. “Have you talked with the Authority?” asked the DEP spokeswoman.

“Not yet.” I said,” I’m girding my loins.”

“What?” she giggled.

“Oh, you never heard that expression?” I asked. She hadn’t. Me and the Director of the Northampton Housing Authority go way back. We have our differences. I had already talked with Dave Adamson, NHA’s Director of Maintenance, but not the big boss. Dave was friendly and approachable and is not someone who sits behind a big desk and plays Mr. Important. He only frosted over when I asked him how come the authority hadn’t seen this problem coming and dealt with it a long time ago. He said I had to talk to the Executive Director, for an answer to that one.

Dave Adamson started with the NHA as a painter, and for someone who is in charge of a maintenance crew that services 612 housing units for families, the elderly, and people with special needs, he seems kind of underqualified. Oh, and blase. “Oh yeah, he said, viewing a rough section of flooring tile in Cahill Building “B”, “Yeah, that’s vinyl asbestos tile.”

“So what?”, seemed to be the subtext. OK, as long a vinyl asbestos tile is undisturbed, it is no problem. Its when the material gets friable, when its abraded or crumbles that the asbestos gets in the air, that people can get sick. The tiling is more than forty years old.
In Forsander some corridor tiling is starting to turn up its edges, in the community building the tiling is badly eroded and missing in spots. In the community room every heating pipe coming up from the basement has grey cement filling the gaps: cement that also looks like asbestos.


The news that Forsander also had asbestos didn’t surprise people up there. “Those boiler rooms out here are loaded with the stuff.” said Pete Cushing, former head of the tenant union up at Forsander. He talked about maintenance at the complex, and Dave Adamson.

“He doesn’t know plumbing, he doesn’t know electricity, he doesn’t know carpentry.” He said.
Pete went to a meeting of the Authority a couple of years ago and more or less let them have it in front of the commissioners about lousy maintenance. No response. A couple months later, however, manna of a sorts descended on Forsander. A flat screen TV and all these elegant chairs for the community room. Pete and others have told me its an old pattern. Scream and something will be done to make you happy.

This last Tuesday I and Jon Hite finally sat down and talked.
He’s tall, gangly, with a greying moustache. He lighted up a Marlboro and we talked.

“I have no evidence that there is friable (loose) asbestos in the heating system.” he said, but admits there is asbestos there and he was going to work with the DEP to wall off off the pipes in question. He had only talked with DEP on the phone. He said, based on that phone call, that the NHA will be going around and inspecting all of the closets at Cahill (and Forsander, I later learned). Both projects were built in the late sixties and are practically identical. He would replace the stove that the tenants I talked with were having trouble with; he would fix the wiring in their apartment. He told me that if they find friable asbestos, they“will follow the proper steps to have the asbestos removed by an approved asbestos removal contractor.” If there is no asbestos hazard, they will be boxing in all the pipes so that they will not be exposed to contact from tenant activities. I had five or six other questions, and he fielded each one. He said that the ventilators in the couple’s building had been cleaned two years ago (the tenants told me it hadn’t0. They had hired Cotton and were going to start dealing with the drainage problem in back of Cahill next week. No, he said, Dave Adamson, who earns about $41,000, had never had any job involving supervision before he came to NHA, and no, he had never given him any training in supervision. Dead silence. To help him out, I commented that he was a nice guy, anyway.

“No,” he said, after some thought, “ No, he’s not a nice guy.”

I was sitting there with my pencil poised to write, and I looked at the pencil, which was still hovering in mid-air. I wondered if he would say that to a Gazette reporter. I guess he wouldn't.