Snows

 

Sunset over the Bridge Street Cemetery in Northampton. 

 

Snowpiles in front of the Tunic Cafe make it so you can't even see across the street.

I'm intrigued by these pay phone images someone has been putting up on the UMass campus. 

 

 

Most college students today are too young to have ever used a pay phone. So what's the point? To confuse them with an incomprehensible image?

 

The frozen solid campus pond at UMass leaves the small number of ducks who failed to fly south last fall trapped in this small unfrozen section.

Because people bring their kids to feed the ducks every day in warmer weather, some of the ducks become completely dependent upon the free food and forget their natural self-supporting ways. 

Call them the welfare ducks. 

 

Legendary photographer Paul Shoul captured this image of the embarrassingly large crowd that showed up at Northampton's First Church last weekend to hear congress-critter Jim McGovern whine about Trump and Musk. 

 

 

Know what's even more embarrassing? The number of audience members wearing masks. 

 

Summer Street

 

The Forbes Library in Northampton has a shelf with local history books on display. Although I've lived most of my life in Springfield, I have lived in Hamp on and off over the decades for years at a time, beginning in the late 1970's when I lived in a pre-gentrified Harrison Avenue hippie-house whose rent I paid by selling dollar joints in Pulaski Park. Yet I don't really know that much about Hamp history, so I decided to borrow the book shown below.

 

The Forbes Library itself has this to say about the book. 

Published as part of Northampton’s 350^th Anniversary Chapbook Series, Lu Stone’s remarkable history of the house and street she called home is a fascinating portrait of the many interwoven stories which make up our neighborhoods. Finely illustrated and impeccably researched, the book is a rich tapestry of the many lives whose fates crossed in the neighborhood in the 110+ years before she purchased the house in 1983. 

The subjects range from working class families and Olympic athletes to Lewis Warner, the President of the Hampshire County National Bank who suddenly absconded with hundreds of thousands of dollars from the bank in 1898. The book remains one of the finest examples of a ‘people’s history’ we have in the region, of dusty stories forgotten through the ages but rediscovered through neighbor’s anecdotes, dusty old newspapers, library microfilm and aging photographs cherished by relatives. 

It is indeed a very good local history book covering the history of Summer Street, which today is best known as a short-cut to King Street and the street with Dunkin Donuts and Cumberland Farms on its corners. 

 

According to this book, impressive Victorian structures once stood at those locations. Was it really an improvement to tear down those historic architectural treasures to replace them with a convenience store and a donut shop?

Here is the smartly painted 17 Summer Street as it looked this morning - not in bad shape for being 153 years old! 

It was originally built as part of a cluster of homes put up to accommodate lower middle class downtown office and factory workers. Today the house is appraised at $554,100 so I guess not too many everyday workers could afford to live there now. 

I was especially intrigued by this sentence discussing the death of one of the last early members of the neighborhood:

The Dibrindisi era on Summer Street sadly came to an end when Mary died in 1992. Indicative of the growth of social service programs throughout the city, Hairston House converted her two-family into a house for recovering substance abusers. 

During my tour of institutions, I once stayed for a time at Hairston House as an alcoholic junkie crackhead who had just gotten out of Ward Five. 

Ward Five is the psych ward at Cooley-Dick. 

However, at the time I was there Hairston House was on Graves Avenue, not Summer. We flew a flag from the porch to try to make the place look more respectable.

 

I guess that Hairston House was originally on Summer, but later moved to Graves. Hey, anybody can know the history of their house, but how many people know the history of their half-way house?

I strongly recommend The Story of 17 Summer, which also features a section suggesting how you can research the history of your own house. Alas, the book is out of print and unavailable anywhere online.  However, along with the Forbes copy, there is also one at the Lilly Library in Florence. Check it out on your next library visit.  

 

Rusty Stealie near Resinate on Pleasant Street. 

 

 

While waiting at a bus stop by Amherst College, I grokked to this sunset. 

 

 

I'll bet this lecture in Greenfield was worth a lot more than 30 cents. 

 

 

Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead was seated at the Grammy's last week with Springfield homeboy Taj Mahal. 

Paul Shoul captured these silly people in Springfield last week. My experience has been that most of the attendees at these types of downtown protests are actually slumming it from the north Valley.

 

 

It's hard to give a White House press conference when you have to babysit the kid. 

     

      

The Hill

 

Since mid-December UMass has been a place at peace. 

 

 

Now they're baaack!

Cold cat and an icy mouse in front of Northampton's Forbes Library. 

 

I was surprised to see that this package store on King Street has gone out of business. It has been a liquor store, under various names and owners, for at least half a century. Good God, if I could have back even half the money I spent in that place over the decades. Those were the days when God was humbling me to raise me up. 

 

 

In better news, a new Oriental restaurant is opening a few doors down, apparently specializing in soups. 

I'll have to check it out and let you know what I think.

Meanwhile, I was pleased to encounter a celebration of a Tommy on Main Street.

 

 

Actually, I heard that movie was awful, but nothing with a Tommy in it can be all bad. 

A most chill-town business in Hamp is Shop Therapy, one of the last places around that still has a kind of counter-culture vibe. 

Their business is so good that they are moving to larger quarters - filling the long vacant space a couple doors down where Faces once was. It was getting pretty crowded in their current location, with aisles so close together you could barely walk down them. Meanwhile, the old Faces space has gone all psychedelic in anticipation of what Shop Therapy will do with their expanded digs!

 

Before I caught the bus home, I stopped at Filos for pizza. 

 

 

It has the best low-cost pizza slices downtown. Filos has also been extensively remodeled, so if you ain't been there in a while check it out. 

Here is the program from the closing of Springfield's Our Lady of Hope Church, where I made my First Communion. 

 

People identify me with the Pine Point section of Springfield (the late, much lamented Marilyn Vennell used to call me "The Mayor of Pine Point") but when my father got out of the military my parents were broke. Therefore we had to live in a house on Littleton Street owned by a relative until my dad got enough money to move back to their beloved Point, where both of my parents grew up. 

 

 

I have fuzzy little kid memories of Hungry Hill. In particular I recall my first day of kindergarten at Liberty School under Mrs. McMann. When we arrived, I remember being surprised to see half the kids there were bawling. "Why are those kids crying?" I asked my mom. "Never mind," she replied, "pay no attention to them." Of course if I could have foreseen the significance of that day, as the start of the dreary years of indoctrination that lay ahead, I would have been bawling right along with them.