Walk in the snow in the middle of the street

February, from the Très riches heures du Duc de Berry (circa 1415)

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

February landscapes look more like drawings than paintings.

I’ve noticed  in the past few days far more Christmas wreaths still hanging on front doors than last year at this time, and holiday lights are lingering later, too. A way to ward off evil spirits or at least viruses?

xxx

Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), the nature essayist, famously wrote that “the most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February’’, that  paradoxically short but seemingly long month. And yet, its sun is warmer than January’s, its days are noticeably longer and you get from time to time a cold but dry and windless day that can be exhilarating – a perfect day for the season. And in some years, you see snow drops and other early flowers popping out along the strips of road with a southern exposure and smell warming earth.

A couple of nice things about snowstorms, for all their inconveniences: the muffling of harsh sounds and that you can walk in the middle of the street.

Inconvenient state lines

 Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Within states and regions, such as New England, that population profiles don’t follow state lines makes coherent and effective policies difficult  to put together,  especially in matters such as public health, for which the states have primary responsibility. While states may impose various (mostly unenforceable) rules to try to control the spread of COVID-19,  those rules may have little relationship with where and how people live.

Consider that western Massachusetts is far less economically and travel-wise connected with Greater Boston than are Rhode Island and southeastern New Hampshire, with their many commuters in and out of “The Hub.’’ And yet Massachusetts policymakers can’t impose rules that fully address that.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has gone further than any other governor in facing the fact that diseases don’t obey state borders by trying to collaborate closely with New Jersey and Connecticut in testing,  quarantine and travel rules. He’s accepting the obvious:  Southern New York State and much of the Garden and Constitution states are all in the same dense Greater New York City region.

Light blue represents the area known as Greater Boston, dark blue represents the Metro-Boston area and red represents the City of Boston proper.

Why Maine’s politically amoral Sen. Collins won

Seal of Sen. Susan Collins’s Trumpian heartland, Aroostook County, land of potatoes and moose.

Children gathering potatoes on a large farm in Aroostook County, 1940. Schools did not open until the potatoes were harvested.

— Photo by Jack Delano.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Perhaps the most-watched political event in New England in this political cycle was Maine  Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s  re-election victory over Maine House Speaker Sarah Gideon, a Democrat, which didn’t surprise me. Senator Collins, a cynic with very plastic principles, or perhaps none at all (recalling her deeply immoral Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, for whom money and power are all), won because she has provided very good constituent services and had deep support in the Trumpian northern part of the state, especially Aroostook County, where she’s from.  

Her victory will help ensure that a President Biden will have a tough time getting his judicial and other nominees confirmed and make it  more difficult for New England, as a region, if not Maine, to get its fair share of federal programs.

Remembering the sweet pollution of yesteryear

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

I suppose  fewer folks than usual will be driving around New England looking at foliage this fall because of  states’ COVID restrictions, which among other things, make it more difficult to get rooms in hotels or inns and  and  tables in restaurants. Many have closed for good. Too bad, those lurid leaves are our region’s greatest natural show, except for maybe a big bad blizzard or heavy-duty hurricane, and bright foliage can last for several weeks, not a few hours, unlike a big storm.

Oh well, our terrible drought means that the colors won’t be as bright this year anyway….

Northern New England has the greatest foliage festival. I particularly remember from back in the ‘60s, when I lived up there, the spectacular shows on Route 100, which goes up through the middle of Vermont, and the Kancamagus Highway, in the White Mountains.

By the dreaded Election Day, on Nov. 3 this year, leaves will  cover the ground, which reminds me of the sweet smoke that used to fill the air from burning  the leaves we’d rake into big piles. The yearly smoke produced a feeling of mellowness and nostalgia. Now such outdoor burning is generally banned because of the serious air pollution it causes. (I remember, too, the air pollution from wood stoves during the energy crises of the ‘70s.) Now, too many people, or the people they hire (including very hard-working illegal aliens), use also polluting (emissions and shrieking noise) leaf blowers, not rakes, to collect the leaves. An improvement?

The disappearance of leaf-burning reminds me of the exit of other unhealthy but pleasant activities, such as smoking a cigarette after a meal and one or two cocktails before dinner. These habits tended to shorten lives, and so it’s good they have faded. But I’ve seen no explosion in  general happiness as a result.

If you do go leaf-peeping, watch out for slippery fallen leaves if we finally get some rain, as well as rutting deer and moose.

Rearranging Boston

Bluebikes in Boston. Originally Hubway, Bluebikes is a bicycle sharing system in the Boston metropolitan area. The system is owned by the municipalities of Boston, Cambridge, Everett, Somerville and Brookline, and is operated by Motivate.

 From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Boston is starting to implement new street-narrowing,  traffic-calming, bike-lane creation and sidewalk-widening plans that will make parts of the city’s very dense urban core more pleasant.

Mass.streets.blog.org summarized the program in May, when it reported:

“The initial plans include a network of new protected bike lanes across downtown Boston and around the Public Garden, expanded bus stop waiting areas, and processes to let restaurants expand their outdoor seating areas on sidewalks and on-street parking lanes.’’

The new bike lanes are already being set up, albeit not yet permanently; cones are being used, not concrete or metal barriers.

Some of these plans were in the works before COVID-19, but the pandemic has jump- started some of them to encourage social distancing and boost walking and bike riding by COVID-cautious people worried about taking public transportation (though those concerns have been found to be exaggerated).

Sidewalks in most American cities are too narrow. Widening them for restaurants, outdoor retail stores and other functions will add to cities’ liveability.

Anything that discourages car traffic and encourages walking and bike riding and, yes, a return to public transportation in center cities, will improve their quality of life and help lure back residents, businesses and tourists who fled because of the virus.

It should be said, by the way, that density per se does not present a COVID-19 peril. Consider how well Hong Kong, Singapore and Taipei have kept virus cases down to a handful. That’s probably in part because of lessons from the East Asian-based SARS epidemic, in 2002-04

And note that virus cases are much lower in  densely populated and affluent downtown Boston than in neighborhoods a little further out with more poor people. To reduce your chances of getting sick with COVID, live in a rich, orderly neighborhood where people follow mask and social-distancing guidelines and lose weight while you’re at it. But back to reality….

Of course  it’s easier for rich folks to leave town in pandemics and  to avoid crowded places.

To read more, please hit this link.

Explosive evenings

M-80

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Residents of Providence are being increasingly disturbed by fireworks  and firecrackers being set off for hours every night, especially in poorer neighborhoods. Lots of these are being illegally used, since in Rhode Island only ground fireworks and sparklers can be legally ignited – in other words, quiet displays --  with firecrackers, rockets and mortars or other devices that launch projectiles banned, except, I assume, for professionally run public fireworks displays  that we used to enjoy on special occasions, especially The Fourth and New Year’s Eve.

The racket,  injuries  and fire threat from illegally used fireworks is one of those quality-of-life issues, like graffiti, that can drive people away from a city. The police must crack down hard. And the  explosives are hurting the sleep we need, especially in these tenser-than-usual times. If some folks see the fireworks as an expression of personal or political liberation many more see them as reminders of entrapment in an urban dystopia.

Knock it off.

Ah, if only people were as interested in reading the Declaration of Independence as in making a lot of noise.

The fireworks frenzy is happening in other cities, too. Please hit this link.

The year-round fireworks dilutes the excitement that we used to feel as we approached the  public celebrations of the Glorious Fourth of July, which I suppose won’t happen this year in most places. When I was a kid we lived on the coast and so most of the fireworks spectacles we enjoyed were on beaches. But we also, probably illegally, had our private shows, mostly involving devices such as  M-80s, cherry bombs and Roman candles,  in backyards – with the  nearby thick woods muffling the noise a bit. But that was only on the Fourth, when the local cops, who seemed to know everyone in town, would look the other way.

My father would stock up several years worth of fireworks in Southern states, where laws were lax. (Now the laws are very lax in New Hampshire — Live Free and Blow Off Your Hand.

Then there was the little cannon he set off every year on the Fourth. We had a loud old time for several hours.

A few boys would light and throw M-80s and cherry bombs at each other (but only on The Fourth!), displaying the same sort of idiocy as in the BB-gun wars they had through the year, in which it was possible to lose an eye or two. Cheap thrills indeed!

Two coming-of-age novels

1909 advertisement

Adapted from an entry in Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,“ in GoLocal24.com

A Stolen Past, by John Knowles, is a 1983 novel as told by a former Yale undergraduate,  about his friendship with and mentorship in college by a famous writer (based on Thornton Wilder, who died in 1975) and a family of Russian nobility/aristocracy living in a somewhat decayed but grand house on the Hudson north of New York City years after fleeing their motherland  after the Bolshevik Revolution. The mysterious theft of a huge diamond plays a major role in this very atmospheric  (including the weather itself) narrative. Like much of Knowles’s best work, it focuses on how unexpected and complicated experiences, inspiring and disillusioning, form maladjusted young characters’ sense of  themselves and their relationship with others.

Knowles’s first book, A Separate Peace, published in 1960,  has stayed his most famous and is considered a classic and an example of his skill in crafting coming-of-age stories. I didn’t read it until the’ 70s, although I was quite familiar with its setting, an elite New England (then) all-boys boarding school based on Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, N.H.  It has always surprised me that a book with such characters and, in a way, exotic setting, and what seems to be a gay subtext, has been so enduringly popular.

The Russians in the book reminded me a little of Vanya Vosoff, a Russian émigré or exile (he had been an officer in Czar Nicholas II’s army) who married a previously married WASP lady whose family owned a company in the shoe industry. The Vosoffs, with her grandson, lived next door to us in a Massachusetts town in the ‘50s and into the ‘60s.

Mr. Vosoff’s English was somewhat eccentric and incomplete but I remember him telling me about some of the plants and animals of the countryside of his motherland. He always seemed to be doing projects in the yard but otherwise didn’t seem to have a job. I wish I had been old enough to ask him about Russia under the old regime, the revolution and the horrifying civil war that followed it. It wasn’t all that many decades before then that those cataclysmic events took place.

There’s sometimes a lot of history next door.

Partly non-virus-related!

From http://openstreetmap.org/

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

With many newspapers shrinking unto death, all they seem to have room for is COVID-19 stuff; there are many other important things happening around the world that aren’t being reported. As the late Bill Kreger, a news editor to whom I reported at The Wall Street Journal once observed: “Sometimes the most important story starts out at the bottom of Page 37.’’ What might we be missing?

Well, The Boston Guardian reports that property and violent crime is down in its circulation area (the Back Bay, Beacon Hill , downtown and Fenway) this year. But maybe that’s a virus-related story? As newly unemployed people run out of money will property crimes increase?

Then there’s an inspiring little item from the March 24 Wall Street Journal: Voters in Mexican border city of Mexicali have admirably told the U.S. company Constellation Brands not to complete a $1.4 billion brewery there because the facility would take so much water that it could jeopardize the irrigation-dependent agriculture in the region.

In other heartening, if mostly symbolic, news, the U.S. has indicted Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and some sidekicks for drug trafficking and is offering $15 million to those who aid his capture. Don’t expect Maduro to appear any time soon in a federal court, but the move is apt to make him nervous.

And there’s the important unhappy news that the world’s greatest coral reef, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, had just suffered another mass bleaching caused by global warming, whose associated increase in carbon dioxide makes sea water more acidic. For more information, please hit this link.

Using eminent domain to drive folks from flood zones

Watch Hill Harbor, on the coast of southern Rhode Island, which is very vulnerable to flooding, especially in hurricanes

— Photo by Stephg82988

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The New York Times reports that the Trump administration is commendably letting the Army Corps of Engineers tell localities to use the threat of eminent domain to get people to move away from increasingly flood-prone areas or else lose federal flood-mitigation money.

This is part of a shift toward  the Corps paying local governments to buy and demolish homes at clear risk of flooding. 

The Corps, with the agreement of the administration, realizes that building sea walls, levees and other protections, such as ordering that houses be put on stilts– for which the Corps pays two-thirds of the cost and localities and states the rest – is very expensive and often have to be repeated. Better for safety, and the taxpayers, that people be forced from these places, which are increasingly inappropriate for buildings because of global warming’s effects. But people naturally love being along the water, so such threats get much pushback.

The barrier beaches of South County would be  places where we could expect the Corps to get tough like this. Whatever Trump’s manmade-global-warming denials, it’s heartening that his administration is taking this unpopular but needed approach.

But what will they do about such urban flood-prone places as Boston’s Seaport District?

To read The Times’s story, please hit this link. 

The lack of ornamentation, or other breaks along the surface, on Boston’s 200 Clarendon Street (aka Hancock Tower) skyscraper here, the city’s tallest, is said to worsen the local wind-tunnel effect.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

What a nice feeling it is after a windy cold morning to feel the sun on your face after the wind drops off.

Boston is the windiest major city in the United States, partly because it’s on a stretch of ocean frequented  by intense storms.  The blasts sure hit you in the wind-tunnel effect  in the mix of skyscrapers and much older buildings downtown, and in the growing but perhaps eventually imperiled-by-sea-level-rise Seaport District. Very off-putting. The wind-tunnel effect is serious enough that building codes and designs may have to be adjusted in downtown Boston. Architects and city planners are working on the problem. I love many skyscrapers but…

Trump's planned 'classical' command

Two “Modernist’’ landmarks: the “Brutalist” Boston City Hall, ugly (to many people). Below, the Hancock Tower in Boston, which most people (I think) find beautiful.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The White House is considering putting out an order called “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again’’ that would mandate “classical’’ styles as the default design for all new federal buildings in Greater Washington, D.C., and for all new federal buildings everywhere, including courthouses, projected to cost more than $50 million each.

Now, a lot of “classical’’ architecture is attractive in its dignified, symmetrical, solid way, and some modern architecture, especially the Brutalist (think Boston City Hall) and Deconstructivist (think the Seattle Central Library and the Stata Center at MIT), hideous to many, but not all, people. (The order would ban both styles.) Some “classical’’ architecture can look silly, with columns looking pasted on in an effort to make a building appear Graeco-Roman (and instant old); or they can recall sterile, heavy Stalinist or even Nazi-era creations.

But many people (including me) find some modern architecture gorgeous. Consider the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington or the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.

The selection of architects, and of the many other people involved in getting public buildings up, should depend on their appreciation of beauty (modified by functional needs and budgetary constraints) of design and quality of materials, whatever the style. And public buildings should look as if they’re going to stand for a long, long time, as we hope (more nervously these days) the country will. Why circumscribe creativity as much as Trump wants to do? There’s a lot of it out there.

Classic “classical’’ — The National Archives, in Washington, D.C.

Pay them to occupy storefronts

Typical New England Main Street, this one in Webster, Mass., an old factory town.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

Far too many downtowns have been hollowed out first by big-box chain stores and their windswept parking lots on the edge of town and then by the Internet -- especially by the near-monopoly Amazon.

So some state legislators in Massachusetts, which has many once-thriving and now moribund, if still-pretty, downtowns,  seek to revitalize them with an economic-development bill that, reports The Boston Globe, “would provide up to $500,000 a year in tax credits to merchants who {decide to} occupy vacant storefronts in downtown areas. The promise of new jobs would help a retailer’s case, but it’s not required. Other factors could come into play: anticipated pedestrian traffic, synergy with nearby businesses, a commitment to improve the storefront, matching funds from a landlord or community.’’

This would have to be a long-term experiment but, depending on the total price tag, worth a try in a few places. The big question is whether you can lure consumers who  have grown addicted to the Internet back into  the habit of patronizing small stores, for their visual, tactile and social pleasures. This little initiative is as much about rebuilding a sense of community as it is about economic development.

Maybe Rhode Island should try this sort of experiment in, well,  Pawtucket – especially if the PawSox decide to become the WorSox.