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TODAY Monday 23 June 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: The Emily Dickinson Parking Garage

Things turn slow in Amherst, Massachusetts at this time of year. The students are departed, the tennis campers are yet to come, and the faculty have gone to ground. "There are three good reasons to become a college professor," said Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel laureate who lived down the road, "June, July, and August."

Though Robert Frost -- Brodsky's favorite American poet -- lived on Sunset Street from 1931 to 1939, the area around Amherst is not the stony, begrudging New Hampshire-type land associated with his verse. The town center sits on a tableland which was the shoreline of Lake Hitchcock, a 160-mile long body created when glacial debris dammed the Connecticut River near its present-day mouth. Ten thousand years ago the dam broke, the Connecticut reverted to its channel, and Amherst and the neighboring town of Hadley were coated with an icing of lakebottom to go on the alluvial cake deposited by millions of years of erosion in the surrounding hills. The place is great farmland, and it was well settled and fortified by the English before the end of the 17th Century.

By the early 19th Century, soil fertility and Yankee diligence had produced a prosperity ample enough that the locals could consider establishing a college. The natural Acropolis of the Amherst tableland made it the logical site, and Amherst College was duly founded as a Congregationalist place of learning.(The first major building was Johnson Chapel, and it still thrusts above the treeline, the only part of Amherst Center visible from the Interstate.) Unlike ambitious Northampton across the river, Amherst had only modest mercantile pretensions, and invested its municipal zeal into farms and schools. When Abraham Lincoln signed the law that established the federal land-grant college system, Amherst eagerly and successfully lobbied the legislature to win the siting of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, now the University of Massachusetts. Soon after, Town Meeting adopted the official town seal, a plow emblazoned on an open book.

It was during this period that Emily Dickinson, member of an esteemed Amherst family, tended a large garden, wrote poems, and each year submitted a pastry to be judged at the agricultural fair. She won many ribbons at the fair, and her contemporaries knew her more for her gardening and pies than for any literary productions.

The town remains a bucolic place with intellectual aspirations. Or perhaps it's just an asylum for information-economy liberals with fuzzy illusions about rural life. But either way, it's really quite pretty. There are still farms in Amherst, most of them subsidized by a state fund that purchases development rights, and many fields and wooded hills accessible to the citizenry (both public land and land owned by the schools, which post a few No Trespassing signs for insurance purposes). The soil will grow anything that survives a deep frost, and the whole area just erupts into green each June, trees and grasses, wild and ultra-cultivated. Nearly everyone raises something. Summers are hot, made bearable by the verdure, the great town swimming pond, and the relative emptiness of the de-studented downtown. It's all a little unreal, and either pleasant or precious depending on your mood.

But one person's peaceful retreat is another person's disappointing bottom line. Amherst merchants complain that the town is insufficiently shopping-friendly. We're not taking advantage of our potential as a "destination." The main problem, they say, is a dearth of convenient parking. Why not build a parking garage? Northampton did, after all, and it's really quite attractive and, more to the point, it's usually full. This made sense to the Finance Committee, worried about the tax base, and it made sense to the Planning Committee, worried about the lack of new things to plan, and before you knew it (well, more or less), you're reading the paper to find that there are two competing "final designs" for the new parking garage that's going to be built next to the apartments for the elderly.

Whoa. The sleeping giant of Amherst social democracy is aroused at last. A parking garage? More cars? What? Time for a plebiscite, preceded by months of wrangling and long instructional letters to the Amherst Bulletin. The merchants are solid. Every storefront in town, from the capuccino cafe to the organic Chinese restaurant, has a sign in the window that says "YES! to the Parking Garage." (The only exception is Il Pirata, the little Neapolitan restaurant with the slow service. Speculation is divided between those who think that the two Italian guys who own it are principled anarchists, a la Sacco and Vanzetti, and those who think they forgot the Scotch Tape.)

But Amherst is still a plow-and-book kind of place, and the anti-garage forces are gathering strength. Basically, they feel that although many of the business owners are rather nice, the profitability of their enterprises and the expanded tax base that will ensue just aren't as important as the ugliness of a parking garage and the inconvenience of the traffic that will be drawn to it. If a few stores defect to Northampton or the malls -- too bad, but hey, we still run this place and, no, we don't want to become another Princeton or another Palo Alto or whatever. This reasonable view is less socially acceptable, however, than one which invokes environmental values. Consequently, much of the anti-garage argumentation talks about the destructive impact of private automobiles -- a line of harangue well known to visitors to Liberty Tree -- which generally are defined as automobiles belonging to somebody else.

Well, hypocrisy is the Vaseline of social intercourse, as Henry Beard once said, and there's no use expecting judiciousness, much less saintliness, in local politics. Personally, I'm for a No vote on the garage -- unless we follow Fred Hapgood's lead and build it underground -- followed by near-interminable civic discussions that eventually lead to the reinstatement of the trolley service that used to run right by Emily Dickinson's old house.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Amherst town fathers and mothers would be well advised to ask Keith Bartholomew what he thinks. Keith runs 1000 Friends of Oregon, one of the most distinguished and influential local non-profit planning group in the country. The experiences of Portland have some pertinence for the Connecticut River Valley. Give a look at his High Five on Land Use Planning.

 

Last week's "Today" columns:

6/20: Dude Wilderness
6/19: Stormy Weather
6/18: Nostalgia
6/17: Air War
6/16: Pray for Swelter

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