Repair the infrastructure and they will come for the buildings

By BILL CHAISSON
We have watched with interest as the Main Street reconstruction project has progressed. The Eagle Times office on Crescent Street is only about 20 yards from Main Street and the heavy equipment has been rattling the windows and shaking the building for many weeks. Our windows are also coated with fine dirt. For several weeks it was at intervals difficult to get into the office and impossible to park in the parking garage.

Rumors about the project were common. At one point I was told that only a base level of paving would be done in the fall and the finish layer would be applied in the spring. We interviewed the supervising engineer of the project and found out that this is so; an inch and a half of “top coat” will be applied next spring.

Last Friday they paved the uphill half of the road, from the Pearl Street intersection up to Opera House Square. The weather seemed to have delayed the schedule; downpours on two or three occasions eroded deep channels in the dirt, which then had to be regraded. The crews have now double-backed to the Lower Village section and I can see that they are setting the stone curbs for the sidewalk construction.

I find it fascinating that asphalt sidewalks seem to be the norm in Claremont. Perhaps because there is so much limestone — an important ingredient in cement — in upstate New York, but I am used to concrete sidewalks, with asphalt being regarded as a bad idea. I have seen it used as a patching medium and it inevitably crumbles relatively rapidly. Using the same paving for both the road and the sidewalk also seems like a safety issue to me; the bright white surface of the sidewalks draws definite boundaries to the roadway. Still, I can see how anyone on a skateboard or pushing a baby stroller would find asphalt sidewalks to be superior.

One thing that I have not fully understood about the public’s relationship with construction projects — wherever I have lived — is everyone’s impatience with the fact they are not completed instantaneously. I inevitably hear people complain that this disruption of their routine lives is going on seemingly forever. And their tone is that of a person who has been consigned to the seventh circle of Hell for no discernible reason and they are finding his grossly unjust.

Businesses that front a torn-up road actually have something to complain about and are certainly excused from feeling put upon. But members of general public act who as if having to follow a detour is some kind of monumental imposition in their daily lives need to find some perspective.

An exception in my experience are the residents of New York City, who accept construction as a normal part of everyday life. That is a city that constantly tearing itself down and rebuilding, generally bigger, higher and shinier than before. New Yorkers seem stunned when construction ends and may be somewhat out of sorts because “I was just getting used it, and the scaffolding was keeping the sidewalk dry.”

Places like Claremont and Springfield, to pick the two most densely settled and masonry-laden places in our coverage age, desperately need construction. Happily, New England municipalities tend to renovate old buildings instead of tearing them down (like New Yorkers do), so construction is more often about rebuilding than building new. 

The Main Street project in Claremont removed a lot of ancient and obsolete infrastructure underground (which is entirely why it is taking so long), but its completion presents an opportunity to rehabilitate several of the buildings along that street that have been mercifully spared the wrecking ball. 

If the city wonders why people aren’t exactly snapping up the vacant historical properties here, they might want to look a the roads in front them, which are often a complete mess. It is, of course, a classic Catch-22: how can you repair the roads if you don’t have the tax base to bring the revenue to pay for it? Now that improved financial practices have raised the city’s Moody rating, perhaps bonding is the answer.

At the dedication ceremony for the Guy Santagate bridge a few weeks ago, I learned from the candid remarks of several speakers, that the historic buildings of Claremont had been spared, not because of the local adoration of their enduring beauty (although that does seem to exist), but because the city couldn’t actually afford to tear them down. In Springfield I heard voices suggesting in a public meeting that the Park Street school building should be torn down, but it is still standing, perhaps more out of financial inertia than preservationist zeal, and now there is an ambitious project afoot to make it into a live-work-play incubator for Millennial tech types. That was apparently sort of the plan for the Monadnock Mills buildings in Claremont, but the “live” part of it didn’t happen while the work (Red River) and play (Common Man) parts of it seem to be doing well.

Now that Main Street is repaved from Elm Street to Opera House square, there is a very presentable path into downtown Claremont. Now that outsiders can coast smoothly into the center of town instead of bouncing through potholes, maybe they will take a fresh look at these 19th and early 20th century buildings and say, “I know what I can do with that.”

 

Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times and has poured concrete but not asphalt.