A look into one future: I dream a little dream of urban life

By BILL CHAISSON
I work in Claremont, so I have this daydream — or perhaps it is a vision — of this downtown more often than I do for Springfield or Windsor, Vermont or for Newport, but I do the same sort of thing whenever I am in those places. I imagine what a downtown would be like were it once again a place where people lived, worked, shopped, and recreated. 

We have a reader who lives in California but grew up in Claremont in the 1950s, and he still recalls all the businesses that used to occupy the buildings on the streets that radiate out from what used to be Tremont Square. He included a long list in one of his emails to the newspaper, and I was impressed with not only the number, but the variety of businesses.

I happen to like urban living, which to me is about being able to walk everywhere to get everything done that needs doing. I grew up in city of 30,000 on Long Island and one of 13,000 in the Hudson Valley. During college I spent a semester in Copen-hagen, Denmark. I moved to the Boston area after graduation and lived in Somerville, the most densely populated city in Massachusetts. I then moved to New York City and lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Eventually I found myself in Rochester, New York, a city of 250,000 people, and then Ithaca, New York, a city and town that, combined, are home to 50,000 people. In between I have done my level best to live in villages where I could walk to amenities.

I don’t see the point of living out in the country unless you are going to work there. Farmers and loggers, and all the folks who help farmers and loggers do what they do, have a reason to live in a rural setting. Everyone else is just out there for the privacy, which just seems wrong to me. For one thing sprawling over the natural landscape interrupts the ecosystems out there. A forest dotted with half-acre lawns, crossed by half-mile-long driveways, and populated with dogs and cats is a forest faced with challenges it doesn’t need. People whinge on about not wanting to look at windmills and claim that they kill too many birds. Sorry, but the collective work of a continent full of rural cats kills a couple orders of magnitude more birds than do the blades of wind turbines.

I have my Claremont daydream a lot because when I moved here six months ago I couldn’t find a place to live in the city. (Journalists don’t make enough money to buy a house; we rent.) So, I ended up living in Unity. Now, I live in downtown Unity in the sense that I can walk to the Unity general store and I see the town offices, the fire station and the school from where I live. And I like the people I’ve met in Unity (are they called Unitarians?), but I am just not loving driving 15 minutes back and forth to work everyday. 15 minutes! Is that all? you are probably saying. Well, yes, that’s too much time and gasoline for my liking.

If I walked for 15 minutes I could cover a mile. A mile from Opera House square would get me to the neighborhood of the hospital to the north, halfway to the airport on the west, and beyond Pleasant Street Cemetery on the south. I would be in better shape too. Honestly, by nature I’m an apartment dweller, so if all the masonry buildings were filled with usable apartments, I’d be happy to live in one. Instead, too many of them are standing vacant or being shut down for code violations like the Goddard Block.

If all of those buildings were filled with “market rate” housing, then the population of downtown Claremont would rise sharply. These folks are an automatic customer base for storefront businesses. These people shouldn’t have to drive to find a place to sit down and have a cup of coffee among familiar faces. They shouldn’t have to drive if they want to see some live music. They shouldn’t have to drive if they want to drop by a friend’s house for dinner, have four glasses of wine, and then go home. Driving your car should be something you do a few times a week, not multiple times per day.

The interesting thing is: this is actually a (at least partly) realizable lifestyle in Claremont (and probably Springfield, Newport and maybe even Windsor) right now. If I had managed to find a downtown apartment here, there are already businesses here where I could get fresh baked goods and coffee, locally grown and raised groceries, clothing, spices from around the world, wine, and books. Heck, I could even take in the occasional live music and theatre performance. In other words, the basics of an urban life are already present here. 

The real shortcoming is housing. This is why — following on my column of yesterday — it is so important to assign true values to these downtown buildings (and, of course, everywhere else in the city): because they are in rough shape. So, a realistic and low assessed value allows someone to (1) have enough capital to invest in improvements and (2) not get slaughtered by property taxes before and while they are making those improvements. 

People seem to think of a downtown as primarily a place to visit, and that’s fine, but downtown businesses need a base of truly local customers that use them every day. When the weather is terrible, the locals will still scurry down the street for their coffee, a newspaper, and a dozen eggs. They will still show up for the theatre performance. And on the nights when the weather is fine, and the theatre performance is over, the downtown people will be thinking about the next stage of their evening, when all the other folks are just looking for their car keys.

 

Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times and he is still looking for a good bagel around here.