[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 52 (Thursday, April 15, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3770-S3771]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  NORTHAMPTON, MA--A REVITALIZED CITY

  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, today's New York Times contains an 
excellent article by William L. Hamilton on the city of Northampton in 
Massachusetts and the remarkable revitalization that has taken place in 
the city in recent years. Northampton is also the subject of a soon-to-
be published book, Home Town, by Tracy Kidder, in which the author 
captures the spirit and essence of community that has turned this 
former small mill town into the cultural, historic and economically 
revitalized city it is today.
  I also commend the woman responsible for much of this successful 
revitalization, Mayor Mary Ford. For the past 8 years, Mayor Ford has 
brought a new spirit to the city with her many successful initiatives. 
Northampton's schools are renovated, its streets are safer, its water 
is cleaner, its housing is more affordable, and its roads are more 
accessible.
  Mayor Ford has also demonstrated impressive leadership in making 
Northampton a leading cultural center of Western Massachusetts. The 
city is home to the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts, 
Paradise City Arts Festival, the Northampton Film Festival, and the 
newly restored historic Calvin Threatre.
  Mayor Ford is on the front lines every day, making an important 
difference in the lives of families in Northampton, and she's done a 
remarkable job. The people of Northampton and all of us in 
Massachusetts are proud of her outstanding leadership, and we commend 
her for making Northampton the vital city that it is today. Well done, 
Mayor Ford, and keep up the great work!
  Mr. President. I ask unanimous consent that the article by William L. 
Hamilton in today's New York Times be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Apr. 15, 1999]

                  Northampton, MA--a Revitalized City

                        (By William L. Hamilton)

       Northampton, a city of 30,000 in western Massachusetts, has 
     been raising issues of community for more than 300 years--
     charity, self-interest, tolerance and division. They are 
     issues as fresh today as they were in the 19th century, when 
     Northampton was painted as a heavenly view by Thomas Cole and 
     described with affection by Henry James in his first novel, 
     ``Roderick Hudson.'' They were raised when it hanged two 
     innocent immigrant Irishmen in 1806 for suspected murder and 
     when it tried a police officer, a native son, for the rape of 
     his own child, during the four years that Tracy Kidder spent 
     reporting his new book, ``Home Town'' (Random House), to be 
     published in May.
       Mr. Kidder, 53, lives in nearby Williamsburg with his wife, 
     Frances, a painter, but considers Northampton his home, too. 
     As he proudly showed it to a visitor recently, the city give 
     him a parking ticket. No place is prefect.
       Like ``The Soul of a New Machine,'' his Pulitzer Prize-
     winning account of the development of a new computer and the 
     advent of the computer age, ``Home Town'' is the portrait of 
     a cultural phenomenon, seen through the lies of the people 
     creating it. It is also the story of a particular town, and 
     how it has made itself a home. The citizens whose experiences 
     are observed in literary detail, from a local judge to a 
     cocaine addict, could be members of a family, sheltered by a 
     civic roof.
       In this decade, in a successful reverse of the demographic 
     direction of the century, more Americans are now moving from 
     big cities to small towns than from small towns to big 
     cities. A 30-year migration by young professionals, baby 
     boomers and retirees from cities and suburbs to rural, 
     exurban areas has produced a new generation of what are being 
     called ``boomtowns.'' Two hour by car from Boston and three 
     hours from New York, Northampton, an ex-industrial mill town, 
     pretty and preserved, is now the product of settlement like 
     this.
       Despite an annual decrease in the city's birth rate, the 
     population has remained steady, which city planners attribute 
     to ``income migration.'' said Wayne Feiden, the director of 
     planning and development. ``Who's coming? A lot of well-
     educated professionals, attracted by a town that's amenity-
     rich and very comfortable to live it.''
       Mr. Kidder, who moved to the area in 1976, is part of the 
     trend. Now, he has filed his report: a firsthand look at life 
     in the type of peaceful place that many find themselves 
     sorely tempted to try. Not everyone stays--native or new 
     arrival. In portraying Northampton, Mr. Kidder has 
     attempted to assemble a set of natural laws, and sides of 
     human nature, that explain what makes any town work, or 
     how it can fail those who love it the most.
       To those making the move, cities like Northampton are dots 
     on a map chosen on a Sunday visit for their size, their 
     safety, their qualities of life and their nostalgia. They are 
     the garden cities of childhood--the kind of hometown they 
     don't build anymore, the kind they may never have.
       ``I was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island,'' 
     Mr. Kidder said recently, ``in a place, Oyster Bay, that kind 
     of vanished as I was growing up. Whole towns disappeared, it 
     would seem, under cloverleafs.''
       He was walking down the gentle slope of Northampton's Main 
     Street, away from the tiny, turreted city hall, past the 
     Academy of Music, a Moorish 106-year-old municipally operated 
     theater, now showing ``Shakespeare in Love.'' A woman in a 
     floral skirt that brushed the tops of her cowboy boots was 
     offering strollers copies of her book on tape. A squat 
     signboard for the Fire and Water Vegetarian Cafe and 
     Performance Space sat like a toad by the curb. There was a 
     branch office of Dean Witter Reynolds across the street.
       Northampton is blessed by confluence and circumstance. 
     Bounded by the Mount Tom and Holyoke hills and threaded by 
     the Connecticut and Mill rivers, it is also circled by

[[Page S3771]]

     institution: Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount 
     Holyoke College, the University of Massachusetts and, sitting 
     at the head of Main Street, the Smith College campus, 
     designed in 1875 by Frederick Law Olmstead. The 19th-century 
     state mental hospital is now abandoned. The poet Sylvia 
     Plath, an undergraduate at Smith in the 1950's, wrote to her 
     mother of walking in the evening to a professor's house for a 
     cocktail party, ``listening to the people screaming.''
       Main Street bends slowly through the town, side streets 
     flowing into it, like a third river. ``There are some magical 
     things about this that couldn't have been planned,'' Mr. 
     Kidder said, speaking of the setting's majestic gait. ``This 
     broad sweep that Main Street makes, it makes simply because 
     of the topography, before you had earth-moving equipment.''
       Northampton's recent history has a familiar plot--a 
     downtown rescued in the 1970's by creative real estate 
     developers and resident pioneers who discovered and 
     reinvented its historic infrastructure. It is an 
     architectural routine: with restoration and new, 
     entertainment-oriented businesses, the low brick buildings, 
     Victorian clapboard houses, Art Deco theater and a Gothic 
     chess set of city hall and courthouse become an animated Main 
     Street. In Northampton, there are apartments above the 
     shops, stimulating street life at night. The crosswalks at 
     the intersection of Main and King streets, where the town 
     converges, are wired with speakers that signal sonically 
     for the blind and stop traffic in four directions, letting 
     strollers spill momentarily into the square.
       To the casual eye, it can look more like a marketing 
     concept than a place to live--a factory town retooled by the 
     wish list of the latte generation. A bookshop's magazine 
     display offers an informal census of Northampton's new 
     citizens and visitors: Raygun, Natural History, Birdwatcher's 
     Digest, American Craft, Bike, Fine Homebuilding, Interview, 
     The Writer, Outside, Macworld and Out. The town has been the 
     subject of a ``20/20'' segment because of a large gay and 
     lesbian population.
       ``It's tempting to parody, but it's too easy,'' Mr. Kidder 
     said, crossing the intersection of Main and King as the 
     crosswalks beep-beeped like Saturday cartoon characters. To 
     the citizenry, it appeared to produce genuine wonderment--
     rainbow-haired teen-agers, mothers in Polartec, men in linen 
     sweaters and loafers without socks crowded the open 
     intersection, as cars on four sides sat muzzled like dogs, 
     waiting for the lights. ``What you see is pretty motley, but 
     there is a solid mainstream, an almost invisible background 
     to it,'' he said.
       Like any town, Northampton is many town, including a town 
     with a native population. As Mr. Kidder writes, the 
     ``Gentrification Is War'' graffito, written prominently on a 
     building downtown, is now softly faded. But two particular 
     towns live together like a couple in a brokered marriage that 
     may or may never grow into love. ``Hamp,'' or native 
     Northampton, shops on the strip of King Street as it leaves 
     town at Main Street, not in ``NoHo,'' or the revitalized 
     downtown, for which Main Street provides the artery.
       ``In all of downtown, I don't think you can buy a socket 
     wrench,'' Mr. Kidder said. ``When you look at old pictures, 
     there were nothing but hardware stores.''
       Because of its newcomers, Northampton is a big, little 
     place, pressured by the demands of the present on the past. 
     ``Without argument, a place begins to go dead,'' Mr. Kidder 
     said, walking on Pleasant Street, where many single-room 
     occupancy houses remain--a short block from Main Street's 
     consumer circus. Local government has kept them there to 
     enforce the town's economic heterogeneity. ``You've got to 
     have this tension. You've got to find a way to let lots of 
     different kinds of people in, and keep them there.''
       Mr. Kidder is not ambivalent about Northampton, but he is 
     not foolish, either, ``It's got problems, of course,'' he 
     said, reciting the national roster of gang crime and 
     homelessness and a drug problem in the local schools that is 
     conspicuous for the state. He was at the bar of the Bay State 
     Hotel, a favorite spot opposite the restored train station, 
     now Spaghetti Freddy's, drinking a Diet Coke. Sitting in the 
     dimly lighted, yellow-wood-paneled tavern, with its etched 
     Budweiser mirror, painting of Emmett Kelly and silent 
     blinking jukebox was like being inside a Christmas tree at 
     night. ``And what limits the size of the town is jobs,'' said 
     Mr. Kidder, who is self-employed. ``The largest employer, 
     which was the state mental hospital, closed its doors years 
     ago.''
       Wayne Feiden, the planning director, concurred. ``Whenever 
     you see polls in Money magazine and the rest, about the best 
     towns, we never make it,'' he said. ``The jobs aren't 
     there.'' Mr. Feiden added that the danger of being a boomtown 
     was that well-paid professionals like doctors and lawyers, of 
     whom there are many in Northampton, who moved there for its 
     charms, would move on, frustrated from feeling underpaid. 
     ``It's why they don't stay.''
       If Northampton does not, despite restored facades, present 
     an unblemished picture, Mr. Kidder makes a strong case that 
     the beauty of a place is not in its skin--it is in its 
     people. They are the simple and dramatic acts and the 
     descriptive faces of his book. They are, he contends, the 
     genius of a place.
       Mr. Kidder's ``Home Town'' hero is a native, who, as the 
     book concludes, leaves Northampton for the wider world, freed 
     of his ``nick-names,'' as Mr. Kidder characterized the linked 
     chain of time spent growing up in the same small town.
       ``It seemed to make too much wholesome sense, from a 
     distance,'' Mr. Kidder said, speaking of Northampton. ``And 
     then I ran into this cop,'' he said. ``Tommy O'Connor, at the 
     gym that I go to.''
       Mr. Kidder was back at his house, not the home built for a 
     professional couple in Amherst and chronicled in his 1985 
     book, ``House,'' but a converted creamery on a mill river 
     that runs beneath the dining room windows. He greeted his 
     daughter, Alice, 20, who walked into the kitchen with a bag 
     of groceries from Bread and Circus, a natural-foods 
     supermarket. She pulled mixing bowls from the cupboards to 
     make dessert for dinner--profiteroles, for guests.
       ``Tommy's a very gregarious guy,'' Mr. Kidder recalled. 
     ``He said, `You don't remember me, do you?' I said no, He 
     said, `Well, I arrested you for speeding five years ago.' '' 
     An electric mixer began clattering in a bowl. ``This guy with 
     a shiny dome had been a curly-haired cop then.'' Mr. Kidder 
     said. ``I remember that after he gave me the ticket, he said, 
     `Have a nice day.' ''
       Mr. Kidder smiled at the recollection; Mr. O'Connor, who 
     now lives in Washington and works for the Federal Bureau of 
     Investigation, remains a friend.
       ``Anyway, he said, `Why don't you come out and ride with me 
     some night?' He said he'd show me a town I never imagined 
     existed.'' It was, of course, Northampton.
       Mr. Kidder said, ``And he was right.''

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