Time for the Quarterly Mea Culpa: Been Busy

Although I am a strong believer in the general principle that entering into the world of social media means a sustained commitment to that activity, I am also all too aware that life sometimes intervenes, and blogging activity therefore waxes and wanes. And sometimes, even within that natural cycle, there are spikes: the equivalent of tonight's so-called (and over-hyped) "Supermoon." Admittedly, we are more likely to notice the lows rather than the highs.

The fact is: most of us have other commitments, many of which legitimately take precedence. I have a good many acquaintances in the blogosphere. Some drop temporarily out of sight when busy with daily work or completing a book or other project. Some, exhausted from publishing multiple posts per day on current events month after month, in addition to their paying day jobs but for no material reward, decide to call it quits or "go on hiatus" for an undetermined period (which probably helped many a career and yes, perhaps, marriage). Yet others, by contrast (God only knows how), just keep going on all cylinders and all fronts.

In my case, it's simply been a matter of first things first. 2012 has proven to be unexpectedly busy: mainly in good ways, I am pleased to report.

For the most part, it has been the "day job" that has kept me busy: some travel during winter and spring breaks, completing the search for and hiring a stellar new library director at Hampshire College, wading through a resultant backlog of student work, and then mainly just teaching classes and (this being the spring semester) supervising theses of graduating seniors: some great ones; reading them, at once pleasurable and instructive.

At the same time, I've been busy with related academic activities:  writing the introduction to an intriguing memoir of women's experience in interwar Belgium and World War II Britain (1, 2), and several book reviews. In addition: revising plans for our Hampshire College field study program in Prague and Kraków and developing a new one with a focus on historic preservation and heritage studies at the Master's level in collaboration with Rutgers University.

Then there is the Town of Amherst. The first half of the year is also when your Town government moves into high gear in preparation for annual Town Meeting. The Joint Capital Planning Committee, on which I serve with Diana Stein as one of two representatives from the Select Board, begins meeting in the fall but turns to a detailed review of new spending proposals from January through April, in preparation for debate on the budget at spring Town Meeting. The Select Board itself has to review and take positions on the articles on the warrant.

Although there are a number of "political" petition articles on the warrant this year—i.e. those that take stands on supra-local issues such as national security and human rights, my bet is that those that meet basic standards of legality and administrative pragmatism/fiduciary responsibility will pass easily. The most controversial articles, by contrast, are likely to be those dealing with the rezoning of Atkins Corner and North Amherst village centers (Articles 24 and 25), and the proposal to create a "local historic district" in the Dickinson historic district downtown (Article 27). All are vital to the future of a sustainable Amherst, and all require a steep two-thirds majority.

At any rate, I take solace in the fact that this blog is not primarily concerned with news and contemporary events, and so, most of what I have to say can usually wait. (To the extent that I do need to comment on pressing political issues, I do that at Select Board and Town Meeting [video here], or on the Town Meeting Listserve—also known as the "Yahoo List.")

And in the interim, I have all along continued to share information and views with my friends on Twitter: that's where one finds real immediacy. It's the daily bread of social media for me, which I attend to religiously (more on that later). Just follow me at @CitizenWald.

The Shape of Our Politics (candidate statement deadline today, and more)

Speaking of deadlines: As most Amherst residents know, the 2010 census resulted in a redistricting not only of congressional seats, but also of Town Meeting. The office of the Town Clerk, GIS staff, and a citizen Districting Advisory Board worked hard to come up with new districts that meet that met the daunting legal standards of proper proportions and shape.

Just over a year ago, there was one unrelated glitch, when the Select Board and Clerk's Office, misinterpreting news stories on the closing of North Church as the home of regular worship, inadvertently reassigned the voting site for Precinct 1 from that congregation's parish hall to Immanuel Lutheran Church in the neighboring precinct. (For better or worse, I was stranded out of town on that Monday and was thus unaware of the screw-up until I returned home and began to receive irate emails from fellow residents of my hyperboreal precinct.) Soon thereafter, the Select Board rectified the mistake.

But back to deadlines. Because of the redistricting, all 240 seats representing the 10 precincts in Amherst Town Meeting are up for grabs this year, rather than being distributed over a triennial cycle. (In order to restore the triennial system, highest vote-getters in each precinct will get three-year terms, the next-highest will get two-year terms, and the remaining winners will get one-year terms.)

Citizens had to submit nomination papers by Valentine's Day (love that).

Meanwhile, the last deadline is upon us:  candidates are asked to submit brief statements about themselves and their reasons for running to the League of Women Voters by the end of the day today (these will also appear in the Amherst Bulletin shortly before the election). It's especially important this year, and yet, because of the larger-than-usual number of candidates, statements will have to be shorter than usual. The cunning of reason again, I guess. The winners will get plenty of chance to talk in Town Meeting, and having to distill one's personal-political "mission statement" into a mere 40 words (only about 40 percent more than a "tweet," if we reckon a word at the traditional five characters) is good practice for having to give a speech in two to three minutes.

And history?

One reason that we are mandated to come up with basically compact and contiguous districts of roughly equal population with a compelling rationale is that redistricting was, historically, abused: at first for mundane partisan-political purposes, and more recently, for racist or other discriminatory purposes. The mother of all cynical redistrictings was of course the "Gerrymander," celebrating its 200th anniversary this year (one of the February anniversaries I was not able to note in time), named after (sad to say, yes:) our Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry (last name pronounced, by the way, with a hard "G" rather than a "J").

As the always informative and often entertaining Mass Moments (a project of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities) explains:

...in 1812, a political monster — the "Gerrymander" — was born in the Massachusetts State House. Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a bill that created oddly-shaped voting districts in several parts of the state. The lines of these districts gave Gerry's party an advantage in the upcoming election. An artist added a head, wings, and claws to the strange shape that was the governor's new home district and declared it looked like a salamander. A quick-witted friend decided a better name was "Gerry-mander." Within a month, the image appeared as a cartoon in the local papers and gerrymander, later gerrymander [with a soft "g"], entered the language. The term has referred ever since to any deliberate redrawing of voting districts to influence the outcome of an election.

None of that stuff here.

Turn in your statements.

Vote early, vote often.

Amherst Village Center Rezoning: A Conversation

As the final day of Annual Town Meeting approaches, there are still plenty of questions about the proposed rezoning of the North Amherst Village Center and the emerging Village Center at Atkins Corner in South Amherst.

Those questions concern both the general proposed uses and the new overlay of "form-based codes," which are an established planning and smart-growth tool but not one that is yet familiar to the general public.

Last week, Amherst Media invited several of us involved in the process to engage in a brief conversation about the process, for the benefit of Town Meeting members and other residents.

The task was, briefly, to explain at once the general logic behind rezoning of village centers, the specifics of the proposed uses for these two areas, and the nature of the new "form-based codes," which take the place of traditional dimensional regulation.


Taking part were:

• Rob Crowner, member of the Planning Board, who will make the motion at Town Meeting. (Rob is a past Chair of the Public Works Committee and member of the Comprehensive Planning Committee.)

• Laura Fitch: architect and North Amherst resident (Pulpit Hill Co-Housing). In her professional capacity, Laura is employed by fellow North Amherst resident Barbara Puffer-Garnier to design plans for one of the proposed new developments in the village center.

• Me: I, too, am a North Amherst resident, as well as a member of the Select Board (I will be presenting our official position on the article at Town Meeting). As the former Chair of both the Comprehensive Planning Committee and the Historical Commission, I am also very much engaged with issues of sustainability and how they relate to historic and neighborhood character.

• Sarah LaCour: a professional planner and historic preservationist, currently employed in North Amherst as Director of Conservation and Planning, W. D. Cowls, Inc. Land Company. W. D. Cowls is among the property-owners proposing new development in the district.

 Further coverage: meetings and interviews relevant to the zoning article, from Amherst Media (ACTV).

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Snowtober Snapshots

Just a few scenes of damage and continuing clean-up:

outside Police Station

Sweetser Park

Hampshire College clean-up

Hampshire College clean-up

Hampshire College: broken apple tree outside my office

Hampshire College: the weight of the snow uprooted this tree outside my office

all that is left

crews still at work in North Amherst November 14

crews still at work in North Amherst November 14

crews still at work in North Amherst November 14

crews still at work in North Amherst November 14

Breaking News Broken: Planning Board Decides to Do . . . Nothing

I had hoped to be able to post a fuller report of the four and a half hours of deliberations by the Zoning Subcommittee and Planning Board last night. However, fate is not cooperating. The latest bulletin from Town Hall announced that 99% of Amherst residents were expected to have power by 6:00 p.m. Unfortunately, I find myself in the 1 percent. For Occupy Wall Street, I'd be part of the 99%, and I'd much rather be in that category in this case, as well.
In any case, since I am forced to give an abridged report: Jonathan O'Keeffe of the ZSC, working with Planning staff, had crafted a set of proposed compromise amendments to the North Amherst warrant article, addressing the strongest objections by a vocal group of Amherst residents, as well as other likely concerns of Town Meeting members.
The Planning Board, after much back-and-forth, rejected these recommendations, mainly on the grounds that they seemed to undo the Board's previous stance, taken through due process and at the appointed time. Mr. O'Keeffe withdrew the motion. The Board then likewise declined to consider an alternative motion that would have signaled the Board's willingness to endorse any hypothetical Town Meeting amendment in the spirit of the recently withdrawn motion. (Got that?). And so it went.
As the hour grew late, a hopefully offered move to adjourn found no second. This allowed time for debate on changing the current "date certain" on which Town Meeting was to take up the Rezoning article. The result: another discussion that in the end left things exactly as they had stood when the meeting began.
It's a shame, really: each argument had some merit. The proponents of the amended article hoped to address significant resident concerns, and thereby to give the controversial measure a better chance of success. Of course, the initial endorsement by the ZSC irritated the originators of proposed new denser development projects. The Planning Board's refusal to endorse the amendments, although rooted in an avowed desire to uphold the integrity of that body's process and preserve the full and proper deliberative rights of Town Meeting, irritated already restive residents.
As a result, both contending parties--the protesting petitioners and the prospective builders--were angered. And everyone who attended the meeting (I wager) went home frustrated as well as tired.

Breaking: Zoning Subcommittee Recommends that Planning Board Backtrack on Controversial Intensified Use in North Amherst

Responding to an outcry from a group of North Amherst residents, the ZSC tonight recommended that the Planning Board keep a portion of Montague Road under its current residential neighborhood zoning, rather than the proposed marginally more intense village center residential. In addition, it bowed to residents' wishes in proposing that not only apartment buildings, but also townhouses be allowed only by special permit rather than the less stringent site plan review. The Planning Board meets at 7:00 to take up this issue as well as hear a presentation by the Cecil Group, the consultants for the rezoning of both North Amherst village center and Atkins Corner, an emerging de facto village center in South Amherst.
Sent from my iPhone

Snowtober, Snowmageddon: whatever you call it, it's pretty nasty

Nobody expected the early October snow to be quite this bad and disruptive here in the northeast--much more so, as the New York Times pointed out today (at least the paper came) than Hurricane Irene.

I somehow ended up in the middle of it. I had to forgo the Amherst House tour—a benefit for the Amherst Historical Society and Museum, on whose board I serve—because I had earlier agreed to chair a session at the Northeast British Studies conference in Worcester. It was a very enjoyable time, though the anticipation of bad weather on the way home took some of the pleasure out the event. It proved far worse than anticipated. Many people on the road that weekend decided to seek accommodations rather than travel further, and hotel rooms quickly filled up. I was intent on going back in any case, but I did decide to convoy with a colleague. Slushy and slippery roads and at times near-blinding snow slowed traffic to a crawl, so that a trip that should have taken about 80-90 minutes lasted nearly four hours. I saw a good many accidents, ranging from cars that ran into ditches to those that hit guardrails head-on. There seemed to be at least one serious accident involving a large trailer-truck and a car. Even coming through Amherst, there were delays: trees down all over. Route 116 north of UMass was blocked by debris and emergency vehicles.

When I came home, there was still electricity, though lights flickered a few times. The power finally went out late in the evening. Reports indicated that 9,000 of WMECO's 126,000 customers were without electricity (which at least allowed me to quip that I was now among the 93 percent as well as the proverbial "99 percent.") Temperature in our house dropped to about 45 degrees Fahrenheit at night, but a woodstove in the addition made life more comfortable.

There was severe tree damage--blocking roads and downing power lines--throughout town and in particular, it seemed, at the norther end. Damage in our yard was not severe, but nonetheless sad: a dogwood and at least one of the antique apple trees near the house broke (because the trees still have their leaves, damage was much worse than in a typical winter storm).

The Dickinson Museum lost power but escaped major loss. Fallen trees and branches damaged a few sections of the recently restored fence (more on that in another report).

On Saturday, residents flocked to a Stop & Shop in Hadley, largely darkened except for emergency lights at checkout and the ends of aisles.

Dairy foods, meats, frozen foods, and other perishables were removed. Blood stains the racks.

These lobsters died in their tank instead of a pot of boiling water.

A brief report from Town Hall, where I am sitting this afternoon because I needed to charge my phone and computer. Town Manager John Musante is back at work and fully in charge of things, coordinating with the various public safety and public works divisions and keeping the community informed via email updates and SMS. There was only a skeleton staff here today, though it is expected that the building will be open for normal business tomorrow.


Fortunately, the homeless shelter was able to open in time for the storm, and served five clients. Others in need of help, including travelers stranded in town, got help from the police and other authorities.

Power in central Amherst has been restored. As of this afternoon 63% of Amherst was still without power. When John called with an update last night, he hoped that power would be restored to everyone within 48 hours. This afternoon, the estimate was a more cautious and vague "multiple days."  As he and Director of Conservation and Development Dave Ziomek (whom I also saw here) indicated, power went out in some sections of town on Saturday night, but because of the extent and nature of the storm damage, WMECO decided to shut down the entire town so that it could more systematically address problems and repair service. Power enters the town grid from three points or stations: one on College St. in east Amherst, one on West Bay Road, and one on Route 116 in the north.  The general plan was to work outward from each station.

As Dave and John explained, the work is particularly delicate because of the extensive tree damage. Not only did trees take down power lines in some places. In others, they are resting on the lines, which means that each such limb has to be carefully lifted out cut away and power in the affected segment tested and restored.  The Department of Public Works took the lead in clearing debris from roads, and it has now been joined by other groups. Today, WMECO announced that its crews are being joined by those from Westar.

Town Manager Musante says that coordination among Amherst departments has been excellent. And on the bright side: as he and Dave Ziomek told me, the declaration of a local and state emergency means that reimbursement for a large share of the clean-up and repair expenses will be available. Not only is this good news for the budget in general: it also allows town staff more flexibility in deciding which actions to carry out where.

On balance, we have been lucky: there were no fatalities or even serious injuries. By contrast, a 20-year-old Springfield man was killed when he touched a guardrail that had been electrified by a downed power line, and two Sunderland residents have been hospitalized, apparently because they tried to use a gas grill indoors. Amherst Fire Chief Tim Nelson was blunt in warning residents not to grill indoors: "If you do this you will die. Period." He's right: both gas grills and charcoal fires generate carbon monoxide that can easily build to fatal levels (1, 2 ).

Like many other towns in the region, Amherst had decided to postpone Halloween trick-or-treating until next weekend (in our case, November 6). As one of my tweeps put it, "Nothing scarier than a 9yo having a light saber duel w/ a dangling power line."

Latest updates on other institutions:

Amherst public schools are closed tomorrow. UMass and Amherst College are set to reopen Tuesday, but Hampshire College, which sent students home or found them accommodations elsewhere in the Valley, now does not plan to have students return until Wednesday afternoon, which means that classes resume on on Friday (Thursday is an advising day.)


Tuesday update:
latest estimates are that some portions of town may not have power until Friday. It's going to be a long week.

Planning Bodies Continue to Grapple With Village Center Rezoning

The Zoning Subcommittee (ZSC) of the Planning Board again took up the question of village center rezoning for North Amherst and South Amherst at a public hearing tonight

Although I was unable to arrive for the start of the session, the tenor and basic content were the same as that of previous sessions: objections from a vocal group of residents concerned about what they view as the encroachment of commercial uses into current residential areas, and in particular, the growth of rental housing that they fear (especially to the extent it might attract students) would alter neighborhood character. Controversy centers both on proposed uses and on the new application of form-based codes, an overlay zoning that regulates appearance rather than uses.

Members of Town staff and the Subcommittee attempted to address the questions and argued that the concerns were exaggerated—or simply misplaced, to the extent that they involved issues not properly within the domain of zoning, as such.

The Zoning Subcommittee voted 2-1 to recommend the proposed rezoning to the Planning Board as a whole, which is now taking up the issue. Voting in favor were Jonathan O'Keeffe and Rob Crowner. Bruce Carson voted against it only on procedural grounds: He strongly supported the measure and simply felt that it would be more effective to deal with it at a Special Town Meeting this winter rather than at the Annual Town Meeting early next month.


Update (post-10:00 p.m.)

After three hours of public comment and internal debate, the Planning Board recommended the warrant article to Town Meeting by a vote of 5 in favor, 2 opposed, 1 abstaining.

During public comment, the Planning Board sought first to encourage reactions to the South Amherst/Atkins Corner rezoning proposal, given that almost all discussion to date has focused on North Amherst. As in meeting of the ZSC, a representative of Atkins Farms/Fruitbowl spoke strongly in favor of the measure. At the ZSC hearing, a representative of the large nearby Applewood retirement community, which is also eyeing an expansion, had likewise spoken in favor of the measure. Negative reaction came chiefly from residents Seymour and Alice Epstein, who restated the contents of an open letter to the ZSC: They fear that increased density could have a fateful or even fatal effect on the life of abutters: noise from a nearby shooting range would impair the mental development of children, construction would threaten the existence of the Eastern Brook Trout, and the impact of traffic in the two new roundabouts was unpredictable; hence any rezoning should be postponed until after the actual vehicular circulation could be measured and studied. Planning Director Jonathan Tucker, although noting the thorough preparation that had gone into the zoning proposal, also said that the Board would welcome the submission of any empirical documentation on the issues in question.

The North Amherst discussion added little that had not been said in any of many previous meetings: Residents repeated their insistence that they were not opposed to development as such and proceeded to articulate their opposition to proposed altered uses or density in the village center area. As in the past, the main theme, repeated in several variations, was opposition to rental housing—in particular, anything that might become undergraduate rentals—as well as opposition to commercial or even mixed-use development in areas now predominantly residential. Paola Di Stefano summarized the contents of an open letter to the ZSC and other Town boards and officials by several residents: the belief that there is already too much rental housing in North Amherst, opposition to any zoning designation other than Neighborhood Residential (the current proposal is for the more flexible Village Center Residential) on Montague Road north of Mill River and on the residential stretch of Cowls Lane, "without exceptions for previous or present business use" (emphasis in the original). The letter and petition moreover note the pain of the signatories arising from the fact that the consultants had not adopted the particular vision of the neighborhood that these residents themselves had proposed.

Only a very few residents—notably several members of the North Amherst co-housing project, which was the object of fear-mongering when it was in the planning stages but is now considered a model of dense and sustainable development—spoke strongly in favor of the project and density and intensified and diversified use in general. Architect Laura Fitch, for example, welcomed the opportunity to address and redress what she called "the zoning mistakes of the 1970s."

In a quasi-new twist, it appeared that the objectors might be placated if the controversial areas of Montague Road and Cowls Lane would be removed from the plan—though this would of course seem to vitiate the purpose of the measure, which is to intensify appropriate development in the village center. A number of other town residents—including some from other precincts—expressed these and other concerns.

Planning Board deliberation was fairly limited. Members attempted to clarify regulations and definitions and address the numerous objections. Rob Crowner and Jonathan O'Keeffe, for example, noted that attempts to exclude certain logically appropriate portions from the Village Center simply because residents objected to the designation made little sense. After all, they reasoned, the whole idea behind a "center" is that it is encompasses a certain critical mass of territory and population.

There followed some deliberations as to whether it made sense to proceed with a vote at November Town Meeting. Did the public adequately understand the measure? Was it too complex for Town Meeting to grasp? Should it be divided or further modified? Should discussion be postponed to a Special, later Town Meeting, in order to satisfy public doubts and criticism?

Noting that the Planning Board had already held close to 40 meetings plus 5 or 6 public hearings, a visibly frustrated Planning Director Jonathan Tucker declared, "the notion that somehow Town Meeting members would not have had the chance to educate themselves" is simply "not credible." Everyone is busy, but "then it's our responsibility" to inform ourselves as best we can. "Anyone who contends that this process has not been adequate is deluded."

Planning Board member and contrarian Richard Roznoy thereupon spoke up: "If a 'delusional' can ask a question..." He repeated his longstanding complaint that the proposal did not adequately address transportation needs, specifically, public transit. (His dedication to complete streets and other sustainable transportation policies is self-evident: he arrived dramatically on his bicylce just in time for the end of North Amherst planning charrette last summer, in helmet, and yellow and black jersey and spandex pants, in order to comment briefly on this topic before the meeting dispersed.) In Roznoy's view, the "transportation flaws are just too major" and "cannot be rectified."  Vice Chair Jonathan O'Keeffe asked: was it not true that the basics were there and could always be modified? Mr. Tucker read from the relevant portion of latest draft in order to demonstrate that transportation was indeed adequately addressed. Stephen Schreiber pressed Roznoy on which public transit was being excluded, saying "This is a huge step in the right direction, and I don't see how this precludes public transportation." Roznoy, it became clear, (a) did not consider the mere option or even presence of public transit adequate (e.g. he seems to have insisted not just on bus routes, but also on designated bus lanes, even though this may not be compatible with the engineering or aesthetic of a rural village center), and (b) truly prefers light rail—which, as Mr. Schreiber noted, many of us may want, but few if any of us will live to see.

Mr. Roznoy concluded by saying that he is prepared to be described as "delusional" and to explain his vote at Town Meeting, The latter, it should be noted, is no idle threat. A year ago, the Planning Board brought forward the long-awaited Development Modification Bylaw, which the Town had been eagerly awaiting for many years as a replacement for an old anti-sprawl measure, which, court decisions suggested, was unconstitutional. Indeed, the ticking clock on the expiration of this old Phased Growth Bylaw was perhaps the only factor that lent any common sense of urgency to a Master Planning process that had dragged on for a decade. At that Town Meeting, Mr. Roznoy, in effect offering an unofficial personal minority report, spoke strongly against the Bylaw, arguing that it was so complicated that he could not understand it. The measure, which faced strong opposition from others likewise opposed to or confused by its provisions, went down to defeat.

In the end tonight, the Planning Board voted 5 to 2 to 1 to recommend the Village Center Rezoning measure to Town Meeting,

• Voting in favor were Rob Crowner, Connie Kruger, Jonathan O'Keeffe, Stephen Schreiber, and Chair David Webber.

• Bruce Carson, as at the ZSC, voted against, but only because he preferred a Special Town Meeting as the forum. Richard Roznoy, as expected, opposed the measure because of its presumed inadequacies regarding transportation.

• Sandra Anderson abstained, like Mr. Carson, not due to content, and instead out of preference for a different procedure (voting schedule or forum).

(Circumstances permitting—always a big "if—I will try to elaborate on these concerns if I am, as I hope, able to prepare a more thorough review of the issues prior to Town Meeting.)


[update: corrected a few typos]

Vignettes of 9/11 10.0 in Amherst

Here, a few further scenes of the day of remembrance in Amherst.

Police Station flag at half-staff

preparations on the north end of the Common, in front of the 1889 Town Hall

officials confer

Firehouse bell

Fire Department officers at the ready

Peace Vigil packs up at the end of its weekly event

decorated planter on Town Common

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official flags fly this year

small flags planted by UMass Democrats and Republicans dot the downtown

flags in Kendrick Park

The Town of Amherst recently completed a lengthy public process to determine the future design and uses of the newly created park, expected to become a major gathering place at the north end of the downtown.

North Amherst farmhouse

I greatly appreciate ritual as long as it is tasteful and dignified. Particularly when it takes place as a true public action, it has the power to convey shared values and create or reinforce community. However the private and spontaneous commemorative gestures are often also compelling. I saw some on the way home after the official events downtown: a small flag mounted on a rural roadside mailbox, a flag flying from a house in an outlying area. Nothing grand, nothing that shouts: just small statements of mourning and belonging.

the end of the day

Spring Flowers at the North Amherst Library

Last fall, volunteers put in new plantings around the North Amherst Library, mostly to take the place of the stately old beech tree that had to be taken down, but also as a part of a larger landscape beautification effort. This spring, we began to see and enjoy the results. Here, the scene in early May (in the background of the first shot: the historic 1826 North Congregational Church).

 

The structure itself—Amherst's oldest library building—acquired a newly colorful aspect when it was repainted, thanks to a Town Meeting appropriation under the Community Preservation Act.

Repairs this coming year, likewise to be supported with CPA funds, will help to stabilize the building's foundation (reports to follow).

To Protect—and Serve!

On Friday afternoon, I spent several very pleasant hours at the annual Amherst Town Employees' Annual Picnic, held at Cherry Hill Golf Course.

It's a chance for dedicated servants of the community to socialize and relax. Several of us elected officials attended, as well:  Select Board Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe and member Diana Stein and I were all there (never fear: although three members constitute a quorum, this was not a violation of the Open Meeting Law, which, although now in new and stricter form, does not pertain to social or chance gatherings where business is not deliberated).

It was nice to see such a good turnout on such a hot day (temperatures hit at least 98 degrees while I was there). It's a reflection of our democratic sensibilities that some of the town's leading officials do a stint preparing and serving the food (actually, much like the holiday luncheon at Hampshire College, where the President, Dean of Faculty, and other administrators dish out the meals).

Here, Police Chief Scott Livingstone (center) and Fire Chief Tim Nelson (right) toil at the grill.

15 May 1886 Death of Emily Dickinson. Do You Know the Stamp? The Souvenir Cover?

On this day in 1886, the poet Emily Dickinson died in the home in which she was born, here in Amherst, Massachusetts. Although she published a few poems and shared more in manuscript with friends and family, the bulk of her oeuvre of 1789 pieces was, of course, discovered only after her death. The history of their publication and editing is a story in its own right, in some ways more dramatic than that of her life.

The Emily Dickinson Museum describes the funeral as follows:

Dickinson’s white-garbed body lay in a white coffin in the Homestead parlor, where the family’s former pastor Rev. Jonathan Jenkins of Pittsfield (Mass.) led a prayer and Thomas Wentworth Higginson of Cambridge (Mass.) read Emily Bronte’s poem on immortality, “No coward soul is mine.” Higginson, who gazed into the casket before it was closed for the service, reported: “E.D.’s face a wondrous restoration of youth – she is 54 [55]; looked 30, not a gray hair or wrinkle; perfect peace on the beautiful brow. There was a little bunch of violets at the neck; one pink cypripedium; the sister Vinnie put in two heliotropes by her hand ‘to take to Judge Lord’” (Years and Hours, Vol. II, 475).

The honorary pallbearers, among them the president and professors of Amherst College, set the casket down after exiting the Homestead’s back door, and their burden was shouldered, at the poet’s own request, by six Irish workmen who had been hired men on the Dickinson grounds.

Following her late directions, they circled her flower garden, walked through the great barn that stood behind the house, and took a grassy path across house lots and fields of buttercups to West Cemetery, followed by the friends who had attended the simple service. There Emily Dickinson was interred in a grave Sue had lined with evergreen boughs, within the family plot enclosed by an iron fence.

Originally the grave was marked by a low granite stone with her initials, E.E.D., but some decades later niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi replaced it with a marble slab bearing the message “Called Back.” The title of a popular Hugh Conway novel, the words were also the complete content of a letter the poet sent her cousins as she entered her final phase of illness.

Below is the Dickinson commemorative stamp (Scott # 1436) that the US Postal Service issued in Amherst in 1971.

Designed: Bernard Fuchs
Modeled: Leonard C. Buckley
Vignette: Arthur W. Dintamen
Letters engraved: Albert Saavedra
Printed: Giori Press

It is based on the famous 1847 daguerreotype—or: "derogg-a-type" (some sort of Freudian slip?)—as outgoing Amherst College President Anthony Marx embarrassingly referred to it at an elite reception following Garrison Keillor's benefit performance there for the Dickinson Museum last winter. (Good luck with that, New York Public Library!)

That youthful image, jealously guarded in the Rare Books and Special Collections of Amherst College—and in fact specially brought out for the above occasion—is the only authenticated representation of the poet, although other candidates appear from time to time and remain the subject of debate.

Image via Wikipedia

Although I was young in 1971, I had been a stamp collector for some years, and I also already knew something about Emily Dickinson and her work. Just what it was, I no longer remember precisely (this was even before Julie Harris's performance of the "Belle of Amherst" on network television in 1976, which I do remember quite well). I believe that we read Dickinson in school; it would have been about the right point in the curriculum, as I recall. Perhaps my mother had taught me about her, too. At any rate, Emily was already a growing presence in my life. (A few years later, I bought my own first paperback edition of her poems.)

So, I ordered a first day of issue cover.

It was the heyday of the first day of issue "souvenir cachets," as these unofficial, privately and often commercially embellished envelopes were known. Mount Holyoke College, which counts Dickinson as one of its most distinguished students (if not actual  "graduates") maintains a page that catalogues the proliferation of those items and other covers involving the stamp. (Note: Back in Emily's day, of course, it was the "Mount Holyoke Female Seminary," as one irate aficionado prissily informed visiting Dickinson scholar Lyndall Gordon after a lecture at Amherst College last fall.)

Below is a rare unused copy of one such cachet, produced by the particularly prolific "Art Craft" company.  It is one of the more repulsive exemplars of the genre. Even leaving the general bad taste aside, it is reprehensible because it is everything that Dickinson was not: sentimental, conventional, cloying, dishonest.

 

The whole presentation is profoundly false, but it begins with the distortion of Dickinson's image, a distortion admittedly ascribable to the poet's own conflicted family. Never happy with the haunting daguerreotype that so appeals to our modern sensibility, they were also dissatisfied with their own early attempts to modify and soften it. In 1897, at the request of Emily's sister, Lavinia, Boston artist Laura Hills first added the fuller and more styled hair and a flat angular lace collar. She subsequently turned the collar into a full-fledged ruff, part of a white dress rather than a superimposition on the old dark one. Emily's niece and zealous guardian of her legacy Martha Dickinson Bianchi had the new image modified still further in 1924, when she published The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson. Taken altogether, the Hills image with its subsequent modifications is quite an accomplishment, in that it manages to be infantilizing and meretricious at once.

I haven't the time or the energy to produce a digital graphic comparison right now, but sometimes the simplest approach is the best: Just cover the falsified image of the hair on the souvenir cachet with your fingers, and you'll see the lineaments of the poet's only authentic image emerge.

I didn't go for one of those fancy cachets. I'm not sure I saw an advance advertisement, but in any case, I think I was, haltingly, already developing a sense of taste and historical evidence. For example, I viewed with a certain skepticism the inordinate interest of some my friends in the deliberately exotic philatelic productions (some were issued on gold foil) of the feudal states of the Arabian Gulf, which to my mind were geared to the market of gullible western collectors rather than actual postal users. (1, 2)

In any case, a kid back then had limited funds and no checking account. The standard practice was to send a request, containing cash payment for the stamps and the proverbial "self-addressed envelope," to the "Postmaster" of the issuing locale, and then, lo and behold, a week or so later, the coveted cover would arrive in the mail.

Looking at mine for almost the first time since then, I see that I made a mistake in the Zip Code by transposing the digits to read 00102 rather than 01002. I know better now. I even know not to pronounce the "h" in Amherst. Not sure which I learned first. Anyway: been there, also got the t-shirt. A week ago at the North Amherst Rezoning Visioning session, I was surprised to hear that the head of the Cecil Group, the consultants who also took part in the public design process for Kendrick Park, still had not absorbed that little linguistic fact of life (though he also, upon learning this, appropriately poked fun at himself).

The spring is always a big season for Dickinson-related events here in Amherst, first and foremost the Poetry Walk, which takes place on the Saturday closest to her death anniversary. This year's Poetry Walk was distinctive, and it was moreover preceded by other events of note (hint: got a cell phone?). Separate reports to follow.


Resources

• Houghton Library, Harvard University:  Emily Dickinson Commemorative Stamps and Ephemera (1 Box: includes stamps, Amherst newspaper articles, ephemera, and a pane of 50 stamps "in a presentation binder stamped in gold lettering: 'Harvard University.'" [in case anyone had any doubts about...what])

• US Postal Service: Women on Stamps

•  National Postal Museum

Back and Busy

In a recent comment to my last piece, a student reader gently asked why I was blogging rather than reading senior theses.

Well, in fact, for better or worse, I wasn't.  Reading theses and other student work was precisely what I have been doing. as is all too apparent, I haven't posted anything here for a month—which, mea culpa, is an eternity in the blogosphere—because I was simply too occupied with other matters.

The onset of spring coincides with the busiest part of the academic term, but there have been other special distractions and pressures this year:  for example, completion of work on the Governance Task Force, as we move toward implementation; the search for a new College president, which resulted in the bold choice of environmental expert Jonathan Lash of the World Resources Institute (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

And here in town, it's been busier than usual, too, with an unprecedented string of zoning and development initiatives:  the final phase of the Kendrick Park planning process , the three-day charrette for the controversial ARA "Gateway" project between UMass and the Town of Amherst, the North Amherst Village Center rezoning visioning process last weekend, and the South Amherst/Bay Road-Atkins Corner planning session yesterday (Saturday). (With any luck, I'll report on some of these—but, the way things are going, don't hold me to that.)

That, and annual Town Meeting, which has now begun, and seems headed for big controversy over issues ranging from the proposed solar array on the old landfill, to zoning amendments on duplexes, parking, and the raising of chickens and rabbits.

It's already been more of a bloody slugfest than many expected. First, there was the unexpected debate over the Community Services line of the budget, and the addition of funds for the re-opening of War Memorial Pool. Then came a protracted fight over Community Preservation Act appropriations—primarily our historic preservation proposals, which for some reason have become a favorite target of naysayers.

Never a dull (or free) moment, it seems.