Beware self-driving-car gridlock

A CTrail train line, which links Springfield, Mass., and New Haven, Conn., and which has had a flood of passengers.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com.

The Rhode Island Public Transit Authority has added three electric buses to its fleet. Bravo! One small step against global warming. For some people of a certain age, the buses are a reminder of how much of our urban public transportation used to be electric, in the form of trolleys.

Meanwhile, we’d better deal with the fact that the advent of millions of self-driving vehicles, hopefully electric, will probably worsen traffic congestion by encouraging more single-passenger driving and even no-passenger driving, with many vehicles being used to deliver stuff. We need much more MASS TRANSIT, not more vehicles, roads and parking lots.

As a sign of the hunger for expanded mass transit, consider that crowding has gotten so bad on Connecticut’s new CTrail line, between Springfield, Mass., and New Haven, that the state and Amtrak are scrambling to make more trains available. Some of the crowding is caused by a surprisingly large number of college students using special passes that gives students at participating institutions unlimited access to public transportation in the Nutmeg State.

To read more of this bad news/good news story, please hit this link.

David Warsh: Climate change and economic modeling

Flooding in Marblehead, Mass., during Super Storm Sandy on Oct. 29, 2012.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

The unexpected pairing of environmental and growth economics by the Nobel committee this year contains many surprises. William Nordhaus and Paul Romer are surprisingly similar in their origins.  Each is a member of an entrepreneurial family in the American West.  Nordhaus is the youngest of four brothers; his father, Robert, was a ski developer and sheep rancher in New Mexico. Romer is the second of seven children; his father, Roy, is a John Deere dealer and former governor of Colorado. Each graduated from an elite high school in the East (Andover and Exeter) before attending college (Yale and the University of Chicago). Both began their graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Yet the two economists’ careers could scarcely have been more different.  Nordhaus, 77, is a master of social engagement and consensus.  Romer, who turns 63 on Nov. 7, is a lifelong innovator and frequent disruptor of the intellectual neighborhoods in which he has found himself. Nordhaus is the world’s foremost authority on the economics of climate change.  Romer is a major figure in the history of economics, who after 20 years left economics to become a public intellectual. The Swedes, having put the two together, made it worthwhile to tell them apart.

The most striking thing about Nordhaus is the steadily expanding cone of his influence over 50 years. He immediately returned to Yale after completing his PhD in just four years at MIT and has never left, except for occasional sojourns, the first of them the most significant: 1974-75 at the International Institute for Applied Systems in Vienna, the cradle of climate modeling. He spent two years as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, 1977-79, served as provost at Yale, 1986-88, and as vice president for finance and administration, there in 1992-93.

As a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Nordhaus served on numerous interdisciplinary committees, including: the Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems, the Panel on Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming, the Committee on National Statistics, the Committee on Data and Research on Illegal Drugs, and the Committee on the Implications for Science and Society of Abrupt Climate Change. In 2014, Nordhaus served as president of the American Economic Association.

He was co-author, with Paul Samuelson, of later editions of the classic textbook Economics, whose 19th and final edition was published in 2009. His most recent books on climate change are A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policy (2008) and The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World (2013).To call him well-connected is an understatement.

Significantly, Nordhaus began his career working on the same problem that Romer later solved: how to bring knowledge creation within the compass of economic theory, instead of simply assuming its steady increase, as is conventional in macroeconomics modelling even today. “An Economic Theory of Technological Change” appeared in the American Economic Review in 1969; Invention, Growth, and Welfare: A Theoretical Treatment of Technological Change later the same year ($93.34 for an out-of-print copy) but for reasons that have never been entirely clear, Nordhaus’s thesis failed to attract the attention that would have allowed him to pursue the question. By 1972, he was working, with fellow Yale professor (and future Nobel laureate) James Tobin, on incorporating natural resources and household accounts in national income accounting – soon dubbed “green accounting.” In Is Growth Obsolete?, in 1973, the authors concluded,

At present there is no reason to arrest general economic growth to conserve natural resources, although there is good reason to provide proper economic incentives to conserve resources which currently cost their users less than true social cost.

In Vienna, Nordhaus became interested in the problem of global warming. By 1977, in“Economic Growth and Climate: The Carbon Dioxide Problem,” he argued that

In contemplating the future course of economic growth in the West, scientists are divided between one group crying “wolf” and another which denies that species’ existence.  One persistent concern has been that man’s economic activities would reach a scale where the global climate would be significantly affected. Unlike many of the wolf cries, this one, in my opinion, should be taken very seriously.

He has been working on it ever since, developing economic approaches to global warming, including the construction of integrated economic and scientific models to determine the efficient path for coping with climate change. Perhaps it was all but fated, given Nordhaus’s family’s background.  In any event, it was this work for which the Nobel Foundation last month cited Nordhaus.

Along the way, he fought off a cancer that could have killed him, worked well with his MIT classmate Martin Weitzman, another authority on climate change, with a different approach; and provided rhetorical support for Romer’s theorizing about the import of new technologies – in particular, Nordhaus’s 1996 study of the economic history of the cost of an evening of indoor lighting since Babylonian times. Nordhaus “returned to Mesopotamian economics,” his biography notes, with a study published on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in which he projected the cost of the war as high as $2 trillion. It was subsequently estimated to have been $3 trillion or more.

A long-term collaboration with Stanford professor John Weyant  and his Energy Modeling Forum’s summer Snowmass, Colorado, workshops, helped bring major energy companies into the climate change tent.  But corporate participation didn’t prevent Nordhaus, in the final pages of Climate Casino, from comparing ExxonMobil to cigarette manufacturers as having been a “merchant of doubt.”  But that has protected him from biting criticism from those who believe that his cautious approach to measurement issues “enabled climate change denial and delay.” For all his mastery of consensus-building, Nordhaus’s central policy recommendation – a global carbon tax – still has a long way to go.

David Warsh, a longtime columnist and economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this piece first appeared.

Still lifes and vets in Maine

Photo by Lynn Karlin in the show of 19 still lifes by the Maine photographer, from her “The Pedestal Series," a display of food in still-life composition in the “Art in the Capitol’’ program of the Maine Arts Commission Nov. 30-Dec. 31. Also in the program, and in partnership with VA Maine Healthcare Systems of Togus, is the Maine Veteran Artists show: works by 39 artists who have accompanied their work with artist statements that includes quotes and stories about how art plays a key role in the quality of life for many Maine veterans.’’

Maine has a long history of luring and keeping distinguished artists, to no small degree because of its physical beauty, especially along its coast.

Maine State Capitol (aka State House), in Augusta. It was built in 1829-1832 and designed by Charles Bullfinch, who designed the very famous gold-dome Massachusetts State House, built in 1795-1798. That’s fitting since Maine was part of Massachusetts until 1820.

Get over it; she's dead

King’s Chapel in Boston. Built in 1749, originally to host an Anglican (Episcopalian) congregation, it later became a quirky Unitarian church that kept some Episcopal aspects.

“Mary Winslow is dead. Out on the Charles

The shells hold water and their oarblades drag,

Littered with captivated ducks, and now

The bell-rope in King's Chapel Tower unsnarls

And bells the bestial cow From Boston Common; she is dead.’’

— From “Mary Winslow,’’ by Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

Build Hope Point Tower

Rendering of proposed Hope Point Tower in Providence.

— By IBI GROUP, Toronto

After some hesitation, I support developer Jason Fane’s proposal to build a squiggly 46-story skyscraper in Providence’s Route 195 relocation district. I realize that some architecture experts hate it, and others like it. But in any case, it would bring new structural excitement to the city, which the city could use. A much better place for the tower would be in a vacant lot in the middle of the Financial District but Mr. Fane says that won’t work for him.

Not surprisingly, some local real estate agents and landlords are fighting hard against the project. The tower would presumably employ its own rental and sales agents. And people who now live in other, lower buildings nearby would love to move into what would be called Hope Point Tower for the impressive views. I think that it would be seen as a very desirable place to live.

It’s sort of a cliché to say this, but the Eiffel Tower was hated by many Parisiens when it went up, in 1889, as were the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center when they went up in the early ‘70s. But well before Saudi terrorists destroyed them, in 2001, they, like the Eiffel Tower, had become symbols of their cities, beloved by millions. (I worked across the street from the Twin Towers and always hated them.)

There are some intriguing questions – e.g., Mr. Fane says that the building, which would be an as yet undisclosed mix of rental and owned units, would have about 800 residents. But how many would actually be in residence much of the time? Would some of the “residents’’ be flight capitalists from Russia, China and other corrupt dictatorships buying units to store and/or launder their money and rarely if ever be there – which has happened a lot in such very rich cities as New York, Boston and San Francisco. Or, I could imagine, given the many very rich families represented by the student bodies of Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, would a lot be occupied by rich kids only in the academic year and/or (only occasionally) by parents flying in from around the world to visit them? What sort of commitment to the city would they have?

Meanwhile, that interest rates are rising and that we may be heading into recession next year may doom the project, even if officials finally give it the go-ahead after the very long delay up to this point.]

Hit this link to see an article on the opening of the Industrial Trust Building (aka “Superman Building’’) in 1928, a much more boosterish time in Rhode Island.

Making America hate again

Environmental factors in decline of shellfish along East Coast

Bay scallop.

Via ecoRI News (ecori.og)

Researchers studying the sharp decline between 1980 and 2010 in documented landings of the four most commercially important bivalve mollusks — eastern oysters, northern quahogs, soft-shell clams and northern bay scallops — have identified the causes.

Warming ocean temperatures associated with a positive shift in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which led to habitat degradation including increased predation, are the key reasons for the decline of these four species in estuaries and bays from Maine to North Carolina, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The NAO is an irregular fluctuation of atmospheric pressure over the North Atlantic Ocean that impacts both weather and climate, especially in the winter and early spring in eastern North America and Europe. Shifts in the NAO affect the timing of species’ reproduction and growth, the availability of phytoplankton for food, and predator-prey relationships, all of which contribute to species abundance. The findings appear in Marine Fisheries Review.

“In the past, declines in bivalve mollusks have often been attributed to overfishing,” said Clyde Mackenzie, a shellfish researcher at NOAA Fisheries’ James J. Howard Marine Sciences Laboratory, in Sandy Hook, N.J., and lead author of the study. “We tried to understand the true causes of the decline, and after a lot of research and interviews with shellfishermen, shellfish constables, and others, we suggest that habitat degradation from a variety of environmental factors, not overfishing, is the primary reason.”

Mackenzie and co-author Mitchell Tarnowski, a shellfish biologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, provide details on the declines of these four species. They also note the related decline by an average of 89 percent in the numbers of shellfishermen who harvested the mollusks. The landings declines between 1980 and 2010 are in contrast to much higher and consistent shellfish landings between 1950 and 1980.

Exceptions to these declines have been a sharp increase in the landings of northern quahogs in Connecticut and American lobsters in Maine. Landings of American lobsters from southern Massachusetts to New Jersey, however, have fallen sharply as water temperatures in those areas have risen.

“A major change to the bivalve habitats occurred when the North Atlantic Oscillation index switched from negative during about 1950 to 1980, when winter temperatures were relatively cool, to positive, resulting in warmer winter temperatures from about 1982 until about 2003,” Mackenzie said. “We suggest that this climate shift affected the bivalves and their associated biota enough to cause the declines.”

This graph shows the rise and fall of soft-shell clam landings from 1950 to 2005. (Clyde Mackenzie)

Research from extensive habitat studies in Narragansett Bay and in the Netherlands, where environments including salinities are very similar to the northeastern United States, show that body weights of the bivalves, their nutrition, timing of spawning, and mortalities from predation were sufficient to force the decline. Other factors likely impacting the decline were poor water quality, loss of eelgrass in some locations for larvae to attach to and grow, and not enough food available for adult shellfish and their larvae.

“In the Northeast U.S., annual recruitments of juvenile bivalves can vary by two or three orders of magnitude,” said Mackenzie, who has been studying bay scallop beds on Martha’s Vineyard with local shellfish constables and fishermen monthly during warm seasons for several years.

In late spring to early summer of this year, a cool spell combined with extremely cloudy weather may have interrupted scallop spawning, leading to what looks like poor recruitment this year. Last year, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard had very good harvests due to large recruitments in 2016.

“The rates of survival and growth to eventual market size for shellfish vary as much as the weather and climate,” Mackenzie said.

Weak consumer demand for shellfish, particularly oysters, in the 1980s and early 1990s has shifted to fairly strong demand as strict guidelines were put in place by the Interstate Shellfish Sanitation Conference in the late 1990s regarding safe shellfish handling, processing, and testing for bacteria and other pathogens.

Enforcement by state health officials has been strict. The development of oyster aquaculture and increased marketing of branded oysters in raw bars and restaurants has led to an increase in oyster consumption in recent years.

Since the late 2000s, the NAO index has generally been fairly neutral, neither very positive nor negative. As a consequence, landings of all four shellfish species have been increasing in some locations. Poor weather for bay scallop recruitment in both 2017 and 2018, however, will likely mean a downturn in landings during the next two seasons.

New England's dignified 19th Century architecture

Proper buildings in West Stockbridge, Mass., in the Berkshires.

— Photo by William Morgan

West Stockbridge is a rich town, with many property owners from New York City with weekend places there.

Shaker Mill, on the Williams River, in West Stockbridge.

They want it real

“Because the people of New Hampshire take their responsibilities as citizens of the Republic seriously, they keep it interesting for candidates who, believe it or not, can get a little tired of the mannered, predictable, and unimaginative qualities that typically afflict modern political campaigns.’’

— The late Sen. John McCain, who ran in the New Hampshire presidential primary in 2000 and 2008.

Street life

“Police Drawings’’ (mixed media, life-size and variable dimensions), by Mira Cantor, in her show “Promiseland,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through Dec. 2.

Rethink ideas about New England's 'viewshed'

Berkshire Wind Power Project, in Hancock, Mass.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

New Englanders might want to read an interview in the New England News Collaborative with Philip Warburg, who used to run the Conservation Law Foundation, authored Harvest the Sun: America’s Quest for a Solar-Powered Future and recently wrote an article headlined “What Red State Kansas Can Teach Blue State Massachusetts about Renewable Energy’’.

He cites a “wind technology training program {in a rural county in Kansas} at the community college. It started in about 2007 with some 5 students, today it’s got 150 students. And they find jobs immediately on graduating from their 2-year certificate program. In fact, they’ve expanded now to include solar technology, so it’s been renamed a renewable energy technology program. Again, not something you would necessarily expect at a community college in the middle of Kansas farm country, but in fact, it provides local employment for a lot of people … and it’s really seen as a huge economic boon.’’

Of course, densely populated and wooded southern New England doesn’t have the wide-open spaces of Kansas but it does have a treasure in offshore wind and more than adequate solar energy (we’re at the latitude of Portugal) to justify major education programs for people going into the wind and solar industries. Let them do their part to weaken the likes of Saudi Arabia.

On wind power in New England, he writes:

“I think we have to think in a more expansive way about what it means to integrate renewables into our landscape. So it might mean more wind turbines, for example, in the Berkshire Mountains or in the White Mountains or in parts of Maine. And I think we can also learn from Kansas in looking off of our shore and saying well actually we can develop wind power on a very large, you could say industrial, scale without creating the kind of reactions we got from vacationers on the Cape … to the Cape Wind project.’’

He may be too hopeful about affluent New Englanders’ tolerance of changes to their “viewsheds.’’ And yet:

“If we took a longer historical view of the New England landscape … we might be more forgiving of the introduction of technologies like wind and solar. If you look at New England’s landscape during the 19th century, it was largely a farmed landscape. We now have reforested New England because farming just doesn’t make that much economic sense on a large scale in New England…. So we’re very attached to thinking of New England as pristine forests, when in fact they’re not pristine forests.’’

To read the whole interview, please hit this link.

The peace of tyranny

At the Nazis’ 1934 Nuremberg Rally.

A country that is truly free

Has citizens who disagree.

There isn't any culture war

In Orwell's 1984.

—Felicia Nimue Ackerman

Chris Powell: Raising tobacco-purchase age would do little for city kids

Why do officials in politically correct cities like Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport put so much effort into posturing on issues over which they have no serious jurisdiction? Maybe it's to console themselves for their ineffectuality with important matters like the worsening poverty, ignorance, and demoralization of their constituents.

Last week Hartford was at it again as its City Council prepared an ordinance raising to 21 the age for purchasing tobacco products. A week earlier Bridgeport had adopted an ordinance purporting to outlaw homemade plastic guns.

Even as Hartford prepared the tobacco ordinance, several of its high school students got sick in school after consuming marijuana-laced brownies given to them by other students. Marijuana possession by minors is illegal but of course it has been decades since that prohibition deterred anyone, and now both Connecticut and the country are starting to figure that the prohibition might as well be repealed and marijuana sold legally and taxed.

So why does Hartford think that raising the age for tobacco purchases will accomplish anything? Why does Hartford think that minors won't continue to purchase tobacco through older friends, as they do with alcoholic beverages?

And what about the bigger question of the age of majority? How sensible is society when it proclaims 18-year-olds mature enough to vote, serve in the military, and make contracts but not mature enough just to smoke and drink?

Poor judgment will always be part of youth. But an ordinance purporting to protect kids against tobacco in a city where most kids have no father in their home and many have no real parent at all is worse than poor judgment. It's a sick joke by shameless adults.

xxx

VINDICATING THE FLAG: Another flag-salute case has arisen from a public school in Waterbury.

Twenty-five years ago the city's school system tried to punish a black high school student who, calling herself a Communist, refused to salute the flag at the start of the school day. She beat the school system in a lawsuit because school administrators somehow had overlooked or deliberately disregarded a renowned U.S. Supreme Court decision from 1943 forbidding schools from coercing students into making expressions of belief. That decision upheld freedom of conscience, which the country then was defending at profound cost in a world war.

In the new Waterbury case some nonwhite students allege that a teacher has been mocking and shaming them for refusing to rise for the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, which they say is their way of protesting racial discrimination.

A trial may be needed to determine exactly what has been happening but there should be no doubt about the long-established right not to salute the flag -- just as there should be no doubt that the right not to salute the flag is a powerful reason for saluting it.

Of course the country has not achieved perfect justice. But it never will. It can only keep improving. With its proclamation of "liberty and justice for all," the Pledge of Allegiance will always be largely aspirational. But the heroes of the civil rights revolution 50 years ago accepted this and always carried the flag into the struggle. They succeeded and changed the country and thereby vindicated the flag.

A good teacher would explain this to his students as he acknowledged their right not to salute the flag. If they still refused to salute, he would let them be undisturbed, since, after all, their liberty still would be pretty good advertising for the country.


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Waste is forever

Rater typical New England Congregation Church, in the college town of Middlebury. Vt.

“Sign at a New England church: ‘Will the last person to leave please see that the perpetual light is extinguished?’’’

— Dave Barry

Beech trees

“The ten hours' light is abating,
And a late bird flies across,
Where the pines, like waltzers waiting,
Give their black heads a toss.

Beech leaves, that yellow the noon-time,
Float past like specks in the eye;
I set every tree in my June time,
And now they obscure the sky.

And the children who ramble through here
Conceive that there never has been
A time when no tall trees grew here,
A time when none will be seen.’’

— “At Day-Close in November,’’ by Thomas Hardy

Animated storytelling in New Bedford

From “SEED, the Untold Story’’ (a still from animation), in Hayley Morris’s show at the New Bedford Art Museum, Nov. 11-Jan. 13. The Fiber Optic Center New Media Gallery at the museum is showcasing Hayley Morris. The museum says that she’s an animation director who uses “mixed media and stop-motion animation techniques to tell stories that unfold through layered textures, hand- crafted details and inventive storytelling. Morris has created work for a broad range of clients in the film, music and video industry. Her animation studio, Shape & Shadow, is in Providence.

Llewellyn King: Internet of Things and climate change rushing at us

The votes that will be cast on Election Day might be the most important votes cast in a long while, but they’re unlikely to change our lives as dramatically as two great tsunamis that are hurtling toward us.

Change Agent Tsunami One is being driven by science. If you thought that the Digital Revolution had reached its apex with the smartphone, or perhaps Instagram, get back to thinking room.

The Internet of Things is on the march and nothing appears to be able or wants to stop it.

Soon you’ll have “smart cities.” In the beginning, these will be the result of evolutionary change. Things like 5G, the next generation of mobile technology, and Wi-Fi using “short towers” — in fact, a lot of small towers — will make Wi-Fi available to everyone in a city.

Then things speed up.

Already, the Digital Revolution is responsible for these lifestyle changers: barcodes, Uber and Lyft, urban bicycle systems and, yes, those scooters that are whizzing around many cities. Oh, throw in Airbnb.

In store is automated transportation with autonomous electric cars and trucks, automated package delivery by drone. Electric small aircraft and automated pilotless air taxis will take you from your home to the airport. Keeping all these moving objects from knocking into each other or into us will take further electronic wizardry.

All of this will come under the rubric of smart cities. The only impediment to this stunning new world of efficiency and convenience is a cyberattack that takes down the electric grid for days, weeks or longer. Every horror that can be conceived would be unleashed: no communications, no food, no gas, no money, no sewage and no water. We’d all be reduced to the state of primitive man without the skills of the Stone Age.

In its way, cyberattack is a greater threat than anything posed by the arsenals of China and Russia. We might perish without a bang, just a whimper. An ignoble but terrible exit.

Change Agent Tsunami Two is climate change. This has all the makings of a global catastrophe. Low-lying countries might not be able to mocytunt the defenses needed just to deal with ocean rise. They’d have move to higher ground in other countries.

Especially vulnerable is the East Coast of the United States. While the Trump administration may be in formal denial, the agencies of government are preparing within their ability to go against the politicians. National labs have maps and charts of the devastation that would result from a sea rise of several feet. I saw the first of these maps myself at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California decades ago. I thought they were fanciful. Now I think they were prescient.

The Navy is particularly alarmed because, as Axios has reported, the sea rise along the East Coast is likely to be worse than in other parts of the world, due to tidal and other geographical factors. Particularly, the Navy is worried about bases in low-lying coastal cities such as Norfolk, Va., and is looking at scenarios as to where these could be relocated efficiently and in time.

Other climate change horrors include tropical bugs in northern climes, mutating viruses, more storms, droughts and tens of millions of people driven from their homes, i.e. refugees.

I have no doubt that we’ll lick the cyberwarfare threat. Technology can take on technology. Many good minds in government, industry and the universities are hard at work. Climate change is a many-orders-of-magnitude more implacable problem.

A very different future is ahead, one that isn’t on the ballot — not this Nov. 6, but it will be in future years. Great new political issues are in the making; issues that are outside of the party-speak of this election, but which will emerge soon. In 2020? Possibly.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Robert Whitcomb: Broadway-bound in Boston

Inside the Colonial Theatre, in Boston.

“Another op'nin', another show
In Philly, Boston or Baltimoe,
A chance for stagefolks to say ‘hello’
Another op'nin', another show.’’

From “Another Op'Nin', Another Show,’’ from Kiss Me, Kate, music and lyrics by Cole Porter. Opened on Broadway in 1948, in the heyday of the great Broadway musicals and their tryouts outside of New York.

When I was a kid, in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, Boston was a big Broadway tryout town, with soon-to-be famous musicals and non-musical plays undergoing clinical testing and treatment in the city’s compact theater district before being sent to New York, or cancelled as unfixable. The Colonial, the Shubert and the Wilbur theaters were nationally known venues where demanding audiences and critics could make or break a production. Elliot Norton, the once-famous and longtime drama critic for Boston newspapers and WGBH Radio and TV, had considerable national power, which he exercised with great care and insight. He was lauded as a “play doctor,’’ whose suggestions helped make productions that he reviewed into hits on Broadway.

While I found some of the productions boring, I usually liked the theater evenings. Before the shows, my parents, my older sister and I would go to what seemed at the time exotic foreign restaurants, such as Athens Olympia, where I had my first Greek food (favoring the baklava) and Ola (sic?), a Scandinavian restaurant, where, I’m sorry to say, we ate whale meat. Except for my parents’ smoking, it was usually fun.

Many of the shows were musicals (by Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Loewe, etc.), but we also watched some serious (and occasionally inappropriate for children!) or comic nonmusical plays, too. If the show wasn’t all that thrilling, we could at least look forward to the colorful refreshments in the lobby in the intermissions.

(We also often went to big movies in Boston’s still prospering movie palaces. Ben Hur, This Is Cinerama, Around the World in Eighty Days, etc., but often matinees – not nearly as glamorous as going out at night. But you could eat popcorn at your seat – a no-no in a real theater.)

Boston’s role as a Broadway tryout town began fading in the 1970s. That strikes me as somewhat paradoxical because the city was starting to sweep off a rather Dickensian grittiness associated with the local decline of the textile and shoe business. By fits and starts, fueled by higher education, technology, investment companies and health care, the Hub was entering a renaissance that has made it truly a world city, with a glittery downtown, like, well, Manhattan.

And now the big British-based Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG) and Emerson College may spark a revival of New England’s capital as a Broadway tryout town centered at the Emerson Colonial Theatre, owned by the college; Emerson has longstanding entertainment-business connections. ATG, which is managing the facility, told The Boston Globe that it wants to do a pre-Broadway show there each year.

Of course, it’s a lot easier to see and hear a show on TV or on your computer than in person, but being in a theater as part of a night on the town is much more memorable. But how to make it easier to get to the theater in dense Boston? One way is for theaters to arrange chartered-bus networks to take people in comfort from places in and around Boston directly to the Theater District in season. We took such a bus to Symphony Hall last year and it was a pleasure. One price would cover tickets and transportation.

And, of course, MBTA service should be upgraded to let it better fit Theater District show schedules if and when Broadway-style show business expands enough in the Hub.

But building more parking garages in the district is not a solution. They simply lure more cars and cause more street congestion.

Putting on shows in big theaters is very expensive. There are smaller, high-quality regional venues in the area, most famously the nonprofit American Repertory Theater, in Cambridge, with 556 seats. They can provide some of the process of a Broadway tryout but not in the same way as big, Broadway-style venues such as the Shubert, the Wilbur and the Colonial, which replicate the sense of being in a New York City theater, with more than a thousand seats. Sometimes producers and directors need to gauge a big-audience reaction.

I wonder if college students in Greater Boston, besides those at Emerson, can do a lot of the low-wage jobs at Boston’s big theaters, thereby cutting production costs and thus encouraging more production companies to start their road to New York in the Hub.

Beats Baltimore and Philly! Of all the East Coast cities besides New York, Boston’s cultural history, highly educated audience and low crime make it best suited to be a Broadway tryout town.

Robert Whitcomb is editor of New England Diary and president of The Boston Guardian, where this column first appeared.

Furniture as fine art

Chair by Greg Brown, in the group show “The Art of Handcrafted Furniture,’’ at New Hampton School’s Galletly Gallery, in Hampton, N.H., through Dec. 13. The show features the work of Greg Brown, Owain Harris, Liz Hallen, Terry Moore, Leah Woods and Jim Zink.

The gallery says “They use wood as a medium to create designs that are functional, expressive and elegant. Each artist has a distinct style and a different goal they hope to achieve with their work. Every piece whether whimsical or simple, modern or traditional, is a work of art as much as it is a table or chair.’

1908 ad for what is now called New Hampton School.

Our 'Banana Republics'

This was a predecessor company of the Boston-based United Fruit Co., which did a lot of business in Central America.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

On the immigration “crisis’’ approaching our southern border, some context: As Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times noted the other day:

“More than 1.4 million foreigners emigrate to the United States each year. If, say, half the caravan { around 5,000 people} reaches the border, and half of those people actually enter the U.S., they would represent less than one-tenth of 1 percent of this year’s immigrants.’’

Despite Trump’s tough-guy approach, unauthorized crossings of our southern border are up slightly this year from last and the number of families crossing together as a unit hit a monthly record last month: more than 16,500 people. That’s how bad things are in much of Central America. (Still, U.S. has about 328 million people.)

The pictures of the desperate marchers are of course dramatic, and being heavily used by the orange man in the Oval Office and his propaganda arm – Fox “News’’.

The Democrats, not being “reality TV’’ experts, are slow on the uptake on the caravan. No, they don’t favor “open borders’’. But mostly because they don’t have the presidency, they lack the opportunity to present a clear position that the public will listen to.

Of course, they should clearly ask the marchers to go back home, but perhaps with the hope for some of them that the U.S. government, which has been controlled by the Republican Party for the majority of time since 2001, might finally come up with a coherent, pragmatic and fair immigration policy that would let them legally enter the country.

Congress, meanwhile, should block Trump threats to cut off aid to Central America, a cutoff that would only increase the lawlessness and poverty that drives these desperate-people north. And they should remind Americans that we are indirectly the cause of much of the trouble. Consider our insatiable demand for drugs, which in turns spawns corruption and gangs in Central America, and that much of the illegal-alien problem can be blamed on U.S. business’s love of cheap labor. A lot of Republican businessmen have loved having low-paid illegal-alien workers.

Also note that many of Central America’s woes can be traced back to the socio-economic-environmental damage done by their past status as heavily exploited economic colonies of the United States. For years such American companies as the old Boston-based United Fruit Co. basically ran these little nations, protected by the U.S. government.

American companies profited from very stratified social classes, a very large impoverished working class and a plutocracy, composed of the business, political and military elites, with whom U.S. firms and government officials worked closely. The dictatorships pushed, in return for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially of course bananas. Thus, “Banana Republics.’’

In any event, the Democrats (and Republicans) should emphasize that the marchers must go through the ordinary orderly process demanded of asylum seekers at our borders. Given the numbers in the current caravan, this will require additional personnel at the southern border, probably including military.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ought to jointly and repeatedly affirm the above.