Dining on the rails

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

One of my fondest travel memories is eating in train dining cars, with most of my experience going way back to before Amtrak, on the likes of the New Haven, New York Central and Pennsylvania railroads. The food and service were remarkably good, considering the lines’ dubious finances and it was pleasant to watch the passing scenery through the window and brood. Compared to other modes of transportation, trains are good to eat on, read on, and, especially, brood on. And you can go for walks.

A drawback, or an allure, of the dining cars is that you sometimes have to share a table. Practiced train travelers learn how to determine whether the other person(s) wants to chat, or be left alone, and how to politely convey whether you want to talk. Decades later, I remember some of these conversations.

Sadly, Amtrak is ending traditional dining-car service on many overnight trains, starting with eliminating those east of the Mississippi, citing the desire by Millennials for more “flexible” and “contemporary’’ eating options. Another treasure of gracious living is derailed.

For a good overview of Amtrak’s current status, please hit this link.

Print against the tide

At the entrance of David R. Godine Inc.’s warehouse, in Jaffrey, N.H.. Godine is a small, high-end book publisher based in Boston and famed for both the content of its books and for their physical beauty.

— Photo by William Morgan

Night work

“The Music Pavilion at Versailles, Moonlight“ (oil on canvas), by Henri Eugene Le Sidaner, in the show “Highlights from the Permanent Collection: Nocturne ,’’ at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Mass., through Jan. 12.

The museum says that "Nocturne paintings" were “originally defined as those that depict scenes evocative of the night, or portray subjects in a veil of light or at twilight. Nowadays, the term tends to refer to any paintings of nighttime scenes. Nocturne paintings are moody and alluring, capturing the unique tranquility that nighttime brings. Nocturne features works by a variety of artists across different countries and times.’’

Religion -- starting conflict and ending it

A common symbol of Christian ecumenicalism

To members and friends of The Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com)

On Thursday, Dec.  5,  The Providence Committee on Foreign Relations  (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com) will welcome as its dinner speaker, who directs the Initiative on Religion, Law, and Diplomacy, and is visiting associate professor of conflict resolution, at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.  She titles her talk "God, Soft Power, and Geopolitics: Religion as a Tool for Conflict Prevention/Generation".

Dr. Prodromou is also a non-resident senior fellow and co-chair of the Working Group on Christians and Religious Pluralism, at the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, and is also non-resident fellow at The Hedayah International Center of Excellence for Countering Violent Extremism, based in Abu Dhabi.

Dr. Prodromou  is former vice chair and commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and was a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Religion & Foreign Policy Working Group. Her research focuses on geopolitics and religion, with particular focus on the intersection of religion, democracy, and security in the Middle East and Southeastern Europe. Her current research project focus on Orthodox Christianity and geopolitics, as well as on religion and migration in Greece.

Schedule:

6:00 - 6:30 PM: Cocktails

6:30 - 7:30: Dinner (salad, entree, dessert/coffee)

7:30 - 8:30: Speaker Presentation

8:30 - 9:00: Q&A with Speaker.

Please let us know if you have any dietary restrictions.

For information on the PCFR, including on how to join, please see our Web site – thepcfr.org – or email pcfremail@gmail.com or call 401-523-3957 

James P. Freeman: Cape Cod winter storms -- curiosity and ferocity

“Winter is begun here, now, I suppose. It blew part of the hair off the dog yesterday & got the rest this morning.”

                                                                                                -- Mark Twain (1892)

The old logs tell it all.

“Blizzard ’05 worst on Cape in my life…” reads the entry on Jan.  23, 2005 in the Weather Wizard’s Weather Diary. So hand-wrote meteorologist Tim Kelley. Indeed, it was epic.

That personal proclamation reflects a larger generational curiosity about the wicked winter weather on Cape Cod. For centuries, the unpredictable oscillations of nature’s fury have provoked vigorous debate about the worst storm to ravage the very exposed peninsula.

Hurricanes come and go. Blizzards stall and meander. Winter’s ferocity is more spellbinding than summer’s clemency. And so the lore and allure of the Cape’s cold-weather excitement – especially nor’easters, sometimes with whiteouts -- is a rich narrative of meteorology, history and geology. And some mythology. Let the debates begin…

“A storm in the fall or winter is the time to visit it…”

                                                                        --Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (published in 1865)

A Cape native, Kelley radiates enthusiasm about the weather like loose electricity. His  stacks of spiral, cardboard-bound, black-inked journals date back to March 3, 1992, when he first began broadcasting with then-start up New England Cable News (now sharing production facilities with NBC10  in Boston). With more than 10,000 daily reports, Kelley calls them “probably the most gratifying part of my career.” Reviewing them is an exercise in excavation: They are a captivating analog history, a sober juxtaposition against the blitzkrieg of digital noise emanating from today’s televisions, laptops and mobile phones. His entries about the Cape are particularly illuminating.

Take the Blizzard of Jan. 22-23, 2005, perhaps the most notorious blizzard in recorded Cape history. Kelley’s observations are stark and emphatic. He recalls that all of Nantucket was “without power,” “80 mph gusts” lashed the coast, and “31 inches” of snow buried Hyannis. (The Cape Cod Times reported 10-to-15-foot drifts and 27-foot swells.) Another entry reads “Benchmark.”  

In New England meteorological lingo the benchmark is 40°N 70°W and helps identify the impacts that a winter storm might have on a region. When the center of an intense low-pressure area moves directly across those coordinates in the winter southeastern New England coastal communities can  often expect a massive snow event, if it is cold enough. The Cape has been in the bull’s eye on many occasions.

“The very snow in the air had a character of its own…the snow of the outer Cape.…”

                                                            --Henry Beston, The Outermost House (1928)

Kelley brings an encyclopedic knowledge and perspective to storms big and small. Maybe surprisingly, then, he is not convinced that The Blizzard of 1978 warrants its place on a list of top winter tempests in Cape Cod history. In fact, he calls that one a “dud” – on Cape Cod. But one man’s dud is another man’s bomb.

Make that bombogenesis.

Don Wilding, a Cape Cod historian, writer and speaker, thinks otherwise. While other winter beasts certainly merit consideration, “nothing tops ’78,” he asserts. That storm (Feb. 6-7) did not qualify as a blizzard on the Cape, certainly not for the snow, which \changed to rain. Rather, this classic nor’easter was a severe wind (92 mph recorded in Chatham) and tidal event (14-½ foot tides measured in Provincetown). “It was a different experience on the Cape”  than farther west, which got very deep snow, Wilding notes.

More of a winter hurricane (a definitive “eye” passed over the Outer Cape), the storm stalled out and hit at high tide on a new moon (astronomically high), when tides would have been “only” four feet above normal. More so, it ravaged the coast, most dramatically rearranging Coast Guard Beach in Eastham and Nauset Spit (later storms would inflict similar damage on Orleans and Chatham beaches).

Satellite view of the Blizzard of ‘78

“The storm had been terrific…”

                                                            -- Joseph C. Lincoln, Cape Cod Yesterdays (1935)

That blockbuster storm evoked an existential threat that presaged future peril. Its lasting legacy was less physical and more psychological. True, its coastal savagery surprised many forecasters at the time (grainy black and white images from space were still relatively new accessories, and there wasn’t much sophisticated computer guidance). But, more importantly, it shocked most sensibilities. When the storm swept Henry Beston’s long-revered “Outermost House’’ out to sea it affected Cape Codders’ psyche. The tiny structure was named “The Fo’castle,’’ was designated a literary landmark by the federal government in 1964, and was seen as a sturdy symbol of the new environmentalism of the 1970s.    Tempests before that storm were recalled mostly for their maritime death and destruction. The shoreline was mere collateral damage.

Henceforth, the idea of coastal areas being routinely imperiled became front and center.  Advances in climate-related technology and early-warning alerts  probably fed that psychology. The ’78 monster became a psychological benchmark.

Still, before the days of Doppler radar and ensemble modeling, the most memorable Cape storms were chronicled by journalists, not in meteorologists. Old newspapers, magazines and books told the story, not the latest GOES satellite composites. And back then, words, not images or metrics, filled minds and bled hearts. That makes Kelley’s written work so compelling today.

Ironically, Thoreau, who wrote what may be the most  memorable manuscript about Cape Cod, is not among the scribes who captured the exquisite cruelty of winter on the barred and bended arm; none of his four trips to the Cape in the mid-1800s occurred in  winter.  

“A winter-closed house gives the effect of mournfulness.”

                                                            --Gladys Taber, My Own Cape Cod (1971)

Henry Beston was more daring. His eyewitness accounts are riveting. During a year-long stay at the Outermost House, in Eastham, he wrote in January 1927, “So began the worst winter on the Cape for close upon fifty years, a winter marked by great storms and tides, six wrecks, and the loss of many lives.” He was enthralled by the fierce gale that hit on Feb. 19 and 20, describing a “convulsion of elemental fury.” Later, in March, he details the wreck of the three-masted schooner Montclair off Orleans. (Her bones still reappear after a good winter thrashing.)      

Then there is the account of the terrible Portland Gale, in 1898.  Much of Joseph C. Lincoln’s work was set in a fictionalized Cape Cod. But Lincoln remembered the Nov.  26 and 27 storm, so named for the sinking of the side-wheel steamer Portland, plying between Boston and the Maine city. Storm damage was catastrophic. There was tremendous damage to the Provincetown waterfront and its fishing fleet. Regionally, more than 400 people perished and 150 boats were destroyed. Nearly 200  people went down with The Portland off Cape Ann. The exact number  isn’t known because the ship manifest was lost. Among the dead were a newly married couple of Lincoln’s acquaintance. Eerily, he memorializes, “… the young wife’s trunk, with all her bridal finery, was washed ashore at Orleans.” The bodies of the couple were never found.

The late-Noel Beyle, local author and agitator, relished winter weather. His black and white photo-essay booklets on all things Cape Cod are tinged with gallows humor. “The real test of wills,” he thought, “is whether the weather is hot or cold!  That is the true contest on Cape Cod, regardless of the season, and it’s paramount most every winter.” April may be the cruelest month, he joked. Consider the April 6-7 blizzard that blanketed the Cape in 1982. Its “north-to-northwest gale” and full-moon tide caused “severe erosion along parts of the Bay shoreline.”

“It does get a bit rough at times… to tough out all these fun winter storms!”

                                                            --Noel Beyle, Cape Cod Weather Oddities (1982)

Of course, other storms deserve honorable mention. Some bloggers on americanwx.com rank the Jan. 26-27, 2015 blizzard (named Juno by The Weather Channel) right up there with the 2005 blizzard. (Sandwich recorded 34.4 inches of snow). The Feb. 8-9, 2013 “extreme nor’easter” Nemo bore resemblance to its 1978 ancestor (it was a benchmark storm too). Three notable storms from the last century weren’t the beneficiaries of the 24/7 news cycle or social-media promotion: the Feb. 17-18, 1952 nor’easter (S.S. Pendleton disaster); the March 2-5, 1960 blizzard (record Nantucket snowfall of 31.3 inches); the Feb. 9-10, 1987 storm (a rare Cape-only blizzard; at the time, said to be the worst blizzard in 30 years). Surely, over time, their standings will be diminished.     

Much was made of the three roaring nor’easters that struck the Cape in March 2018 over the span of just 11 days. All three storms were essentially benchmark events. And the coastal erosion that the trio caused was depressingly brutal at such places as Nauset Beach in Orleans. Their formation and subsequent track was, weather.com reported, unusual but not unprecedented. The three potent systems that formed in early 2015 were of similar occurrence; they also passed near the benchmark. Storms, like history, can repeat themselves.        

Before he became known as “Dr. Beach,” Stephen P. Leatherman wrote Cape Cod Field Trips, published in 1988. A geologist by training, his expedition underscores that the Cape is a relative geologic infant, a product of the last Ice Age, which ended about 12,000 years ago. He traces its origin and evolution from “yesterday’s glaciers” to “today’s beaches.” It is exclusive real estate.   

The Cape’s location makes it a desirable target for storms. It’s on the edge of a continent and on the edge of an ocean. It also sits about half-way between the equator and the North Pole, and thus in a region where tropical and arctic air clash. Throw in a fluctuating jet stream and the Labrador Current and Gulf Stream, too. As a consequence, weather comes from all directions. Tim Kelley boasts that “Cape Cod has the most interesting weather on earth.” Especially the winter variety.

“This storm, it is true, had extraordinary credentials.”

                                                            --Robert Finch, The Outer Beach (2017)

In many ways Kelley himself bridges past and present -- yesterday’s journalist and today’s meteorologist. His state-of-the-art tools allow him unparalleled access to high-tech prediction but his old-school weather logs allow him deep access to recollection -- a key intangible that gives his on-air presentation the depth of soul. Something we need now. Even when the power goes out.

In a data-driven world, we also demand  nontechnical, accessible explanations of events that just might be beyond our ability to explain and act on. Meanwhile, there’s the age-old drama/conflict: man vs. environment. In any case, Kelley reminds us, “Weather is a balance of extremes; ‘normal’ is abnormal.”

How will Boreas, Greek god of winter, and other divines manage the ferocity of storms not yet dreamed up? For those seeking comfort, take solace in Mark Twain’s universal exasperation. Trapped for days indoors during the Blizzard of 1888 and his wife unable to travel, he wrote Olivia the following:

“… a blizzard’s the idea; pour down all the snow in stock, turn loose all the winds, bring a whole continent to a stand-still: that is Providence’s idea of the correct way to trump a person’s trick.”

 xxx

James P. Freeman is a New England-based writer, financial adviser and former banker. He is a former columnist with The Cape Cod Times and New Boston Post. His work has also appeared here as well as in The Providence Journal, The Cape Codder, golocalprov.com, nationalreview.com, and insidesources.com. A version of this essay has appeared in Cape Cod Life.

Boarding school art

Kelly McGahie, “Star Lake’’ (digital photograph), by Kelly McGahie, in the show “Hidden Treasures 5,’’ at Phillips Exeter Academy’s Lamont Gallery through Dec. 14.

This exhibit features the work of Phillips Exeter Academy employees, faculty and students across departments. The pieces span media as well, including stained glass, watercolor, photography, fiber arts and more. The artists use their different media to reflect on exploration, expression and the role of the arts at the famous boarding school in Exeter, N.H.

Water Street in downtown Exeter, an affluent town founded in 1638 and named after a town in Devon, England.

Llewellyn King: Homelessness in America at crisis point

The British call it sleeping rough. We call it for what it is: homelessness.

It starts the day when all the support systems -- fragile as they often are -- fail. When there is no home to go to; no bed to sleep in, no meal to eat, no toilet to use, no place to wash even a face -- just the hard, cold and often wet streets that offer no succor. The hospitality of a concrete sidewalk is scant.

That is what faces 4 million luckless children each year in the United States, according to Renee Trincanello, chief executive officer of Covenant House Florida, which operates shelters in Ft. Lauderdale and Orlando. Once they hit the streets, they are vulnerable to every horror that can happen to a child, including sex trafficking. “They also are used by drug dealers to inculcate a habit,” Trincanello told me.

In the United States, homelessness is at a crisis point. Cities are clogged with the homeless from coast to coast. If you travel a lot, as I do, you are aware of how homelessness is at its most conspicuous where there is prosperity -- a byproduct of high rents in cities like San Francisco, Austin, New York and Boston.

Very close to the Capitol in Washington, around Union Station, the homeless sleep on the sidewalks, sometimes with the barest needs met by charities -- needs like a sleeping bag, if they have been identified and are lucky. Train stations are a mecca for the homeless because they have public toilets and offer warmth. But Union Station has removed most of its seating to keep out the homeless.

To draw attention to the misery and extreme danger of children sleeping in the streets, and to raise money, Covenant House branches in the United States, Canada and Latin America organize sleep outs. Once a year, executives like my friend Jan Vrins, managing director and leader of Navigant’s global energy practice, takes a sleeping bag, puts it on top of a cardboard box and gets a hard night’s rest on a parking lot pavement.

Vrins says, “It isn’t fun to sleep in a concrete parking lot on a carton box with a sleeping bag. But the time we spend with these youths before we sleep out is wonderful. First, we have dinner with them and have sessions where they share their stories.” Afterward, the children are safely tucked up in the shelter and the adults repair to the parking lot.

In every case, Vrins says, something has happened to them. “Their families have broken up, sometimes because of addiction; there have been storms, as in Puerto Rico, and they end up in the shelters. So, climate change is leading to more kids on the street,” he says.

Vrins says that he was introduced to Covenant House by an executive from Florida Power & Light. “That was 11 years ago, and I got hooked,” he says. Now he is Covenant House Florida’s vice chairman.

Trincanello, who is married with two daughters, has spent her career with Covenant House. She told me that her father wanted her to be a lawyer; she pushed back and became a social worker.

If you sign up to sleep out with Covenant House, whether it is in chilly Toronto or as, as Vrins notes, more benign Florida, you will join some of the cream of America’s executive talent from Accenture and Black Rock, to Cisco, KPMG and other companies. In fact, prominent companies field “teams.”

Vrins, who is married with two sons, heads the Navigant team. Each sleeper is expected to raise $1,000 for Covenant House. This year, he laid down on the concrete in Ft. Lauderdale on Nov. 26. He says 130 people slept out there and raised $270,000.

A native of the Netherlands, Vrins is one of those gregarious people who puts his arms around you with his smile. He speaks with passion and love of the homeless children in their crises. Trincanello, whom I have not met, has a voice as warm as a winter hearth. I can imagine it melting fear in a scared child. Together they do work which is not a molecule short of noble.

Vrins says of sleeping out: “When you wake up in the morning, you feel blessed. When homeless kids must look for the next place to spend the night, you feel blessed.”

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

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

What's historic in Newport?

Shops along Newport’s Thames Street near Waites Wharf

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

The main owner of the western end of Waites Wharf, in Newport, and the owners of The Deck restaurant, Riptides bar and Dockside nightclub on the wharf, want to demolish those establishments to make way for a 150-room waterfront hotel. Some people want to block the demolition with the argument that the buildings are somehow historically significant, which seems a stretch to me.

The bigger issue is whether it’s a good idea that even more of downtown Newport’s storied waterfront be blocked off by hotels and condos. And a longer-term issue is what rising seas, which already imperil the city’s Point neighborhood, might do to the likes of Waites Wharf.

Please hit this link to read a good article in the Newport Daily News article on this.

Fragments but complete

“Study for Torso of Walking Man,’’ by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), in the show “Rodin: Truth, Form, Life,’’ through Dec. 21 at the Fairfield University Art Museum, Fairfield, Conn., through Dec. 21.

This exhibition displays 22 bronze sculptures by the renowned sculptor. The museum notes he used a variety of materials to create his sculptures, but all used modeling to emphasize his personal response to the subject. Many of his sculptures are meant to be fragments, with heads, hands and torsos lacking the rest of the body. Rodin saw these fragments as complete works in their own right. He heavily influenced the development of 20th-Century modernist sculpture.

The museum is on the first floor of the renovated lower level of Bellarmine Hall, above, on the campus of Fairfield University, a Jesuit institution.

Plotting, not idling

“Two Idlers” (detail), by Robert Frederick Blum (1857-1903), in the show “For America: Paintings from the National Academy of Design,’’ in New York, at the New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art through Jan. 26.

(This image courtesy of the American Federation of Arts.)

The show features artist members of the National Academy of Design, such as Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth, along with masterworks from genres of art such as the Hudson River School and American Impressionism.

The New Britain Knitting Co. factory shown in this set of directions for washing some of its products, about 1915. For many decades the city was a major manufacturing center.

Don't depend on one company; mill village in verse

Cleanup activity at one of the General Electric Pittsfield plant Superfund sites on the Housatonic River, which the company heavily polluted in its heyday.

One thing that any community —in New England or elsewhere — should avoid is over-reliance on one or two big companies. Pittsfield, Mass., found that out when General Electric, which once employed 14,000 people at its facilities in that little city, closed most of its operations there, leaving economic devastation. Now, Pittsfield (the capital of the Berkshires) seeks a diverse collection of much smaller firms and is having modest success in turning around the city.

Jonathan Butler, the president and CEO of 1Berkshire, a business development group, told New England Public Radio:

“If we were to have another employer with 10,000 or 15,000 jobs come in, {to Pittsfield} that would scare me. I think that would scare those of us [who] work in economic development.”

I have strong memories of covering the 1970 elections in Pittsfield for the old Boston Herald Traveler. It then still had a thriving downtown, though you could sense slippage.

To read more, please hit this link.

Assawaga Mill, Dayville, Conn., in 1909

Factory Town in Verse

Old New England mills (many of them beautiful, and built for the ages) and the towns that grew around them have become the subjects of a curious form of romance in recent years. So now we have poet, novelist, essayist, environmentalist and former Connecticut deputy environmental commissioner David K. Leff out with a verse novel, The Breach: Voices Haunting a New England Mill Town, which studies the decline of such a community facing economic and an environmental crises.

To hear Mr. Leff talk about his book, and read from it, please hit this link.

Grace Kelly: A lovely urban park over a brownfield

ecoRI News photos by Grace Kelly

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

The Woonasquatucket River Greenway, in Providence, is an oasis wrapped around Route 6 and urban sprawl. And it recently officially opened its latest addition: the Woonasquatucket Adventure Park.

Blue jays and cardinals weave through browning tall grasses and perch on sumac trees, as Donny Green, bicycle-program director for the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council (WRWC), and I trudge over rain-soaked ground to a large gray structure. A bike path cuts a line next to us.

“This is the pump track,” said Green, gesturing to the wave-like structure. “It’s really made for BMX bikes, and the idea is that you start in a high place, drop in with momentum, and pump the bike through and push through turns, using the body to keep momentum through the course.”

Next to the pump track is a parkour course and a field with off-road biking and walking trails that wind their way through wildflowers (jn season).

It’s not your typical playground. The idea is to provide access to alternative sports for kids who aren’t interested in soccer, football, baseball and the like.

The park’s pump track is designed for BMX bicycles.

“I run a program called 1PVD cycling which is a high-school racing program that focuses on kids who don’t have access to what is a relatively exclusionary sport,” Green said. “And before this was all built, I was here with one of my students and we were looking at this space and we thought, ‘This is a perfect practice spot.’”

While this space is being used to bring alternative outdoor activity to an urban area, it’s also the cherry on the cake of a brownfield-reuse effort.

Once home to the Lincoln Lace and Braid mill, which burned down in 1994, the space was riddled with rubble and polluted soil. It was originally slated to be a passive vegetated area after remediation.

“Unfortunately, we had an issue with ATVs regularly using the area and potentially damaging the cap,” said Lisa Aurecchia, WRWC’s director of projects.

So when Green and some of his students came up with the bicycle/park idea, it provided a unique solution

“We kind of walked into an idea that everyone really ran with,” Green said.

But it wasn’t easy. To make the area safe for adventure activity took another three years, demolishing what was left of the mill, removing contaminated debris, covering contaminated soil with an impervious cap, and installing rain gardens and native plants to reduce flooding.

“It was always a struggle finding a use for this space because it was a brownfield, but you see this hidden space, and it’s a quiet space which is actually really beautiful,” Green said. “That sort of helped us decide to go forward with it, because yes it has these complications but this is a gem. We've got greenway already built onto it, we're connected to two other parks in this area, and there's neighborhoods around that could utilize it. We thought, it’s too good a space to leave alone, let's make something out of it.”

Grace Kelly is an ecoRI News journalist.

He only looks happy

““Wa

“Whale’’ (fine art print), by Cape Cod-based photographer Bobby Baker, in his “New Bedford Collection”.

© Bobby Baker Fine Art

Sam Pizzigati: Bloomberg could buy 2020 election and still make money

Via OtherWords.org

BOSTON

Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York’s mayors since 1942, hosted billionaire Michael Bloomberg for three terms.

The first of these terms began after Bloomberg, then the Republican candidate for mayor, spent an incredible $74 million to get himself elected in 2001. He spent, in effect, $99 for every vote he received.

Four years later, Bloomberg — who made his fortune selling high-tech information systems to Wall Street — had to spend even more to get himself re-elected. His 2005 campaign bill came to $85 million, about $112 per vote.

In 2009, he had the toughest sledding yet. Bloomberg first had to maneuver his way around term limits, then persuade a distinctly unenthusiastic electorate to give him a majority. Against a lackluster Democratic Party candidate, Bloomberg won that majority — but just barely, with 51 percent of the vote.

That majority cost Bloomberg $102 million, or $174 a vote.

Now Bloomberg has announced he’s running for president as a Democrat, arguing he has the best chance of unseating President Trump, whom he describes as an “existential threat.” Could he replicate his lavish New York City campaign spending at the national level? Could he possibly afford to shell $174 a vote nationwide — or even just $99 a vote?

Let’s do the math. Donald Trump won the White House with just under 63 million votes. We can safely assume that Bloomberg would need at least that 63 million. At $100 a vote, a victory in November 2020 would run Bloomberg $6.3 billion.

Bloomberg is currently sitting on a personal fortune worth $52 billion. He could easily afford to invest $6.3 billion in a presidential campaign — or even less on a primary.

Indeed, $6.3 billion might even rate as a fairly sensible business investment. Several of the other presidential candidates are calling for various forms of wealth taxes. If the most rigorous of these were enacted, Bloomberg’s grand fortune would shrink substantially — by more than $3 billion next year, according to one estimate.

In other words, by undercutting wealth-tax advocates, Bloomberg would save over $6 billion in taxes in just two years — enough to cover the cost of a $6.3 billion presidential campaign, give or take a couple hundred million.

Bloomberg, remember, wouldn’t have to win the White House to stop a wealth tax. He would just need to run a campaign that successfully paints such a tax as a clear and present danger to prosperity, a claim he has already started making.

Bloomberg wouldn’t even need to spend $6.3 billion to get that deed done. Earlier this year, one of Bloomberg’s top advisers opined that $500 million could take his candidate through the first few months of the primary season.

How would that $500 million compare to the campaign war chests of the two primary candidacies Bloomberg fears most? Bernie Sanders raised $25.3 million in 2019’s third quarter for his campaign, Elizabeth Warren $24.6 million. Both candidates are collecting donations — from small donors — at a $100 million annual pace.

Bloomberg could spend 10 times that amount on a presidential campaign and still, given his normal annual income, end the year worth several billion more than when the year started.

Most Americans don’t yet believe that billionaires shouldn’t exist. But most Americans do believe that America’s super rich shouldn’t be able to buy elections or horribly distort their outcomes.

But unfortunately, they can — or at least, you can be sure they’ll try.

Sam Pizzigati, based in Boston, co-edits Inequality.org for the Institute for Policy Studies. His recent books include The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.

A New England personality?

The poet resting place in the Old Bennington Cemetery, Bennington, Vt. While he is deeply associated in writing and temperament with New England, he was born in San Francisco and spent much of his winters in later life in Florida.

“People in the north-central Great Plains and the South tend to be conventional and friendly, those in the Western and Eastern seaboards lean toward being mostly relaxed and creative, while New Englanders and Mid-Atlantic residents are prone to being more temperamental and uninhibited,’’ according to a study published online by APA’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

I think that there’s something to this, though I might add “irascible’’ for New Englanders. And what do they mean referring to “Eastern Seaboard”? Isn’t New England there? For the region with the most crooked folks, I vote for the South, with its sweet-talking con men.

These studies are lots of fun but of course have marginal utility. To read more, please hit this link.

'Planning with people'

Edward Logue, far right, presents some Boston redevelopment plans to Mayor John Collins and Cardinal Richard Cushing.

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

Hearing of the publication of Lisabeth Cohen’s new book, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, reminded me of cities I lived in or near over the decades, though it didn’t particularly remind me of Providence.

When I lived in Connecticut, in the early and mid ‘60s, Edward Logue (1921-2000) was already something of a national figure for his sometimes too confident efforts to push urban renewal in New Haven, where he was the city planner. He was determined to create a “slumless city’’ through assorted public-housing projects and a huge downtown mall. He did help save and/or improve some neighborhoods but overall he failed to turn around the city, home of very rich Yale University, of which he was an alumnus. Indeed, the city, run by the also “visionary” Mayor Richard Lee, continued to decline during their tenures, in part because of the destabilization caused by their tearing down of some lower-middle-class neighborhoods. Well aware of New Haven’s rising crime rate, I learned to walk fast through the city, whose train station I often used in the ‘60s.

In Boston, Ed Logue performed duties somewhat similar to what he handled in New Haven. He was an integral part of a huge effort to create what was called “The New Boston’’ in 1961-68. I worked in Boston as a reporter in 1970-71, when I saw much of his recent handiwork. The city, for so long down-at-the heels, was starting to look better – in general – though some of the new buildings were/are cold and sterile-looking.

While Mr. Logue undertook some actions that led to evisceration of some neighborhoods – some probably worthy of evisceration, such as honky-tonk Scollay Square -- he learned from the social damage he inadvertently helped create in New Haven not to willy-nilly tear down some beautiful old buildings that could be repurposed, and he consulted neighborhood leaders more than he had in New Haven. But he also was one of those pushing to create Government Center as a Scollay Square replacement whose unfortunate centerpiece is the hideous City Hall Plaza, which planners have been trying to “fix’’ ever since.

When I moved to New York, Mr. Logue was there, working on big redevelopment projects.

Mr. Logue had some big successes in reversing urban decline in some neighborhoods, along with some abject failures. He found that cities are more complicated than even the smartest and most well-meaning city planner can imagine, and that while there’s a role for top-down planning, even involving what may be unpopular decisions (if only in the short term), old cities have physical and social fabrics that are easier to tear apart than to repair. So his belated motto became “planning with people.’

What brought back some big cities, notably New York and Boston, more than planning and urban renewal, included the growing fatigue with car-based and “boring” suburbia, as well as demographic change, which brought lower crime rates and a growing percentage of single people. Then there were the multiplier effects of increasingly thriving industries in certain cities, such as technology in Greater Boston and finance in New York. Some cities became “hot’’ again.

As for Ed Logue, he spent the last part of his life happily living in rural, or maybe call it exurban, Martha’s Vineyard, amongst other refugees from urban angst.

An ER for geriatric patients in northern New England

Main entrance of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, in Lebanon, N.H.

Council member Dartmouth-Hitchcock has announced plans to open a Geriatric Emergency Department in Lebanon, NH. Dartmouth-Hitchcock is New Hampshire’s largest private employer and only academic health system.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock will partner with West Health, a group of nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations dedicated to lowering healthcare costs for seniors, to establish their geriatric ER. Over the next three years, Dartmouth-Hitchcock plans to develop specialized areas within its emergency department and then use telehealth to spread the practices to four other sites in the region. The geriatric ER will be designed with protocols, resources, and specialized care areas to optimize the acute care of senior citizens. The majority of hospitals implementing geriatric ER’s are located in urban or larger medical centers, making the Dartmouth-Hitchcock-West Health partnership the first in the nation to focus on a largely rural population.

“Improving the delivery of care in rural areas is one of the strategic imperatives for Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health, as we grow to meet the needs of patients around the region,” said Dartmouth-Hitchcock CEO and President Joanne M. Conroy, MD. “With our strong programs and passionate providers in Emergency Medicine and Geriatrics, along with our dynamic Connected Care Center, we are uniquely qualified for the development of a rural telehealth model of geriatric emergency care that this collaboration will enable.”

Weep for what could make them glad

“First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.’’

From “Directive,’’ by Robert Frost, written in 1946 and widely considered the greatest poem of his later years, and one of his most unsettling.

To read the whole poem, please hit this link.

David Warsh: Take Trump's attempted extortion to the electorate

Pennsylvania Station in the 1910s. It was torn down in 1963.

There was a time when New York City had the gateway it deserved.

Demolished more than half a century ago, the former Pennsylvania Station by McKim, Mead & White was hardly the first great building in town to face the wrecking ball. The Lenox Library by Richard Morris Hunt and the old Waldorf-Astoria by Henry Hardenbergh on Fifth Avenue also came down. For generations, New Yorkers embraced the mantra of change, assuming that what replaced a beloved building would probably be as good or better.

The Frick mansion, by Carrère and Hastings, replaced the Lenox Library. The Empire State Building replaced the old Waldorf.

Then, a lot of bad Modern architecture, amid other signs of postwar decline, flipped the optimistic narrative.

From “Penn Station Was an Exhalted Gateway. Here’s How It Became a Reviled Rat’s Maze,’’ by Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times. April 29, 2019

You hear a lot these days about narrative. I don’t know anyone better on the topic, at least in the world of economics that I follow, than Mary Morgan, of the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics.

Morgan is an expert because she is an accomplished practitioner. The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think (Cambridge, 2012), is based on eight scrupulous case studies of how mathematical models gradually supplanted words in workaday  technical economics. The philosophical examination established Morgan among the world’s leading historians of economic thought.

A related group research project on the nature of evidence produced an edited volume of essays, How Well Do Facts Travel? The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge (Cambridge, 2011).  Since 2016, she has led a scholarly European Commission research project on “Narrative in Science.”  Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012, she served four years as its vice president for publications.

From Morgan’s introduction to a special issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, “Narrative knowing is most immediately relevant when the scientific phenomena involve complexity, variety, and contingency….”

From her essay in the same issue, “What narratives do above all else is create a productive order amongst materials with the purpose to answer why and how questions.”  Their power is illustrated in novels, she writes; their question-answering and problem-solving capabilities are most evident in detective stories.

I’ve been reading Morgan in connection with an economics story.  But I thought of her in connection with events these last two weeks in Washington, D.C.

I had no time to listen to the impeachment hearings last week. I gathered from the news reports I read that the testimony was damning.

Republicans seem to believe that the attempted extortion of the government of Ukraine was, as Wall Street Journal editorial columnist Daniel Henninger put it, nothing more than Donald Trump’s  “umpteenth ‘norms’ violation.”  The Ukraine caper wasn’t a constitutional crisis. But is clearly was a crime. The fake Ukraine election-interference story was even more shocking.

Therefore it seems right to bring the case. Still, it doesn’t seem sufficient reason to remove the president from office at a time when an election is at hand, especially since a significant minority of voters seem not to think the president did anything out of the ordinary. Impeachment forces Republicans candidates to clarify their views – and to go on clarifying them for years to come.

The thing to do is to take it to the electorate.  The attempted extortion was an anecdote – a short, grimly entertaining account of something that Trump did, an illustration of a good tradition torn down.  But it is only one anecdote of many.

Next year’s election is the key event. The order of American presidents is among the most fundamental narratives of the history of the United States.  Let the House leaders draft the impeachment articles, the membership pass quickly them, and the Senate debate. Move on to the Democratic Party primaries.

The Moynihan-conceived plan to convert the Farley Postal Building across the street across the street from Penn Station (also designed by McKim, Mead & White, into a new train hall is going forward.  But only Donald Trump’s defeat next year can begin to flip the pessimistic narrative of the nation.od

David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somervillle, Mass.-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.

Just keep it away from Facebook

“Data Collection” (onionskins, dye and acrylic on canvas), by Marsha Nouritza Odabashian, in her show “Stir: Drawings and Paintings,’’ through Dec. 1 at Galatea Fine Art, Boston