What works for downtowns
Boston skyline on a windy, rainy day.
— Photo by Bert Kaufmann
In downtown Providence.
— Photo by Payton Chung
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Obviously, many jobs that have required being in a company’s office five days a week won’t be coming back, as remote work (whose adoption was rapidly accelerated by COVID) and artificial intelligence (which will probably destroy many millions of jobs) keep chomping away at them. This, of course, has presented a big challenge to city downtowns – some of which continue to report scary vacancy rates. But things aren’t as bad as has been presented, and indeed some downtowns are rebounding.
And even as employers have cut back on office space, more and more are demanding that employees who have been entirely remote return to the office at least several days a week. This requires precision planning! Good companies know that many good ideas, especially for problem-solving, come from in-person collaboration.
Hit these links:
https://centercityphila.org/uploads/attachments/clnkqulms0ngyngqdkvd1ozpk-downtowns-rebound-2023-web.pdf?utm_source=ccd&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=downtowns&utm_id=report&utm_content=oct2023
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-31/despite-remote-work-downtown-nashville-is-thriving-for-residents-and-visitors?srnd=citylab
City officials are coming to realize that thriving downtowns will depend much more on recreational visitors and new and old residents drawn to their conveniences and cultural and other nonwork-related attractions and activities, and much less on workplaces (except the work done by staff at such places as restaurants, performance venues, museums and so on).
The Providence Food Hall, scheduled to open next year in the old Union Station, is an example of the exciting attractions that will keep people coming downtown as visitors and get some to want to live there. It will build on Rhode Island’s reputation as a food center.
BUT, the success of the food hall will depend to no small degree on the city stopping the social chaos and crime, and fear of crime, that sometimes envelop Kennedy Plaza. There are some fine examples of how public spaces that had become messes have been cleaned up and restored to the civic treasures that they had been. Consider Bryant Park, in Manhattan. (Thanks for the reminder, Brian Heller.)
Hit this link for an update on the Providence Food Hall project (named Track 15):
https://www.golocalprov.com/business/providence-food-hall-announces-name-and-initial-vendors
Downtown Providence is better positioned than many places to thrive in cities’ brave new world because of its walkable compactness, its colleges, whose students and staffs patronize local business, and the fact that a middle-and-upper-class neighborhood abuts it.
In Bryant Park, next to the New York Public Library.
— Photo by Kamel15
Mainers are like Norwegians
In far Downeast Maine Lubec, West Quoddy Head Lighthouse and Quoddy Narrows, with Grand Manan Island, Canada, in background.
“Almost everyone I spoke with in Maine who’s involved with the Arctic told me that Mainers have more in common with people from Iceland and Norway than they do with people from New York or California – they all live in relatively small communities with fairly extreme weather, and mainly depend on the ocean and other natural resources.”
Tatiana Kennedy Schlossberg (born 1990), environmental journalist, daughter of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy
The woods are ready
“Forest Floor,’’ by Dan Hoftstadter, in his show “From Life: Drawings by Dan Hofstadter, ‘‘ at Atlantic Works Gallery, Boston, through Nov. 25.
The gallery says:
This is a show of “direct, perceptual drawings, unmediated by tools. The artist always keeps his sketchbook by his side, a constant companion to his work as an abstract painter and arts writer. Shown at the gallery are freehand landscapes – responses to wherever he was living at the time - along with portraits and figure studies.’’
Red memories
Cristine Kossow, “Summer by the Pound” (soft pastel), by Cristine Kossow, at Long River Gallery, White River Junction, Vt. She lives in Vermont’s (Lake) Champlain region.
Landsat photo of the immediate Lake Champlain region—only part of the much longer drainage basin and overall valley that reaches the Atlantic Ocean north of Nova Scotia via the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Daily Paintworks says Ms. Kossow:
“{E}njoys painting everyday objects, finding what is personal in the common items we all encounter --vintage tools; teacups; our animal friends; piles of produce; piles of anything really, because she loves the rhythm of repetition.
”Cristine has her prejudices. She likes to punctuate her work with a sneaky dash of periwinkle; it's her color. And she had a bitter feud with red for decades. But one summer, at the urging of a bumper crop of tomatoes, Cristine called an emotional truce and began a cascade of red musings that, in hindsight, mystify her.’’
Judith Graham: Who will care for elderly patients?
From Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Health News
Thirty-five years ago, Jerry Gurwitz was among the first physicians in the United States to be credentialed as a geriatrician — a doctor who specializes in the care of older adults.
“I understood the demographic imperative and the issues facing older patients,” Gurwitz, 67 and chief of geriatric medicine at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, in Worcester, told me. “I felt this field presented tremendous opportunities.”
But today, Gurwitz fears that geriatric medicine is on the decline. Despite the surging older population, there are fewer geriatricians now (just over 7,400) than in 2000 (10,270), he noted in a recent piece in JAMA. (In those two decades, the population 65 and older expanded by more than 60 percent) Research suggests each geriatrician should care for no more than 700 patients; the current ratio of providers to older patients is 1 to 10,000.
What’s more, medical schools aren’t required to teach students about geriatrics, and fewer than half mandate any geriatrics-specific skills training or clinical experience. And the pipeline of doctors who complete a one-year fellowship required for specialization in geriatrics is narrow. Of 411 geriatric fellowship positions available in 2022-23, 30 percent went unfilled.
The implications are stark: Geriatricians will be unable to meet soaring demand for their services as the aged U.S. population swells for decades to come. There are just too few of them. “Sadly, our health system and its workforce are wholly unprepared to deal with an imminent surge of multimorbidity, functional impairment, dementia and frailty,” Gurwitz warned in his JAMA piece.
This is far from a new concern. Fifteen years ago, a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded: “Unless action is taken immediately, the health care workforce will lack the capacity (in both size and ability) to meet the needs of older patients in the future.” According to the American Geriatrics Society, 30,000 geriatricians will be needed by 2030 to care for frail, medically complex seniors.
There’s no possibility that this goal will be met.
What’s hobbled progress? Gurwitz and fellow physicians cite a number of factors: low Medicare reimbursement for services, low earnings compared with other medical specialties, a lack of prestige, and the belief that older patients are unappealing, too difficult, or not worth the effort.
“There’s still tremendous ageism in the health-care system and society,” said geriatrician Gregg Warshaw, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
But this negative perspective isn’t the full story. In some respects, geriatrics has been remarkably successful in disseminating principles and practices meant to improve the care of older adults.
“What we’re really trying to do is broaden the tent and train a health-care workforce where everybody has some degree of geriatrics expertise,” said Michael Harper, board chair of the American Geriatrics Society and a professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco.
Among the principles geriatricians have championed: Older adults’ priorities should guide plans for their care. Doctors should consider how treatments will affect seniors’ functioning and independence. Regardless of age, frailty affects how older patients respond to illness and therapies. Interdisciplinary teams are best at meeting older adults’ often complex medical, social, and emotional needs.
Medications need to be reevaluated regularly, and de-prescribing is often warranted. Getting up and around after illness is important to preserve mobility. Nonmedical interventions such as paid help in the home or training for family caregivers are often as important as, or more important than, medical interventions. A holistic understanding of older adults’ physical and social circumstances is essential.
The list of innovations geriatricians have spearheaded is long. A few notable examples:
Hospital-at-home. Seniors often suffer setbacks during hospital stays as they remain in bed, lose sleep, and eat poorly. Under this model, older adults with acute but non-life-threatening illnesses get care at home, managed closely by nurses and doctors. At the end of August, 296 hospitals and 125 health systems — a fraction of the total — in 37 states were authorized to offer hospital-at-home programs.
Age-friendly health systems. Focus on four key priorities (known as the “4Ms”) is key to this wide-ranging effort: safeguarding brain health (mentation), carefully managing medications, preserving or advancing mobility, and attending to what matters most to older adults. More than 3,400 hospitals, nursing homes and urgent care clinics are part of the age-friendly health system movement.
Geriatrics-focused surgery standards. In July 2019, the American College of Surgeons created a program with 32 standards designed to improve the care of older adults. Hobbled by the covid-19 pandemic, it got a slow start, and only five hospitals have received accreditation. But as many as 20 are expected to apply next year, said Thomas Robinson, co-chair of the American Geriatrics Society’s Geriatrics for Specialists Initiative.
Geriatric emergency departments. The bright lights, noise, and harried atmosphere in hospital emergency rooms can disorient older adults. Geriatric emergency departments address this with staffers trained in caring for seniors and a calmer environment. More than 400 geriatric emergency departments have received accreditation from the American College of Emergency Physicians.
New dementia-care models. This summer, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced plans to test a new model of care for people with dementia. It builds on programs developed over the past several decades by geriatricians at UCLA, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of California at San Francisco.
A new frontier is artificial intelligence, with geriatricians being consulted by entrepreneurs and engineers developing a range of products to help older adults live independently at home. “For me, that is a great opportunity,” said Lisa Walke, chief of geriatric medicine at Penn Medicine, affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania.
The bottom line: After decades of geriatrics-focused research and innovation, “we now have a very good idea of what works to improve care for older adults,” said Harper, of the American Geriatrics Society. The challenge is to build on that and invest significant resources in expanding programs’ reach. Given competing priorities in medical education and practice, there’s no guarantee this will happen.
But it’s where geriatrics and the rest of the health-care system need to go.
Judith Graham is KFF Health News reporter.
Role reversal
“Upscale Your Den and Live Fully” (graphite and colored pencil on paper), by Boston-based artist Sammy Chong, in his show, opening Nov. 24, “Be Beast,’’ at 3S Artspace, Portsmouth, N.H.,
The gallery says:
“In Sammy Chong’s surreal drawings of endangered species, anthropomorphized animals are empowered as the dominant species in a hierarchical, fictional reality. Shining light on animal extinction, the work reminds viewers about the impact of our habits and choices on the world and its creatures.’’
Symbols of New England
The stone wall at the farm in Derry, N.H., where Robert Frost lived with his family in 1901-1911. He described the wall in his famous and complex poem "Mending Wall".
Stone wall in Maine
From the New England Historical Society:
“New England stone walls are as distinctive a feature of the landscape as bayous in Louisiana or redwoods in California. Hundreds of thousands of miles of them criss-cross the region like so much grillwork.’
Hit this link to read the article “Seven Fun Facts About New England’s Stone Walls.
Chris Powell: Maybe they can hide Conn. car tax
Toll booth on Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway in 1955. There are no longer toll roads in the Nutmeg State.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Most Connecticut state legislators purport to hate the car tax -- that is, municipal property taxes on automobiles. A special committee of the General Assembly has been created to review the tax and suggest alternatives for raising the billion dollars it pays into municipal government treasuries each year.
Since cars are sold more frequently, collecting the property tax on cars is more complicated than the property tax on residential and commercial property. Since the property tax on cars is not escrowed as property taxes on mortgaged properties usually are, car taxes fall unexpectedly on many people when the bills arrive from the local tax collector. As the economy weakens, poverty worsens, and more people live from paycheck to paycheck, the car tax is resented even more.
Another complaint is that the car tax is unfair because identical cars may be taxed much differently among towns. But this isn’t peculiar to the car tax; it’s a function of differences in local tax rates. Similar residential and commercial properties are taxed differently among municipalities as well because of different tax rates, and different rates are not necessarily bad, insofar as some municipalities choose to spend and tax much more than others.
Eight years ago a state law reduced the disparities in car taxes, imposing a car tax cap of 32.46 mills. According to the Waterbury Republican-American, the car taxes of 54 municipalities are capped -- that is, their general property tax rate is higher than the car tax cap. The disparities in taxes on similar cars have been reduced but often remain sharp.
A mill equals $1 of tax for each $1,000 of a property’s assessed value. Property tax is calculated by multiplying a property’s assessed value by the mill rate and dividing by 1,000. For example, a motor vehicle with an assessed value of $25,000 located in a municipality with a mill rate of 20 would have a property tax bill of $500.(The disparities in all municipal property tax rates result mainly from the concentration of poverty in the cities, which in turn results mainly from the concentration of the least expensive housing there and from the decision of municipal officials, under political pressure and the pressure of state labor law, to pay local government employees more generously, as well as from the inefficiency encouraged by large grants of state financial aid.
Inconvenient and unfair as the car tax may be, the real problem with it is that legislators and governors don't dislike it as much as they like the revenue it raises and the ever-increasing spending they require in state and municipal government. Indeed, the most obvious remedy for the dislike of the car tax isn’t even proposed -- to reduce municipal spending or reduce state spending and redirect the savings to municipalities.
As always, cutting spending is out of the question at both levels of government, even in the face of policies and programs that don’t achieve their nominal objectives. The broadest and most expensive policies and programs, like education and welfare for the able-bodied, are never audited for their failures. To the contrary, their failures are mistaken as evidence to do still more of what hasn’t accomplished what the public imagines the objectives to be.
That is, politically the status quo is loved far more than the car tax is hated.
Since even $100 million in spending cuts can’t be found in state and municipal budgets, how could state government find the billion dollars needed to eliminate the car tax?
Of course state Senate President Martin M. Looney, Democrat of New Haven, has his usual idea -- raising taxes on the wealthy, particularly on their capital gains. Progressivity in taxation is always a fair issue and matter of judgment, but in Connecticut it is meant less as justice than as protection for inefficiency and patronage.
Another idea is an 8 percent sales tax on homeowner and auto insurance policies. That wouldn't be more popular than the car tax, if people noticed it. But they wouldn't if it was levied against insurers on a wholesale basis, like the state’s wholesale tax on fuel and the taxes on electric utilities that are passed along hidden in electricity prices. Then the sales tax would be hidden in the price of insurance, and insurers, not state government, would be blamed for the price increases while legislators congratulated themselves for eliminating the car tax at last.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net).
New program addresses economic welfare of patients
Edited from a New England Council report
“Boston Medical Center (BMC) recently announced it will allocate a $3 million grant from the MassMutual Foundation toward a program to support the economic welfare of pediatric patients and their families….
“The Economic Justice Hub will consist of three branches as BMC leads other hospitals in tackling inequalities in health-care access. The first branch will expand BMC’s StreetCred program–a free-tax-filing series started in 2016 that has returned more than $14 million to families and assisted them in opening 529 college savings accounts. The second branch will create new jobs for parents as peer educators and financial navigators to help other families in pediatrics seeking financial support. The third branch will facilitate a study on the ‘cliff effect,’ which occurs when a person’s wage increase triggers a disproportionate loss of government benefits, leaving families with limited resources to allocate toward healthcare, housing, food, and childcare.
“‘We know that wealth is directly tied to health,’ said Alastair Bell, M.D., MBA, president and chief executive BMC Health System. ‘Through initiatives like the Economic Justice Hub, we are building on BMC’s quality, compassionate care with family supports that address the economic inequities at the root of many health disparities. We are grateful for partners like the MassMutual Foundation who generously invest in this work, which can truly impact the healthy futures of our community.’’’
Increasingly resonates today
“Madness” (1941) (watercolor, gouache, ink and graphite on paper), by Arthur Szyk (1894-1951), in the show “In Real Times: Arthur Szyk: Artist and Soldier for Human Rights,’’ at Fairfield (Conn.) University Art Museum, through Dec. 16.
Courtesy of Taube Family. Arthur Szyk Collection, in The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, University of California at Berkeley.
Llewellyn King: Some veterans' suicides are linked to minute brain tears
Arizona Army and Air National Guard members participating in "Ruck for Life," an event promoting military suicide prevention.
World War II Memorial in the Fenway section of Boston.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
This is a horror story.
It is a story of suffering unmitigated and of death from despair. It is the story of our veterans who are 57 percent more likely to take their own lives than those who haven’t served their country.
Every day in the United States an average 17 veterans commit suicide. Those who have served in special combat force units, such as the Navy Seals, being a little more likely to die this way than regular forces.
These veterans are suffering and dying in plain sight. Veterans, whether they have seen action or not, are ending life by their own hands — hands that willingly took up arms to serve.
There is a clear and present crisis in deaths of those who have borne the battle, heard their country’s call and who die, often alone in despair.
Around Veterans Day we remember them, but what do we know of them?
More veterans have taken their own lives in the past 10 years than died in the Vietnam War. Frank Larkin, chairman of Warrior Call, an organization that asks anyone who knows a veteran to call them from time to time and ask, “How are you doing? What do you need? Can I get help for you?” But mostly to convey the comfort of knowing that “You are not alone.”
However, the problems are beyond loneliness and the well-known precursors to suicide: drug abuse, alcoholism, joblessness and broken relationships.
New research shows that what ails these sad heroes isn’t just psychological and moral despair, but physical brain damage -- minute tears in the brain that CT scans don’t pick up.
A leading researcher into brain injury and concussion, Dr. Brian Edlow, a professor at Harvard and associate director of the Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery at Massachusetts General Hospital, said these tears are only discovered in postmortems, when the brain tissue is put under a powerful microscope.
The cause of these tears, Edlow told guest host Adam Clayton Powell III in a special Veterans Day episode of the television program White House Chronicle, are blasts that troops experience on the battlefield and in training — massive concussive blasts, over and over again. Those concerned emphasize that the victim doesn’t have to see combat to suffer damage, it happens in training as well.
Sometimes the tears are the result of a head injury such as a soldier’s head hitting the inside of a tank or a blast throwing a soldier against a wall, but mostly it is the shockwave, according to Edlow.
“Just to appreciate the scope of this problem, if you look at the post-9/11 generation, those who answered the call to serve after September 11, 2001, over 30,000 active-duty and veteran military personnel have died by suicide during that time period, which is four times more than the number of active-duty personnel who died in combat,” he said, adding that the “extent of the suicide problem is humbling.”
Larkin said that as many as two-thirds of those who commit suicide have never been to a VA hospital or sought institutional help.
For Larkin, the story is very personal. His son Ryan, a decorated Navy Seal who served for 10 years with four active-duty deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, was a suicide.
Ryan returned from active duty a changed young man, 29 years old. He was moody, didn’t smile and showed classic signs of depression. His family couldn’t get him out of it and his brain scans were negative. After a year, he took his own life.
Earlier, Ryan had asked that his body be used for medical research. Postmortem diagnosis at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center revealed substantial brain damage that wasn’t detectable during the year before his death, his father said.
“The system didn’t know what to do and it defaulted toward psychiatric diagnosis,” Larkin said.
Referring to scans and other techniques now in use to examine the brain, Edlow said, “We simply are not accurate enough to detect these sub-concussive blast-related injuries.”
Ryan’s tragedy is repeated 17 times every day — and that figure doesn't account for those who die in deliberate accidents and are otherwise not reported as suicide, Larkin said.
While medical science and the military catch up, all we can do, as Larkin said, is to check on a veteran, any veteran. You could save a life, bring a man or woman back from the precipice.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.,
Linda Gasparello
Co-host and Producer
"White House Chronicle" on PBS
Mobile: (202) 441-2703
Website: whchronicle.com
‘First they came….’
This is the "First they came..." poem attributed to German theologiian and Lutheran minister Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984) at the Holocaust memorial in Boston.
Frank Carini: The brazen and well-financed disinformation campaign of the anti-wind-farm crowd
Overview of climatic changes caused by burning fossil fuel and their effects on the ocean. Regional effects are displayed in italics.
Oil spill covering kelp.
The anti-wind mob chums the waters with red herring. The conspiracy theorists continue to hide behind critically endangered North Atlantic right whales to spin tales about offshore wind. Their faux concern is nauseating.
When it comes to the real threats to the 350 or so North Atlantic right whales left on the planet — entanglements with fishing gear and strikes with ships — the mob’s ranting and raving goes largely silent, and my stomach turns.
These self-proclaimed pro-whale warriors only care about the lives of these majestic marine mammals when they fit into their manufactured hysteria about offshore wind.
Among those spreading the mob’s propaganda are southern New England firebrand Lisa Quattrocki Knight, president of Green Oceans, and Constance Gee, a Westport, Mass., resident and Green Oceans member; Lisa Linowes, executive director of the Industrial Wind Action Group Corp, also known as The WindAction Group; Protect Our Coast New Jersey; and blogger Frank Haggerty, a blowhole of offshore wind misinformation.
Their bluster is either funded by the fossil-fuel industry and/or they are wealthy coastal property owners more concerned that their ocean views will be ruined by a different type of energy infrastructure. Either way, the lives of whales, dolphins, birds, and humans living near polluting fossil-fuel operations don’t matter.
To read the whole article, please hit this link.
Beats thinking
“Muscle Memory” (monoprint drypoint construction with violin and mirror), by Massachusetts artist Debra Olin, at Brickbottom Artists Association’s (Somerville, Mass.) members show, through Nov. 19.
Stuart Vyse: Looking for the light in our inner worlds
This essay first ran in New England Diary on Nov. 19, 2017
I used to dread the descent into darkness in late autumn. There comes a time when, well before you get up from your desk to go home, the world outside your window is as black as midnight. It is barely five o'clock in the afternoon, but there is no natural light left to guide you home or illuminate your evening activities. It is too early to sleep, and yet you must push against the blackness to stay alert and awake. Eventually here in the northern latitudes, the reluctant cold-weather sun manages only the briefest appearance in the middle of the day before slipping away behind a mid-afternoon sunset.
It is easy to feel depressed by the weight of light's absence -- by a life that sometimes feels subterranean and nightmarish. But I have come to welcome the change of year. Seasons mark the time. All seasons. They tell us we have been here before, and if all goes well, we will be here again. The changing light and landscape conjure memories: of jumping in piles of leaves, of a beautiful ice storm, or of a frozen lemonade drunk in the car on the way home from the beach.
Thanks to a quirk of our psychology, we tend to suppress the unpleasantness of the past, and our memories are often warm and nostalgic, no matter what the temperament of those distant times.
I have grown to appreciate the brightness hidden within the winter black. There are the familiar holidays clustered around winter solstice -- that shortest day when the darkness begins to slowly pull back its veil. These celebrations are filled with candles and lights and burning fires that show the way to the equinox and warm weather beyond.
Although there is less light around the solstice, the light there is is of a special quality. The winter sun hurls its shafts through the window at a flatter angle, crashing them against the floors and walls. During the season we are inside the most, the sun finds a way to light the room as brilliantly as possible, and then too soon it is gone.
But, for me, the great hidden light of the dark season can only be seen from outside. As you walk the sidewalks or drive through your neighborhood at night, the houses are lit from inside out, throwing great yellow beams onto the lawn. We never know what goes on in other people's homes, and sometimes it is better that way. But from a safe distance away I imagine families together -- not avoiding the darkness outside, but drawn to the light and heat inside. Making a warm world together within the wintry one beyond the walls.
Perhaps it is wishful thinking, but I like to imagine that, for those of us who live where there are seasons, this cycle serves an important purpose. I want to believe that during this time of year when the sun recedes beyond the horizon, nature compels us to go home. Like bears returning to their caves, we come inside -- not to hibernate -- but to awaken to a different source of illumination.
The spinning Earth tells us to spend a little less time outside and a little more with family and friends -- and, perhaps, a little more in the smaller spaces of our inner worlds. Ideally, when the warm weather returns, we emerge restored, with a new appreciation of the world outside.
Of course, life is not always ideal. Sometimes the sense of cold-weather fellowship is more an idea -- a memory -- than a reality. Easier seen from outside on the sidewalk than from inside the house. But even then, the blackness of winter provides the perfect backdrop for imagination and reexamination. As we are forced indoors we have a chance to look inward, too. A chance to seek a private incandescence to guide us through the dark season.
Perhaps this is part of what the winter holidays are supposed to do. Show us a different source of light; encourage us to look inward as we go inside; and give us hope that the spring will come again.
The gathering shadows of autumn are often difficult to accept. The hope of longer days seems so far away. But I have come to understand that, when darkness comes, we need not rue the absent sun. It is simply time to go inside and make our own light.
Stuart Vyse is a psychologist and writer living in Stonington, Conn., where he lives in the old Steamboat Hotel, about which he wrote an eponymous book.
The publisher explains:
“From 1837 to 1900, the tiny borough of Stonington, Connecticut, was a major transportation hub on the route between New York and Boston. Steamboats leaving Manhattan followed Long Island Sound to Stonington Harbor, where passengers boarded trains for the rest of the journey to Providence or Boston. Stonington’s Steamboat Hotel, built 1838 near the piers and railroad yard, was home to saloons, restaurants, a pool hall, a cigar shop, a tailor and a barber shop. Merchants, hotel keepers and saloon workers passed through the building, each with their own unique story. Many of them were immigrants or first-generation Americans, and they are a window on a late nineteenth-century class of merchants and service workers. Join local author Stuart Vyse as he reveals a lively portrait of remarkable harmony in a small village that was far more diverse than it is today.’’
Bright light therapy is a common treatment for seasonal affective disorder, which is associated with diminished sunlight from fall into the winter.
But it usually doesn't usually last long
“Infatuation” (acrylic, wallpaper on canvas), by Allison Bremner, at Bates College (Lewiston, Maine)) Museum of Art.
— Image courtesy of artist, who is of Alaskan Native American background.
Hathorn Hall, at Bates College
— Photo by Odwallah
Textile mills in Lewiston along the Androscoggin River about 1910. The city became a major industrial center in the mid-19th Century, first with sawmills, then with textiles. Money from the latter helped found Bates College, in 1864. Many of the workers were of French-Canadian background, and French used to be widely spoken in the city.
Sadly, Maine’s second largest city, after Portland, became nationally know for Robert Card’s mass shooting there on Oct. 25. that killed 18 people in the normally peaceful place.
The horror, the horror
Charles Ives
“O Prejudice….You enter into the little boy of a New England town and make him stand and gape with the same horror at {the} man going into a Catholic church as the man going into a saloon.’’
— Charles Ives (1874-1954), famed American Modernist composer, insurance executive and native of Danbury, Conn. He’s a considered a father of estate planning.
Danbury, Conn., the “Hat Capital of the World,’’ in 1879
Homeless surge into the affluent Back Bay
- Photo by Ed Yourdon
The Boston Public Library, on Copley Square. The peculiar lighting is from sunlight reflected off a high rise nearby. Homeless people have been congregating in increasing numbers on the square.
— Photo by Daniel Schwen
Excerpted from The Boston Guardian
“Back Bay landmarks were experiencing a surge in homeless occupancy even before the city cracked down this week on the South End encampment known as Mass & Cass, making stakeholders anxious about potential displacement.
“A range of factors have increased disruptions from unhoused Bostonians around heavily trafficked landmarks like the Boston Public Library (BPL), Prudential Center and Copley Square.
“With the city pledging to enforce anti-tent ordinances once and for all on the city’s largest encampment, civic and business groups in the Back Bay worry they’ll bear the brunt of the fallout.
“Meg Mainzer-Cohen, president of the Back Bay Association, says recent months have already seen a dramatic rise in homeless displacement to the Back Bay, a timeline that coincides with the spike in South End violence and the city’s warnings that it would soon disperse the encampment.
“‘In August things were very quiet, especially given the warm weather. By September, the situation had changed dramatically and we saw a major increase in people in need of services in the neighborhood,’ she said. ‘There’s a large presence in front of the library with a massive influx of people and what feels like an encampment.”’
To read the whole article, please hit this link.