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Last August Northampton Redoubt interviewed James Howard Kunstler, noted author, social critic and a leading proponent of New Urbanism. He spoke on infill development, specifically as it pertains to the thirty-one unit Kohl condominium proposal off of North Street in Northampton, which has since been amended to twenty-five units. Mr. Kunstler did not have the benefit of viewing the Kohl proposal prior to the interview, but he weighed in nonetheless.

NR: Mr. Kunstler, is all infill good?

JHK: There are many ways of looking at it okay, one way is this: that we are now entering an era in which we are going to reactivate our existing towns because the suburban project is over. We will be reactivating and infilling our towns. What we’re seeing now is that in the early stages of this we’re not very good at it. Over the last fifty years of putting most of our investment in suburbia our skills have been lost. We’re getting them back, but we have a ways to go. To some extent the New Urbanists have been very helpful in retrieving the necessary principles and methodology for doing this kind of work. We owe them a real bit of gratitude for diving back into the dumpster of history and getting this information, for example, (on) how to design mixed use urban buildings.

What’s really going on at the moment is that the architects have not kept up with the urbanists. The urban design is getting back to a pretty good normative level where we’ve rediscovered that you have to bring the building out to the sidewalk edge, if it’s a downtown business building. It has to relate directly to the street and the public realm which is composed mostly of the street. And that you have to make a provision for retail at the ground floor and other things upstairs. We get that now; we’re doing that pretty well, at least in my town of Saratoga Springs, (NY), which is a comparable caliber sort of town to Northampton.

What you’re seeing is that the architecture has not really come back to this level of urban design. The architects are still lost in the raptures of modernism, which includes an inability to proportion buildings correctly or to ornament them with any kind of conviction. One of the guiding principles of the modern experience in modernist ideology is that you can’t do ornaments on buildings. That has tended to persist and it’s still with us. At the highest level of architecture, the highest levels of practice in architecture these days, the big stars are still preoccupied with mystifying the public and that’s exactly what we don’t need. We don’t need to confound people’s expectations about how the building’s work or how they relate to the public realm. In fact we need to reconnect the broken connections. The architects are not helping at the moment although at the non star level, the level that they’re practicing in Saratoga Springs and perhaps over in Northampton, at the non star level they’re not as preoccupied with making statements of mystification as much as they are in New York (City) or Barcelona. But the lack of skills is still obvious. We’ve had a very exuberant period of infill here (Saratoga), with about seven to eight new buildings in the last forty-eight months; almost all apartment buildings with retail on the ground floor; they behave the way we want them to, the urban setting. But the architecture really lacks conviction and grace.

NR: In Northampton we’ve had a couple projects in the past couple of years downtown where they’ve taken previously developed sites and put in, as you say retail on the first floor, dwellings on the second floor and that isn’t really being argued. What is being argued is there’s a proposal now to put in thirty-one condominiums in an urban forest that’s right now very close to wetlands. This would be single use, there wouldn’t be any frontage on the street; they are not creating a traditional street with the faces of the buildings towards the street. They’re creating basically parking lots in the forest and the backs of the buildings would front the parking lot. You would drive down a traditional street that’s been there for over a hundred years with single or maybe two family homes, quaint homes, and it would culminate in a thirty-one unit subdivision of row houses. And the city recently rewrote its local wetlands ordinance to allow for encroachment up to within ten feet of wetlands in the built up areas. The argument has been not so much that infill in and of itself is good or bad but rather is (in regard to) the design of this particular project going forward.

JHK: Yeah, it sounds pretty bad. I think that’s correct to say if the proposal does not include the creation of a legitimate urban street that relates to the building, if it’s just a tower in a parking lot.

NR: It is two or three story row house condominiums. There is no street per se in the traditional sense. The streets now are dead-ends.

JHK: Well they need to create traditional streets and the town should make it illegal to do any more cul de sac type development. Clearly that is now something that we’re done with in America. For one thing it implies that the thing is going to be automobile oriented. There is no question that the car dependent period of our history is coming to an end. Now what you’re seeing is an inability for us to let go of that idea. So we’re still designing for it. I think the truth of the matter is it’s over.

NR: The argument in favor of these condominiums is that it’s better to eliminate the in-town forest rather than to eliminate the forest that’s in the outskirts of town.

JHK: You end up with a whole set of issues that relate to confusion over urban and rural typology, which is to say, people end up being very confused about what’s the town and what’s the country. They’ve got an impulse to both urbanize the rural edge and then to try to ruralize the affect of urbanizing the rural edge. All their impulses are confused and I see this all over the place.

NR: Unfortunately infill has been called, “good,” simply by the use of that term.

JHK: People have also co-opted the term New Urbanism and then done half-assed versions of it. Just co-opting a name doesn’t make it good.

NR: We’ve talked about the design but the buildings are designed poorly and they don’t match the existing character of the neighborhood. It means a lot more traffic and a lot more asphalt. When we’re going to be building to within ten feet of wetlands it generally doesn’t account for one hundred year floods and what homeowners might end up living with after the property is conveyed to them.

JHK: I would just add f**k those motherf**kers.

NR: As a result of this type of issue some private residents in the city have formed a group called the Northampton Design Forum and they’ve invited the Notre Dame School of Architecture, the graduate school, to come here with Dr. Philip Bess.

JHK: I know Phil Bess very well and I admire the Notre Dame School very, very much. They’re one of one or two university programs in America that know what they’re doing. He’s a really a good man and he knows exactly what he’s talking about.

And with that the community now turns to consider Notre Dame’s suggestions which can be viewed at http://sites.google.com/site/northamptoncharrette/.

For most of my life I have harbored an ambivalent view of the military, glad that we had one but also glad that serving is voluntary. My initial perceptions were formed by listening to stories told to me by my relatives and friends, by lessons learned in school, by watching the tube, and by going to movies, mostly at the Calvin Theater and occasionally at the Academy of Music. I had the requisite G.I. Joe man-doll as a kid, and little plastic soldier figurines that I blew up with dirt bombs and sabotaged on Lincoln Log bridges with a garden hose.

I have fuzzy recollections of life as a boy planting myself in front of the TV to watch afternoon shows like, “Gilligan’s Island,” “The Electric Company,” “Hogan’s Heroes,” “Dark Shadows,” and a few others. Those programs lead into the evening news broadcasts and I remember Walter Cronkite, Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith reporting on the details and images of the Vietnam War, coffins of soldiers, and Nixon’s failed presidency. I remember Wide World of Sports anchor Jim McKay reporting on the hostage tragedy that shook the Munich Olympics in 1972. I was riveted to the TV and learned at an early age that our decision makers, those who craft our public polices, are not infallible and that they should be questioned, vehemently at times, because they make mistakes like anyone else.

Vividly I recollect my late father telling me how he was drafted and was, “in” when President Kennedy froze the Army during the Berlin Wall crisis in the early 1960s. That was when the words “iron curtain” became synonymous with the Cold War and was a few years before I was around. Though Cpl. LaFleur never saw action, to his dismay he said for six months he didn’t know whether he would be shipped overseas to the front, as he described it. I discounted his words and service as a youth, something I learned over time was naive on my part. Moreover, he didn’t have much positive to relate about his military service, so when I became of age and registered for selective service at the age of eighteen, I did not rush out to enlist. Over the years I’ve questioned myself from time to time as to whether or not that was the right decision, but it was one that I was able to make so I did, for better or worse.

As time went by I listened to my great-uncles as they described their service during World War II. Two had survived the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, and another saw action in the Battle of the Bulge in Europe. The latter described to me repeatedly and emotionally how he saw his best friend blown to bits as they crouched together in a round hole they had dug in the ground. He said his buddy’s brains were splattered everywhere. According to Uncle Eddie, most of his unit was wiped out while he was in a hospital bed because he had sprained his ankle in a pick-up baseball game. He lived out his years with an ample amount of guilt for having survived the conflict while others did not. As he lost his memory in his old age, he never seemed to forget images of that war, images that he carried with him until he died. He never stopped proclaiming in reference to government officials of all sorts that, “They’ve gone too far, and they won’t stop.” In the end he was proud of the small role that he had played in defeating the axis forces; he had helped to build pontoon bridges as a combat engineer. He had enlisted in the Army at the age of thirty-five and attained the rank of corporal.

My late father-in-law was also a military man, a master gunnery sergeant in the Marines, a recipient of the Silver Star and Purple Heart among other honors. The left breast of his uniformed was loaded with, “fruit salad,” a term he said military personnel used in reference to the military medals and ribbons they might display when donning formal attire. He served for over thirty years; including two tours of Vietnam in the 1960s where I understand he took the lives of others and witnessed things that he did not speak of, except to say that, “war is Hell.” “Top” was a serious dude indeed and he decried, “chest thumpers,” those he described as overzealous in their pursuit of achieving military goals to the detriment of others, including their own compatriots, and those who boasted about it afterward. He said that not everyone he served with was honorable, and I often wondered what he had been subjected to and what he subjected others to during the Vietnam War. But I knew not to ask, he did not want us to know.

So like most if not all of us, I have known or met many people who have served in the military, some who saw action and many who did not; some who love the lifestyle and others that feel differently. I’ve learned not to judge these folks on first meet, to not judge a person by the uniform he or she might wear, because that uniform does not signify what is in a person’s head or heart, but rather to me it signifies their life’s circumstance. Just because someone enlists in the military does not mean that they enjoy killing others or destroying civilization; it may mean that they wish to perform work that preserves freedom and promotes democracy. Conversely, I hope that this reservation in judgment is reciprocal as well; just because someone is opposed to war does not mean that they oppose the people who serve as soldiers.

As of today I have met several persons that have served in the Iraq War effort. One is Florence resident Tim Tompkins, who served out of Kuwait test-flying helicopters for the Army National Guard and briefing daily the top brass on logistics and readiness. I first met Tim at a youth soccer tournament in Agawam. Arriving mid-way through the day wearing his fatigues, boots and a beret, Tim is tall and trim with thinning silver hair. I knew that he was no military newbie, and I was curious to learn his story as it were. Tim is a family man, married and a father of four children. He owns a home and works out of Barnes Municipal Airport in Westfield. From what I can tell, Tim is always on the move, doing something for someone, or going somewhere to do something for someone.

Not long after we met Tim learned that he was being sent to Kuwait for a year to support the Iraq War effort. As he prepared to leave there was much anxiety surrounding his family and friends for obvious reasons. In his twenty-seven years of service to that point it was the first instance where Tim had been thrust into this type of role for any length of time. He had joined the Army National Guard during peace time in the early 1980s, with a primary focus on readiness, preparing for natural disasters, and training for search and rescue missions. Going to war was a whole new experience for him to consider, but something that he always knew was a possibility. Today if one enlists in the service, one can be fairly certain of going overseas to serve in a war theater.

As I expressed to Tim my appreciation that he was serving and also my view that it didn’t seem fair that he was to leave his family behind while I was to stay and stand by the sidelines during soccer games, he downplayed his service and instead spoke of how he looked at it as a team effort. He said that he was glad that there were people like me and others at home to help look after and support his family, to keep things moving along. He was counting on us to carry on life as normal in his absence. Tim stoically told me that we all serve our country in different ways, and that this was what he was equipped to do, that he was prepared to do it, and so he did.

Tim Tompkins

When he came home on leave for two weeks during that year, while our daughters ran up and down a soccer field chasing a ball, I and others picked his brain about what was going on over there and what it was like. I was apprehensive and couldn’t tell initially if he liked the inquisition, but he always answered respectfully, honestly and frankly. Eventually Tim learned that I kept a web log for the Valley Advocate and that in my spare time I attempted to cover issues related to the city of Northampton, and its residents. Not long after that, he asked if I’d be interested in learning more about his service and of course being a bit of a busybody, I took him up on it. It took the better part of a year for Tim to go through channels once he had returned home, but eventually he was granted permission by personnel at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. to bring me up in a Black Hawk helicopter as a member of the media, to show me what the Army National Guard is ready to do. Earlier this year I tagged along with Tim and a Civil Air Patrol unit during a day of training exercises, and later I visited Tim again at work to learn more about what he does and how he views things.

In the coming months I hope to revisit what I learned and to provide the crux of it here. It might take me awhile to sift through the pictures and to edit the information that I collected, so your patience is greatly appreciated.

DESIGN NORTHAMPTON WEEK will start with an introductory presentation by Professor Bess at the Northampton Senior Center from 7 PM to 9 PM. After that, the studio will be open for business in the ground floor gallery space of APE at 126 Main Street throughout the week.

Professor Bess is a nationally prominent urban design expert, known for his effective work with communities, said Joel Russell, Chair of the Northampton Design Forum, which invited the Notre Dame design studio to Northampton. He is best-known for spearheading the successful effort to save Fenway Park, by working with the community and design professionals when the iconic Boston ballpark was threatened with demolition. His students have done superb work wherever they have been invited. Russell added that the Mayor of Cooperstown raved about the work they did in her community last year.

Those attending will participate in formal and informal discussions of work in progress, view drawings by students, and provide comments and suggestions that will be reflected in the next days work. Key to the success of the week of activities will be the involvement of all segments of the community, especially individuals and organizations who do not usually participate in City planning processes. This work is intended to help the City implement the Sustainable Northampton Plan, by using visual images to illustrate the concept of sustainability.

For a complete schedule and additional information on NORTHAMPTON DESIGN WEEK activities, see http://northamptondesignforum.blogspot.com.

The Northampton Design Forum was formed in June to advance the City of Northamptons sustainability goals by promoting high-quality urban design and architecture through open and inclusive public processes. The Forum will sponsor DESIGN NORTHAMPTON WEEK under the umbrella of Available Potential Enterprises, Ltd (APE), a long-time standard-bearer of the local arts scene. The Forum kicked off fundraising efforts to raise the approximately $16,000 needed to bring the students to town, and began planning a week of activities to help the students engage the community.

To date the group has raised about half of the total funds needed and has received support from numerous businesses and residents who will provide meals and places for the students to stay while they are in town. Tax-deductible contribution checks to support Design Northampton Week should be made out to A.P.E. Ltd, our sponsoring organization. Please write “Notre Dame Design” on the memo line of the check. Checks should be sent to:

A.P.E. Ltd

126 Main Street

Northampton, MA 01060

To receive updates on the project, please include your email address with your check.