Whitcomb: Taking Long Walks; Stitching Together Downtown; Comforting the Comfortable

Sunday, January 03, 2021

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“What Youth deemed crystal,

Age finds out was dew.’’

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--- Robert Browning (1812-1889), English poet

 

“As Americans get vaccinated, they must decide whether to remember the people who sacrificed to keep stores open and hospitals afloat, the president who lied to them throughout 2020 and consigned them to disaster, the families still grieving, the long-haulers still suffering, the weaknesses of the old normal, and the costs of reaching the new one. They must decide whether to resist the decay of memory….’’

 -- Ed Yong, who writes on science for The Atlantic. He has degrees in zoology and microbiology

 

Happy New Year! It’s good to see 2020 slink away.

 

The other week I accidentally came upon a TV series on PBS called The Road to Rome, about eight British personalities of varying faiths and nonfaiths, ages and physical conditions walking on the ancient Via Francigena pilgrimage route to the Eternal City. It’s part of a wider series on the network about religious pilgrimages.

 

(I’ve known a couple of people who completed (by foot -- a real pilgrimage) the famous El Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain. Neither told me that they got a religious experience out of it, but they much enjoyed some of the life stories of their fellow pilgrims.)

 

The pilgrimage-to-Rome series is a colorful travelogue, most of it outdoors. It’s very engaging, sometimes funny and sometimes a little melancholic. It got me thinking that many of our lives are   frequently interrupted pilgrimages to something, though we often don’t know to where, until, maybe, the end.

 

T.S. Eliot wrote in “Four Quartets: “Home is where one starts from. As we grow older/ The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated….’’

 

But “In my end is my beginning.’’

 

Everyone sees himself/herself as the center of their own universes in a narrative mostly invisible to others. And that narrative involves erratic internal and external movement. We are all “road stories”.

 

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PHOTO: File

I’m not crazy about school reunions, in part because they are partly fund-raising events, and breathed a sigh of relief last spring when my 50th college reunion was cancelled because of you know what. It was provisionally postponed to next June, but who knows if that will happen? Still, such reunions have value as venues where you learn about the narratives/pilgrimages of others while helping you better understand your own. You discover things about classmates you never knew and hear life stories of classmates whom you might not have known at all while in school.

 

And you’re reminded of the confusions of time, how it goes forward and then seems to circle back and speeds up and slows down.

 

Anyway, 2021 might well be better than 2020, though it could be worse. Will we experience time in 2021 much differently than we did in slow, locked-down 2020, with its boredom and claustrophobia tempered by flashes of anxiety and even unexpected pleasures? Will it become (relatively) broad, sunlit uplands or just clearings in the woods?

 

 

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PHOTO: GoLocal

A More Together Downtown?

Providence officials, aided by professional planners, are trying to envisage how to improve the city’s downtown by stitching it together more tightly after car-dependent, suburban impulses have tended to fragment it.

 

Manuel Cordero, co-founder of the nonprofit DownCity Design, said “The idea is to create spaces that are welcoming and vibrant, and to address some of the longstanding issues, such as lighting and accessibility, to create a better set of interconnected spaces for our downtown.’’

 

Of course, every city needs to try to implement the best design ideas to adjust to changing demographics, technology, architecture, engineering and economics. But that might be even trickier than usual now because of the uncertainties of COVID-19. How might the pandemic permanently change how we live in, work in and visit cities?

 

To read ecoRI News’s report on this, please hit this link:

 

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One very good piece of urban news, especially for those of us in the Northeast Corridor:  A new, natural-light-filled train hall opened Friday in New York’s Penn Station complex. It has 92-foot-high ceilings and glass skylights and recalls the glorious masterpiece that was the Beaux-Arts Pennsylvania Station, opened in 1910 and torn down in ‘60’s. It was replaced by the hideous cavelike, dank, dark and overcrowded Penn Station that we all hate – the busiest train station in America.
The new hall is in the James A. Farley Post Office building, across Eighth Avenue from the main Penn Station, which is under Madison Square Garden.
The facility will only serve Amtrak and Long Island Railroad passengers, at least initially. Subway and other riders/victims must continue to use the old station. But more changes are planned in the passenger-rail complex – by far America’s busiest – in coming years.
What a nice way for New York City, which suffered much from the COVID catastrophe in 2020, to start the new year. And maybe it will inspire the political will to fix a lot more of America’s decayed transportation infrastructure. Big things can still be done, even in mostly gridlocked America, with strong and brave leadership.

The Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully (1920-2017) famously bemoaned the destruction of the 1910 Pennsylvania Station: “Through Pennsylvania Station one entered the city like a god. Perhaps it was really too much. One scuttles in now like a rat.”

 

 

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PHOTO: File

Greater Boston’s Biotech Bonanzas

Yet again, the technological center of Greater Boston spins out a health-and-wealth creating development, as Cambridge-based Moderna has come up with a highly effective vaccine against COVID-19. As The Boston Globe has noted, such other local companies as MilliporeSigma, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Gingko Bioworks have helped Moderna and other drug makers create vaccines while other local companies have worked on treatments. And all with astonishing speed.

 

While attention has been focused on vaccines, let’s have louder shoutouts for the researchers who have developed those increasingly effective but under-publicized treatments. I thought of this when learning that one of my sisters was hospitalized with COVID for four or five days over Christmas, when she was given meds and extra oxygen in a small, rural northern New Hampshire hospital. Things briefly looked dicey, but she has since been released, mostly, apparently, because of medications that weren’t available early last spring, when the pandemic exploded. She and her husband, who also contracted the illness but not nearly as severely, now must huddle down in their house in the woods along a pond for a while, with their main amusements TV, unreliable Internet connections and the deer, moose and bears wandering their property. For now, anyway, that beats a studio apartment in Brooklyn.

 

The speed with which some new treatments can be developed has been stunning, and holds out much hope, and not only for COVID victims. But, of course, with so many scientists working on COVID, what weren’t they working on?

 

Loud applause, please, for SCIENCE.

 

The density of scientific enterprises in New England continues as a locomotive pulling the region’s economy. It’s another reason we’re fortunate to live here, even with that annual cool snap called “winter’’.

 

The center of all this is Cambridge’s Kendall Square, the compact Silicon Valley of the East.

 

But a bit of moral ambiguity: Moderna disclosed last Tuesday that it was immediately making its vaccine available to its U.S.-based workers, contractors and board members and the adults those people live with. Okay, you can see the ethics and practicality of quickly vaccinating their people who are actually making the stuff. But board members, most or all of whom are rich and nowhere near the manufacturing process? Including them puts a few people much more vulnerable to the virus further back in the line.

 

It reminds me of the members of Congress who had eschewed mask wearing and social distancing, and downplayed the pandemic for months, especially at Republican political events, going to the head of the line for their  shots.

 

But then, in vaccination distribution and so many other “public services,’’ the powerful almost always go to the head of the line. But don’t complain: It would be like whining that rocks are hard.

 

 

Physician/Patron of the Arts and His Artists

We’re also lucky that New England is so welcoming to the arts, with Rhode Island and Boston the centers. You get a good sense of this reading the new autobiography in the form of a graphic novel called Chazan!: Unfiltered about the Ocean State’s leading patron of living local artists, Joseph Chazan, M.D.

 

Joe Chazan, who is now 85, is a physician, scientist and very successful businessman (kidney-dialysis services) and has been a big figure around here for a long time. His often humorous, larger-than-life personality has energized civic culture.

 

Besides the exciting (funny, sad, educational and a lot in-between) story of Dr. Chazan’s life from its very modest beginnings, the book serves as a panoramic view of the local art scene, showing the work of many artists, some well-known, some not. With art work by Erminio Pinque, script/story work by Lenny Schwartz, story work by Bradley Starr and help from others, the book entertains even those who may have known nothing about Dr. Chazan’s decades of supporting local artists, including, for example, helping to start AS220, the downtown Providence arts center. (Full disclosure: My wife, a painter, is one of the many artists listed in the book.)

 

All too often, rich people chase status by only buying the work of famous artists. But Joe Chazan seeks out little known but promising artists and helps some of them become well known. He knows that there are plenty of hidden treasures around here.

 

Hit this link for more information about the book, including how to buy it:

 

 

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Providence City Hall PHOTO: GoLocal

Online Tax Trauma

The City of Providence can do better with its online services, such as the computerized system for recertifying homestead property-tax exemptions. It’s badly written (including a misspelling), confusing and at least one element in it—one of the drop-down functions – works very, very slowly if you have high property-id numbers. You can have a big dinner while you’re waiting to get to your number and proceed with filling out the form.

 

Paper forms are almost always better than computer forms, and humans are usually better at answering questions than are computers.

 

I know that all is sometimes near-chaos now, what with COVID, but when things calm down, the city ought to hire a firm to make the city tax assessor’s office more user-friendly. Don’t blame the friendly clerks who work there. This is a senior-management problem.

 

Hit this link to look at the problem:

 

 

Poorly Targeted Relief

The  new bi-partisan COVID relief and stimulus package will give $600-per-person payments to many who don’t need it, including up to $3,000 to families of five earning as much as $150,000, reports The Washington Post.

 

And now the Democratic-controlled House has backed an apparently doomed plan (supported in this case by an increasingly thrashing and trashing Trump)  to boost the individual payments to $2,000 from $600 and apply it to families of five earning up $350,000! The median household income in America is around $60,000.

 

While most of us like “free money” this is irresponsible. Relief legislation should be focused on those who really need the help. But the measure will only extend unemployment benefits for 11 more weeks. Too short. Further, state and local governments, whose finances have been reeling from COVID-related costs, should get more aid; unlike the Feds, they can’t just print more money and must balance their budgets (except for Vermont, which always does anyway). And state governments, not the Feds, are the primary agents in public-health matters and so are on the front line against the pandemic.

 

Further, more money should be spent on fixing the Feds’ so far badly managed vaccine-distribution programs – mismanagement that has made things so much more difficult for local and state public-and-private-sector anti-pandemic efforts.
 

That so much of the relief money would go to the affluent will also serve to diminish its economic-stimulus effects since the affluent save/invest a much higher percentage of their money than do the poor and middle class, and, anyway, with travel, restaurants and other sectors much limited by pandemic restrictions they have fewer places to spend it. Politically, giving so much money to people who don’t really need it makes a lot of sense, economically no.

 

Meanwhile, watch congressional Republicans, who backed big tax cuts especially favoring the very rich, and blew off warnings about exploding budget deficits, become deficit hawks again once the Biden administration starts formally proposing legislation.

 

 

Those Blow-Up Holiday Creatures

Now that the holiday season is over, except for Epiphany, on Jan. 6, I’ll miss those blow-up, forced-air yard decorations – the Santas, the reindeer, the elves, etc., with their hissing pumps. (I’ve not yet seen blow-up Nativity scenes but perhaps I’ve not been observant enough.) It’s amusing to see dogs barking at them and to watch them being blown across the street in gales and sometimes deflating like big balloons. Americans’ love of extreme holiday decorations is charming.

 

xxx

 

With two superb, but very different, bookstores on Wayland Square, in Providence – Paper Nautilus and Books on the Square -- the neighborhood feels like the literary capital of the area.

 

 

The Real Puritans

Sarah Vowell’s chatty (and sometimes a tad vaudevillian) and well-researched book The Wordy Shipmates is a remarkable combination of drollery and serious, if popular, historical writing. She gets into the heads of the New England Puritans, some of whom were brilliant, such as John Winthrop,  Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, and virtually all of whom were literate and wrote a lot, and analyzes how their actions and beliefs help lay the religious, civic and political foundation of what became the United States. Indeed, as the late Anglo-American journalist Alistair Cooke once observed, “New England invented America.’’

 

She says in the book that “the most important reason I am concentrating on {Massachusetts Bay Colony leader John} Winthrop and his shipmates in the 1630’s is that the country I live in is haunted by the Puritans’ vision of themselves as God’s chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire.’’

 

But in Winthrop’s famous and sometimes misquoted and misunderstood line, the colony would be "as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us,’’ he was warning that its members would be judged for how they lived there. And he never called that city “shining.’’

 

Her book is a very entertaining place to start to learn about the creation of New England and the myths and facts around it. Then you can go and read the much more scholarly work of such academic historians of the region as Harvard’s brilliant Perry Miller (1905-1963).

 

My father’s ancestors were Puritans, though some fairly early on became Quakers and then were advised to get out of town fast. My only physical stuff from that time are some musty religious tracts, which those 17th Century characters cranked out in large numbers. Worth little.

 

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