Springfield is on the rebound. Like the coming of spring, it is not readily apparent on the surface of things: the built environment does not yet sufficiently capture or express all the positive changes that are taking place here.
What is radically, evidently different is the approach to the way the city is doing business, which includes its record-keeping, its finances, its public safety approach, and aspects of its human relations. Over time, these will have a dramatic effect on improving the city. Meanwhile, litter still blows around, buildings still crumble, and residents still have to pay the bills. It’s not a city that makes you feel perky.
That’s why it’s hard to talk about the fact that I was house-hunting in Hartford the other day. While I love Springfield and all its warts and striving, I also have to move.
After months of personal agonizing, my family has made the firm decision to pick up and relocate as soon as this spring. We have wanted to remain in Springfield as long as it worked for our family. Over a year ago, my husband was laid off from his job, and for nearly a year he has been commuting an hour to the far suburbs of Hartford. We gave this arrangement as much time as we could stand to give it, but with three young children to raise, we decided once and for all that we need to live and work in one place.
After all, this is what cities can typically offer, and it’s why I like to live in them.
New England’s cities are sort of a special case, and I find myself swimming upstream in seeking out an urban family lifestyle. All the forces of nature seem leagued in an urging of families like ours not to make a home in the city. When we first sought to move to Springfield, my husband did contract work at LEGO in Enfield, Connecticut. Few, if any, of his colleagues lived in Springfield, so our deliberate location in the city was possibly viewed as a peculiarity. We never sought others’ approval in such choices, but friends and colleagues we know have consistently opted to locate as close to Springfield as West Springfield or East Longmeadow, but no closer.
Over time, I began to wonder why it felt as though there was a forcefield pushing people away, when really the city seems central in geographic location as well as cultural and civic aspects, full of opportunity. Was there anyone else in the city that saw it this way? How could I find them?
We rented a ranch house in Sixteen Acres for two years, until my husband happily secured a salaried job in Springfield. We were finally able to buy a house—our first—in a denser section of Forest Park, purposefully selecting a home that was within walking distance of the public school we had chosen for our children. This would potentially simplify our lives and connect us more to a neighborhood.
We wanted to make our lives as walkable as possible. We wanted to live somewhere stimulating on a variety of levels, and it’s been nothing short of that now for the three years we’ve owned the house. Writing about and documenting the experience was never something I set out to do when buying the house, and yet it has been highly rewarding to do just that. There is a rich environment here for examining, telling stories, and peeling the layers of the onion.
In looking at Hartford, which is a much easier commute for my husband, we are similarly facing choices about walkability, stimulating community life, and above all, the bias of people who wish to advise against locating in an urban setting. This bias is reflected in nearly every conversation I have with interested parties wanting to share their view about life in a southern New England mid-size city. Usually the view is negative. No matter how hard I try to remain neutral, fact-based, and focused on the essential good intentions of most people, such negativity essentially gnaws at me from the inside out, gradually killing all hope about humanity.
Then again, my experience in Springfield has given me new reasons not to take anyone’s advice too seriously, to grow a thicker skin, and to find out for myself what’s true or false. I know now that finding like-minded city-dwellers may or may not happen easily, or ever. So we’re moving to Hartford, and we’ll likely place our children in a public school there. We’ll face whatever challenges and rewards are in store. City life matters to us, and we know that no place in the world is perfect. Life is an experiment.
While I’ve grown to love Springfield, I’ll probably grow to love Hartford, too, and I’ll continue to have conflicted feelings about regional polarizing challenges as well as the troublingly anti-city society I see around me.
Meanwhile, I haven’t quite decided how to approach my documentation work. I’ll continue to write and photograph regardless, placing myself on this peculiar blurry line between being a citizen and being a journalist. But something tells me Springfield doesn’t want someone living in Hartford to write about it, even if I still find it of interest, maybe even more so from a sister city’s point of view. How can I do that writing, if I am no longer that citizen, and yet not entirely a journalist, either?
Springfield needs its own people to stand up for it, since for a long time now, people from outside the city seem to have felt they had the right to tell its story. That isn’t the case anymore—or it oughtn’t be. There is no one person who can capture the city’s story, or many stories, and no singular soul can make it advance, or solve its problems; the success so far is a team effort on multiple fronts.
Any successes in the future will likewise be the result of many voices coming together. Blogging works well when it stems from a diverse community of many, and it feeds into real life, outside computer networks. More people telling Springfield stories about itself will help to crystallize what that story really is, helping to trump bias and negativity with truth and reality—shedding light on what is largely unknown to those outside certain circles.
That said, there may be something to be said for forming a kind of city-blogging bridge between Springfield and Hartford. I hope to be able to keep writing about this city as long as it seems honest to do so, rather than like exploitation. Somehow, I have to find a way to ask its permission, when the time comes.
