My driveway, not long ago, looked like those windswept landscapes where forlorn polar bears play. I’d waited too late to blow the snow, led astray by forecasts of a balmy 52-degree afternoon.
I’m bad at snow removal. I blame my Southern childhood, in which frozen precipitation was as enticing and non-existent as the gold of El Dorado. (In my defense, I do know how to catch crawdads.)
That recent round of the white stuff gummed up the works all over the place. My commute was slippery, and the always-teeming streets of Northampton proved harder than usual to navigate, thanks to the mini mountain range of snow that always takes shape in the middle of Main Street after the plows visit. It was only thanks to good planning in the wake of the Northampton BID’s sudden dissolution that snow removal from downtown sidewalks continued till the end of 2014. The Greater Northampton Chamber of Commerce led a fundraising effort to continue working with Gartin LLC, the company contracted by the BID, through Jan. 1.
These days, as we embark on that long stretch of iciness that reaches into March, downtown sidewalks could prove more of a patchwork affair in the wake of storms. As Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Suzanne Beck explains, downtown property owners are now responsible for snow removal and sidewalk cleaning.
That’s one of many problems that have to be addressed with the loss of the BID. Lightning rod though it was, the BID had a hand in a lot of what happens downtown. In a recent conversation with Northampton Center for the Arts Director Penny Burke, a particularly acute problem came up. “The unexpected and precipitous demise of the BID has had a strong impact on the Center for the Arts. We had a really good working relationship with the BID, coming together to share ideas and to sponsor events that were arts-related downtown,” she said. “A lot of what’s been going on is trying to grapple with carrying on without them. Not really in terms of finances, but in terms of organization. One example is Arts Night Out — we collaborated with the BID not only on that event, but on certain special events around that. We had had multiple meetings — about lots of potential things — and they’re all temporarily tabled.”
It’s clear that, in a city that’s long prided itself on its role as an arts mecca, downtown arts programming is too important to go begging. Though even Burke herself has questioned whether a more gentrified Northampton is still as much the arts-friendly place it once was, the map of downtown businesses clearly boasts plenty of art stops, from those with a big footprint like R. Michelson Galleries and Don Muller Gallery to smaller, but no less important, names like FOE and William Baczek Gallery. Downtown business owners have to step up in the wake of the BID and keep the arts at the heart of Northampton’s economy or risk downtown becoming just another quaint New England shopping district.
The issues go beyond the obvious. The Center for the Arts had, Burke explains, financial ties with the BID. For several years, that organization underwrote the fireworks that end First Night. “They were also supporting members of Arts Night Out,” Burke explains. But, she says, “It wasn’t the amount of money [that was important to Arts Night Out] — it was about $100 a month. It much more had to do with being able to get out and do things on the street.”
They also saw to things like wheeling massive blocks of ice onto sidewalks for the Ice Art event, which is no longer happening this year.
“The most important and most fruitful relationship with the BID was the collaborative aspect,” Burke says. “We basically said, ‘We’ll be the arts and ideas people and you help us get those arts and ideas on the streets without disrupting traffic.’ When you’re doing chalk art or ice art on the street, it’s a collaboration with the DPW, with the BID. It’s all about being able to go out on the street safely.”
Beck lays out the problem in clear terms. “Everything’s deconstructed now, and the first question is what are the priorities [for downtown], as opposed to, ‘This is a list of the things the BID did and how are we going to replace them.’
“The arts events were a really strong partnership and I would hope — I’m not the one to determine what the priorities are, so I’m not going to comment about what they should be — but the Center for the Arts hopefully could replace the services that the BID provided on their own initiative, and not wait for the business owners.”
This is an important moment for Northampton. A lot of people, including business owners, artists, city residents, the Center for the Arts, and the newly named city Department of Arts and Culture talk about the importance of the arts to the city. The will is there. All that remains is deciding who will lead the way in the hard work of keeping the arts a central factor in downtown’s vitality, BID or no. That won’t, one hopes, take what Burke jokingly said Northampton artists need: an “arts messiah.”
I just hope they don’t ask me to do the snow removal.•
