Eight years ago, in North Adams, Massachusetts, artist Eric Rudd talked the city into dumping several dozen tons of sand on tiny, narrow Eagle Street, just off Main, where Mom & Pop businesses have come and gone for 150 years. He brought in a local rock band and invited kids to come and play in the sand for three hours on a July afternoon. Zillions of kids showed up, along with their parents and grandparents.

Eagle Street was struggling then, with plenty of vacant storefronts and buildings starting to slip away from a generation of deferred maintenance. Between picture taking and helping their kids with sand castles, those parents and grandparents couldn't help taking a good look around, perhaps for the first time in many years.

Like Claremont, North Adams boasted a thriving manufacturing economy, but took a huge hit when its largest factory closed in 1986. In 1999, the complex of 26 abandoned mill buildings became the home of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA), spurring a cultural and spiritual revival that has turned the city around, slowly but surely.

Rudd's Eagle Street Beach is an annual event now, but the street is still struggling, mostly because of landlords who will neither sell their buildings nor invest in them. But there have been some bright spots, and they happened because some creative people looked at the possibilities, got ideas, and followed through on them. All those annual afternoons at the "beach" had a lot to do with that.