NORTH ADAMS ARTICLES, PAGE TWO

"SOMETIMS WE ARE LIMITED BY OUR SURROUNDINGS." That was the graffiti I found in the alley next to Newberry’s (with the word "sometimes" misspelled), when I was taking photos for a window art installation.

Most of us remember our first taste of ice cream, the first time we drove a new car home from the dealer, that first kiss, and the first time we fell in love. I know I do. I also remember the first time I saw North Adams.

Tony was always eager to tell me his wonderful stories and reminiscences of growing up in North Adams, but he often talked about the present and the future, too. He was never stuck in the past. He had a computer and was on the Internet long before I even thought about it.

"We could walk for everything: shopping, work, church. We did a lot of things together as a family, like blueberry picking. We were kind of poor when we were kids. We didn’t have much. We had the basic things. I was happy. We had a plain, simple life."

River Street became the home of the Harvest Soup Kitchen and the Salvation Army. Front doors lay open in tenements and houses, exposing baby carriages and rusty bicycles under stairwells. Sheets of clear plastic covered windows, and young men smoked cigarettes and worked on junky cars.

"They kept the wood around the mirrors. The wainscoting is still there. But they took all the memories out. I wanted it to stay like it was."

A few days after the grand opening of the Porches Inn on River Street, I walked over there and sat for an hour in a rocking chair on the porch. Two elderly ladies struggled up the steps and asked me if it was okay to go in and look around. I said, "I did, so I guess you can, too." So they headed in and came out about 15 minutes later. One said, "We saw one of the rooms, and I wonder why anyone would pay all that money to look out their window at the car wash."

"Why should it be loved as a city? It’s never the same city for a dozen years all together. A man born forty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing of the New York he knew. If he chances to stumble upon a few old houses not yet leveled, he is fortunate. But the landmarks, the objects which marked the city to him as a city are gone."

A little after 9:00, Carl and I got restless and walked out into the cool air. A man on a bicycle stopped and said: "Did you hear about it? A plane just hit the World Trade Center, and they think it’s a terrorist. It’s awful."

On Thursday, October 4, I watched with sadness as the familiar J.J. Newberry’s sign was retired. It did not go easily, stubbornly hanging on for a full eight years after the closing of the last five and dime in North Adams.

When city native James Martin opened his North Adams Co-op Shoe Store at 113 Main Street on March 2, 1902, he wouldn’t have even dreamed that it would last into the next century.

When you drive down the Mohawk Trail into North Adams and come around the turn past the entrance to Beaver Street, it pops up suddenly, that forever startling scene, the two long brick mills, the narrow passage between, and Notre Dame church in the distance.

There’s an old story in my family that my mother often tells. She’s always been dissatisfied with the way she looks in photographs, and this used to annoy my father. There would be a family gathering or a holiday, and then the photos would come back. "That’s a terrible shot of me," she would say.

I stopped, scrambled out of the car, and got my camera ready. Photographers live for moments like these. When it reached a spot directly behind the top of the tree, the cloud burst into a celestial glow, and I clicked.

"We had 10 million pigeons in that urban renewal area. When Purina was there, they had tons of seeds around, and people fed them. The street sweepers would throw popcorn to them. We had pigeons all over. They perched on rooftops and chimneys."

"Why is it that the kids don’t seem to notice these buildings (at Mass MoCA) at all? I talk to kids who ride their bikes up here. I ask them, ‘What do you think of these old mill buildings?’ There’s no differentiation in their minds between them and the 1950s church across the street."

By the time the yellow school buses are making their rounds again, two colorful trolleys from Illinois will be parked somewhere in North Adams, awaiting the chance to carry tourists up, down, and around our steep roads in search of museums, art galleries, historic houses and neighborhoods, and the natural wonders of North Berkshire. What will we show them?

"I used to march in the Fall Foliage Parade when I was a kid. I was in the high school band. It was the longest parade I was in. I always liked that parade. There was something about North Adams."

When Doug Bartow was interviewed for a job at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in late 1994, the museum was still waiting to be certified for state funding. He had no guarantee that the position would still exist the following spring, when he expected to complete his graduate studies in design at the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.