Maynard Seider: North Adams is at a Crossroads

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By Maynard Seider
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. — Fifty years ago, a federally-financed urban renewal project brought down half of Main Street in North Adams. Years later, Joe Manning ("Disappearing Into North Adams") captured the emotions of many residents who wished it hadn't happened. For Anthony Abuisi Jr., "They took down the blood and guts of our community. We made a terrible mistake by tearing down our heritage." Josephine Lamberti recalls, "Nobody wanted that urban renewal but there was no outright opposition."

Today, North Adams stands at a crossroads similar to the one the city faced half a century ago: what will the future of its downtown look like and who gets to decide? First, some background.In 1986, Thomas Krens, the director of the Williams College Museum of Art, met with North Adams Mayor John Barrett III. They hammered out an agreement to convert the abandoned Sprague Electric buildings into the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Krens and his junior partner, Joseph Thompson, came up with a business plan promising that the museum would create over 600 full-time equivalent jobs. Two years later, a $35 million grant from the Legislature pushed the project along, though it took more than another decade before Mass MoCA opened on Memorial Day weekend, 1999.

Almost as soon as he had that initial meeting with Barrett, Krens left the area to consult for the Guggenheim Museum in New York and in 1988, he began a 20-year stint first as head of the museum and later as director of the Guggenheim Foundation. In his absence, Joe Thompson guided the project along and today continues to serve as MoCA's director.

Meanwhile, Krens began building an international reputation with flashy presentations at the Guggenheim in New York like "The Art of the Motorcycle" and extending the Guggenheim brand world-wide with new buildings, notably the Frank Gehry-designed museum in Bilbao, Spain. While Krens had numerous successes, he amassed more failures, most significantly, the grandiose Abu Dhabi museum which never got off the desert ground. In Krens' own words, only a quarter of his big projects "have come to fruition."

NEW IDEAS ADVANCED

After a public absence of nearly 30 years, and without a Guggenheim connection, in 2015 the 68-year-old Krens visited North Adams several times, promising to build a contemporary art museum and an extreme model railway museum. Never publicity-shy, Krens made one of his trips on motorcycle, accompanied by four actors including Laurence Fishburne and Jeremy Irons.

At that visit, Krens made no promises, but stated that a renovated Mohawk Theater needed to happen. At another press conference, Krens traded in his Hollywood entourage for a couple of Massachusetts political heavyweights, former Governors Michael Dukakis and William Weld, who showed up to support his proposed Extreme Model Railway and Contemporary Architecture Museum (EMRCA). Weld's presence may have been voluntary in 2015, but by 2017, Weld, a principal of Boston's Mintz Levin Strategies, had been retained by the Krens team (X-RR Blog, August 21, 2017).

In early 2019, Krens made his most extensive presentation on his future plans for North Adams, not in the city itself, but in Williamstown, at the Clark Art Museum. Perhaps Krens assumed that he would reach more prospective investors in that audience than in North Adams, Berkshire County's poorest community. While North Adams lacks great wealth, it does possess two "opportunity zones," economically distressed locations where investors can receive significant tax breaks on their capital gains. The legislation authorizing such zones is silent on what can be built there, but Krens has already stated that he wants his extreme model railway to be located there, with the hope of a 25 percent return on investment.

At the Williamstown event, Krens listed all the buildings— besides the EMRCA — he expected to erect, located near each other in the downtown area: the Massachusetts Museum of Time, the Mt. Greylock Distillery, the Global Contemporary Art Museum, a museum of motorcycles, 3-D movie venues, a restored M ohawk Theater, a parking garage that could also serve as an event space, and a 110-room luxury hotel, spa, and wellness center.

To his credit, Krens admits that "Mass MoCA's not had the economic impact that we projected," this despite an additional infusion of $25.4 million of taxpayer money from the state in 2014. Now, though, Krens' new goal of making the region "the No. 1 cultural destination in the United States" would presumably finally revitalize the North Berkshires. At the Clark, Krens singled out a member of the museum's planning and finance committee, Berkshire Medical Center's Dr. A. Gray Ellrodt, who stated that the finished projects will attack the "diseases of despair" (e.g. depression, drug abuse, suicide) that affect the area. Krens apparently said no more about that, nor did he mention that Dr. Ellrodt is an investor in his enterprise (John Seven, Berkshire Magazine, August, 2016).

According to the Krens economic impact analysis, the completed projects will add $180 million each year to the Berkshire economy and create as many as 2,000 new jobs. For the most part, though, these tourist-service economy jobs will not provide "living wages" to North County workers. Estimates of the total of yearly tourists to the region approach 750,000, but the Krens team provides no environmental impact analysis. Without passenger train service to the area, virtually all of these tourists will arrive by car, damaging an already devastated environment.

WHO GETS TO DECIDE?

While the urban renewal program of half a century ago led to the demolition of the historic buildings on the south side of Main Street, Krens proposes to erect new tourist-centered buildings on that street and the surrounding area. In both cases, what has emerged and what may transpire have long-lasting consequences.                                        

Now, with the Krens plans still on the drawing board, questions need to be asked: Should a tourist town be the future of North Adams? Who gets to approve the Krens building plans? How are decisions made and by whom? The mayor? City Council? Tom Krens and his investors?

Let's close with a thought experiment: If the following binding referendum were to be offered to the voters of North Adams, what might their answer be: Do you prefer a luxury hotel or affordable housing to be built in a downtown "opportunity zone"?

Maynard Seider is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) and author of "The Gritty Berkshires: A People's History from the Hoosac Tunnel to MASS MoCA."