There are many excellent reasons favoring new apartments on Hope Street, and I’d like to share my personal reason, nourished by my long history living here: my love of downtown.
In 1970, when I was 22, distraught about the Viet Nam war and longing for community, I moved to Franklin County. My first Greenfield apartment was an efficiency owned by Bill Forbes, a respected downtown business owner. Franklin County voted for Nixon in 1972, but on inauguration day Bill — a selectman! — led a gaggle of us in an antiwar march down Main Street. In that crowd of people, in the middle of downtown, I felt seen. Maybe Greenfield was a place where, like Bill, I could be myself and get away with it. Maybe it was home.
Eventually I landed a VISTA job in Greenfield’s new Legal Services office, went to law school, and came back to live here for the rest of my life. For years I took roaming downtown for granted: buying parakeets at Woolworth’s, trying on shoes at Hamilton’s, watching myself on Jeopardy! in the Sears TV showroom (I lost), gossiping over burgers at Carl’s, and most of all, being drawn like a magnet into Wilson’s, with its ever-changing window displays.
In 1993, when I was on the Town Council, WalMart announced plans to build a superstore on the French King Highway. This behemoth was swallowing downtowns across the nation, and our local treasure, Wilson’s, was at great risk. Alarmed, I helped organize a campaign to scuttle this plan by popular referendum, and we won.
While malls, superstores, and the internet were changing the face of Main Street, Wilson’s lived on for 27 more years! Now Wilson’s ground floor is about to be resurrected as a new downtown anchor — an expanded Green Fields Market, with a broader array of choices and lower prices. I’m proud to be a member of the Franklin Community Co-op’s Board of Directors that is working hard to make this happen. (The Recorder, Sept. 22, “Green Fields Market — Changing Inside and Out,” by Tammy Erickson).
Downtown is still the community’s beating heart, the space where all kinds of people meet in a public, often personal way, and building market-rate apartments near Main Street rings the bell for downtown devotees like me. Those apartments will attract people who want to live here, who love that our downtown still has a movie theater and a bookstore, and who can afford to rent a nice place. More well-employed people living downtown means more life downtown — more restaurants, more shops, more music, more pubs, more poetry, more art. I imagine Hope Street tenants walking to the library, stopping at the bank, then heading down Main Street for coffee, a meal, a loaf of bread, a haircut, a bag of groceries, in the convivial midst of others — friends, acquaintances, strangers — doing the same.
If you, like me, still cherish downtown as the place where community happens, please vote “No” on Nov. 4.
Wendy Sibbison is a retired lawyer who served for 13 years on the Greenfield Town Council (1988-1994 and 1996-2003).