"Don't be fooled by me. Don't be fooled by the face I wear. For I wear a thousand masks,
masks that I am afraid to take off and none of them are me." —Unknown

07 February, 2005 - 11:01 a.m. - Northampton: a character sketch
On Saturday, B and i visited Northampton, Massachusetts. Neither of us had been there before, but we'd heard good things about it and so decided to check it out for ourselves.

It's an interesting place. It seems to be one of the few cities in the Northeast whose center hasn't been sucked dry by shopping malls (it looked like the nearest strip mall was a few exits away off I-91). That is, there's Main Street and Pleasant Street, and there are shops and restaurants on these streets, and people park their cars in public lots and walk.

The county courthouse is on the corner of Main and Pleasant, and the county hall of records is around the corner on Pleasant. There's a theatre that brings in good-and-not-goofily-famous acts like Steven Wright (comedian) and Martin Sexton (singer/songwriter). There are two small independent movie theatres within walking distance from one another, both of which were playing movies i'd like to see.

There's a store called Faces that sells all manner of random oddities--it's as though someone took all the random goodies from Ikea, leaving behind most of the furniture and housewares, and shoved them into Faces. There's a Ten Thousand Villages (which doesn't count as mass-corporate because it's a fair trade store with only a relative handful of locations).

There's a mall that is what malls should be: an indoor place without tile floors and with small corridors that connect several independently owned shops. And it's wonderful because all of these local shops seem to do just fine.

We ate at a place called Cha Cha Cha. The food was healthy.

The houses in Northampton, at least in the bits that we saw, are all in good repair. There are few if any of those newly-constructed cardboard things that contractors today insist are sturdy, but there are equally few of the charming brick houses that make up the neighborhood of Center Square in Albany.

The people we saw ranged in age from several months to retired; the number of people our age with very young children was refreshing, if a little unnerving (the biological clock, it ticks...). The main drawback: despite the large number of college students (Smith College is in town, and UMass Amherst must be nearby, as we saw many male students as well), there wasn't as much diversity in race as i expected.

Anyway, it's an interesting town. In many ways, Albany feels like a city asleep, one whose downtown is slumbering peacefully now that there are two major shopping malls and a good number of strip malls to draw away the business. Northampton, on the other hand, feels vibrant, its downtown more like a college student with a slight hangover than a thirty- or forty-something who has to work the next day.