THE BELT

“There are things /We live among ‘and to see them/Is to know ourselves’. 

                                                    ~On Being Numerous, by George Oppen    

 

    

The Montview Neighborhood Project began in response to Northampton’s urban development plan.  Known as ”infill”, it seeks to concentrate new housing downtown and in neighborhoods within easy walking/biking distance to the city center.  Montview checks those boxes, but it isn’t what one imagines when talking about an urban neighborhood.  It’s rather an agri-hood that finds itself included in an urban zoning area.

 

Lots of people in Northampton have never been in Montview. More-often-than-not, people cannot find the neighborhood, even with detailed instructions.  Those whose families  have been here for generations, and newcomers alike appreciate living in an area that has historically been affordable and feels rural but is “downtown”.  Documenting Montview,  recognizing its unique characteristics,  shining a light on its past as well as its present situation seems important in this particular moment. 

    

 Leave Pleasant St. at Holyoke St.  Walk under the old rusted railroad trestle, with graffiti covered walls to the end of the block, where Holyoke intersects with Williams Street. It’s a different world in front of you. 

     

Beyond these last few streets —Valley and then Henry Street—down Hockanum Rd and under the I 91 underpass is the Connecticut River  and its floodplain: the Meadows, some thousands of acres of rich farmland, once so famous the town was called “Meadow City'.    The river, the historic floodplain, the fields and woods, the plants and creature that inhabit them, the sights and sounds , the vernacular one, two and multi- family wood-frame dwellings and the old William’s Street School.  This is the Montview landscape —the space we inhabit.  The space between the country and the city. The neighborhood developed and still exists within a well-defined border that measures about .7 miles. A state highway (Pleasant Street) on the west and rich floodplain on the east side.  To the south, Hockanum Road, built where the  Mill River used to run to the Connecticut, and on the north, a small conservation area and a former farm house on Montview Ave..  Montview residents can look up and see the Summit House on Mt. Holyoke.  And visitors to the Summit House can and do look down with delight and awe at the landscape we occupy.  The view from Mt. Holyoke was celebrated by artists and writers; it drew visitors from around the world.  Reflecting on this, Susan Danly, in her essay, Mount Holyoke:  “The Grandest View in the World” (2002) , wrote:  

 

During the nineteenth century Mt. Holyoke attracted not only keen academic 

and tourist interest, but the attention of numerous artists as well.  The images 

they created underscore the value of rural landscape in our understanding of 

regional and national identity and the ongoing urge to preserve such areas for 

posterity.  Mt. Holyoke, like all elevated vantage points, offers the possibility of 

taking in the large picture, of thinking about aspects of nature on a grand scale,

of contemplating the role of human-kind in the natural world.  

—Changing Prospects, The View from Mount Holyoke p.19

 

The project is educational.  We’re interviewing residents of Montview, collecting stories and photographs; leafing through existing archives and reading other accounts of this particular part of Northampton.  We’re putting them altogether so residents and visitors,  city officials and decision- makers— members of various committees and boards—get a sense of the place, the people who live here and the very soil/earth that surrounds us.  We feel the story is largely forgotten.  The space —our .7 miles and the people who live within it,  the fertile floodplain soil on which the neighborhood was built and The Meadows beyond,—undervalued.  The project hopes our work —looking at what was and at what is—will help guide the city in making future decisions that impact this unique and important historic part of Northampton.

 

“I began to realize my great mistake about Northampton: my identification of the town with its urban core, an identification that ignored the extensive, fertile farmland located to the south and east, farmland that, in fact, made the town possible, that was the "chief thing aimed at" by its original European settlers….The "great Meadows" was as much a part of Northampton, historically speaking, as Meeting House Hill—the two were, in fact, inseparable. “

— David Fleming, The Lost Meadows of Northampton, p.27 MassReview

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