Metropolitan Statistic Areas
October 16, 2010 § 3 Comments
As an addendum to Wednesday’s post on the old Town Commons of Hawley:
Usually, I study cities and the palimpsests of history upon them, the ways in which their histories are used by their publics and their powers that be, and historians as well. Hawley is about as rural a place you can get. But, Hawley (and all the tiny towns around it, none of which have much more than 1000 people in them) is included in something called the Springfield Census Metropolitan Statistical Area. The Springfield CMSA is home to over 680,000 people. Sounds impressive, no? But this is an artificial “Metropolitan” area, as are all such beasts. To wit, Springfield is actually home to about 155,000 people. Certainly, there are cities within the Springfield CMSA beyond Springfield, like West Springfield and Holyoke. But Hawley isn’t a city. And it’s not exactly near Springfield. It’s about 45 miles away, in fact.
Thus, the Springfield CMSA is an artificial catchment area. Officially, the US Office of Management and Budget and the US Census Bureau make use of CMSAs for policy making and the like. The basic idea behind the CMSA is an urban “cluster”, a region with a relatively high population density. The outlying areas are included if they have strong ties to the central urban centre. And this is where the Springfield CMSA doesn’t make a lot of sense. Hawley and the towns around it are not all that closely connected culturally or economically with Springfield. Instead, Greenfield in the Pioneer Valley and Pittsfield, in the Berkshires, are the urban centres that are tied to these towns. Northampton could also make a claim. It is to these places that the residents of Hawley, Charlemont, Plainfield, Ashfield, etc., commute if they commute. Rarely is it Springfield.
But this might also explain their inclusion in the Springfield CMSA, as both Greenfield and Northampton lie within it. And so the catchment area of Springfield just keeps spreading. Pittsfield is its own CMSA. But, still, it remains that deeply rural communities are artificially included in a statistical area that has little if any connection to them. Life in Hawley and life in Springfield are not even remotely related. Springfield, despite being a small city, is a downtrodden and gritty one. Hawley is a rural community nestled into the hills of Western Massachusetts.
Either way, while I can see the argument here, I do not see the statistical value of including Hawley with Springfield. They are 45 minutes and worlds apart from each other.
And it also speaks to the danger of trying to compare urban populations. For example, it is often said that Boston has a population over 5 million. That’s just not correct. The City of Boston has 650,000 people in it. Boston is the centre of Suffolk Co., which has a population of about 760,000. If you factor in the immediate suburbs of Boston, its population grows to about 1.5 million. But Boston’s Census Metropolitan Area is home to something close to 4.5 million people. However, Boston’s CMSA extends from New Hampshire in the north to include most of eastern Massachusetts, as well as ALL of Rhode Island, which itself includes the CMSA of Providence, the largest city in Rhode Island.
In other words, the Boston CMSA covers some 366 square kilometres, and includes regions that, like Hawley, are about as far from urban as you can get. In short, CMSAs are wildly inaccurate when it comes to measuring and comparing urban populations, especially when definitions of what constitutes a CMSA in the US is not all that consistent across the board, or when other nations use different defintions of what constitutes an urban area.
For example, in Canada, the equivalent is a Census Metropolitan Area, which is a statistical unit centred around a “large” city, of at least 100,o00 people. Montréal’s CMA is a much more sensible defintion of such a statistical area, as it includes the core city and the Île-de-Montréal, as well as the neighbouring Île-de-Jésu, which includes Laval, and the south shore, which includes suburbs such as Longeuil. And then it includes the expanded ring of suburbs that surround the Laval-Montréal-Longeuil nexus. And while there are rural areas included in this territory, especiallty to the north-west of the Île-de-Montréal, they lie between and betwixt bedroom communities and other regions that are clearly centred on Montréal.
But, either way, one cannot compare the Boston CMSA to the Montréal CMA because they are not similar birds. In fact, they might not be birds at all. To equate Montréal’s with Boston’s, one would have to include Sherbrooke, or Québec, or Ottawa within the Montréal CMA, much like Providence, RI, and Manchester, NH, are included within Boston’s.
Shameless Self Promotion, for a good cause
October 14, 2010 § Leave a comment
I was on GlobalNews at 6 last night here in Montréal in a story about the Griffintown Horse Palace and our plans to save the Palace from re-development in Griffintown. Also, The Gazette has a similar story this morning has a story.
Old Hawley Town Commons
October 13, 2010 § 11 Comments
Driving through the hills of Western Massachusetts this past long weekend, we came across the old Town Commons of Hawley. Hawley today is a town that is home to fewer than 400 people and has no real centre to it. Aside from a Highways Department, there’s not much evidence of an infrastructure in Hawley, though there is also a Town Hall. There is no post office or schools in Hawley, nor is there, to my knowledge a church. There is one corner store, though, but no gas stations. For services, the people of Hawley tend to travel to neighbouring towns, in particular, Charlemont.
Hawley Town hall
But Hawley has a history. Pioneers from nearby Hatfield made their way up the mountains and into Hawley. It was incorporated as a town in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1792. From then until the mid-19th century, Hawley was a centre of the forestry industry, as well as several smaller businesses, like the usual: blacksmiths, taverns, etc. There was once an old town commons on what is today called East Hawley Road.
Today, the old Town Commons is the parking lot for a series of trails that explores the bog and lakes around the area. There is also an information kiosk about the old town commons, including a plan of what used to be there.
Now, it’s not like North America is a place without history, though sometimes it’s as though Europeans seem to think it is. The aboriginals have been here for thousands of years, and there are remnants and ruins of their cultures littered across the continent. The Spanish have been in Mexico since the early 16th century. The French have been in Canada since the early 17th century, around the same time the Dutch and the English landed in what is now the United States. And those European colonies conquered, colonised, and displaced the aboriginal populations as they expanded across the continent. So none of this is news, but my point is that there is evidence of earlier settlements and cultures across the continent.
Out west, there are ghost towns. These places were once booming frontier towns whose time has come and gone. The most recent spate of ghost towns date from the 80s and 90s, as frontier industry dried up and hit hard times. Sometimes, the ghost towns aren’t on the frontiers. As a teenager, I lived in Port Moody, BC, which itself had annexed and old Imperial Oil Company town, cleverly called Ioco (get it, Imperial Oil Co.?). By the time I lived there in the early 90s, the town had long since been abandoned, the oil refinery on its last legs (it’s since been closed).
Lawn Bowling in Ioco, c. 1920
In the eastern part of the continent, ghost towns are rarer, but if you find yourself in the countryside, there are abandoned farmhouses and homesteads. In the swamps of Eastern Ontario between Kingston and Ottawa, near the Rideau Canal, one sees countless abandoned homesteads from the windows of the train. This was marginal land, settled in the 19th century and then abandoned and farm kids moved into the industrial towns and cities that dot the landscape of eastern Ontario. In Western Massachusetts, the area around Hawley is littered with decaying stone fences that once marked of homesteads from each other. Now they appear as seemingly random markers in the woods.
But to see visual evidence of a settlement that no longer exists is something else. I found it slightly strange to be standing on a site that 150 years ago was home to taverns, churches, shops, and the like. More people lived in Hawley in those days, of course, and travel to the neighbouring towns wasn’t as easy as it is today. The roads of Western Mass are narrow and windy as they go up and down the hills, around corners, avoiding private property, mountains, hills, lakes, creeks, and rivers.
Drawing of Old Town Commons, Hawley, MA
But once there were people in Hawley, and there was a common. And that’s where they conducted their business, got married, had their children baptised, got drunk, fought, and came together as a community. It was rather eery to stand in that same place on a sunny Sunday 150 years later, contemplating whether or not the bog would be a good place to walk the dog, and pondering the Volkswagen, Subaru, and Volvo station wagons that brought the yuppies from Boston, New York, Northampton (and, of course, Montréal) to the trails that lead out from the Old Town Common of Hawley. The land today is owned by the 5 Colleges of the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. And they’re the ones who’ve put the effort into at least re-creating the plan of the Old Commons and they take care of the bog and the trails.
Advance Copy
October 12, 2010 § Leave a comment
I’ve been remiss. A few weeks ago, I launched a new blog at Current Intelligence. My blog, Advance Copy, is about books, with a bit of music in between. Twice a week, on Monday and Thursday, I will be posting a round-up of book, publishing, and music news under the title “End Notes.” In between that, I will blog on various issues relating to books, publishing, and music.
Every Monday, we re-publish the finest reviews from H-Net, and we also publish our own original book reviews from our contributors. Our reviews page can be found here.
And now, each and every Thursday, in partnership with FiveBooks.com, we are re-publishing one of their author interviews. Our first one, an interview with journalist Thomas De Waal about the Caucasus, can be found here. As we publish more, they will also be found on our Reviews page.
So come on over, check out my new blog.
Nerd Humour
September 17, 2010 § Leave a comment
I have finally decided to read the foundational text of my discipline/profession, Herodotus’ The Histories. So far, halfway through Book 3, it is a lively and informative read. I’m reading the Penguin Classics version, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt half a century ago in 1954. This edition, published in 2003, was updated and revised by John Marincola of New York University. Anyway. At the start of Book 3, there is an account of the weather in Egypt:
In the reign of his [King Amasis of Egypt] successor Psammenitus, an unparalleled event occurred — rain fell at Thebes, a thing which the men of that city say had never happened before, or has ever happened since till my day. Normally, in upper Egypt no rain falls at all; but on this occasion it did — a light shower.
This causes Marincola to drily observe in the notes: “It does in fact rain in Upper Egypt, but not much.”
Hilarious.
Something is Rotten in the Country of Canada
September 6, 2010 § Leave a comment
Seriously, there is something deeply and fundamentally flawed in this country. According to The Globe & Mail, Ontario is making a push to become the centre of the digital entertainment industry in Canada. That’s all fine and good until one realises that the industry is presently centred in Vancouver and Montréal. So, basically, Toronto, backed by the provincial government, is now going to take on the other two major cities in the country, backed by their own provincial governments, in order to see who wins. This is just wrong.
Certainly, the provinces have had flashpoints, economically speaking, including Québec’s infamous deal with Newfoundland for Churchill Falls. But that deal was made because Newfoundland lacked the ability to harness the power of Churchill Falls. Vancouver and Montréal, on the other hand, are already the centre of this industry. What Toronto and Ontario are doing here is nothing short of cannibalisation.
Something is wrong, very wrong, in this country.
Griffintown Horse Palace Foundation Soirée
September 4, 2010 § Leave a comment
I am pleased to announce that the Griffintown Horse Palace Foundation will be hosting a shared benefit soirée on Thursday, 14 October from 6-9pm with the Darling Foundry. The event will be held at the Darling, which is located at 745, rue Ottawa, in Griffntown. The poster is below.
Tickets cost 125$, per person and are tax deductible. They can be procured either by contacting me, or on the Horse Palace Foundation’s website.
New Adventures in the Arts, or, Art, History, and “Authenticity”
September 3, 2010 § 1 Comment
Yesterday I met with a stage and set designer for a new play being produced at the Hudson Village Theatre in Hudson, QC (just off the Island of Montréal), opening Thursday, 28 October, entitled Wake of the Bones, written Montréal playwright David Gow. Wake of the Bones centres around the discovery of a mass grave of Famine victims on Pointe-Saint-Charles in Montréal by Irish labourers constructing the Victoria Bridge a decade later. The labourers were from Griffintown, at least in this version, and they decide that a wake needs to be held to send the dead souls off to their eternal paradise.
The Black Rock, erected in the memory of the mass grave. Today it's located on Bridge St. in Pointe-Saint-Charles, on the approach to the Victoria Bridge
The designer, Anouk Louten, contacted me as she attempts to get a handle on Irish culture and life in Griffintown in the mid-19th century, attempting to re-create a set as authentic as possible.
This, of course, got me thinking about the usual intersection of history, memory, and the public. Because of course Gow is taking licence from the historical record for the purpose of creating art. It is true that the mass grave of Irish Famine victims was found by the bridge workers, who were also Irish. But the workers probably lived in Goose Village, not Griffintown. A minor quibble with the historical record, to be sure, but still one that those who argue for ‘authenticity’ get their knickers in a twist over. And, I’m sure Gow will also take artistic licence with the characters, their setting, and so on and so forth.
This week, in class, I was teaching the Persian Wars, including the legendary battle at Thermopylae in 480 BCE. Of course, pretty much the entire Western world has seen the movie, 300, which fictionalises what actually happened at Thermopylae some 2,490 years ago. The movie over-dramatises the valour of the Spartans, distorts and obscures the rationale for battle decisions made by the Greeks (including the Spartans, who are conveniently left out of the decision to withdraw 6,700 Greek troops from Thermopylae to avoid being caught in a pincer movement by the Persians), leaving the brave Leonidas and his 299 Spartan warriors to hold off the Persians. As much as I love this film, I always find myself somewhat troubled by it, I kind of feel the film-makers made like the cops in the OJ Simpson case with the glove. Recall that the glove didn’t fit Simpson, who more than likely got away with murder at that trial. At the time, a friend of mine, a law student, opined that the cops may’ve planted the glove, so desperate they were to secure a conviction. If this is true (and really, who knows?), the over-zealousness of the cops allowed Simpson to walk (though, as they say, karma is a mother, and Simpson is in the slammer for other crimes right now). In the case of 300, the film-makers took an already dramatic story about Leonidas and his warriors and over-shot, they over-dramatised something which could’ve stood on its own.
So, as an historian, films like 300 bother me. Not because they take licence with the historical story, but because they pull an Oliver Stone. Stone, of course, once said that you had to hit American film audiences over the head with a mallet in order to get their attention. I think he’s wrong, people aren’t that stupid. But sometimes it makes great art, sometimes, most of the time, it’s just superfluous.
But artistic licence, I fail to see what’s wrong with that, it can make the story more interesting, it can allow the artist to make their point more effectively.
As for authenticity, I’m not sure it matters so much in the larger sense. Certainly, I like Anouk’s attempts to create an authentic set. That, for whatever reason, matters to me. The setting of historical novels, plays, films, this is the detail, the background of people’s lives. Take, for example, The Gangs of New York: a wildly fictional account of the goings-on in the Five Points of Manhattan in the early 1860s. The story itself may be a load of bollocks, but the setting of it in the Five Points, from what I can see, that’s authentic, that reflects the reality of life in what was probably the worst slum in the world.
But authenticity of story or experience (in the case of museums, etc.), I’m not so sure this is desirable or even possible. I think it is impossible to completely re-create the ‘authentic’ historical experience. For one, there’s the obvious problem: it’s impossible, because it is no longer 1861, or whenever. The physical setting is just that, a re-creation of the historical, it can be an authentic re-creation, but that’s as far as it goes. And I think that by itself is a laudable goal, but that should be the end goal. There is no need to go any further, because it is impossible to go any further.
And, so far as I’m concerned, if the story is based in this historical record, that it aims to reflect the setting, then that’s fine. Artistic licence needs to be taken, at least most of the time, maybe not so much in the case of Leonidas’ last stand.
The Shoe on the Other Foot
August 23, 2010 § Leave a comment
Being Canadian, it sometimes feels like we’re the ones on the short end of the stick in global affairs. We’re the ones the Americans invaded during the War of Independence and again in 1812. During World War I, the British used our troops as cannon fodder in battles like the Somme. We have been colonies of the French and the British. Economically, we’re largely dependent upon the Americans. Our peoples are descendent from the colonised of the world (ok, so is the rest of the Western world). In short, I think Canadians like to see themselves as victims, or at least feel like victims far too often. This is why winning double gold medals in hockey over the Americans at the Olympics is such a big deal. For that moment, we’re the winners.
The once-great Vancouver band, Spirit of the West, wrote a song back in the early 90s called “Far Too Canadian.” It’s a lament for our status as hewers of wood and drawers of water, amongst other things. The lyrics:
I’m so content, to stand in line
Wait and see, pass the time
Talk a streak, fall alseep, wake up late, whine and weep
I kiss the hand that slaps me senseless
I’m so accepting, so defenseless
I am far too Canadian
Far too Canadian
…I am the face of my country
Experssionless and small
Weak at the knees, shaking badly
Can’t straighten up at all
I watch the spine of my country bend and break
I’m a sorry state.
A sobering thought, that song. And all the cheesy, stupid, lame-brained Molson Canadian ads in the world (apparently has more square feet of “awesomeness per person” than any other nation on Earth) can’t change it.
That being said, we do have our moments, our victories, and our glories. But we tend to play those down, too (except when they involve gold medals, hockey, and the Olympics). We’re a modest people, I suppose.
So all of this being said, I’m always surprised to find Canadians on the other side, at least historically-speaking. Not far from Charlemont, Massachusetts, is the town of Deerfield. On 29 February 1704, during the War of Spanish Succession, a joint force of 47 French and Canadian soldiers and 200 Mohawk warriors (including the Pocumtuck, who had lived in what is now the Pioneer Valley before the English settlers arrived) raided Deerfield before dawn. The raid was partly in revenge for the settlers’ violent and callous treatment of the Pocumtuck, which culminated in a massacre in what is now nearby Montague Township in 1676.
The combined French-Canadian-aboriginal force caught the settlers unaware before dawn and massacred 56 people. 109 people survived the raid, they were captured and made to march 500km north to Québec, in harsh winter conditions. 21 of them either died or were killed during the trek. Most of those who made it to Québec were eventually ransomed and made their way back to Deerfield. A few, most notably the pastor’s daughter, Eunice Williams, chose to remain. Williams spent the rest of her life at Kahanwake, a Mohawk settlement near Montréal, marring a Mohawk man and having a family with him.
The Deerfield Raid was no doubt a traumatic event for the people of the small settlement. And it has lived on for the past 300 years, it is a foundational story in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. At times, listening to people describe it, reading newspaper stories about the raid, and seeing how it is represented in the pop culture of the Valley, I even get the sense that the trauma of the raid lives on. Certainly, it is strange for a Canadian to realise the Americans were victims of the colonial era. It is even more bizarre to realise that one’s ancestors were the ones who caused the trauma. We are usucally the victims, not the aggressors of historical trauma.
The fact that the 1704 raid lives on in Deerfield, and is largely forgotten in Québec (as France lost that war), is significant. No doubt it lives on in part because Deerfield’s raison d’être today is as a tourist site. Historic Deerfield is a national historic site, and the town’s economy centres around the historical experience there, and the 1704 raid factors heavily into it. It is no doubt the most significant event to have occurred in Deerfield in its 337 year history. And, as a result of the historicisation of Deerfield, the 1704 raid gets played out, reinterpreted, and re-assessed almost daily by the town’s residents, the historical educators, and the tourists who come to visit.
But for me, a Canadian, the first time I visited Deerfield, on a warm, sunny day in late May 2006, I was stunned to find a place that was traumatised by Canadians, at least a place that was not an aboriginal settlement/reserve. And as I took in the colonial American scene in front of me that day, I couldn’t help but feel a shudder of fear imagining that 247-man strong force crawling across the plain along the Deerfield River, coming out of the mist and the snow and laying siege to a small frontier settlement. And every time since that I have driven past, or been into Historic Deerfield, I cannot shake that feeling of terror that the colonist there must’ve felt that cold February morning 306 1/2 years ago.
Matthew Barlow 