Let there be light!
Ed McCormick, community affairs chairman for the Great Barrington Rotary Club, has just announced there will be holiday lights, after all, along Main Street. Heavens be praised.
“The Great Barrington Rotary Club, in conjunction with the 250th Anniversary Committee had purchased and installed holiday wreaths and garlands on decorative street lights located along the newly renovated Great Barrington Main Street. An agreement has been reached to illuminate the wreaths and garlands with white holiday lights,” read McCormick’s dispatch, adding: “Great Barrington has been the target of national media in recent years for its lack of holiday decorations.”
On the weekend before Thanksgiving, Rotarians had risked life and limb to don the 20 black “period” light fixtures, between Bridge and Cottage streets, with holiday garlands, bows – and strings of white holiday lights on poles that were equipped with electrical outlets.
The lights were intended to replace the decorations that once festooned the late lamented Bradford pear trees, and produce a new illuminated allée, adding some sparkle to the reconfigured Great Barrington downtown corridor. Such cheerful decorations just might deter the Fox News Network’s Ranter-in-Chief Bill O’Reilly from castigating the town once again for its lack of holiday spirit.
“We purchased those decorations with the express purpose of having them lit,” explained one Rotarian.
Problem was they weren’t lit.
Except for one, that is. The Mercer clock.
At the corner of Railroad and Main, the imitation gaslight wick and globe atop the “period” light fixture had been replaced by a clock, an oversized, gold-rimmed pocket watch, complete with a winding stem on top. And not just any clock. A Mercer clock. At night, it was alight, as were the lamps in the garlands below, the only decorated pole in Great Barrington to be illuminated. The clock was the gift of Housatonic Water mogul Jim Mercer – who knew he had a clockworks, too?
The Mercer Clock — and pole — are similar in appearance to the other 19 decorative lights, but with one important difference: Mercer owns them.
As Town Planner Chris Rembold notes: “The clock is not a National Grid fixture. It was paid for by Mr. Mercer, and the electricity is actually connected to his building. He pays for the power.”
So the problem with the rest of the decorations resides with National Grid. “They’re working on getting the wreaths lit,” one Town Hall official explained. National Grid owns the poles. Was it an issue of liability? What if a holiday wreathe caught fire – or ignited in a spasm of peace on earth?
So when RIC O’Reilly bellows on Fox, he can direct his asinine comments to the power company.
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And while on the topic of Main Street, may we say that, in contrast to what the self-appointed guardians of downtown illumination have declared, the slender new aluminum light poles have a graceful graphic elegance, even eloquence, unlike their clunky predecessors – whom nobody noticed until they were replaced.
Overall, the Main Street corridor looks rather good. And when trees are planted up and down Main Street – and remember these trees are 12 to 15 feet tall and there are many more of them than there were before– the lines of the streetscape will be softened.
And thank goodness the powers-that-be have resisted calls for replacing those aluminum light poles with more of the black “decorative” fixtures. Great Barrington isn’t the precious theme park those living in Great Barrington’s Upper West Side imagine it to be.
And really, if you’re yearning for “period” lights, let them be real gas lamps. Let the lamplighters go forth at dusk with ladder, candle and match to light them, and return at dawn to extinguish them. That’s period lighting.
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The great hotel debate in Great Barrington approaches a dénoument this coming week, as the Selectboard begins a hearing process to determine whether a special permit should be granted to hoteliers Vijay and Chrystal Mahida to build an upscale hotel on the site of the derelict Searles School on Bridge Street.
The proposal has provoked such a sudden appreciation for the former high school complex among those who for the past ten years haven’t given a second thought – if they ever had a first thought — for the moldering brick structure on the banks of the Housatonic that an acquaintance of ours, a local history aficionado, wonders: “I wish the Searles debaters would put some of their energy (and donations) into the Historical Society’s struggle to restore the 1771 Truman Wheeler House into the town museum and educational archive center. The Society barely has enough money to cover its operating costs.”
