die, hilton, die!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i will not ever be able to accept the hilton and i don't care if it has the most wonderful cafe in the world even if they lower themselves to allowing locals to dine there. it is simply wrong to plop down an enormous and UGLY piece of bad architecture in the middle of an historic town, dwarfing all the other buildings and destroying life for all the residents of the green street apartments. it has already ruined the property values of its neighboring buildings. the dead-end alleyway it will be creating, with the trash compactor at the end, will be a perfect venue for rape and murder. or simple mugging, if people are lucky. the people in the green st. apts. will be much less safe & more likely to be robbed.

i am in an extreme state of grief over the destruction of my town. and higgins IS destroying it. what happened with the old state hospital was criminal, as was the way that the "multi-use condo village" experiment became kollmorgan hill. i don't know how much she had to do with smith's takeover of green street but that's a whole other thing.

it is not ok with me under any circumstances to have that hotel there. it will never be ok. higgins thinks people will be excited to visit northampton what with its fancy new hilton garden inn & all. she's thinking only about tourist dollars and tax revenue from the hotel. but one of the things that makes northampton the place it is, is that we have very few chain stores here. those we do have (not including king street, which is where the hilton should go if it has to be here) simply occupy buildings that are already there, and those buildings can become something else in the future. urban outfitters didn't knock down the whole bank to put their store there, so it's still a gorgeous building and when they go out of business, which i expect will be soon, something else & hopefully more local can take its place.

the hilton is the first major criminal attack on main street. it to me is on par with the taliban destroying the spiritual statue things in afghanistan, and the bagdhad museum being unprotected & looted.

i'm not going to be argued out of it. but i am trying very hard to understand how anybody is able to cope with it. perhaps they haven't looked at the plans. perhaps they think it will be pretty, even though it's crowding out everything around it. perhaps they think it will be nice to have a new, manicured park.

but it will no longer by our public park. it will become the hilton park. and it is the only public space we have downtown. the ONLY public space, and it's going to have a hilton garden inn towering 5 stories over it. i am seriously at a loss. my only sliver of hope is that the dollar will become worthless before he can actually build it. i would rather become homeless and die in the winter on the city hall steps than live here with a hilton. except i'm actually going to keep having a home as long as i can manage it. if my mother weren't here & i hadn't promised her i would never let her wind up in a "retirement home", i would seriously think about running away, but i don't have anywhere to go. i don't want to have to move. but i cannot figure out how to cope with this thing.

the hilton is not ok, and yet in spite of my denial and disbelief it is apparently going to be built no matter what. it is the helplessness that is the worst thing - i think feeling helpless leads a lot of people to despair. the citizens of northampton tried everything to stop this project but it was already a "done deal". i can't believe that even the two lawsuits didn't work out. nothing we say matters. and this is a big deal because it cannot be un-done. the mayor thinks that the building can be used for something else should the hilton go out of business, but she doesn't even think about having destroyed an historic landscape.

i know that everybody is going to accept compromises because they (think they) have no choice, but this is architectural serial killing, what she's doing. it's aesthetic slaughter. and there are many documentations of the fact that aesthetics can contribute enormously to a person's state of mind, that beauty really does matter and it makes us happier. i know that to be very true for myself. i love our downtown and it is being murdered. imagine if all the citizens here were forced to have the nike logo branded onto their foreheads. that's how it feels to me. she sold our city down the river for a dollar. to a FRANCHISE.

end of rant. for now.