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Alive in the Hills
Hit by decades of hard times, Pittsfield is moving beyond its inferiority complex, led by pioneers who see potential in its low prices and Berkshires setting
 Helping to revive Pittsfield's nightlife are new clubs and restaurants such as Dottie's Coffee Lounge on North Street, shown here. (Stephen Rose Photo for The Boston Globe) |
Joyce Bernstein wanted a
A transplanted New Yorker, Bernstein in 2002 had just bought a building in downtown Pittsfield with a Goodwill store as a tenant. The Goodwill wanted to expand, but Bernstein and her partner, Larry Rosenthal, hoped to attract a more upscale tenant.
"Why can't we have a Starbucks here?" she remembered thinking. "But Starbucks said no to a five-year rent concession, and we couldn't find a restaurant, so I said I'll do it myself."
The result? Spice, a stylish restaurant that Bernstein opened last year. With its mahogany trim and bright-red awning, Spice is one of many new additions that are transforming this overlooked old mill city to a destination in its own right.
New art facilities, restaurants, and cafes dot the downtown, and now even second-home owners are paying up for stylish new properties. Pittsfield is finally benefiting from its proximity to the Berkshires' many cultural and recreational attractions, as tourists and others discover its lower-priced housing and a citified atmosphere in the country.
One of the Berkshires' early famous residents was Herman Melville, who was said to have gotten the inspiration for the white whale in Moby Dick by the profile of Mount Greylock that he could see from the study window of his rambling farmhouse in Pittsfield; to him, it resembled the back of a surfacing whale.
In the 20th century, Pittsfield's fortunes rose and fell with
"Pittsfield had a not undeserved inferiority complex," Bernstein, 57, said of this city of about 45,000.
Even so, urban pioneers such as Bernstein saw new possibilities in downtown Pittsfield's low-priced and abandoned storefronts. In 2002, a group of artists spearheaded by Maggie Mailer, daughter of author Norman Mailer, won Bernstein's blessing to move Mailer's Storefront Artist project into Bernstein's building on North Street rent-free. The old pessimism about the city's future gave way to a new spirit of optimism as artists painted and sculpted in public view of passing pedestrians.
"Pittsfield was this big canvass you could create something on," said Megan Whilden, director of Pittsfield's Office of Cultural Development. "It wasn't finished like Lenox or Stockbridge."
A series of new developments clinched this old blue-collar city's reinvention as a cultural destination. In 2004, newly elected Mayor James M. Ruberto created an Office of Cultural Development. The historic Colonial Theatre reopened last year, and the Barrington Stage Company relocated from Sheffield.
Real estate developers such as Beth A. Pearson saw a new market for well-heeled professionals and second home buyers. In 2003, Pearson, a GE marketing executive whose father was a development director in upstate New York, purchased a 12-unit apartment building on drug-infested Bradford Street for $250,000. To attract upscale tenants to the brownstone, she put up a sign, "Boston-style apartments."
"The guys at the local tavern around the corner had bets out that I wouldn't be able to pull it off," said Pearson, 44, a dynamo in high-heeled boots. "I'd go there to rile things up."
Around the same time, Pittsfield police made a major arrest that quelled drug-related violence that was plaguing the city. And Pearson succeeded in renting all 12 of her apartments on Bradford Street for $700 to $850 a month.
Then she fell in love with another old building, once the site of the Pittsfield Young Ladies' Institute and an elegant hotel in the days of the horse and buggy and Model T. She was so taken with this stately building with its sweeping four-story staircase that she quit her job at GE.
She bought it for $650,000 and sank $4 million into a renovation, creating luxury condominiums with mountain views and landscaped gardens. Condos at The Maplewood currently sell in the $250,000-to-$400,000 range.
Pearson estimates that, in the past two years, second home ownership of condos and single-family homes in town has increased 30 to 40 percent.
While home sales have slowed in the current down market, prices of the properties that are selling are escalating. The median price of a single-family home through the first nine months of 2007 is up 5.65 percent to $163,650 over the same period last year, according to real estate data publisher Warren Group.
The condo market is more active. With the addition of new projects, Pittsfield has notched 49 condo sales so far this year, compared to 40 last year and just 24 in 2005. And the type of condos selling now are much more expensive than in previous years. The median condo price at the end of September was $369,500, according to the Warren Group, compared to $146,250 in 2006.
Nancy Hall and Toshi Abe, a married couple from Princeton, N.J., bought their unit at The Maplewood as a second home after a few memorable trips to the Berkshires. The retired research scientists hadn't set out to become second home owners. It just happened.
"One of my friends said you have to do something special for your 60th birthday," said Hall, 61. "We came to Lenox and had a wonderful weekend and ended up seeing something that was happening in another month. We came back for the jazz festival, and, while we were there that weekend, Arlo Guthrie was singing in Pittsfield. I told my husband we needed to buy an apartment."
She had grown up in New York City and her husband in San Francisco, so they wanted a second home in a city like Pittsfield as opposed to a small, rural town.
"We wanted to be someplace where you didn't have to get into your car to live your life," she said.
With revitalization fever in the air, 26-year-old Jessica Rufo opened the whimsical Dottie's Coffee Lounge in September. It has a flapper motif and features live entertainment on Saturday nights. "I get street people next to bankers next to kids with purple hair," Rufo said.
Down the street from Dottie's is the new Poetry Cabin, a sculptural installation of wood and steel where passersby can jot down their thoughts on paper and hang them from a rope like clothes drying on a clothesline.
The city's weekly cultural calendar buzzes with ceramics classes, theatrical productions, and jazz concerts. Pittsfield also has attracted entrepreneurs and creative businesses such as Interprint Inc., a décor printing company, and WorkshopLive, which produces music lessons on the Web.
North Street is a mix of newly renovated spots and more utilitarian establishments such as hardware stores and pizza pads. Nondescript brick low-rises share the downtown with grander-styled Gothic buildings. Pittsfield is a city, after all, and it doesn't have the Norman Rockwell-like innocence that the famous painter found in nearby Stockbridge.
"We have all the same social problems large cities have but on a smaller scale," said Ruberto, 60.
Still, Pittsfield continues to move forward. The city has a $1.8 million Streetscape project scheduled for spring that will bring cobblestones and period lighting to North Street. Pearson has the $12 million New Amsterdam project, a cluster of newly created modular structures and rehabbed buildings that will provide moderate-rate housing in downtown Pittsfield.
And Bernstein has just opened Burger, a '50s-inspired burger joint, next door to the more elegant Spice. As she sees it, the revitalization of Pittsfield is a result of people here adopting a new attitude about their city.
They "had to start looking at the downtown not as a dying factory town," she said, "but as part of the cultural Berkshires."
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
