June 22, 1916
By Mickey Friedman
With great recognition comes great responsibility. Living in Smithsonian Magazine’s The Best Small Town in America is an honor, and Great Barrington and its people have done a bang-up job serving as a sterling example to less fortunate small towns all across this great land of ours. Raising rents, raising taxes, replacing stores that once sold mundane nuts and bolts and boring car parts with snazzy boutiques offering tourist-pleasing exotica.
But there’s no resting on our laurels, for as the honors accumulate, our task grows more difficult. Monocle Magazine, yes the Monocle Magazine, with offices in London, New York, Hong Kong and Istanbul, after what must have been a several decades-long exhausting trip around the globe, has realized what every Berkshireite has known for the longest time: GB is one of the five best villages in the world to live and work. The World. I’m thinking two bests make one better than best.
Like me, you probably didn’t spring for the £6 Monocle wanted for their best villages issue which is why we have our own private Mad Men: John Guilfoil Public Relations LLC of Georgetown, MA 01833. Trumpeting to rich and poor alike our grand success.
Naturally, one of the great responsibilities of being The Best Small Town in America is finding the funding to issue the Best Small Town Press Releases in America. How lucky are we that the Selectboard approved the expense and our few cranky complainers (Republicans) couldn’t find that line item in the budget during Annual Town Meeting?
A less modest citizen of one of the five best villages of Planet Earth might be taunting our neighbors: “Eat your heart out Sheffield, Stockbridge, Lenox and Lee. Not to mention Alford and Mount Washington.” Whose Selectmen imagine they can do the people’s business without press releases. Sadly, they still have to saddle up their metaphorical horses to go house to house shouting out their latest news. But the better intentioned amongst us pray that someday they too will be able to pony up the funds for their own Public Relations firm or better yet borrow ours for two hundred a month.
Now, an inquisitive, shall we say envious Stockbridgean might enquire what makes Barrington so special. A fair question. And one the Monocle addresses from the get-go: “Don’t let the hometown vibe of Rubi’s café fool you. A charming spot with a steady stream of ladies who lunch and twenty-somethings on laptops it may be, but it’s also just one element of a thriving community that is getting it right.”
Getting it right. Because that’s the way we roll here in Barrington. Rain, shine, sleet or snow, we’re out there getting it right.
For those who might be getting it wrong, for those small towns without that steady stream of ladies who lunch, whose unfortunate ladies might be working nine to five or tending at home to their young, Monocle continues: “Great Barrington is a small town that feels every inch the village; it also has a vision for a sustainable future.”
You clearly need a vision. And renewed energy. From our new streets, our enthusiastic if modest multi-species treelets to our brand-new Darwinian crosswalks we expect will ultimately weed out the old and weary, or those with baby carriages just too slow to dodge the on-coming cars cruising our new expressway-like Main Street. Because, really, if we don’t eliminate the distracted daydreamers and the sixty, seventy, or eighty-somethings who can’t really afford to pay their real estate taxes anymore, and begrudge our 21st Century Harvard Preparatory Regional High School, where will we put the trendy twenty-somethings?
For perfectly understandable reasons – the authors must surely have been exhausted from scouring the globe grading villages – Monocle misattributes the development of the Indian Line Farm’s Community Supported Agriculture project to the Schumacher Society rather than to Robyn VanEn and Jan VanderTuin. And misplaces it in Great Barrington rather than over the border in South Egremont. The first American CSA surely makes it into the vision column because visionary consumers pre-pay their visionary farmer to farm with vision. And nobody at Monocle imagines South Egremont the best small village in the world. So why let a few measly miles spoil such an uplifting story.
Why not give E. F. Schumacher the credit for our best village vision? White, German, not so small, beautiful but dead, he’s probably more appropriate than our rabble-rousing red and black GB-born W.E.B. DuBois, whose rundown AME Church, thank God, is for sale. To be replaced, one can dream, by a fish-farm to table fish and chips joint.
Vision. Because if you can’t have a sustainable present you ought to aim for a sustainable future.
So expect our modest sidewalks to be filled with starry-eyed visitors this summer. Smile. Let them double-park. Know they’re just trying to get it right while they shop. Be Kind. Be better than best.
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“Better Than Best” first appeared in the June 9, 2016 edition of The Berkshire Record.
Great Barrington’s press release announcing its continuing great fortune: