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The North Adams, Massachusetts city council has rejected a proposal to turn a former school building into 75 units of affordable and market rate housing.
City residents attended Tuesday night’s virtual city council meeting to protest the project. Michael Fierro said he represents many who live near the Sullivan Elementary School property on Kemp Avenue.
“We propose you demolish the current school building, revitalize and expand Kent Park into a neighborhood park, seeing our tax money put into green initiatives and a community space rather than more infrastructure,” he said.
Council Vice President Jason LaForest made the motion to deny Mayor Tom Bernard’s ability to proceed with negotiating the offer from Zenolith Partners, LLC and Sano-Ruin Construction.
Local art fans likely recognize the work of Nick Cave, who makes his âsoundsuitsâ out of fabric and found objects. In a city devoted to costuming, his sculptures would seem to be of obvious interest, and his works of contemporary art have been featured in Prospect New Orleans and expos at the New Orleans Museum of Art and Contemporary Arts Center.
Caveâs work on the installation of a massive cloudlike sculpture covered in found objects at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) is threaded through âMuseum Town,â a documentary about the creation of the institution in North Adams, a former mill town in western Massachusetts.
Sometimes in the mid-1980s I took a trip to a then-unsung North Adams with a friend, and surprisingly discovered that its physical location was picturesque â mountains nestling it, and a river running like a ribbon through the town.
However, the old mill town also housed an immense abandoned factory whose striking buildings were left rotting. The center of the town was impoverished, with many of its stores closed; one of the few open bars was inhabited by aging alcoholics and other people who had seen better days. Much of the housing was wood frame and decaying, and the town faced a great deal of unemployment, a lack of revenue, decaying social services and population decline.
Doc Talk: Figures of speech, Berkshires bounty
By Peter Keough Globe Correspondent,Updated December 15, 2020, 7:17 p.m.
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Shigetaka Kurita, the inventor of the emoji, sketches in a scene from The Emoji Story. David Allen/Utopia (Custom credit)
Will emojis, those enigmatic hieroglyphics ubiquitous on the Internet, replace language as we know it? Thatâs one of the questions raised by an expert interviewed in Ian Cheney and Martha Shaneâs whimsical but thoughtful documentary, â
The Emoji Storyâ (the expert says no). At any rate. the cute and sometimes scatological pictographs (the smiling ordure emoji is one of the most popular) have made an impact on how we communicate.