NORTHAMPTON — Anna Bowen, who owns Strada Shoes on Main Street, recently spent half an hour helping a customer find the perfect fit, but as she was about to pay, the woman pulled the shoebox back. First, she wanted to know Bowen’s position on Picture Main Street, a controversial $43 million project to redesign downtown.
Was Bowen “bike-friendly”?
“I threaded the needle,” Bowen recalled. “I told her I was excited, but I was very nervous.’”
Bowen made the sale, but she hasn’t forgotten the implied threat: Support Picture Main Street, or else.
Jackhammers are still a ways off, but the touted “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to modernize Main Street has already torn the city apart. That’s because a lot more is at stake than a half-mile of asphalt. This struggle is for the very soul of this quirky college town, and it poses an existential question for our online age: What, and who, is Main Street for?
The clash isn’t as simple as cyclists versus drivers, or people who embrace change versus those who fight it. It’s also about New Englanders who resent being told what’s good for them, and how local politics, in the time of Trump, can break down into us versus them.
Bike lane battles have long played out in Boston, but Northampton isn’t Boston — and it doesn’t want to be. Shays’ Rebellion started here, and 240 years later, a proud defiance and intense distrust of big-city interference live on. Complicating things, as usual, is money.
With about 31,000 residents, Northampton is a small city that can feel like a village — which only highlights stark disparities. Home to postcard-perfect Smith College, the city struggles to fund its own public schools. It’s famously nicknamed Paradise City, but a lack of affordable housing has pushed people into homeless encampments in the woods.
Although these are familiar problems, they’re happening in a time when public comment has moved to Facebook, the newspaper of record is competing with memes, and no one has control of the narrative.
In the middle of it all is Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra, a Smith graduate who inherited the Picture Main Street effort — and its awkward acronym, PMS — from her male predecessor, and today finds herself accused of putting Trumpian vanity projects ahead of critical city services.
“The mayor, just like the president, doesn’t care what we think,” posted one critic in the Facebook group Public Comment Northampton. “PMS is her golden ballroom.”
One thing nearly everyone agrees on: Main Street needs help. Take a stroll downtown, and you’ll see empty storefronts, broken sidewalks, and people camping out on the steps of City Hall. You’ll also find many small business owners who are reluctant to weigh in on Picture Main Street for fear of losing customers, along with a few loud opponents upset over what they see as the city’s plan to sell its soul for state and federal funding for some “bike lane fantasy.”
“People are not going to bicycle in town to go shopping,” said Robert McGovern, the 81-year-old owner of Packard’s bar. “You know, Grandma is not going to be sitting in a [expletive] basket while you pedal her to Packard’s for a beer. It’s not going to happen. It’ll be the kiss of death for downtown.”
But others say it doesn’t go far enough. “I would love to do away with all parking on Main Street,” said a local acupuncturist, Jennifer Nery, “for an even stronger version of a public square.”
In Northampton’s own “keep it weird” sort of way, Main Street is already a place to see and be seen.
There’s Al, who sits on a bench with his rubber duckies. “Behave,” he recently scolded one, “or I’ll turn you into paté!” And it can be hard not to bump into a friend or a college student, a rock star or a congressman. (Pixies front man Charles Thompson and US Representative Jim McGovern often pass through.) Old-timers may reminisce about what came before all the “for lease” signs, but at night, the indie music scene is still going strong.
The city’s history is etched onto Main Street as well — in colorful murals and in the collective memory of women’s marches, Pride parades, and antiwar protests. It’s no wonder the redesign is emotional for people, said Elizabeth Sharpe, codirector of the museum Historic Northampton: It brings up nostalgia.
“Main Street is an idea,” she said. “It represents order, your values, responsibility, civic virtues . . . It’s a place where people come together.”
It’s also a transportation artery, and city leaders say they want to make it safer. On average, there’s about one crash per week. The state Department of Transportation identified it as one of the region’s top “crash clusters” for people walking and biking between 2008 and 2017.
Part of the problem: Northampton’s Main Street is one of the widest in New England, roughly 90 feet in some places. City planning and sustainability director Carolyn Misch compared it to a python: fat in the middle, with 1 to 3½ lanes depending on the creativity of the driver. As one local bookseller put it, “I’ve been here 30 years. I still don’t know how to drive down Main Street.”
Picture Main Street would narrow the road, add separated bike lanes, and reduce parking spots. It would also bring grant money to upgrade sidewalks and replace water and sewer lines. Altogether, it’s work Northampton couldn’t afford to pay for on its own, Misch said. The first phase of construction is expected to start in 2028, and the whole thing could take five years.
To many retailers, five years seems like an eternity.
“I’ve survived online shopping. I’ve survived Trump twice now. I’ve survived COVID,” said Bowen. Although she’s cautiously optimistic she will survive the Main Street overhaul, too, “I’m not 100 percent sure we can.”
Robert McGovern is also worried. Packard’s was nicknamed “the bar that never closes” after it stayed open through the Blizzard of 1978. But times have changed.
“The big crowds of people we had in the ′80s and ′90s — they’ve gone away," he said. “And they’re not coming back.”
Years of construction will only deter people from coming downtown no matter what the mayor says, he added. “She’s living in a bubble.”
Sciarra barely eked out reelection last fall, and has warned residents about a likely override. Now, people who’ve long questioned her priorities are incensed about surging costs for Picture Main Street. In two years, the estimate has risen from $26.3 to $43.3 million — about 65 percent. The project is mostly funded by state and federal money; Northampton’s share is $11.8 million — but that’s still $11.8 million many think could be better spent.
Sciarra formed a community task force to share a fuller financial picture with the public. However, her “FACT Force” quickly became fodder when a former city councilor who goes by the alias Quaverly Honeyspoon attacked “the lying mayor” and her “FACT Farts” committee. Her Instagram post racked up over 1,000 likes — and featured a closeup of her bosom, captioned: “I had to pull out the big guns for this one. Cannons, if you will.”
“My god,” wrote one commenter, “I’ve never been so into politics.”
But with insults flying, many residents are nervous about speaking up.
“I hear from people regularly who say, ‘I’m not going to come to public comment; I’m not going to put myself out there,’ ” said Sciarra, adding that if people are afraid to express their opinions, “that’s not healthy for democracy.”
PMS traces back to the 2010s when city leaders seeded the idea for a new downtown that would meet the needs of a new generation. Main Street was built in the 19th century, when people had to come downtown to shop, said Wayne Feiden, who led the city’s planning department for 25 years before retiring in 2022. Now, “they have other options,” he said, “so it has to be a different kind of place.”
But what kind of place would Northampton be without its one-of-a-kind stores?
That’s what concerns Mazie Cox, who was part of the team that developed Main Street’s multilevel Thornes Marketplace and revitalized downtown in the late 1970s. Back then, Thornes was known as the “Glitter and Granola” building for offering a bazaar-like retail experience that combined art and fashion with natural foods — the original hippie chic. When Cox last visited Northampton a couple years ago, she found it “depressing.”
“The streets were dirty,” said Cox, who worries PMS goes too far and that vital retail will suffer. “Bricks were coming up. People weren’t taking care of Main Street.”
In September, Northampton hosted a presentation by Toole Design, sharing video renderings of Main Street. Some residents still say public communication about the project has amounted to “show and tell” by city officials.
“You know, ‘These are our beautiful graphics from our high-paid consultant in Boston, and this is what’s good for you,’ ” said resident Rutherford Platt. “They’re smug in the assurance that they have federal and state money, which they’re damn determined to spend.”
They’re “not listening to the will of the people,” said Mike Denno, a retired photographer who has lived here his whole life. “The current mayor and the City Council are going to leave — and every one of us is going to be here to deal with it.”
Jason DeGray, Picture Main Street’s lead engineer at Toole in Boston, is no stranger to public outcry over bike lanes, but said this city is in a class by itself.
“Northampton punches above its weight in terms of the volume of the public discourse, and that’s a good thing,” he said. “This is a hard conversation about how Northampton reinvests in itself for its next generation.”
The city has solicited and responded to feedback for Picture Main Street over the course of many meetings and years, and shared information about delays and escalating costs, Misch said. “Inflation, and the war in Iran, is not helping.”
There’s no question people are anxious, said resident Liza Styles, standing near Main Street’s rainbow crosswalk. As the mom of two young children, she is excited about the bike lanes but also understands the public’s concern about fiscal responsibility, she said, observing that Picture Main Street is Northampton’s Big Dig. “It is a huge change, and change is hard.”
Sharpe, the museum director, suggested that’s really what connects past and future: “This is too simple to say,” she said, before saying it anyway. “Main Street always changes.”
Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.