Not Even Paving Paradise to Park Three Cars

The Plastic Pavilion and the Village-Wide Erosion of Design Standards

There is a precise moment in the decay of civic standards when a town stops seeing a scarred landscape as temporary and begins treating it as normal. It occurs when an administrative body looks at a degraded piece of public landscape, shrugs its shoulders, and decides that a permanent eyesore is an acceptable price to pay for raw convenience. In the heart of Shelburne Falls, at the former Mechanic Street Brook site by the Buckland school campus, this failure of spatial planning is preserved in a patch of dirt and ruts. It reduces a prominent village gateway into a muddy vehicle footprint. Joni Mitchell famously sang about paving paradise to put up a parking lot, but the municipal leadership has managed something even more structurally absurd: they have compromised the public view right where traffic from Route 2 enters the village corridor, not for a vital infrastructure hub, but to maintain an unpaved swamp that routinely holds a grand total of three cars.

The defenders of this municipal eyesore will instantly deploy the standard administrative defense. They'll argue that the parking lot is a critical necessity—that the village is starved for vehicle space and that the mud patch is an indispensable overflow safety valve to handle campus traffic.

It is an argument that collapses under direct inspection of the surrounding parking inventory on the school campus grounds.

An objective infrastructure audit of the campus parking layout completely dismantles this narrative of scarcity. Navigating through the school's primary lot reveals a sprawling, underutilized layout consisting of a front section and a rear dog-leg extension completely hidden from Main Street by buildings, mature vegetation, and playground structures. Tucked safely out of public view, this campus infrastructure contains at least twenty-two standard, viable vehicle spaces that sit entirely empty. This includes a clear grassy island right in the middle of the paved lot—a stable green space that drivers religiously avoid for no documented reason, choosing instead to leave it pristine while repeated vehicle use churns a high-visibility village border into a slurry of clay and standing water.

The alternative capacity sits empty, paved, and hidden from the public eye week after week. Yet town leaders permit the prominent Mechanic Street entrance to the village to be used as a low-utility, unpaved dumping ground.

Worse still, this arrangement fails to solve the very traffic pressures used to justify it. During peak morning drop-off and afternoon pick-up hours, the presence of the mud lot does nothing to alleviate congestion. Instead, drivers routinely park directly in the active roadway to let children out, creating a bottleneck where oncoming traffic is forced to wait before pulling out and maneuvering around stopped vehicles. The mud lot does not cure the hazard; it merely sits as a permanent aesthetic penalty at the town's literal threshold.

The real danger here is the corrosive habituation of local governance. When a Selectboard and its planning authorities allow a muddy hole to persist at a primary town entrance, they train the public to accept substandard conditions as a permanent baseline. People get used to the ruts. They get used to navigating the standing water, walking through the muck, and staring at a degraded asset. Eventually, the community stops asking why a natural brook was culverted, covered, and forgotten. This is what institutional drift looks like: a refusal to correct course because maintaining a mistake is easier than exercising genuine leadership.

Historic districts rarely decline through catastrophe; they decline through tolerated exceptions. Every uncorrected exception becomes the precedent used to justify the next exception. When neglect becomes familiar, oversight weakens.

This process does not stop at the edge of the school mud patch; it creeps directly onto the village infrastructure across the river, where the "plastic pavilion" reveals itself not as an innocent civic addition, but as an insider rescue operation for private real estate speculation.

At the new Pocket Park on the former Singley Furniture lot, the underlying reality is a transactional loop involving Ancient Glacier LLC—a commercial partnership co-owned by prominent local glass artist Josh Simpson. The LLC acquired the historic property without conducting sufficient regulatory due diligence, only to discover that an unmitigable four-foot structural fire hazard between the old buildings destroyed the site's commercial viability. When the owners demolished the buildings to start fresh, they triggered a total collapse of their grandfathered rights. Under modern zoning regulations, the cleared, narrow lot became functionally unbuildable for private enterprise.

Rather than forcing the commercial partnership to absorb the long-term financial loss of holding a dead asset, the Selectboard stepped in with a municipal lifeline. The town leased the unbuildable private lot with public funds, transforming a corporate real estate liability into a guaranteed rental revenue stream for the owners.

To complete this insular loop, the layout and the harsh concrete retaining walls installed in the fall were developed under a design framework tied to the property owner’s immediate family network. The owner of Ancient Glacier LLC, Josh Simpson, has a son, Josiah Simpson, who is a licensed Professional Landscape Architect and a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst landscape architecture program. While Josiah Simpson’s precise operational role, if any, in this specific project has not been publicly detailed, the final physical outcome—utilitarian concrete retaining walls paired with a plastic lumber pavilion—stands in noticeable tension with the standards of environmental stewardship, contextual design, and regional integrity traditionally emphasized by that program. For alumni who respect the UMass legacy of rigorous regional planning and public landscape integration, watching an inside family asset be transformed into a cheap, greenwashed municipal eyesore—while professionals either actively participate or silently stand by—is deeply disheartening. It raises legitimate questions about consistency, professional ethics, and competitive process.

The issue here is not whether residents appreciate volunteer-built amenities; it is whether public projects inside a protected historic landscape are held to the same procedural and aesthetic standards imposed on ordinary citizens. Residents navigating historic district approvals are routinely expected to satisfy detailed aesthetic and procedural requirements regarding traditional timber framing, traditional setbacks, and historical continuity. Municipal projects should not be exempt from the standards imposed on the public.

A structure whose approval process, petroleum-based materials, and apparent deviation from published historic district expectations raise serious questions about procedural consistency should not be granted a permanent pass under the guise of municipal convenience or family-linked design authority. The defenders of the project lean on the same tired, greenwashed, small-town tropes: they claim it provides a necessary shelter, that it was built with community labor, and that the intent behind it overrides any minor bureaucratic technicalities. They expect the village to applaud the cheap convenience of recycled plastic lumber while largely ignoring serious questions about whether its placement, materials, and absence of standard public postings align with the rules routinely imposed on ordinary residents.

By allowing a flawed plastic structure to occupy a prominent visual corridor while simultaneously maintaining a degraded mud pit at a major town entrance a mile away, the Selectboard has signaled that rules are fluid and safety baselines are negotiable. The environmental and aesthetic degradation happens in plain sight, one unvetted project and one uncorrected mistake at a time.

The village is being trained to normalize degradation. A muddy scar remains untouched at a major thoroughfare while nearby campus spaces sit empty and hidden. A visually discordant pavilion appears in a protected historic corridor despite unresolved procedural questions. Together, these are not isolated oversights. They are evidence of a governing culture that increasingly treats standards, aesthetics, and public accountability as optional.

The commissioned report collecting dust on the official town website.
https://townofshelburnema.gov/files/Shelburne_Falls_Design_Guidelines_1999.pdf

DOSSIER: Andrew Baker

DOSSIER: Andrew Baker

Executive Summary: The Teflon Gatekeeper

Andrew Baker has spent more than two decades accumulating overlapping civic roles in Shelburne Falls—arts, economic development, housing, sewer, school committee, and finally the Selectboard—cultivating the profile of a dedicated community servant while developing a precise institutional reflex for deflecting accountability downward and away from himself. As a Selectboard member, Baker holds direct oversight authority over the Shelburne Police Department. That authority obligates him to respond when constituents bring documented evidence of civil rights violations, selective enforcement, and officer misconduct.

The documented record shows he has not done so once. Not for a single complaint. Not in six years.

Instead, the record captures Baker using his official municipal email to accuse a constituent of criminal trespass without evidence, then being forced to issue a rapid retraction once it was proved no warning signs existed. It catches him executing physical and administrative retreats at the local post office, using shifting internal titles ("neither the Select Board chair nor the Police liaison") to insulate himself, and routing systemic police complaints back to the exact police chief under investigation. Baker is a long-tenured insider who has learned to navigate every complaint without ever engaging its substance, making institutional evasion the defining feature of his public service.

Introducing Seven Tire Natives

MOHAWK REPAIR INSTITUTE

SHELBURNE FALLS, MASSACHUSETTS  ·  FOUNDED 2026

INTRODUCING SEVEN TIRE NATIVES

THE biological foundation of the Mohawk Repair Institute, and why it started with seven tires.

When I took over this building, there were seven automotive tires sitting on the property, left behind by the previous occupant, headed nowhere in particular. I repurposed them as planters. It seemed right: take what was left, put it to use, grow something that belongs here.

That is, in miniature, what the Mohawk Repair Institute does.

Most people who find MRI find it through the archive concept, or the sculptural work, or the name itself, which was already on the building when I arrived, and which I am keeping deliberately, as a teaching instrument rather than an erasure. But the nursery is the part you can hold in your hands. Seven Tire Natives is where the ecological argument becomes physical.

"The name was already on the building. We took it seriously."

On the False Accusation of Antisemitism, the Evidence That Refutes It, and the Institutional Silence That Followed

The Statement That Should Not Have Been Necessary

On the Unsupported Accusation of Antisemitism, the Evidence That Refutes It, and the Institutional Silence That Followed

By John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

There is a polished stone bench on the hill above Buckland, in the cemetery that looks out over the Deerfield River valley. I made it. A local Jewish woman named Susan Garfield Wright had commissioned stone sculptures from me when I first arrived in this area, pieces for her husband Michael that stayed in the home they shared throughout her life. After Susan died, her husband and daughters came to me with an intimate request: would I move large stones from their property to the cemetery on the hill, and polish one into a bench in her memory? They wanted it designed to receive a bronze plaque that would tell her story. A permanent marker, in the place where she rested. I did it. The bench is there. Anyone can go see it.

Baby "chose" the pliers so mommy could have a podcast with 3 views

The Spiritual Coach, the Receipts, and the Politics of Selective Compassion: A Palimpsest of Erasure in She'lburne Balls

By John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

Before we dive in, let me be clear: I am not calling for a boycott of Amanda Star Kingsley’s book.

The Unforgiving Town Was Real

SIX YEARS: THE COMPLETE RECORD

The Unforgiving Town Was Real

By John F. Sendelbach Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

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PART I: THE FRAME

Chapter 1: The Book Review as Mirror

On May 15, 2026, the Greenfield Recorder published a book review.

That is not unusual. The Recorder publishes book reviews, community announcements, features on beloved local residents. It is a newspaper of record for Franklin County and the North Quabbin, serving — as its masthead says — the people of this region since 1792. It has served some of them better than others.

The review was of a novel called The Unforgiving Town, written by Joan Livingston, who served as editor-in-chief of the Greenfield Recorder — and the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Athol Daily News — from December 2018 through January 2022. The reviewer was Tinky Weisblat, a food writer and local historian, self-described "Diva of Deliciousness," and her admiration for Livingston was total. Five books since leaving the paper. An audiobook. Two screenplay projects in development. "Talk about a work ethic!" Weisblat wrote. "I admit I'm a little jealous."

Here is the plot of The Unforgiving Town, as described in the review. A man named Al Kitchen returns to the fictional Massachusetts hilltown of Holden after serving seventeen years in prison for manslaughter. He killed the owner of the local bar while attempting to rob it. He and the bar owner had a longstanding feud. Most people in town believe the killing was deliberate, not the lesser charge he was convicted on. He has nowhere to go except the house he inherited from his grandmother. Prison changed him — he read, he worked hard, he came to regret what he did. All he wants is to fix up the house, find a job, live quietly. To become, in the reviewer's words, "a useful member of society."

The town won't have it.

It treats him as a permanent pariah. It refuses to accept that a man can change. It harasses him, freezes him out, blocks every path toward ordinary life. When he ends up dead on a back road — in what the police chief suspects was not an accident — his cousin is the only mourner.

The Greenfield Distorter ~ our local corporatized monopoly rag

HERE’S A PIECE THEY’LL NEVER PUBLISH. THEY’D RATHER RUN FLUFF PIECES FOR INCOMPETENT “LEADERS” TO SAVE FACE THAN ADMIT THEY WERE WRONG. IT’S INSTITUTIONAL INERTIA AT ITS WORST — POLLUTING THE VERY DEMOCRACY THEY CONSTANTLY CLAIM TO BE SAVING.

Submitted with My Turn: "The Soil, the Silence, and Six Years"

To: Dan Crowley, Editor, Greenfield Recorder

From: John F. Sendelbach, Shelburne FallsDate: May 2026

Mechanic Street Brook Daylighting & Village Greenway

UnErase Mechanic Street Brook

A Daylighting, Greenway, Watershed Learning, and Community Repair Proposal

Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026

© 2026 John F. Sendelbach — All Rights Reserved

NOTE: This document evolves as field investigation continues. Current version: May 2026.

OVERVIEW

Core Project Vision: Restore baseflow to historic Mechanic Street Brook. Primary location: Ghost Hollow, a steep-sided, ten-foot-deep former stream channel behind the historic barn at the town-owned 49 Mechanic Street parcel. Three main technical interventions: install a Dutch-Door Weir (self-regulating passive flow-control structure) at the existing diversion; decommission and physically remove the 1961 Rat Tunnel (the diagonal 3-by-4-foot box culvert that is the root cause of sixty years of flooding); and daylight the brook through the restored Otter Way corridor on the town parcel.

Expected Results: Natural meandering channel with pools, riffles, and bioengineered banks. Primary construction material: approximately 200 tons of local glacial stone sourced from Beaver Picchu™ property less than a mile away. New public greenway and watershed learning corridor connecting Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School to the Deerfield River waterfront. Elimination of stagnant mosquito-breeding ditch, replaced by continuously moving water and a functional natural predatory ecosystem. First accurate stormwater map of the Mechanic Street corridor — solving a documented DPW infrastructure crisis that recently produced a drilling incident when a contractor struck an unmapped concrete pipe on Bridge Street.

The Geographic Loop: The restored brook physically reopens the historic water corridor that once connected the Arms Cemetery — now the Beaver Picchu™ upper watershed — to the Pratt Memorial (Arms) Library, whose foundation sits within twenty feet of where the brook once cascaded to the Deerfield River below Salmon Falls. One block south of that cascade point, at the corner of Bridge Street and Deerfield Avenue, is the Pocumtuck State Park heart site at Salmon Crossing, where the Sachem Salmon sculpture and the Sixty Square Sphere will be installed above the glacial potholes where Shelly still waits. The brook restoration and the PSP heart site are not adjacent proposals. They are one connected argument, written in the landscape by two centuries of erasure and now being corrected in the same generation.

Immediate Municipal Actions Required:

• Direct DPW and Conservation Commission to cease and remediate illegal brush/leaf dumping in Ghost Hollow
• Authorize Water Department and DPW to release all available drainage records
• Retain the 49 Mechanic Street parcel permanently in public ownership
• Approve submission of the MassDEP Ecological Restoration Pre-Design Grant

Key Partners: Shelburne Conservation Commission · Shelburne Water Department · Shelburne DPW · Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School · Connecticut River Watershed Council · Mass Audubon · Franklin Land Trust · UMass Amherst LARP Department · Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association

fish tour

The Fish Tour

The Culinary Institute of America ~ Hyde Park, New York

A Culinary Sculpture Series for the Hudson River Watershed Proposal ~ May 2026

John F. Sendelbach  Sculptor & Landscape Designer. Shelburne Falls, MA 

The Idea in Plain TermsOne sculpture already lives on the CIA campus: a twelve-foot Atlantic sturgeon made entirely from salvaged culinary cutlery. “Old Diamondsides” stands near the entrance plaza, overlooking the Hudson River that once teemed with its living namesakes. It was installed in 2015 as the first node of a larger idea. The Fish Tour completes that idea.
Eight site-specific sculptures, each fabricated primarily from recycled stainless steel kitchen tools and equipment, trace a deliberate pedestrian route across the Hyde Park campus. Each piece represents a signature species of the Hudson River estuary — ecologically, historically, and culinarily significant. Interpretive signage at every stop weaves together river science, watershed restoration, culinary tradition, and the deeper interdependence of healthy waters and healthy kitchens. The tour begins at the academic core and descends toward the riverside, turning underutilized spaces into moments of surprise, recognition, reflection, and quiet delight.It is a walking conversation between the kitchen and the river.

20 song autobiography

©2026 John F Sendelbach

7 AM Knock

The 7 AM Knock: A Ledger of Silence and Revelation

Thinking about Omi’s life on the day of her birth got me reflecting on the rest of the bloodline. If Omi’s deafness created the "inherited acoustics" of our house—the need to project and launch words across weather—then my father’s silence created the deeper infrastructure of our history.
By the fall before COVID hit, the family rhythm had shifted to a hospice rotation. My brother, my sister, and I—the three of us left after losing our brother Alan—took turns traveling from Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Massachusetts to sit vigil in Lancaster, New York. My parents were in their final landing place: a modest apartment at Greenfields. Three weeks prior, during our last real conversation, my mother had drifted into a hallucination, calling me Jeff, my childhood best friend. My father and I didn’t correct her; we just shared a quiet glance of acceptance, watching the blurred lines of a long life softening at the edges. When I arrived that final Friday, she was unconscious in the medical wing—just hours from death.
Everyone knows you don’t knock on a door at seven in the morning unless the world has shifted. I was kneeling on the white carpet of that small living room, surrounded by the vintage transit schedules and victorian papers I had brought to photograph for my eBay shop, trying to keep my hands busy while my heart waited. When the knock finally came, my father and I shared a look of absolute knowing. I opened the door to a Black nurse who had come to tell us that Nancy Ann (Sahs) Sendelbach born in 1929, was gone.
Later that afternoon, in the strange hollow quiet that follows a death, I drew one final entry out of my father’s internal ledger. I brought up the derogatory language I had pushed back against in my teens. At 94, he finally explained the root of it. He told me about the late 1930s in Buffalo—walking to technical high school through neighborhoods carved up by redlining, where he and his friends were regularly chased and harassed by Black kids. That unspoken trauma became the silent engine behind the “white flight” that carried my parents to the rural safety of Orchard Park in the 1960s.
The irony is layered and thick. They had moved us onto land founded in the early 1800s by Quakers like David Eddy (who arrived from Vermont in 1804 and claimed hundreds of acres around what became the Four Corners) and Obadiah Baker (who settled in 1807 and opened his home for the first sanctioned Quaker meetings). This was ground soaked in reformist ideals: a stop on the Underground Railroad, where Quaker families helped fugitives heading north to Canada. The Baker homestead on East Quaker Road still carries that marker today.
Yet that same Quaker “plainness” and moral clarity rested on prior displacement. The Haudenosaunee—particularly the Seneca Nation—had long stewarded this territory. By the 1820s–1830s, through treaties, pressure, and the gradual sale of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, the Seneca presence was largely removed from the immediate area, even as Quaker settlers built meeting houses, aided escaped slaves, and championed the oppressed. We grew up running through fields and playing in Smokes Creek, a landscape shaped by both the Friends’ quiet testimony and the later hand-crafted integrity of Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft movement nearby. We were products of a retreat from urban friction, raised in a cradle built on layered displacements.
Sitting there at 94, my father didn’t need to be forced into reconciliation—he was ready. I coaxed the story out, and he spoke clearly: he had no problem with Black people. He had reached a place of transcendence, cared for in his final years by a diverse staff at Greenfields and delivered the hardest news of his life by a Black woman. He didn’t die carrying the secret or the old fear. When he handed me my mother’s gold wedding band that afternoon, the inherited acoustics of our house finally harmonized.
The fields of Orchard Park are mostly cookie-cutter subdivisions now. But on that white carpet in Lancaster, a much older and more complicated landscape was finally cleared.