The Closed Loop of Civic Influence: Institutional Insulation on the Bridge of FlowersBy John F. Sendelbach · May 2026
I’m out here again in the pouring fucking rain, covered in mud up to my eyeballs, digging dirt like a man possessed to birth a native plant nursery — and those words keep running through my head like a broken record: “You are dead to me. Only when you call my name out, will I reawaken and I promise it will get ugly.”
That was the opening shot. August 26, 2019. More than nine months before the public petition. A 10+ year Bridge of Flowers Committee member, Joanne Soroka, sent me that email. Not a conversation. Not a disagreement worked out like adults. A straight-up threat. A preemptive gag order. A promise of consequences if I ever mentioned her name. She developed a bad taste for me and chose venom instead of dialogue. And it wasn’t long after that the whole committee joined in.
This isn’t about flowers anymore. This is about all-female power structures accusing men of misogyny while maintaining gender apartheid — a sentence so radioactive it should come with a hazmat warning. This is about a civic fiefdom masquerading as a public landmark. This is about a proprietary board that treats taxpayer-funded property like its own private estate. This is about an entrenched oligarchy dressed in pastel cardigans and laminated signage.
Let’s rip the petals off this fragrant little cult and drag the whole operation into the daylight for the autopsy it deserves.The Custodial Elite and the Closed LoopKay Berenson didn’t found The Greenfield Recorder, but she founded recorder.com, ran the paper as publisher from 1996 to 2009, and became publisher emeritus. In 2005 she delivered a solemn lecture about Americans embracing “falsehoods they like” over hard truths, about newspapers as sacred watchdogs, about the death of democracy in the face of comfortable lies.
Beautiful words from a member of the custodial elite. Because this same Kay Berenson was also sitting on the Bridge of Flowers Committee — the proprietary board that controls a major public civic asset. In June 2020, right after that toxic Change.org petition detonated (the one Change.org itself deleted for defamation and misinformation on June 9th — a fact the Recorder mysteriously never reported), Berenson allegedly helped organize secret Zoom meetings. The mission: coordinate the erasure of my seventeen-year artistic legacy from the bridge. No notice. No phone call. No opportunity to present audio, video, contracts, or evidence.
They voted to delete me in private like I was a glitch in their perfect insular family compact. And the Recorder — Berenson’s own paper — covered the aftermath without ever telling readers that its publisher emeritus was helping run the deletion committee. This is the rent-seeking gatekeeper class in action: producing no actual value themselves, but claiming total control over access to a public resource while lecturing everyone else about truth and democracy. The watchdog didn’t just look away. It helped bury the body.The Chair, the Denial, and the Patrician HierarchyAugust 2025. The $3.2 million bridge renovation gets its big ribbon-cutting. No PA system. Speeches swallowed by traffic. Pure amateur hour from the patrician hierarchy.
I spot Annette Szpila, committee chair, the same woman quoted in the June 18, 2020 Recorder endorsing the “anti-racism spirit” of the petition against me. With a witness present, I asked her directly about those quotes.
She looked me dead in the eyes and said she never said them.
They didn’t exist.
I was wrong.
Probably unhinged.
The article is still in the archive. Her name. Her quotes. Former editor Joan Livingston later confirmed they couldn’t just remove it. One woman from the custodial elite denying documented reality to the face of the man they helped destroy. All-female power structures accusing men of misogyny while maintaining gender apartheid. Let that line marinate. It never gets less insane.The Token and the BackstabberAnn Loftquist — the only non-white member (half Japanese) in the committee’s entire ninety-eight-year reign — was supposed to be different. At the time we were friends. She looked me in the eye after I lost my studio and delivered what I thought was the only raw honesty I ever received: “We threw you under the bus.”She knew exactly what happened because she was sitting on the bus when they did it. She was in the meetings. She watched them do it. And she said nothing in my defense.
After 2020 I moved into the giant mill building. Ann was working just fifty feet down the hall. Dozens and dozens of nights — often until 3 or 4 in the morning — we were the only two people in that massive empty structure. She never seemed afraid. She stayed late. She felt safe enough with me there that she didn’t bolt. Joanne Soroka’s studio was only thirty feet away. She and Loftquist and the other committee women would meet there weekly, laughing and having a good time, all while knowing they had played a major role in my destruction and the loss of my studio — which is exactly why I ended up in that mill in the first place. No remorse. No apologies. Just me grinning and bearing it, because if I said anything they’d call me unhinged.
She’s not just a backstabber. She’s the token — the single half-Japanese diversity prop the patrician hierarchy trots out whenever someone calls them on their all-white, all-female, ninety-eight-year gender apartheid. The same diversity crowd that screamed at me for being a man, labeled me a “racist disrupter,” and supported a petition falsely calling me racist — never once called out the old women’s club. They have yet to publicly acknowledge Paul Forth’s genius addition to the Bridge of Flowers: the pothole fountain with the black stones of Africa. Not one word.
Hypocrites. Blind. Selective. They saw a male target and went for the throat while protecting their own structurally racist, insular power structure. All-female power structures accusing men of misogyny while maintaining gender apartheid. And using a token to launder the optics.The $60,000 Soil Catastrophe and the Laminated LieApril 2026. A contractor tells me twice, unprompted, that the proprietary board specified the wrong soil type for the entire $3.2 million renovation. No documented horticultural expertise. Pure committee arrogance. Remediation cost: sixty grand in donor and taxpayer money pissed away.
Their response? A pathetic laminated sign saying the plants “weren’t thriving” and they’d changed the soil. No names. No accounting. No apology.
I have a Cornell BS in Floriculture and Ornamental Horticulture, a full semester of Soil Science, and seventeen years of permanent installations on that bridge. The professional gardeners who actually work the dirt daily apparently weren’t consulted either.
The Recorder ran a couple photos. No questions. No dollar figures. Just another fig leaf from the rent-seeking gatekeepersprotecting their civic fiefdom.The Federal Bomb They BuriedMarch 12, 2026. Federal Judge Mark G. Mastroianni denies qualified immunity to Detective Tucker Jenkins — finds it plausible he manufactured probable cause by feeding misleading information and ignoring exculpatory evidence.
I sent the Recorder the case number and details. Total silence. The same paper that gave saturation coverage to the petition against Jenkins went mute when a federal court dropped a bomb on one of the insular family compact’s protected assets.The Closed Loop of the Civic FiefdomThis is the machine. This is the entrenched oligarchy in full bloom.KKK crosses in the 1920s.
A predatory priest abusing generations of boys.
False police reports processed without interviews.
Botched investigations.
Tinted-window intimidation laps.
Godfather protections.
All-female power structures accusing men of misogyny while maintaining gender apartheid.
Preemptive threats from Soroka in 2019. Tokens who stay silent. Backstabbers who ride with the pack. Weekly studio meetups full of laughter while the man they helped destroy worked fifty feet away. “Racist disrupter” smears from the diversity crowd that never once challenged the old women’s club. Laminated lies. And a newspaper whose publisher emeritus helped steer the very proprietary board that did the erasing — all while lecturing the rest of us about truth and democracy.
I’m still out here digging in the rain. Still building something real while the custodial elite protects legacies that deserve to rot. Still documenting every omission, every denial, every cowardly non-answer from the rent-seeking gatekeepers.
The consensus of silence has had ninety-eight years to perfect its game. But the ledger is public now. The recordings exist. The court records don’t lie. The victims are still walking these streets. The illuminated cross of institutional protection has been drifting down the Deerfield River long enough. It’s time we drag that bastard ashore and force this entire town to look at it under clear, merciless daylight — no more laminated excuses, no more private Zooms, no more comfortable silence.
The flowers are beautiful.
The civic fiefdom maintaining them is rotten to the core.I’m not watching another cross float by.
And I’m damn sure not shutting up while this insular family compact keeps pretending the flowers don’t smell like pure bullshit.
— John F. Sendelbach
Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts
