King Sang Boos: Yes, Picture Main Street!

It’s too early in the new year to read another doomsday plaint from letter writer Rutherford Platt about Picture Main Street [“The last First Night Northampton?” Jan. 6].  There are many of us in Northampton who welcome a downtown that will meet the future, despite the implementation challenges ahead.

Will the reconstruction on Main Street be easy? No. But with care and cooperation and support from most of us, the businesses downtown can hold on.

Let’s keep a vision of a vibrant and safer downtown with many more viable trees than the ailing ones that will be removed, and with wider sidewalks to welcome even bigger crowds of many more celebratory First Nights. Let’s move toward the future instead of cementing ourselves in the past.

Change is hard, but that does not mean hard things cannot or should not be done, especially with the Climate Crisis already bearing down on us. Draw on that New England fortitude that built Northampton. We can survive and then thrive!

Kit Sang Boos

Northampton