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North Adams Housing Authority Replaces Hydrants With CARES Act Funds

By Jack GuerinoiBerkshires Staff
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NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The North Adams Housing Authority used CARES Act funding to replace out of service fire hydrants at the Greylock Apartments.

Housing Authority Director Jennifer Hohn said the topic came up at a recent board of commissioners meeting when Chairman Colin Todd, who works for the city's Water Department, noted that the hydrants at the Greylock Apartments in the West End were not in optimal condition. 
 
"I was shocked. This was the first I have heard this," Hohn said in an email exchange. "I assumed that when hydrants are no longer working, they are replaced as soon as possible. I panicked, thinking that the health and safety of our residents were at stake. Additionally, the lives of our firefighters were at risk if, God forbid, there were a major fire and no source of water immediately available to hookup to."
 
Hohn said four of the five hydrants at the Greylock Apartments were out of service and one was on its "last leg."
 
The city is only able to replace so many hydrants at a time so she tapped the authority's federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act money to purchase five hydrants. She said the total expenditure was $10,176.85
 
"NAHA is 100 percent federally funded by HUD," she said. "As a result, this will alleviate the city of some financial burden during difficult times when collaborating resources is so vital for the city and NAHA."
 
Hohn said the hydrants were installed in late December.
 
"The health and safety of our residents have always been, and will always be our number one priority," she said.
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North Adams' Route 2 Study Looks at 'Repair, Replace and Remove'

By Tammy DanielsiBerkshires Staff

Attendees make comments and use stickers to indicate their thoughts on the priorities for each design.
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Nearly 70 residents attended a presentation on Saturday morning on how to stitch back together the asphalt desert created by the Central Artery project.
 
Of the three options proposed — repair, replace or restore — the favored option was to eliminating the massive overpass, redirect traffic up West Main and recreate a semblance of 1960s North Adams.
 
"How do we right size North Adams, perhaps recapture a sense of what was lost here with urban renewal, and use that as a guide as we begin to look forward?" said Chris Reed, director of Stoss Landscape Urbanism, the project's designer.
 
"What do we want to see? Active street life and place-making. This makes for good community, a mixed-use downtown with housing, with people living here ... And a district grounded in arts and culture."
 
The concepts for dealing with the crumbling bridge and the roads and parking lots around it were built from input from community sessions last year.
 
The city partnered with Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art for the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program and was the only city in Massachusetts selected. The project received $750,000 in grant funding to explore ways to reconnect what Reed described as disconnected "islands of activity" created by the infrastructure projects. 
 
"When urban renewal was first introduced, it dramatically reshaped North Adams, displacing entire neighborhoods, disrupting street networks and fracturing the sense of community that once connected us," said Mayor Jennifer Macksey. "This grant gives us the chance to begin to heal that disruption."
 
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