The Letter to the Editor the Daily Hampshire Gazette Wouldn't Publish

July 22, 2009
To the Editor:

I deeply admire what Smith College does as an educational institution of the liberal arts and I enjoy cordial relations with many colleagues at Smith. I cannot say the same about Smith’s postures as a landlord. Smith needs to show its competitive muscle in the academic marketplace, but its muscular approach to a local restaurant seems unworthy of the college and an unintended repudiation of the legacy of one of its distinguished alumnae, Julia Child.

In the current economy the challenges of running both a restaurant and a liberal arts college for women are daunting. By constructing a building for its engineering and microbiology departments, Smith is opening a new frontier for liberal arts colleges for women, once again setting the pace. Killing a successful and nationally respected local restaurant that happens to be a sometimes bumptious tenant bears the marks of corporate arrogance and blindness, a misguided exercise in tough love.

To many people I know, the Green Street Café is not merely a part of the food services industry, but also a mainstay of the greater Northampton community. It is here that doctors, lawyers, professors, psychologists, students and their families, lovers, poets, musicians, writers and artists come to eat and to share thoughts and ideas. Locals who dine here come from the hill towns and from across the Valley, from Springfield and Holyoke, Lenox and Stockbridge, and from New York city. Those who are not local will by word of mouth often end up at Green Street; professional actors from Hollywood to NYC when in town usually dine there, and are left alone to enjoy their dinners with friends or colleagues. Putting the Green Street Café out of business is, whether intended or not, an act of silencing a conversation that that larger community enjoys only in the intimacy and security of the restaurant on Green Street.

Let me give but one anecdote of how that community speaks to itself. Having played the piano at Green Street on a weekly basis for more than ten years, I have accumulated a lot of anecdotes about how this eating place generates a sense of community, but one example must suffice. Before the Spring, 2009, series of weekly poetry readings on Thursday evenings, I would offer an hour or so at the piano, and arrive early enough to have a light supper. Before one of those engagements, I was sitting by myself at a table near the piano when a woman wandered in, new to the restaurant, which at the time was nearly empty. She (let me call her “Ms. Nightingale”) was there for the poetry reading, she said. After scanning the empty tables upstairs, Ms. Nightingale elected to remain in the area near the piano, and I, in a fit of gallantry, invited her to join me. It turned out that she was, like me, a poet, but unlike me, a poetry journal editor from out of town. When she learned that I would be at the piano, she confessed that in her younger years she had had a good voice, and sung many tunes. Like what? I asked. She said she could sing the Schubert “Trout” Lied. We chatted while we ate, and while many poetry-hungry customers streamed by to take their meals upstairs. Finally, it was my time to play. Unexpectedly, as I took my seat, Ms. Nightingale came over to the piano, and suggested we try the “Trout,” which I knew by ear, but which was not in the show tune vein of my Thursday night programme. She sang with a lovely voice, and soon we were improvising around one show tune after another. A small audience had formed in the entry way and along the bar. As we reached the bridge of one tune, she blurted out that she couldn’t remember the lyrics to the next stanza, so I played the bridge by myself to give her time to remember, and was just about to reach the end of the bridge when a Smith College professor, who had been sitting at the bar, raced over to her with his iPhone, having successfully downloaded those missing lyrics. Ms. Nightingale sang the rest of the song, and when she had finished, and after the applause, people asked us how long we had been performing together, and people talked and talked.

This sort of serendipity is hard to come by. The Green Street Café affords many people their chance to be touched by such moments.

It would be an act of bravery on the part of the individuals at the top of Smith College to pull back from the brink of the destruction of a restaurant and the harming of a community. Smith College does not need to be remembered for the lesson it is teaching John Sielski, a local boy from Whately who attended UMass. It needs to be remembered for the role it plays in supporting a web of conversations that make the Northampton area vibrant and sustainable as a community, a role that the liberal arts plays in an institution of higher learning. If the Green Street Café is forced to vacate the premises on Green Street, the restaurant will die. Smith College, a venerable liberal arts institution of higher learning for women will have snuffed the life out of a restaurant for being, well, another home for the liberal arts. I pray that a greater wisdom will prevail at Smith.

Yours truly,

Bill Moebius
Conway, MA