From the Save the Worcester State Hospital Clock Tower Facebook group:

On Wednesday, July 27, 2011, the Final Global Workshop for the Worcester State Hospital Campus was held at Preservation Worcester. Those from the Worcester community were disheartened to hear that the state intends to demolish the Clock Tower. In light of the fact the structure does not quality for historic tax credits and the expenses associated with stabilizing and restoring the building are significant, it is the opinion of DCAM (Division of Capital Asset Management) that there will not be any interest in the property. We encouraged the state to consider at least trying to market the building

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and as a last resort to stabilize the structure as an architectural relic.

We were granted a little breathing time and will reconvene in about 6 weeks. The time for us to act is now. Please share with us any ideas of potential developers, please encourage people to”like” our Save the Worcester State Hospital Clock Tower, and please forward ideas on how we can safe-guard this structure which is significant in so many ways.

(Photo: Worcester State Hospital Clock Tower, a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic licensed image from Sean’s photostream.)

For those of you craving whatever scraps you can get of Scott McLennan’s writing, he has a great piece in the Boston Globe about the Indian Ranch in Webster.

I have a minor obsession with the Indian Ranch.  (Indeed, one might ask what I don’t have a minor obsession with…)  I’ve never been there, though; the prospect of a life-sized Charlie Daniels statue and waving my country music flag proudly have proved too daunting. 

But maybe the Marty Stuart concert in September will be my tipping point…

(Image: Webster – Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic photo from Michael Femia’s photostream.)

For years now, I’ve been talking about how/whether Worcester’s amateur online writers can produce 5% of the city’s news. Why 5%? It’s inspired by this Clay Shirky talk:

The problem is that the thing that’s going away, newspapers account for 85 percent of, by the figure Professor Jones has in Losing the News — which is the vast bulk of this iron core of news is produced by one class of entity. And anybody who thinks about large-scale system design recognizes that is effectively a single point of failure problem. And if anything bad happens to the institutional model of this 85-percent producer of this thing we care about, the whole system is suddenly at risk. And that’s effectively the issue we’ve got.

So we don’t need another different kind of institution that does 85 percent of accountability journalism. We need a class of institutions or models, whether they’re endowments or crowdsourced or what have you — we need a model that produces five percent of accountability journalism. And we need to get that right 17 times in a row.

One obvious question is: how do know when you’re at 5%? I did a couple case studies on the Real Worcester blog, and since that site’s moribund I thought I’d copy them here, both to preserve them and as a starting point for my own thinking.
Continue reading A 5% solution—more thoughts →

It seems

like Worcester has become Main Street USA to Boston Globe reporters. In yesterday’s Globe, there was an article about how the “Main Street cost index” has been going up steadily for the past year. Ground zero — the Lincoln Square plaza.

To wit — “A dozen eggs that sold for as little as 89 cents a year ago now cost $1.39.”

I’m as sympathetic as anyone to price increases (because I have to buy food too), but it’s a bit weird to be talking about a plaza with “a Stop & Shop grocery store. A Lowe’s building store. A Target department store. A Dick’s Sporting Goods. A Barnes & Noble bookstore. A Papa Gino’s pizza shop. A Staples office supply store. And a MetroPCS cellphone retailer” without also talking about the shopping venues across the street, which include an Aldi (eggs at 99 cents) and a Savers (which sells better quality gently used clothing than Target at a lower price).

Perhaps I’m colored by a view that one can be satisfied with frugal comfort, but it’s just weird to have Worcester — a great place to live if you thrive on cheapness — portrayed as an inflationary Anytown USA.

Besides, the only thing real Worcesterites should care about is that Providence is so jealous of Gateway Park they want to build a similar research park there. So there!

Just in time for the Green Solidarity Conference and for508’s drafting a question about sustainability (if you need a Google Plus invite, send me an email) comes a Brookings Institution report on the Clean Economy.

Among other things, the report ranks 100 US urban areas by the percentage of ‘green’ jobs in relation to the total area jobs.  Springfield/Pioneer Valley was ranked at #6; Hartford was ranked at #28; Boston at #48; Providence (including Fall River) at #42; and Worcester at #33.

According to the Springfield Republican, “Worcester had 6,537 or 2 percent of that region’s total number of jobs, according to the report.”

For those thinking about sustainability in Worcester, increasing these types of jobs might be one part (though certainly not all) of that.

Today’s Globe has an article on internet cafes, profiling the Net Play Cafe in Worcester.  It’s well worth a read:

“I feel it’s a legal, legitimate business, and we’ll see what shakes out,’’ said Matthew Durand, who owns Worcester’s Net Play Cafe.

Durand was interviewed from a phone in the cafe, while watching this reporter on a closed-circuit security camera. He said he was in Florida and that he owns several cybercafes around the country. This one is not profitable, he said, blaming the raids.