Farewell, The Market

I try not to clutter my Facebook page with too many of the presents, fan pages and other applications that have sprouted the past three years, but if any place deserved a spot, it was the Market, a small deli in downtown Pittsfield. Its brow was certainly higher than the city's typical store, with well-made sandwiches, salads and pastries, beer and wine, and nice dry goods for sale. However, there was nothing fussy about it; in fact, the aesthetic was eminently approachable, amiable and uncomplicated. The store's owners even know their fonts well. I favor anywhere or anyone that knows it has something good happening, but doesn't need to broadcast it loudly.

Perhaps that humility was the Market's problem. At the end of last week, the store's owners unexpectedly wrote in a bittersweet tone on their Facebook page that they were closing immediately. Opening a store like this in downtown Pittsfield is a tough sell. As much as the city has tried to re-position itself as an upcoming, artistic secret that's so good that you want to tell your friends but don't want to tell your friends in case it spoils the scene, there are not many people walking down North Street who would patronize a grocer like the Market. Trust me, I walked it every day for three months this summer.

Gentrification is often discussed as a linear movement -- once a neighborhood changes, it never recaptures what once was. But in many places, change is topsy-turvy, as steps happen in one direction but are then foiled; things remain the same for a long time, lurch in one direction and then jerk back to where they were. I don't object to a store like the Market establishing a gentrifying flag in the sand in a place like Pittsfield (or to me also putting one in by patronizing it and [briefly] moving there) because there are places that the market, as in the real estate one, is never going to discover naturally.

Western Massachusetts isn't Brooklyn, where every neighborhood adjacent to Bushwick is the next candidate for gentrification, in a process that seems to repeat itself endlessly. Without some people willing to create their own scene and to try something new in a quiet place like Pittsfield, it's probably only going to continue its post-industrial parabolic decline. Introducing the gentrifier here is fine with me because she's never going to overwhelm the rest of the city's character. Rather, she'll create a very distinct combination of the rough and the refined, which is a pair that's quite hard to find these days, making the place all the more special.