"You remember what this section of Northampton was called years ago?
The Belt. The Belt.
Do you remember that?"
people
"My father married the girl next door. She's Polish and he was Italian... I just stayed here. I love Valley Street. It's my street."
"This property I have used to be an asparagus farm. This place right here used to be the barn where they processed the asparagus."
“My great, great, great grandfather bought the first motor truck in Northampton, the first motor truck, yep. Before that was all wagons.”
"When I was farming, though, that was really exciting. I mean all the small farms. Yeah, you just can't visualize it."
An appreciation...
"In my yard here, my grandfather planted fruit trees. And my mother used to call the backyard the orchard."
"The Gross family, they came from Poland, and that was the side of the family that built the house on Hockanum road."
"My grandmother and grandfather had ten children, five boys and five girls, and I don't know how they lived at 107 but they did."
"This house was very reasonably priced for a new couple just starting out. They wouldn't let me put my name on the deed because I wasn't 21 yet. I was 20. So I had to wait six months later and put my name on the deed."
"There's a species of animal around here that's the Cottontail Rabbit. And there's another one called Woodchuck. And I do not feel like going to war with them again."
"I mean, to this day, I meet people in Northampton, and I describe where I live, and they have no idea that it exists."
Coal Trestle, Holyoke Street, 1930s. Photo courtesy Mike Willard.
places
The Belt
"This was The Belt. So we decided maybe it was named after Pleasant Street because there's a lot of wine, a lot of bars. People drink that — a belt. Maybe it was for this. We finally found out, just two years ago, "the belt" is farmland."
Farms
Raymond's Corner Store
"Next to 107 Wiliams. We had the little corner grocery store, it was Raymond's, and there was one in every neighborhood. You could get meat, bread."
The Dike & the Floods
"We used to have a pile of kids, we'd go to the corner and sit and watch em build the dike."
Skiing the dike, 1940. Photo courtesy Martha McCormick
"I'm gonna tell you a story and you can laugh if you want or cry. Maybe I shouldn't even tell you." —Joan Fortier
about
The Montview Neighborhood Project is an ongoing oral history project to explore and document life — past and present — in one of the most unique and historic neighborhoods in the city of Northampton, Massachusetts.
It’s interesting, Montview. A bit of a backwater, a small “downtown” neighborhood just a ten-minute walk south on Pleasant from Main Street. Built on the historic flood plain of the Connecticut River, Montview has city on one side and country on the other, occupying as it does a space between the urban landscape and the Meadows — acres of rich farmland along the Connecticut River.
For more background on the project, click here.
If you have suggestions on people to interview, places to document, stories to cover, or photos to include, please contact us.
Claudia Lefko: 413 584-0068
Ben James: benjabirdy@gmail.com
All photos are by Ben James unless otherwise attributed.
Claudia Lefko
Gail Hornstein
Ben James