Great Barrington, MA

In Sneakers and Jeans

As the strains of a South American samba play in a little downtown boutique, an elderly couple grab hands and dance between the displays. On the street outside, a teenager with a ring in his nose strums his guitar as a tanned executive pauses to listen after parking his Mercedes. It’s just another sunny day in Great Barrington.

At the foot of the Berkshire mountains in the southwest corner of Massachusetts, this town of 7,527 has long defied the image of New England reserve. If Boston wears pin stripes, Great Barrington is in blue jeans.

“I think it’s a very warm, friendly, liberal, exciting town,” says Hilda Banks Shapiro. “Just the way people react to new ideas and support cultural events, I think we do very well in an open and generous way.”

Shapiro, 74, is one of Great Barrington’s favorite personalities. A mother of 12, grandmother to a dozen, and great-grandmother to two, she teaches music and presents an annual concert series as the head of Barrington Performing Arts. She’s on the board of six other local organizations sponsoring everything from an innovative school to a progressive toy store. But Shapiro is probably best known around town for her ever-present, red high-top sneakers and for never having learned to drive a car.

“Well, sneakers are comfortable you know, and I’m long past caring about anything but comfort,” she says. “And, if I’m walking out of town on an errand, I seldom get far before someone pulls up and says, ‘Oh, hey, hop in.’”

Shapiro has picked up many a ride from people she’s stomped past on Railroad Street in those red sneakers. Just off Great Barrington’s Main Street, Railroad Street is a center for boutiques filled with crystals, art glass, retro furniture, and hand-painted wash bowls. Main Street is more conservative—a long, wide expanse of pavement, it’s flanked by two-story brick buildings housing no fewer than three sporting goods stores and five Japanese restaurants.

But it’s the backstage side of Main Street that caught the eye of Rachel Fletcher, who works for the Great Barrington Land Conservancy. In 1988, Fletcher looked out the rear window of the conservancy building and saw nothing but debris blocking her view of the Housatonic River. She persuaded about 15 other volunteers to help remove the remains of a burnt-out building that had been bulldozed over the bank. “What we discovered was that we were in a kind of natural Eden right in the back yard of Great Barrington,” Fletcher says. “It kind of lit the imagination of many people in the community.”

The project ended up not only healing the Housatonic but acting as a medicine for healing the town as well.

“Especially in the early days of the project, there was a recession going on and a limit in tax dollars,” Fletcher says. “There were these huge battles going on in town meetings. Yet on weekends, these same people would be out standing next to each other hauling rubble. So many people want to give back to the community, and this was a way they could do it comfortably during that difficult time.”

Fletcher and more than 1,500 volunteers have continued the project, dragging nearly 300 tons of garbage off the banks of the Housatonic and creating a quarter-mile of pristine trail called “River Walk.”

Great Barrington’s history of civic duty isn’t new. In 1781, Mum Bett won her case in a Great Barrington court to become the first slave in the United States freed under due process of law. Her husband, Jack Burkhardt, was the great-grandfather of W.E.B. DuBois, one of the founders of the NAACP, who was born in the town in 1868. Poet William Cullen Bryant practiced law here until 1826, when he left for a career as editor of the New York Evening Post, advocating human rights and the abolition of slavery.

“We have a long tradition of being open-minded,” Shapiro says quietly, “because everyone kind of knows you and knows that you have the best possible feelings toward the town and the people who live in it.”

Elf Lefferts writes from her home in Connecticut, just a little south of Great Barrington.

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