Manhan Rail Trail Sinkhole's Clean Water Loan

The sun shines on the sinkhole on March 17th
after a long destructive winter.
Last month the city of Easthampton applied for a loan of $450,000 from Massachusetts’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund to repair the Manhan Rail Trail. The role of the Clean Water State Revolving Fund Program is to extend loans with low interest rates to communities that demonstrate a critical need for drinking water or wastewater-related infrastructure projects. This creative application has not gone unnoticed by local critics of the rail trail.
But the decision to apply for money from the state, just five days after the economic stimulus bill passed last month, speaks to the town’s desire to resolve the growing issue while the weather and economic climate are favorable. It also signifies the town’s disappointment with the pace of Governor Deval Patrick’s deliberations on a proposal to spend $3.1 of the state’s $11.7 billion dollar share of the federal economic stimulus bill on rail trail renovations throughout the state. Northampton’s Mayor Mary Clare Higgins first submitted the sweeping proposal to repair and link rail trails across the state at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington D.C. in January. Massachusetts has the highest density of rail trails in the country and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has been the principle owner of unused railways in the state for decades.
Friends of Manhan’s Craig Della Penna speculates that a majority of Manhan’s construction costs will come from transporting workers and materials to the isolated work site half a mile down a trail designed to exclude large vehicles, and more recently even all-terrain vehicles and snowmobiles. The plan is to acquire permits to fill the sinkhole, rebuild embankments, restructure a more stable concrete drainage tunnel, and dredge out all of the material that washed into the river.
The last undertaking is critical as the town is primarily eligible for a loan from the Clean Water Fund, at two percent interest, because the material that washed into the river presents a health risk due to it’s proximity to a sanitary sewer line that parallels the trail. The possibility remains that Deval might use stimulus money to replenish the Clean Water State Revolving Fund and thus enable it to offer a zero percent loan to Easthampton instead, so proponents are watching the governor closely. Easthampton Department of Public Works has also come under increased scrutiny as the questions have been raised by town officials and citizens as to whose responsibility is it to inspect what are referred to as “alternate transportation corridors” or rail trails? And how was a grey area in safety regulation allowed to form and remain for half a decade?

The Manhan Rail Trail where it passes under Park Street,
3 miles away from the sinkhole, is still in use and very
popular on a sunny weekday.
The costly damage done to the drainage system began last September when stones dislodged from a drainage tunnel running under and perpendicular to the trail, blocking the flow of rain water through the drain. Early December’s persistent rains and tepid temperatures created an acute need for drainage and eventually caused a segment of the trail to slide away leaving behind a hazardous 25 foot deep, 15 foot wide sinkhole that has since then double in width and deepened slightly with the formation of a vernal river that travels down to join the nearby Oxbow river, a subsidiary of the Connecticut River.



At the southern most part of the former railway,
south of South Street, an existing concrete
and metal pipe culvert, or drainage tunnel,
remains functional.

https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/bridgetm/SnowDay.mp3

Art from Art

In my judicial interpretation of U.S. Copyright Act, Shephard Fairey’s revision of the Associated Press photo would be protected by the fair use defense because the nature of the photo, the character of the use, and the effect on the market were such that the AP was in no way defrauded or deprived. Fairey altered not only the image’s color scheme, he also captioned it and changed the direction of Obama’s gaze while retaining the same composition i.e. the facial outline. The alterations had a transformative effect on the work. Captioned as it is Fairey’s work should be protected as a political commentary on par with criticism or parody. The non-commercial character of the use accompanied by the viral cooperative manner in which the revision was even further altered, transferred into different mediums (collage, stencils, posters, stickers, murals, digital art, fashion) and inserted into public space make it simultaneously grass roots political speech and art. The anti-commercialism of Fairey’s punk cultural context is critical in interpreting his purpose.
That Shephard Fairey went on to do commercial work, in keeping with personal ethical standards, is incidental. His professional reputation profits from cultural phenomena and its political implications but Fairey still should not be penalized for his use of the image. News events, context, the way a man looked when he looked at a camera, the content of reality should not and can not become something a company can just own for more than a decade. We only get to keep a president for eight years. Iconic images will arise. Granted they aren't just free floating in the public domain to be picked up and photocopied and sold; however, in this case after Mannie Garcia captured a moment in a photograph Fairey responded to it in a political, artistic, non-commercial way which likely increased the exposure and prestige of the original photograph and did no conceivable harm to the AP. He has never denied the influence of the original image and he has made no effort to collect from street or internet vendors making money off of derivatives of his work, indicating to me that AP’s claim of degradation of the value of their work and their ability to make money from their copyright is unfounded.

The black and white photograph of the juxtaposition on the left (extracted from this video) exhibits both the context of Fairey’s Obey street art and the infinite opportunities for artists to riff off each other. In my opinion this presumably copyrighted photograph's unique existence is dependent on Fairey’s execution of his Obey piece to the same degree that Fairey’s later Hope poster is dependent on the existence of Mannie Garcia’s copyrighted photograph and it, to me, is all art.