I notice there are lines painted on the streets. They don’t do much of that anymore. It’s amazing how many things haven’t changed. Looks like there were a lot more trees downtown back then, which is sad.
I looked for me! I worked on Federal St and lived on Bartlett ave. I was always walking around downtown! Thanks for sharing! It’s nice to remember how great Pittsfield used to be. Hopefully we will get a good leader who will care about this place some time soon. Not just someone looking to fill their pockets and the lifetime benefits. We need this great town to be restored.
Grew up just north of Pittsfield and moved away in '88. Thanks for posting! Looks just the way I remember it, already going downhill when I left, you can see the Capitol Theatre already boarded up.
1987 is the year I packed up and left town. Best thing I ever did. Pittsfield was a great place to grow up though. 1960s and 70s were a blast. Great video guys. Brings back lots of memories. Thanks a lot. Jimmy Gregory
I grew up in Pittsfield in the 40's, big difference back then. you could walk the streets in no fears. there were patrol cops on every corner of North st and we all knew them by name. Would you believe there was still wagon drawn ragmen, and Icemen that delivered ice door to door and milkmen did the same. 7 movie theaters in town.(not much for tv back then.) Loved the big Bells and Stars over North st at Christmas time. all the way up too!. A safer time. But we progressed like the rest of the world. It can never be like it was. But neither are we. Kay Pasa!
Where exactly did we progress to? Judging by the comments we're worse off now than we were then. Which then begs the question, where did we progress to?
I was 17 years old in '87, It was great growing up there in the 70's-80's by '87 I really noticed a change in the way the city was changing, Crime boomed, crack was on the scene, it was just getting different. July of that year I moved away. I still go back to visit a few Fam. members and am SHOCKED at how deplorable it became. SO many people moved away, far away
What is sad is that back in the 80's they were working on redesigning the downtown to have a mall with more big chain shops and making it a central area for people to go. But a bunch of folks who are probably dead now didn't want to change the look of north street. So they built up Allendale into a big shopping area and syphoned off people from going to downtown. Now downtown is just like every other mill town that didn't change with the times. Now there really isn't any reason to go there.
Oh my God that would've changed the whole city! Yeah they're all dead now, what a shame they literally ruined the city for people in my generation. That'd be cool if they brought Allendale to downtown.
@@saredarizzo5727let's be real here, they didn't ruin shit. That honor rightfully belongs to Jack Welch, GE, and the corporate greed that values the bottom line above *_everything_* else. Probably toss in some local corruption as well. Seriously. No amount of redeveloping downtown into some shopping hub would have produced meaningfully different results. Just look at the Berkshire Mall. Look at Allendale. The only thing it would have accomplished is prolonging the inevitable a tiny, tiny bit and making a handful of people very rich via typical "small town" backroom deals before descending back into ruins. Development vs redevelopment doesn't exactly matter when there simply aren't enough people to sustain *_any_* combination of it. The people, and therefore the money to support any of it left with GE & they couldn't exactly be replaced by other industrial entities b/c they left the place a toxic dump while denying it was a toxic dump, and it took them until ~2000's to start liberating even a *_fraction_* of their industrial property. FFS, the cleanup wasn't even deemed "complete" *_until a few years ago,_* but they haven't even *_started_* remediation on the 1-1/2 Mile Reach Riverbanks cleanup area of the Housatonic River & we taxpayers are footing ~1/3 of the bill for that. But in reality cleanup isn't, and never will be, even remotely complete b/c anywhere they were able to finagle deed restrictions can literally never be rezoned. e.g., if it's currently industrial it can never ever be "upgraded" to recreation or residential or anything else requiring lower levels of PCB's. I really can't absolve Pittsfield leadership b/c they've always been kinda shady, but it was GE that absolutely *_decimated_* Pittsfield. But I dunno, maybe I'm overly cynical.
This is a fuckin head trip 0_o, looking at this place 7 years before my birth. i live here now and it just keeps getting worse. really wished i was a kid in the late 50s or early 60s when times were safer and there was more to do.
From the pitt to kingston ontario and back to vermont,where I went to nursing school-yea,still a shithole...wtf was I thinking,pondering returning home?Still,it was fun riding around
@@briankelly9347 I keep seeing your replies Do you not realize that an entire state having low crime on average does not mean there can't be high crime rates in particular areas? I've lived in Pittsfield my whole life, and the people you're replying to look to be residents, or former residents. The downtown area, North of the roundabout, have a high drug addiction rate, a homeless problem, and gang violence.
