I once read that the area around The Common was once a Nipmuc burial ground - pretty sacred stuff ya know. Today there sits commercial highrisers where the Nipmuc Nation once powwowed. I'm thinking that just might have sumptin to do with all them business catastrophes? And maybe Wusta itself?
Like in 1674 a couple Puritan dudes - Gookin and Eliot - aka Pilgrims, came along and screwed the Nipmucs outta like a 8 square miles of prime real estate for a measly 12 Schillings - like 56 cents in today's money. Then their other buddies came along and systematically forced the Nipmucs from their other lands, pillaged their Maize fields and hunting grounds - effectively eradicating Nipmuc culture from the face of the planet. Give a white guy a bible and a flintlock - whataget?
Then more Puritans, aka Pilgrims, came along and setup shop (a bar no less) in Wusta, then started burying their dead folk all around The Common; desecrating the century old graves of the heathen Nipmucs. So I'm guessing there must be some pretty pissed off Nipmuc spirits still wandering the streets of Wusta. Hey if I was a Nipmuc spirit I'd come back and haunt the shit outta Wusta. So me thinks that curse thing sounds pretty darn credible.
Talkin about curses. Ya know what's pretty weird? None of the local busybody bloggers saw this restaurant catastrophe comin. Hey what the heck do we have em for? Where was Bill "The Eyes and Ears of Wusta" Randell? Or Jeff "The Travelin Taxi Man" Barnard? WTF guys! As I always say, leave it up to the good ole T&G for the real news - they got professional journalists ya know.
Hey maybe part of the reason is that none of the locals visited the joint. Wusta is a pretty apathetic place - downtown is dead at noon. And now with no students around this place really does seem like a graveyard. Thinking here... what about those two wannabe food critics (Mike & Nick) at Eating Worcester. Maybe they had a hand in that restaurant's demise - a bad review maybe? Sorta doubt it, but ya never know.
But there's the good news folks! We got a tidbit from a Washington insider. An Arizona based restaurant chain is comin here to exact revenge. Just kidding. No really - to help our dwindling downtown dining scene. Seems Mayor Joe's letter was misinterpreted as Wusta seeking help from Arizona - SOS please send refugees ASAP.
So the world famous Heart Attack Grill (neat video behind this link) - home of the Bypass Burgers is coming to Wusta along with a bunch of Mexican nationals fresh from a stint at an Arizona meat packing plant where they trained as food service workers - on a federal program no less.This is a freaking dream come true for Mayor Joe. He wanted to diss Arizona, but got a neighborly helping hand for his economic recovery program (sucker a real company with real jobs with really low wages to come here and then fleece the bejeepers outta em). And he rescued a bunch of illegals from the grips of the dastardly Arizonans too. But there is bad news - ain't any locals eligible for any of the jobs - gotta speak Mexican. Oy veh!
So where are they gonna locate then? You guessed it - at the corner of Front & Commercial Sts. Um? Pushing fate me thinks.
Maybe, just to be on the save side the city otta bring in a Nipmuc medicine man to appease the restless spirits.
16 comments:
I wouldn't be too worried about the Nipmunk ghosts, they all packed up and headed to Boston.
That burger chain ever arrives in the Wuss and we can kiss goodbye to our blogger buddies, Paul "Cocaine and Whiskey Breakfast" Collyer and "Stomach Worms" Town Taxi.
About those Nipmucs of Worcester:
"As early as 1630 there is a record of a Nipmuc known as Acquittamaug walking to Boston with his father, each carrying a bushel and a half of corn from Woodstock, Connecticut, to the starving settlers for sale. Just a generation later the colonists were offering bounties on the scalps of Nipmuc men, women, and children. Prior to the arrival of the English settlers, Ojibway oral history tells that a sign was given and the people knew that a terrible thing was on its way to destroy the people." - Wiki-
Sounds like something that closely indicative of City Hall activity.
Funny story Will. You have a flair for writing short satiric stories.
Keep it up.
I would love to see that grill come here.
BA dude you have such a way with words. An exquisite phraseology.
I'd love to sink my gums into one of them thar burgers heh?
Hey thanks dude!
I try, but seldom succeed.
Come on back now ya hear!
Hey Anon. Nuttin but cynics around this city.
Poor poor Nipmucs. The least the city could do is let em build a casino here. Think about that.
Wusta would actually have cash carrying visitors instead of shopping cart pushing homeless folk and bag carrying welfare recipients.
A wise Indian man once said to me, Will, get a life.
I'm tryin!
Bill has become a prophet. I mean this guy is like the Jesus of failing Worcester Bussiness.
His new thing is to pick which businesses are going to fail..This man is sick. He sounds like he gets off to the thought of Best Buy leaving the Greendale mall.
He probably had an orgasm when he heard City Grille went south.
The best part about this is he thinks he's breaking the story. Sadly he isn't. Anyone from Worcester (no Bill Holden doesn't count)or with half a brain pulse knows the mall is on life support. It isn't a stretch to imagine it going under.
But it kills me how smug he is in thinking this is a patented Bill Randall original production
~Steve P
Steve-dude! Have a heart for the delusional, as my Mom always said. They just don't know what they're talking about. God made them stupid for a reason. Wise words.
So cut Bogus Bill some slack man.
MR, are you gonna post? Or are you like window shopping dude?
Why would anyone be surprised that two restaurants have failed in that location?
It's an impossible spot to sustain at this time, for reasons so timeworn and obvious that I hesitate to repeat them yet again.
But here we go:
Downtown isn't "user-friendly" enough for the few offerings it currently contains. Since there are so few, by default they must serve as destinations, not as one of the many elements you'll find in a truly developed urban neighborhood, where people tend to park and walk and hang out, hitting a number of spots.
If all you have are "islands" in your vast ocean of emptiness you better have a big place for the boats to dock, if I may murder a metaphor or two.
Can't do it in downtown Wusta. Crap, even to go to the White Hen is impossible.
Not enough people living downtown to support enough businesses to make it a walking destination.
I don't know how to turn that tide, what sort of things need to happen to create that critical mass.
One good move would be to hammer the college consortium to create new dorms downtown, or at least student apartments. Give them incentives if you need to. You gotta get people besides the usual downtown zombie collection, and which have disposable income, if anything's going to happen, and if you wanna make Joe and Jane Tatnuck feel safe down there.
Crowd attracts a crowd. Wow I'm really coming up with some shiny gems today - and that's the problem and the source of my pain when this topic arises.
The answers are so crystal clear, yet the powers that be are unable to heed them. It's a very frustrating thing and at this point what else is there to say?
MR
He's alive!
Risen from the dead have you?
Hey MR! Saw you lurking out there and wanted to solicit your opinion.
Very well summed up.
This issue has been beaten and battered since the I arrived here 5 years ago.
Sadly, the only attraction left is Dunkin Donuts. Oh, and the WPL. Is Shacks still still around?
Is City Square the solution. Nope!
Its a zero sum game being played out for the media.
Thanks!
Don't 90% of all small businesses fail regardless of the economy?
How is overpriced food people don't need, going to be a reliable source of income if there aren't a bunch of people who can afford it that eat there?
Why not just have a gas station and a tire place there? Then where the smoke hookah place thingy is near the common, just put an off track betting place. What else.
Oh yeah, put a pool supply place where the little kitchen was. The trick is, is to have useless, publicly unaccessable,interactively arbitrary, anomaly like places that you can't just walk into without some prior commitment. You don't want to have anything there that you can just walk into and enjoy, because that is of course not the city "we" want.
Like the library. "We" don't like that place because just anybody can walk in and "USE" it. That kind of potential volatility is too much freedom. What we need more of are places where you can't just eat there even if you have the money, but rather because you have some special engagement that makes you better than everybody else.Otherwise you are scum off the street, oozing around, suspiciuosly looking for trouble to get into.
What Worcester's little body swap hotel needs, is more stuck up, pretentious, exclusive tight ass, pricks and their wives who can't even cook canned soup. Why? Because putting the cart before the horse is supposedly, the way to get things done. So, in that spirit(that non-Nipmuck spirit), just cut a few steps outta the revitalisation and get right to the useless sacks of yuppy shit taking up precious air for reasons beyond our simple minds's comprehension. Just start at the end and work our way backwards!
The 90% number is like (in 2 years) is relevant - but that they expired in 3 months. Can only indicate poor planning & mgmt. The guys' line of credit got cut?
Never ate there, but then again rarely go downtown. For what?
So what'll perk up downtown?
Something unique? Creative? This is Wusta, folks want traditional stuff.
Funny how the Hanover Theater never spawned other complementary businesses. The store fronts around it are still boarded up going on two plus years? Not an economy to invest in is the only answer I can assume. Or can be the owners want long year leases with participation contracts.
Yeah, the Hanover theater didn't seem like a wise idea to me regardless of the economy. I'm not some economicly smart person, but I don't understand how a theater is going to make an area get more business or housing or people to move in who will bring prosperity to that area. I'm not knocking it, but Will, could you even explain to me how EXACTLY SPOON FEED TO ME, how a theater is going to revitalise an area economicaly-I honestly don't know. Nobody seems to be able to explain this to me with any command over a bigger picture that it's function serves, but rather just vague speculation.
"Oh great show, I think I'll buy a house here now." You know what I'm trying to explain? I just don't get it.
Also, I think maybe the bad economy had something to do with the grill shutting down. Maybe the person financed it on margin and expected a close call, but in relation to a decent economy. Still, 90% of small businesses fail anyway-I didn't recal it being over an average two year period, but that's just an average I think. Pie and Coffee talked a bit about population density in Worcester being maybe something a business would look at to determine if going there with their business would be profitable. They mentioned the potential businesses doing something called a site survey to figure out how much busines they'd get in Worcester. I understand that this is just a probability of customers, not a given. Many things in life are just probability and many would argue that it governs our known universe. But the probability of anything happening has to do with the number of possible outcomes and the amount of them that is the outcome you are looking for-in this case customers, right? So, what if the amount of people surveyed as potential customers had nothing to do with or less to do with their potential for eating there than expected, because the survey was just factoring in people milling about. Maybe they figured there were so many people with such and such buying patterns in the area, but failed to recognise that people don't just say, "Well it is highly probable today that out of all these people at least some will go to that bar/grill. I am in an age group and occupation that has a higher percentage of bar goers who enjoy grill food. Therefore, we are going to that Corner Grill-I don't know why exactly I want to but feel it is my destiny."
Don't want to get into details. A source for economic analysis on a variety of issues in Wusta is the Worcester Regional Research Bureau - beware its highly propagandistic.
The Hanover is financed by Hanover Insurance - very deep pockets.
P&C's take is sophomoric - its straight out of a text book - as you describe it. I don't follow 508.
In a nut shell: Businesses attract businesses - you see people, you set up a business next door - in Hanover's case - a bar or restaurant would suffice.
But ain't nuttin happening there. Why? Its easy to say its the economy and it is in part. Start up capital that's' the key and risk adversity.
I heard that part of Southbridge St. was once a very active bar scene - now offices. Now its Green St.
Gotta stop, you get the idea, you're not naive.
Oh, you sure are one wordy commenter.
The Nipmuc did not curse the yt-man. The yt-man who is cursed by his own Prophecies.
M Nipmuc M Proud...we are not shadows
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