Last I attended the Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham, Massachusetts: an impressive downtown steampunk festival which can draw as many as 10,000 people when the weather is good.
Last week, the weather was not good, with intermittent rain throughout the day, but that did not dampen the spirits of the great people at the event.
Due to my very busy schedule, there are only so many events I can get out to, but with a number of the events that previously filled my schedule no longer running, I now find myself more aware of just how many great events there are in the Steampunk community around New England.
Waltham takes its steampunk seriously.
Steampunk is a fantastically positive culture. One of the underlying principles of it is a do-it-yourself attitude. I am reminded of a quote from President Kennedy in which he says "Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."
That describes the Steampunk ethos. That which we have made, we can fix and improve. I believe that accounts for the success and growth of Steampunk in our modern culture of conflict, negativity, and post-factual thinking.
I am deeply grateful to have had the chance to meet so many good people across the world of Steampunk, and I am even more grateful that I count so many of them among my friends.
One of the most underappreciated jobs in the world is that of mother. Teacher. Therapist. Coach. Peacemaker. Referee. Travel Agent. Logistician. These are just a few of the roles that come together in the role of mother.
My mother deserves the credit for a great deal of my moral development. She taught me the importance of considering the effect that every one of my actions would have upon others. While I have certainly not always been successful, I have always striven to live up to the standard she taught me of try to make the world a better place.
Both I and my daughter's mother (also known as my wife) love our daughter with all of our hearts, but Amy takes care of her in some ways that are unique and special to her. She connects with her on a level that only a mother can. She works with her on art and other skills which I personally lack. I am deeply grateful that I found such a good woman to be the mother of my much beloved child.
In general, on this Graturday (written one day late on the Sunday that is Mother's Day), I am thankful to all the mothers out there doing incredible, unrecognized but vital work to raise the best children that they can, and, in the process, making the world a better place.
Thank you to moms everywhere, and especially to my wife Amy, the best mom right here.
"I never knew Groton had a downtown." This is how David Collins started his column in yesterday's edition of The Day, prompted by the new signage that is now up on Interstate 95, discussed briefly in this article.
For those who are not familiar with Groton, Connecticut, it is a town with unusual geography. In the 19th century, it was split between Groton Bank, which was the portion of Groton on the bank of the Thames River, which was densely populated and supported by the shipping industry, and the town of Groton, which was the rest of the town's 45 square miles, was sparse farmland with occasional villages.
Annotated map of Groton from Google Maps.
Apologizes for the business pins. No way to remove the ads.
As it developed, an area around Long Hill Road near exit 87 off I-95, just outside of Groton City, which Groton Bank would ultimately come to be called, became a center of shopping and commerce. The proximity to the highway, I presume, made it an attractive location for mid-century developers, providing the five strip malls which dominate the area now known as Downtown.
A short way further down that road, one finds Town Hall, the major town field Poquonnock Plains Park, the Public Library, Groton Recreation Building, and the Groton Senior Center, which forms something of a municipal district.
Zoomed in on Downtown Groton. This map is about a mile
from one end to the other. Town Hall is at the far right.
Long Hill Road is at the far left.
As my regular readers may have notices, I love dictionary definitions.
down·town
ˌdounˈtoun/
NORTH AMERICAN
adjective
adjective: downtown
1.
of, in, or characteristic of the central area or main business and commercial area of a town or city.
"downtown Chicago"
synonyms:
central, metropolitan, metro, urban; More
adverb
adverb: downtown
1.
in or into a downtown area.
"I drove downtown"
noun
noun: downtown; plural noun: downtowns
ˈdountoun/
1.
the downtown area of a town or city.
"the heart of Pittsburgh's downtown"
synonyms:
city center, (central) business district, urban core; More
While we often think of Downtown as referring to an urban center, "Downtown" is really just the core of business and commercial activity in the area, which is what Groton's "Downtown" is, thus why it is called Downtown Groton. While towns like New London, Norwich, and Westerly have more traditional 19th century style downtowns, Groton, like Waterford, has a post-war style downtown area, built along the 1950s and 1960s concepts of separating various forms of zoning to different parts of town: commercial here, residential there, industrial in the other place.
Long Hill Road is affectionately referred to as Hamburger
Hill, because there are actually at least half a dozen
places along the short stretch of road to get a hamburger.
Some of the burgers are better than others.
As it turns out, that form of zoning creates a dependency on cars, prevents neighbors from interacting, and generally causes a colder, less connected community, but that's a story for another day. The point is that Groton has what it has, and what it has is a vibrant, thriving, suburban-style downtown area.
Downtown Groton contains 5 main shopping plazas plus a number of other freestanding businesses and smaller plazas. Within and near Downtown, a shopper can find nearly anything they seek, including groceries, clothes, Post Office, auto dealerships, a hardware store, hobbies and entertainment, pet supplies, and more.
Is it a beautiful area with quaint New England charm? No. Is it a downtown hub of commercial activity, absolutely.
Citadel Game Cellar has something
going on almost every day.
While it largely lacks mixed use development (two small mixed used developments are in the downtown area), and its suburban nature would stretch the definition of the term "walkable," I often walk the area. I frequently walk from my apartment to the Citadel Game Cellar, one of the best game stores I have found in the country, with events happening almost every day.
While Downtown Groton leaves quite a bit to be desired, it's not an embarrassment either, bringing millions of dollars of economic activity to the town and tremendous revenues onto the tax rolls.
In discussing the Downtown designation, Mr. Collins says:
It turns out, I discovered after a search of the town website, the term downtown used for that section of Route 1 was sealed in a 2006 planning study for the town, which envisioned all kinds of mixed-use development around the old shopping centers — development that, of course, never happened.
The Groton Strategic Development Plan envisioned that construction of more housing and an effort to make the area more "walkable" would transform the area that the study authors conceded, because of its age and design, "can no longer compete as a traditional suburban-style shopping destination."
So, as the authors note, it is a tired, old shopping district. And all the development they envisioned that would make it into a downtown has never happened. Still, that's the downtown interstate travelers will be directed to, about the worst of what Groton has to offer.
Let's talk about what we can find in the "worst of what Groton has to offer."
In this stretch you can find American, Mexican, Indian, Thai, Japanese, and Chinese food.
This one plaza has Indian, Japanese, and Thai food, plus an
Indian grocery store.
The newly refurbished Groton Shopping Center is 100% occupied, including a well balanced mix of businesses.
In this plaza, you can work out, buy groceries, buy clothes,
and get a new set of spark plugs.
Even the most run down of Downtown Groton's plazas, Groton Shoppers Mart, contains many of the key businesses that, while not revolutionary, are the backbone of a commercial district: Big Y, Starbucks, and Gamestop. Even though the properly is somewhat in limbo because of owners who cannot agree on what should be done with it, it still maintains a relatively high occupancy because of the demand for businesses to serve the growing economy of Groton.
Groton Shoppers Mart suffers from having too many owners
who cannot agree on how to manage, improve or sell it, so
it just kind of exists.
For those who are not familiar with redevelopment initiatives, they tend to move slowly. This is partly because they are complex and involve many players, and partly because there are many ways that they can go fantastically wrong.
There are basically two ways to cause redevelopment occur on privately held, developed land. The town can create incentives and try to get buy-in from the land owners, or they can try to use eminent domain to claim the property and force the changes. The eminent domain solution has certain problems.
That means that the developers have to want to make the change. It takes years to research and develop a plan, then there is the process of getting buy-in from the land owners. Then it takes years more to make the plans to implement it, financing must be raised, and finally action is taken.
Did anything happen within the years shortly after 2006 that might have deterred that process?
Oh, yeah, that.
I didn't move to Groton until 2014, so I don't know the full details of what happened around that time, but, given that the Economic Development Commission and the Office of Planning and Development are working to execute today that very same concept of mixed use development and modernization in Downtown, I would surmise that what we are seeing is simply a situation in which a good idea is moving at the speed of government, interrupted by a terribly inconvenient financial crisis that rivaled the Great Depression.
Downtown Groton is the second area of the town that will become a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district in order to help finance these developments. TIF is a brilliant policy in which future tax revenues can be used as guarantees against loans for infrastructure necessary for development. The financing is procured by the developers, not the town, and the developer is responsible for it, but they are able to use a portion of the increased tax revenues to pay off the loans. The town only pays if the development happens and the tax revenues increase. The developer gets the loan paid for them as long as they hold up their part. Everyone wins, most of all the people of Groton win.
It must be very difficult to write a weekly column, which would explain why Mr. Collins failed to do even the most basic research into the current situation. Research which could have included asking his colleague who wrote an article on the EDC tour which ran in the same issue as his column.
I wouldn't know what it's like to write a weekly column like that. I only have experience writing a daily one.
In today's weekly gratitude article, I'd like to express gratitude for the great many wonderful friends and supporters I have.
I have had one particular occasion this week to be reminded just how many good people there are out there looking out for me.
The most pronounced occasion was early this week when I received an email from Watch City Steampunk Festival informing me that ConCardia would not be welcome there. Within 12 hours of our sharing that information, Watch City Steampunk Festival had received numerous emails of support for us from people who had heard what happened and were outraged.
Back in early April, I wrote an article entitled Hurt, in which I discussed how hurt I was at the fact that some people whom I thought were trusted friends had turned on me. But the fact is that I was suffering from a lack of perspective. While one or two people have unexpectedly left me, hundreds of people continue be there for me and my family. Some of them do so quietly and others do so publicly, but the important thing is that we have an incredible community friends who we now know beyond a doubt will be there for us.
And, we will always be there for them. That's what a community is: people who can count on each other, and I count myself truly blessed to have such a wonderful community, both online and in our local area.
Discovering just how much love is in our community made me realize that I do not have room for hate and anger in my life. There is too much good for me to want to focus on the evil.
Author's Note: As always, these articles are created with the best information that I have available at the time. Should you find factual inaccuracies, please email me at feedback@michaelwhitehouse.org and I will work to correct the article to be more accurate. As an additional note, the purpose of this article to discuss a specific alternate way that events could have gone which would have resulted in a more desirable outcome for all involved. This article is not intended to discuss whether or not people were right to attack Jeff Mach and his company, nor is it discussing the allegations at all. It is discussing what actually happened and the results thereof. Other articles may address those other issues.
I woke up quite rested this morning for the first time in a long time. I woke up at 6:00 AM, but I fell asleep at 9:00 PM. That's the key to a good sleep: not waking up late, but getting an early start. Like sleep, the outcome of many things comes out of how it began.
For those who are not familiar with the company, Jeff Mach Events was a company that ran geek events primarily in the New Jersey area. Their main events were Wicked Faire (a general geek festival), Steampunk Worlds Fair (the largest Steampunk event in North America), and Geeky Kink Event (an event which is accurately described by its name). In all, they ran 7-10 events per year of various types.
On March 13th, I had the unpleasant duty of announcing to the Steampunk community that Silver Phoenix Society would be stepping away from running Steampunk Worlds Fair and that, as a consequence, the event would likely either not happen or not happen as they expected.
But to really understand what happened on March 13th, let's rewind two months to mid January.
At the time, Amy and I were rank and file department heads. In fact, until I was invited to a department head meeting, I didn't even know that we warranted the title. We ran the Info Desk, sold merch, and ran ConCardia at the events. We didn't talk to a lot of the other staff between events. I spoke to Jeff as much as I needed to for my role. Amy was hired to be his "assistant", but that mostly just meant some simple office work like assembling rooming lists and updating the social media Buffer feeds.
It seemed like just another week, but what we did not know was that the house was full of gas just waiting for a spark to ignite it.
That spark, as it turned out, was a post from Jeff Mach seeking new staff and volunteers. Jeff's detractors seized on this, screen-shotted the Facebook post and placed a caption on it warning that no one should work for that company because it mistreated people. From these small pebbles the avalanche began.
I became aware of this on January 23rd when I first started seeing the posts. The posts were on the pages of former staffers who had previously and publicly declared their desire to see Jeff Mach and his company destroyed, so I perceived this to be nothing more than an attack by those who had promised to do so, but it was much more complex that that.
History and Alternate History
The best way to give a good understanding of what happened is to discuss what should have happened. I have spent a lot of time pondering how this could have turned out right. Nobody wanted Steampunk Worlds Fair to fail, so why did it fail? What they wanted was for Jeff Mach to be out of it, but they didn't understand that you couldn't transfer ownership of an event from a debt-loaded company to new operators 10 weeks before the event was to run. Even we didn't understand the full complexities. No one had ever attempted anything like this before.
There is a scenario in which this could have turned out well for everyone: a form of negotiated settlement. If Jeff Mach had agreed to be bought out of his company before the great angry mobs of the Internet were brought into things. Of course, this would have required there to be two parties to form an agreement. The department heads of the company were speaking regularly and could have agreed to something, but who was there who could have negotiated for the other side?
Elise Potenza
As it turns out, there was one person who was playing both sides to the middle and could have facilitated such an outcome: Elise Potenza.
We later discovered that she had been orchestrating things in a significant way on both sides, either for vindictive purposes or as part of a play to take over the company, the details of which we'll discuss tomorrow.
Elise was on the Consent Team in 2017 and was privy to all the personal allegations against Jeff Mach. She was in regular communication with the former staff who were working to see him brought low. She may have been feeding them information during the crisis in January, and she certainly leaked the confidential chat log which was the action which most directly led to the decision to step away from Steampunk Worlds Fair.
She and her boyfriend Jakal Blackwell had also been on the Executive Committee in 2017, so were privy to a great deal of operational information and would have been able to leverage that perceived authority.
How could it have worked?
On the Thursday one week prior to Wicked Faire, in January, she could have contacted all of the department heads to a meeting of vital importance. At that meeting, she would present the accusations which had been made public as well as any other information that she was able to share. She could then have presented anonymized versions of any other accusations she was privy to. Naturally, she could not include names or identifying details, but simply broad strokes to give us the picture. She might have also explained that she knew that strong forces were assembled to take down Wicked Faire if action was not taken.
At that time, this meeting would have contained the same people that the actual department head chat contained. Most of that staff was there to do a job for the attendees. We wanted the events to continue, for the people to have a safe and fun event, and to go back to our lives on Monday having had a good weekend. How that happened wasn't terribly important.
She could then have presented some kind of buyout plan. It could have taken any number of forms from a non-profit to a group forming an LLP. The purchase would have been funded by a fixed payment over time from the new company to Jeff Mach, similar to the agreement that was almost adopted in February.
People having fun at Steampunk Worlds
Fair, which will no longer be running.
The response from the department heads, after some initial pushback and sharp questions, would probably have been, "OK, whatever, that's above my paygrade. See you next weekend."
Elise could have then told her friends on the other side what was happening and gotten them to call off the attack dogs as the process wound slowly through the legal channels, allowing the events already on the schedule to continue successfully under transitioning management.
Why would that have worked when we didn't listen to Elise when she assured us that she had some kind of evidence?
In this alternate history, rather than saying more or less "I know something you don't know, so you need to trust me," she would have shared what she knew.
I Know Something You Don't Know Makes a Poor Argument
Since Elise was on the Consent Team, it might be asked why we did not take her word that there were serious allegations and action needed to be taken. We didn't trust her because she was not trustworthy due to her past actions. She had used dubious information to remove a superior so she could be promoted into his former role.
A couple years ago, Noah Smith was the highly competent and very effective Company Manager of Jeff Mach Events. There were some supplementary tasks that he was responsible for, such as human resources and other technical business duties which he didn't do a great job of, but that was Jeff's fault for giving Noah duties for which he was not qualified, rather than Noah's fault for not being able to do them.
Noah did a fantastic job at something Jeff had never been able to do, leading the company in a way that led the staff to feel appreciated and like they were part of a well organized team.
Elise wanted Noah's job. She wasn't actually qualified for it in temperament or experience, but she wanted it nonetheless. She knew two things that would help her get it:
1) She knew that Jeff Mach took consent violations very seriously and tended to give credence to the accuser over the accused regardless of evidence or lack thereof.
2) She knew that Noah Smith had seasonal depression and as the winter approached, his ability and desire to deal with stress diminished.
Using this information, in the late fall Elise found charges against Noah. (I'll explain my choice of verb in a moment.) She brought these to Jeff with the suggestion that something should be done. Jeff approached Noah and told him that there were two allegations against him and asked what he'd like to do about them.
Noah surprised Jeff (but not Elise) by saying that if he could get a small severance package, he'd resign quietly. Jeff was not trying to push Noah out and was quite surprised by his reaction. His intention was to investigate the allegations because he worked closely with Noah and the allegations didn't match his personal perceptions. Noah believed that Jeff was taking advantage of his depression to push him out of the company with the threat of a scandal that he did not want to deal with.
Noah left the company, believing that Jeff had maneuvered to push him out. Elise's name stayed out of it. Jeff lost a competent Company Manager. Numerous staffers followed Noah out of the company as he spread the story that Jeff had forced him out, and the seeds took root which would subsequently destroy the company.
But for all the damage, Elise got what she wanted. She was promoted to "Manager on Duty", a job very similar to Company Manager, and a job she took over others who remained in the company with greater qualifications.
There was some question as to whether or not
Noah's departure was due to consent
allegations. This is an excerpt from the Div
Head chat which Elise conveniently
redacted when she shared it with Brenna.
When I say "found" allegations, I do not know where they came from or if they were true, but I do know from something that happened a couple of weeks ago that Elise does not believe they were true. At Dark Side of the Con this past March, after she was fired from Security on Friday night, she decided that the four EMTs on staff were not sufficient and called in a friend to volunteer. That friend was Noah Smith, an individual that she had reported allegations of sexual misconduct against two years earlier. This means that she either knowingly brought a dangerous individual to an event in a staff role (for which she did not have the authority) or she knew that the allegations were false and she lied to Jeff two years earlier to rise in the organization.
We did not know what would happen at Dark Side of the Con in January, but we did have our strong suspicions about what had happened to Noah and Elise's "allegations," which is why we refused to act on her word which we all considered quite dubious.
Who Killed Steampunk Worlds Fair
There are many people involved in destroying this very popular event that we worked desperately to save, but there was one person who was in a position to offer a solution to save it who did not, and that person is Elise Potenza. What was her motivation in destroying the events rather than attempting to buy them? We can never know that. Maybe she lacked the sophistication to see such a solution. Maybe she wanted to let if fall apart so she could step in to create a new company to rebuild from the ruins. Maybe she just wanted to see the world burn. I leave such speculations to the reader.
A Note about Dark Side of the Con: Many conventions do not have any medical staff present. If there is a medical event, they call 911 like anyone else. Almost no club nights have EMTs on staff. Jet, the owner of Dark Side of the Con, went above and beyond to have any EMTs present, and having 4 on Saturday night (5 with Noah) was exceptional. While the EMTs were kept busy, most of the issues they deal with at an event like that are people who have had a few too many drinks. Without EMS, Security would give them some water, sit with them a bit, and walk them back to their rooms to sleep it off. With an EMT present: they check their blood pressure, take a pulse, do a couple other quick checks, then give them a glass of water, walk them back to their room and let them sleep it off.
