Thank you for the Gazette’s coverage of the imminent eviction of tenants in the Amherst Motel so that the site may be redeveloped into a two-story apartment building. (“Amherst Motel tenants face eviction,” June 6.)
While some of the evictees will incur logistical, financial and emotional inconvenience in their search for a new dwelling place, the socioeconomic impact of the imminent eviction is insidiously underscored by the proposed change of name for the site. Right now its name is the practical, no-nonsense Amherst Motel. The redeveloped building, we’re told, will be called Aspen Heights.
Right: another of those affected, pseudo-romantic apartment-complex names that have been popular among real estate developers for decades, probably because they connote some kind of imagined sophistication.
The best-known Aspen in America is a super-chic, grotesquely overpriced
ski town in Colorado, which (along with Utah) is where most of the aspen
trees in America grow.
“Heights”? The site is not somewhere up the long hill where Route 9 goes
up to the center of town. It’s at the bottom.
John Stifler
Florence