Renovation and new building are the watchwords for North Adams, Massachusetts. Thomas Krens (remember him?), the former director of the Guggenheim Museum who, thirty years ago, first proposed the idea of turning an abandoned twenty-six-building factory complex here into an art center, has new plans for more museums in the city. His plan announced in fall 2015 now seeks to create another new contemporary art museum, a museum of model railroads and contemporary architecture, and to renovate a 1938 movie theater in order to establish a “cultural corridor” in this depressed northwestern corner of the state.

This follows by a little over a year the approval by the Massachusetts state legislature of a $25.4 million grant to the original factory-complex-turned-art-center—the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MASS MoCA—that will enable the now sixteen-year-old facility to double its gallery space (adding 130,000 square feet, purportedly for the enormous installations of the art of the 1960s, ’70s, and up to the present), improve its performing arts venues, and make other upgrades for the benefit of visitors. Along with the initial grant of $35 million back in the 1990s, the state has now doubled down on its commitment to MASS MoCA, which expects its renovation of the old Sprague Electric plant into a multi-arts center to be completed by the end of 2016.

All well and good, but in some ways the promised work of economic development never really started. The millions in state aid to MASS MoCA were not