Letter from Andrew Armstrong

A Challenge to Mayor, Trustees

They are gone! Who are “they”? The sports parker families, and they’re all the same: fathers with scruffy beards, wearing baseball caps forward or backward; mothers fixated on their phones; sons swinging baseball bats, real or imaginary, on Main Street; daughters looking like they’d rather be anyplace else.

These people love baseball? Do they, or is it Major League baseball—with its hype/stats/cable channels/replays/rule changes—that they love? I think it’s the latter, because I never see any visitors pause to watch games being played at Doubleday Field. That’s baseball, too.

To my point. Every summer I hear local residents say, “The traffic and parking problems just get worse,” and they’re right. The situation isn’t going to improve in 2027, with the planned expansion of both area sports parks. The trolleys were intended to alleviate this issue? Yes, and to my observation the trolley system has been less than a rip-roaring success, because parents willing to spend hundreds of dollars to send their sons to a non-instructional sports park, with meaningless games, will spend any amount of money to park on or around Main Street. Or, they’ll try to cram their enormous cars into a two-hour parking space, gambling that they can return before they get a ticket. And if they get a ticket—and if they decide to pay it—that’s just part of the cost of a visit to Cooperstown.

Here’s my suggestion: Make Church Street, and parts of Fair, Pioneer, River and Lake streets, seasonal no-parking zones, with signs telling visitors to use the trolley. It would be wrong to help a private business? It’s the best solution right now. Doing that might cost the village some parking revenue? I think the village can afford it.

So, I offer this letter as a challenge to the mayor and trustees: You have nine months to come up with a solution, whether it’s my solution or someone else’s. Cooperstown summers can never be what they once were, but they can be less chaotic than they are now.

Andrew Armstrong
Cooperstown