Page 9 - BusinessWest November 14, 2022

Pittsfield Mayor Linda Tyer says the city has made great strides when it comes to growing and diversifying an economy once dominated by GE.
ent city than it was 20 years ago,” he said, adding that a strong focus on the arts and hospitality has changed the narrative in this community.
The pandemic obviously took a heavy toll on these businesses and the overall vibrancy of Pitts- field, said Butler, but it has managed to come almost all the way back this year, with the arts venues rebounding and hospitality venues back to something approaching normal.
James Galli, general manager of the Hotel on North, so named because it is on North Street, agreed. He said the hotel is on pace to have its best year since opening in 2015, and the mix of
guests that it attracts provides some good insight into Pittsfield and what now drives its economy. “We get a lot of travelers coming in from Bos-
ton and New York to go to Barrington Stage and the Colonial Theatre,” he said, citing two of the main cultural draws in the city. “We get a lot of millennials coming in for hiking and the beauty of the area, some business travelers coming in for General Dynamics and some of the area busi- nesses in town — and it’s a good mix. We are the center of the Berkshires, so we get people staying with us for two, three, four days at a time; they’ll go down to South County or up to North County or into the Pioneer Valley, but they’ll stay with us because we’re very central and they can do a lot more if they stay with us.”
In some ways, the pandemic has actually benefited the Berkshires and especially its larg- est city, said those we spoke with, noting that the remote-work phenomenon has made it possible for those working for businesses in New York, Boston, and other expensive metropolitan areas to do so from virtually anywhere.
And with its high quality of life and (compara- tively) low real-estate prices and overall cost of living, Pittsfield has become an attractive alterna- tive, said Tyer, noting that the city is in the midst of a housing boom that has slowed only slightly even in the wake of rising interest rates and per- sistently high prices.
The Next Chapter
It’s called the ‘Library Suite.’
This is the largest suite among the 45 guest rooms at Hotel on North, and easily the most talked about. That’s because, as that name sug- gests, it’s decorated with books — some 5,000 of
them by Galli’s count.
“There’s a moveable ladder, and ... it looks like
a library,” he told BusinessWest. “There’s every- thing from full sets of encyclopedias to children’s books, the Harry Potter collection; we’ve found them at tag sales over the years and made it into a unique, different type of room. It speaks for itself.”
“The Pittsfield of 2022 is a
completely different city than it
”
The library suite, which boasts about 850 square feet and goes for as much as $700 a night, depending on the season, has been occupied most every night over the past several months, said Galli, noting, again, that visitors of all kinds are coming back to Pittsfield, and to this hotel, which was created out of two historic buildings on North Street.
Business started to pick back up in June 2021 as the state essentially reopened, he said, and momentum continued to build into this year, which has yielded better numbers than the years just prior to the pandemic.
He attributes this to many factors, including some pent-up demand for travel and vacations as well as the unique nature of the hotel, which has several different kinds of rooms, each of
Pittsfield
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was 20 years ago.
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