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Local pronunciation is more or less like "HolyOak" as one word, no break from "Holy" and "Oak". I'd say pretty much anywhere in New England it would will be said that way.
Holyoke is pronounced Hole-Yoke. No one else in New England says it-lol-but to those of us who come from WMass that's how it's said. Two syllables.
Amherst - student slum full of frat boys on cocaine, awaiting the two glorious days when 1) a local sports team gets in the playoffs or championships, so they have an excuse to riot and vandalize stuff, and 2) the day they can move back to their parents' basement in Mansfield and continue going to Nickelback shows at the Comcast Center, safe in the embrace of copious Dunkin' Donuts and long commute times. Rural outskirts and neighborhoods don't have that as much, but you're isolated and paying a lot to live in those scenic areas with Ph.D.-educated neighbors. Nice town center with local restaurants, retail, and bookstores. UMass is a concrete wasteland, but the main economic driver of the area, and a good school for those who utilize it correctly. Amherst College is a lovely little liberal arts campus with a classic feel. Hampshire College is an alternative utopia on an old farm with shabby seventies buildings (but still very high tuition!), where students don't receive grades and build-your-own-major is the norm.
Hadley - this is the area's premiere strip-mall, and you'll find Wal-Mart, Target, Whole Foods, a real mall, gas stations, etc, all backing up to dairy farms. Hadley smells like Ohio (i.e., manure), because there's real actual dairy farms still functioning there! This odor wafts over to UMass, to make that aforementioned type of suburbanite students annoyed, and seal their conviction that they must return to Mansfield at all costs because even though it's actually not that rural around Amherst, it's the most rural place most of these kids have ever been ("waaaah gross, it smells like faaaahms - I can't wait to get out of this horrible cowww town and back to "Real" Massaholechusetts!"). Beautiful scenic dairy and crop farmland and old houses from the 1700s once you get off Route 9 and head north or south of it on roads like Route 47. Their zoning and master planning prevents these areas from getting screwed over, promoting farm conservation, except of course on Route 9. Hadley has an interesting deal with the chain-store gods - sacrifice Route 9 for the sake of saving the character of the rest of town. I can't say I blame them. Pretty sure the tax rates reflect that deal with the "devil" too - you'd pay much higher in Amherst or Pelham for example. It's an interesting in-between area with nice outskirts, and if you don't mind driving a few miles either direction to Amherst and Northampton for a downtown, it will suit you well.
Northampton - cultural "urban" hub for the area. Unique downtown filled with independent shops that depend heavily on students' possession of Mommy's/Daddy's credit cards to survive. Despite the pretension, there's a lot of interesting cultural events that come along with this, so can't criticize this phenomenon too deeply - it helps Northampton survive and grow. Great restaurants running the gamut from ethnic to downscale, to very nice local coffee shops, to extremely upscale attempts at Manhattan ambience. Music venues bringing national and regional pop acts to the Iron Horse Entertainment quasi-monopoly of Calvin Theater (big names of various genres), Iron Horse Music Hall focusing more on folk and acoustic, and Pearl Street Nightclub focusing on more edgy music including hip-hop, punk, electronic performers. Local music scene to be found at The Elevens, Sierra Grille, Bishop's Lounge, Hinge, and house shows. Neighborhoods around Smith College and out to Florence and Leeds (each with a separate center, but within Northampton city limits) are quite nice. Real Estate prices have stayed high for the area because of the destination appeal of Noho, and the very pleasant quality of life. You won't have the student zoo problems of Amherst, but you can always head over there for performances at the colleges, for the restaurants, or Amherst Cinema, the one independent cinema left in the area (Noho's Pleasant Street Theater closed over the last couple years). There's a few low-income housing areas in Northampton, but not much in the way of real crime going along with it - these areas on the outskirts mostly are where the holdovers from pre-gentrified Northampton live, and they call it 'Hamp instead of Noho, and will regale you with memories of when Northampton more resembled Chicopee or something back in the 60s to early 80s when it turned the corner from blue-collar to Ph.D-collar, urban retiree-collar, and trust-fund-collar. King Street is north of downtown and is Noho's strip mall of fast food, Stop N Shop, auto dealers, etc, and even a Wal-Mart, before they came to their vegan locavore senses and opened the River Valley Market Co-op at its far northern end. Northampton tends to be the place where post-Umass and other five-college graduates hang out before figuring out what else to do with their lives - those types compete for retail, waiting, and coffee shop jobs, and mostly live east ('hoods along Rt 9 coming west into downtown) and south of the downtown (along and around Rt 10 towards Easthampton), so avoid that area if you don't want to witness a high level of young hipster-y drama, though those areas have convenience factor for the downtown.
Easthampton = Northampton's younger brother, where a dedicated core of people open interesting local shops and venues, and maintain art studios and such in old mill buildings, in the hopes of replicating Northampton's lifestyle but on a tighter budget and with more of those curmudgeonly blue-collar leftover people around to harsh their ultraliberal mellow. Easthampton is quite nice, but some neighborhoods do have a bad vibe man! Worlds colliding!
Greenfield = Northampton and Amherst meet Athol. Cheaper and more removed from immediate college-town vibe - a strange mix of socioeconomic strata converge here. Traditionally a factory town producing tap and die products for tool-making, that went away, but it started to get influenced by the colleges. This is where you might find that meth lab - but, but - you'll also find comfortable Volvo drivers shopping at the local co-op and farmers market, embracing heartfelt but slightly unbearable political folk music performances focused on world peace, and being all condescending about their destitute neighbors' need for a discount store (Wal-Mart has been continuously warded off since 1993, keeping Greenfield's 1950s-era Wilson's Department store successfully undead and fascinating in its zombieness), but their presence and affluence also keeps the place from being totally dominated by the down-n-out, and you'll also get a few amenities from the college towns like good local coffee shops and restaurants, a brewpub, and a downtown movie theater. You just need to not mind the loitering factor of mostly harmless Section 8 people - it's not Springfield, here in Greenfield these folks are pretty much too lazy to mug you. Job prospects are slim around Greenfield, but it's mostly a nice place to live! Good town for young families on a budget as it's quite affordable compared to Northampton and Amherst but you can get to either in under 30 min.
Surrounding rural towns (Whately, Hatfield, Williamsburg, Leverett, Montague, Wendell, Conway, Ashfield, Colrain, Shelburne, Gill, etc, etc) to the area: sublime old New England towns full of forests and farms, swamp yankees and neo-hippieish communes, and even a few wealthy and semi-famous (e.g. Bill Cosby, John Hodgman) living in relative harmony, eating local food, meditating about world peace and personal self-realization on hilltops, and enjoying supreme natural beauty but with relatively quick access to the central towns for entertaining and shopping. Again, slim job prospects without a long commute, and a big caveat that many of these still have dial-up internet!
Also, your question about the water - when I was living there every year the city would send out notices about the public drinking water and it's elevated level of... something probably not good. I can't remember exactly what, but it was disconcerting.
Also also, as you go south past the "Tofu Curtain," aka the Holyoke Range and Mount Tom range of hills, the "Happy Valley" slips away and suddenly you are back in the "real" America of greater Springfield. Read into that assessment whatever you will
Amherst - student slum full of frat boys on cocaine, awaiting the two glorious days when 1) a local sports team gets in the playoffs or championships, so they have an excuse to riot and vandalize stuff, and 2) the day they can move back to their parents' basement in Mansfield and continue going to Nickelback shows at the Comcast Center, safe in the embrace of copious Dunkin' Donuts and long commute times.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FCMA
Also also, as you go south past the "Tofu Curtain," aka the Holyoke Range and Mount Tom range of hills, the "Happy Valley" slips away and suddenly you are back in the "real" America of greater Springfield. Read into that assessment whatever you will
Haha I like "Tofu Curtain", I don't think I've heard that one before. It really does exist though. Once you're past northern Holyoke, it feels like a much different state.
VA Dude...Good Luck in your decision. We love it here in Holyoke! I grew up here in Hampshire County, then moved to AZ for 25 years...but came back for family. We looked at all the towns and settled on Holyoke due to a slightly lower property tax rate and more favorable housing prices.
We found West Holyoke, an area called "Rock Valley" on the Holyoke/Southampton line. We love the proximity to I-91...we can travel north to "Hamp" or south to Springfield. It feels VERY rural, but it's close to everything we need. We considered the Hampshire and Hampden county...did not want to be as far North as Greenfield. That's how we found a secret gem...Rock Valley.
I also love that I-91 is illuminated with brilliant street lights in Holyoke. This starts at the Springfield city line and continues up through Easthampton. Yeah Holyoke!
As a new homeowner, Holyoke Electric gives you a nice 20% discount for 2 years..yeah Holyoke!
I think the locals pronounce "Holyoke" like this: "Whole-Yolk" I say "Holy-Oak" but the newscaster, Shannon Eggy from Channel 40 hails from Holyoke and SHE says "Whole-Yolk". They paint Green Shamrocks on the streets for the St. Patrick's Day Parade. There are lot of Irish here.
They're wrong. Probably a typo. I grew up not too far from Holyoke and it's always been HOLE-YOKE, two syllables. I could go back home tomorrow and ask a bunch of people and they would all say HOLE-YOKE, two syllables. I could call somebody who used to live in Holyoke right now and ask him and he would say Hole-Yoke.
Hol-yoke. You divide the word after the L. If someone says holy-oak, they come from elsewhere and it sounds a little bit weird.
Not that you'd care, but calling it "NoHo" (or "Noho") brands you as an outsider, or at least that you've been here less than 20 years. It's still Hamp to a majority, as it is to all natives and those who moved here to fit in.
Oh I know it's 'Hamp. Noho is pretty much unbearably pretentious! But that's what those damn kids and yuppies like me who pass through for a few years and have taken over too much of the place call it. As a champion of the underdog when it comes to this kind of obnoxious gentrification thing, I hope "Hamp" stays the majority!
So Hamp always means Northampton? Isn't that discriminatory against Easthampton, Southampton and Westhampton? Are they not important enough to be shortened?
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Oh dear, I will have to learn a new language if I move to the Pioneer Valley.
