Holyoke Saint Patrick's Day Parade
Holyoke Saint Patrick's Day Parade parade is hosted every year on the Sunday of the week that has Saint Patrick's Day. Each parade attracts around 400,000 spectators from all over the United States of America. Past spectators have included President John F. Kennedy, two Speakers of the House and other notable officials. Drawing on the Irish heritage of Holyoke, in its earliest days known as "Ireland Parish", the inaugural Saint Patrick's Day Parade was hosted on March 16, 1952, after a group of local businessmen met at the local Brian Boru Club and proposed the idea. Since that time the Holyoke Saint Patrick's Parade Committee which has since grown to more than 100 people and presents multiple awards to distinguished citizens every year. Parade Spectator Estimates By Year Since its inaugural event in 1952, the parade has grown substantially; the event, considered as much a regional as local venue, attracts many spectators from surrounding states and Ireland itself in recent years. The parade enjoys an audience beyond its participants, with more than 1.2 million viewers watching over the channel and online streams of local PBS affiliate WGBY, which broadcast it every year from 2001 through 2018.
WWLP resumed as the broadcaster of the parade in 2019 through its CW channel, included a livestream. Other local media outlets including WGGB-TV and the Springfield Republican cover the event. Holyoke Caledonian Pipe Band, regular feature in the parade since the first and oldest continuously operating pipe band in North America Holyoke, Massachusetts Saint Patrick's Day Official website, Holyoke St. Patrick's Committee WGBY Official Stream, WGBY-57 PBS SpringfieldHolyoke St Patrick's Parade: Behind the Scenes, WGBY video chronicling setup of parade in 2010 Surrounding municipality committees organized to send delegations of honored persons and community groups as contingents to the parade- Agawam St. Patrick's CommitteeChicopee St. Patrick's Parade CommitteeGreater Easthampton St. Patrick's Day Committee, representing Easthampton and SouthamptonNorthampton St. Patrick's AssociationSpringfield St. Patrick's CommitteeSons of Erin, organizing Westfield's Parade Contingent St. Patrick's Committee of West Springfield
Loom
A loom is a device used to weave cloth and tapestry. The basic purpose of any loom is to hold the warp threads under tension to facilitate the interweaving of the weft threads; the precise shape of the loom and its mechanics may vary. The word "loom" is derived from the Old English geloma, formed from ge- and loma, a root of unknown origin. In 1404 it was used to mean a machine to enable weaving thread into cloth. By 1838, it had gained the meaning of a machine for interlacing thread. Weaving is done by intersecting the longitudinal threads, the warp, i.e. "that, thrown across", with the transverse threads, the weft, i.e. "that, woven". The major components of the loom are the warp beam, harnesses or shafts, shuttle and takeup roll. In the loom, yarn processing includes shedding, picking and taking-up operations; these are the principal motions. Shedding. Shedding is the raising of part of the warp yarn to form a shed, through which the filling yarn, carried by the shuttle, can be inserted, forming the weft.
On the modern loom and intricate shedding operations are performed automatically by the heddle or heald frame known as a harness. This is a rectangular frame to which a series of wires, called healds, are attached; the yarns are passed through the eye holes of the heddles. The weave pattern determines which harness controls which warp yarns, the number of harnesses used depends on the complexity of the weave. Two common methods of controlling the heddles are a Jacquard Head. Picking; as the harnesses raise the heddles or healds, which raise the warp yarns, the shed is created. The filling yarn is inserted through the shed by a small carrier device called a shuttle; the shuttle is pointed at each end to allow passage through the shed. In a traditional shuttle loom, the filling yarn is wound onto a quill, which in turn is mounted in the shuttle; the filling yarn emerges through a hole in the shuttle. A single crossing of the shuttle from one side of the loom to the other is known as a pick; as the shuttle moves back and forth across the shed, it weaves an edge, or selvage, on each side of the fabric to prevent the fabric from raveling.
Battening. Between the heddles and the takeup roll, the warp threads pass through another frame called the reed; the portion of the fabric, formed but not yet rolled up on the takeup roll is called the fell. After the shuttle moves across the loom laying down the fill yarn, the weaver uses the reed to press each filling yarn against the fell. Conventional shuttle looms can operate at speeds of about 150 to 160 picks per minute. There are two secondary motions, because with each weaving operation the newly constructed fabric must be wound on a cloth beam; this process is called taking up. At the same time, the warp yarns must be released from the warp beams. To become automatic, a loom needs a tertiary motion, the filling stop motion; this will brake the loom. An automatic loom requires 0.125 hp to 0.5 hp to operate. The back strap loom is a simple loom, it consists of two bars between which the warps are stretched. One bar is attached to a fixed object and the other to the weaver by means of a strap around the back.
The weaver uses their body weight to tension the loom. On traditional looms, the two main sheds are operated by means of a shed roll over which one set of warps pass, continuous string heddles which encase each of the warps in the other set. To open the shed controlled by the string heddles, the weaver relaxes tension on the warps and raises the heddles; the other shed is opened by drawing the shed roll toward the weaver. Both simple and complex textiles can be woven on this loom. Width is limited to. Warp faced textiles decorated with intricate pick-up patterns woven in complementary and supplementary warp techniques are woven by indigenous peoples today around the world, they produce such things as belts, bags and carrying cloths. Supplementary weft patterning and brocading is practiced in many regions. Balanced weaves are possible on the backstrap loom. Today, commercially produced backstrap loom kits include a rigid heddle; the warp-weighted loom is a vertical loom. The earliest evidence of warp-weighted looms comes from sites belonging to the Starčevo culture in modern Serbia and Hungary and from late Neolithic sites in Switzerland.
This loom was used in Ancient Greece, spread north and west throughout Europe thereafter. Its defining characteristic is hanging weights. Extra warp thread is wound around the weights; when a weaver has reached the bottom of the available warp, the completed section can be rolled around the top beam, additional lengths of warp threads can be unwound from the weights to continue. This frees the weaver from vertical size constraint. A drawloom is a hand-loom for weaving figured cloth. In a drawloom, a "figure harness" is used to control each warp thread separately. A drawloom requires two operators, the weaver and an assistant called a "drawboy" to manage the figure harness; the earliest confirmed drawloom fabrics come from the State of Chu and date c. 400 BC. Most scholars attribute the invention of the dra
Holyoke Dam
The Holyoke Dam referred to as the Hadley Falls Dam, or Hadley Falls Station is a granite dam built to produce hydroelectric power in tandem with the Holyoke Canal System at Hadley Falls on the Connecticut River, between Holyoke and South Hadley, Massachusetts. The current dam is the third structure to be built across the Great Falls at South Hadley; the dam, along with the Canal System, is recognized by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as a Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark for its use by Clemens Herschel in the development of the Venturi meter, the first means of measuring large-scale flows, the McCormick-Holyoke Turbine by John B. McCormick known as the Hercules Turbine, which doubled the efficiency of turbines to more than 80% in its time; the river between Holyoke and South Hadley contained what was known as the "Great Falls" a natural 53 ft drop in the river 86 miles upstream of the Atlantic ocean. Following the success of the textile mills in the planned industrial city of Lowell, Massachusetts a group of investors sought to imitate this city along a natural curve in the Connecticut River.
George C. Ewing a sales representative of Fairbanks and Co. marked what was known as West Springfield, as a site for future development. By the fall of 1847 Ewing, acting as land agent for the investors involved, obtained possession of 1200 acres of land on the right bank of the Connecticut river at Hadley Falls for the purpose of establishing an industrial city. A charter was obtained from the Massachusetts Legislature in the winter of 1847-1848 under the name of the ‘Hadley Falls Co.’ with a capital of four millions of dollars. In the summer of 1848 a timber crib dam was constructed across the Connecticut River at the Great Falls. Constructed using a timber frame the dam was filled with rubble and stone and was completed in a matter of months. Upon completion the gates were closed at 10AM and the reservoir behind the dam began to fill; as recorded in Harper's Weekly, “The engineer took great pride in his work, when it was finished, the gates shut down, he is said to have irreverently exclaimed: ‘There!
Those gates are shut, God Almighty himself can not open them!’” By noon the timber dam had sprung massive leaks, the footing began to show signs of weakness at 2:00PM. The dam had not been properly secured to bedrock and at 3:20PM the dam gave way and a torrent of water and debris headed downstream towards Chicopee, Massachusetts. A foreman sent a telegram to investors in Boston which read, "3:20 p.m. your dam has gone to hell by way of Willimansett." Holyoke Canal System Media related to Holyoke Dam at Wikimedia Commons Hydro Electric Development, a pamphlet produced by the Holyoke Water Power Company during its upgrade of electrical infrastructure at the dam in 1951
Puerto Ricans in Holyoke
As of the 2010 census, Massachusetts had the largest Puerto Rican population, per capita, of any city in the United States outside Puerto Rico proper, with 44.7% or 17,826 residents being of Puerto Rican heritage, comprising 92.4% of all Latinos in the community. From a combination of farming programs instituted by the US Department of Labor after World War II, the housing and mills that characterized Holyoke prior to deindustrialization, Puerto Ricans began settling in the city in the mid-1950s, with many arriving during the wave of Puerto Rican immigration to the Northeastern United States in the 1980s. A combination of white flight as former generations of mill workers left the city, a sustained influx of migrants in subsequent generations transformed the demographic from a minority of about 13% of the population in 1980, to the largest single demographic by ancestry in a span of three decades. In time the city has become a center of Puerto Rican culture on the mainland, with at least one member of the Senate of Puerto Rico being an alumnus of Holyoke Community College, the city being honored by both the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in the Chicago, in New York City's National Puerto Rican Day Parade.
Following the passage of the Foraker Act, a United States designated colonial government was formed, as the island had been annexed by the Americans following the Spanish–American War. Soon after this government was instituted, several delegations were sent from Puerto Rico to various cities in the United States that were seen as potential trading partners on the mainland. Among the first of these delegations of legislature members and trade representatives, was one which would visit Springfield in 1901. In the following year the newly formed Puerto Rican government would offer to make the first assistant of that city's Mechanic Arts High School, Arthur D. Deane, the supervisor of the island's industrial training. Deane would decline this offer but accepted one as a temporary agent to the Puerto Rico Department of Education and making a report back to the agency in January 1902 on steps needed to establish Puerto Rico's first industrial arts programs. In 1901, former Holyoke mayor and congressman William Whiting invited the first civilian colonial governor Charles H. Allen to the city.
Allen, an infamous figure in Puerto Rico's history as an American colony, was a former congressman from Lowell and Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the Spanish–American War, appointed to head the island's new government by President McKinley, whom he had accompanied to Mount Tom two years earlier. During his visit Allen touted the construction of roads, completed with no-bid contracts as a resounding success, while praising the tariff situation around the island's sugar industry as ideal, he would emphasize the sugar growing capacity of the island and lament that less than half of the island's arable land was in production. During his short tenure as governor and the years that followed, he wasted no time in changing this to suit his own interests. By 1907 Allen would position himself as the robber baron of sugarcane, controlling an estimated 98% of the United States' sugar capacity through his American Sugar Refining Company, which vastly reshaped the economy of the island. By 1930, an estimated 45% of all arable land on Puerto Rico was dedicated to sugar plantations under Allen's control.
At the time of his visit to the city a writer for The Republican would close the description of Allen's reception optimistically, comparing Holyoke with San Juan, remarking that the two cities were the same population at that time. While the first Puerto Rican immigrants wouldn't arrive in Holyoke en masse until after the Second World War, its own history in Puerto Rican culture begins with Sixto Escobar's mainland debut at the Valley Arena. On May 7, 1934, Escobar defeated bantamweight contender and Canadian flyweight titleholder Bobby Leitham, in a fight that made headlines in local papers and was seen as a dramatic upset in the world of boxing. A few weeks on May 22, Escobar faced his second opponent on the mainland, Joey Archibald, at the same venue, beating him handily before moving on to a rematch with Leitham in Montreal; these two matches marked an early chapter in a storied career. At the end of World War II, the government of Puerto Rico began the Puerto Rican Farm Labor Program, coordinating with the US Department of Labor to bring seasonal farm workers into the mainland, not unlike the Mexican Bracero program.
Between 1947 and 1990 the program would bring in 421,238 Puerto Rican agricultural laborers to the United States. Many of these workers found work in Connecticut and the Pioneer Valley working for the Shade Tobacco Growers Agricultural Association. Holyoke's history in Puerto Rican settlements first began around the mid 1950s, when a landlord named Domingo Perez, purportedly became the city's first Puerto Rican resident. By 1956 an article in The Republican reported on 1,000 Puerto Ricans in a self-described immigrant colony in the Greater Springfield area; the first to settle in the area were met with racial discrimination and open hostility, with one Boricua restaurateur describing their people being "treated like animals" at the time. This same family had followed a similar route many others would, having moved to the area from New York where they had settled in 1948. By 1958, the Springfield Union, a local newspaper, had begun referring to a Puerto Rican community in The Flats neighborhood of Holyoke known as Ward 1.
One of the biggest challenges with making inroads with existing communities was the language barrier of the first arrivals, with many only speaking Spanish. Some of the earliest program
Holyoke Heritage State Park
Holyoke Heritage State Park is history-oriented state park located in the city of Holyoke, Massachusetts. The park opened in 1986 on the site of the William Skinner Silk Mill, lost to fire in 1980; the park is managed by the Massachusetts Department of Recreation. A visitors center has exhibits about Holyoke's industrial and cultural past; the landscaped grounds offer picnicking and views of the city's canals and mill buildings. The Holyoke Merry-Go-Round, the Children's Museum at Holyoke, the Volleyball Hall of Fame are located in the park. Holyoke Heritage State Park Department of Conservation and Recreation
Holyoke station
Holyoke is an Amtrak intercity train station near the corner of Main and Dwight streets in Holyoke, United States. The station opened on August 27, 2015, eight months after Amtrak's Vermonter service was re-routed to the Conn River Line through the Pioneer Valley; the first railroad station in Holyoke had opened in 1845, followed by the H. H. Richardson-designed Connecticut River Railroad Station in 1885. Though passenger service to Holyoke ended in 1966, the 1885 depot is still extant; the opening of the new station returned passenger rail service to Holyoke for the first time in 49 years, to the Dwight and Main streets site for the first time in 130 years. A two-year pilot program will add two daily Amtrak Shuttle round trips in June 2019; the Connecticut River Railroad opened to passenger service between Springfield and Northampton in late 1845. When the Vermont and Massachusetts Railroad reached Brattleboro in 1850, the Connecticut River Railroad began running through service from Springfield to Brattleboro.
Over the next century, the line was host to a mix of local and long-distance passenger and freight service. It became part of the route for numerous New York-Montreal trains as early as the 1860s, was acquired by the Boston and Maine Railroad in 1893. Holyoke’s original train depot, located near Dwight and Main Streets, was a modest wooden structure that served both passenger and freight needs; the site of the original depot is today occupied by dealership. The Connecticut River Railroad Station was built in Holyoke in 1884-5 for the Connecticut River Railroad. Designed by the American architect Henry Hobson Richardson, it was one of the last in his series of Northeastern railroad stations; the station building, rectangular in shape, was designed with a double-height waiting room lit by high dormers. The building, constructed with granite and brownstone, included a slate covered hipped roof with multiple dormers. In 1965, with passenger service waning, the station was converted into a mechanical shop by Perry's Auto Parts.
Long-distance service over the line ended in October 1966, with local service between Springfield and Brattleboro lasting several more months. In 1972, Amtrak began running the Montrealer, which ran along the line at night, stopping at Northampton but not Holyoke or Greenfield; the Montrealer was discontinued in 1987 due to poor track conditions on the line. Service resumed in 1989 after Amtrak seized control of the line in Vermont from the Boston and Maine Railroad, but the train was rerouted over the Central Vermont Railway through Massachusetts and Connecticut to avoid the still-dilapidated Conn River Line which Amtrak did not control. A stop was added at Amherst to replace Northampton; the Montrealer was replaced by the daytime Vermonter in 1995, using the original route through Connecticut but still avoiding the Conn River Line in Massachusetts. In 2004 the structure was cited as one of the ten most endangered historic sites in Massachusetts. In May 2009, as the building sat littered with graffiti and falling into disrepair, it was purchased from a private owner by the City of Holyoke's Gas & Electric department.
Plans to repair the building did not at the time include allowing its use as a rail depot. In August 2014 the Holyoke Office of Planning & Economic Development issued a report detailing a number of potential new uses for the former Connecticut River Railroad station building. Proposed potential uses were divided into four broad themes: Food Uses, Collaborative Workspaces & Commercial Uses, Community & Cultural Uses and Academic Engagement & Educational Uses. In order to shorten travel times on the Vermonter and add additional local service to serve the populated Connecticut River Valley, the Pan Am Railways Conn River Line was rebuilt with $73 million in federal money and $10 million in state funds; the Vermonter was rerouted to the line on December 29, 2014 with new station stops in Northampton and Greenfield. A stop at Holyoke was planned to open with Northampton and Greenfield but delayed; the city considered reactivating the former station building, but instead decided that a site at Dwight Street a block west provided a better place for a modern station design.
The new Depot Square Railroad Station, which cost $3.2 million, includes a 400-foot -long high level platform, 170-foot-long canopy, a waiting area and staircase facing Dwight Street. The station has a 25-space parking lot and loop for bus drop off and is handicapped accessible; the city first planned a one-car-length "mini-high" platform with a longer stretch of low platform, but changed to the longer high-level platform in 2014. The construction of the new station was funded by a $2 million MassWorks Infrastructure grant from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Construction for the station began in November 2014, a formal groundbreaking was held on December 22, 2014, one week before the Vermonter was rerouted to the line; the station was intended to open in April 2015, but construction took longer than expected. Depot Square Railroad Station opened on August 27, 2015. Commuter rail service has been proposed for the corridor, running between Springfield and Greenfield with four daily round trips.
A 2014 state transportation funding bill included $30 million for acquiring used MBTA Commuter Rail rolling stock and new locomotives for the service. In June 2018, Governor Charlie Baker announced that two daily Amtrak Shuttle round trips would be extended to Greenfield in 2019 as a pilot program; as of February 2019, the two-year pilot is expected to
Venturi effect
The Venturi effect is the reduction in fluid pressure that results when a fluid flows through a constricted section of a pipe. The Venturi effect is named after an Italian physicist. In fluid dynamics, an incompressible fluid's velocity must increase as it passes through a constriction in accord with the principle of mass continuity, while its static pressure must decrease in accord with the principle of conservation of mechanical energy, thus any gain in kinetic energy a fluid may occur due to its increased velocity through a constriction is balanced by a drop in pressure. By measuring the change in pressure, the flow rate can be determined, as in various flow measurement devices such as venturi meters, venturi nozzles and orifice plates. Referring to the adjacent diagram, using Bernoulli's equation in the special case of steady, inviscid flows along a streamline, the theoretical pressure drop at the constriction is given by: p 1 − p 2 = ρ 2 where ρ is the density of the fluid, v 1 is the fluid velocity where the pipe is wider, v 2 is the fluid velocity where the pipe is narrower.
The limiting case of the Venturi effect is when a fluid reaches the state of choked flow, where the fluid velocity approaches the local speed of sound. When a fluid system is in a state of choked flow, a further decrease in the downstream pressure environment will not lead to an increase in the mass flow rate. However, mass flow rate for a compressible fluid will increase with increased upstream pressure, which will increase the density of the fluid through the constriction; this is the principle of operation of a de Laval nozzle. Increasing source temperature will increase the local sonic velocity, thus allowing for increased mass flow rate but only if the nozzle area is increased to compensate for the resulting decrease in density; the Bernoulli equation is invertible, pressure should rise when a fluid slows down. If there is an expansion of the tube section, turbulence will appear and the theorem will not hold. Notice that in all experimental Venturi tubes, the pressure in the entrance is compared to the pressure in the middle section.
The output section is never compared with them. The simplest apparatus is a tubular setup known as a Venturi tube or a venturi. Fluid flows through a length of pipe of varying diameter. To avoid undue aerodynamic drag, a Venturi tube has an entry cone of 30 degrees and an exit cone of 5 degrees. Venturi tubes are used in processes where permanent pressure loss is not tolerable and where maximum accuracy is needed in case of viscous liquids. Venturi tubes are more expensive to construct than simple orifice plates, both function on the same basic principle. However, for any given differential pressure, orifice plates cause more permanent energy loss. Both venturis and orifice plates are used in industrial applications and in scientific laboratories for measuring the flow rate of liquids. A venturi can be used to measure the volumetric flow rate, Q. Since Q = v 1 A 1 = v 2 A 2 p 1 − p 2 = ρ 2 Q = A 1 2 ρ ⋅ p 1 − p 2 2 − 1 = A 2 2 ρ ⋅ p 1 − p 2 1 − 2 A venturi can be used to mix a liquid with a gas.
If a pump forces the liquid through a tube connected to a system consisting of a venturi to increase the liquid speed, a short piece of tube with a small hole in it, last a venturi that de
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Media related to Holyoke Canal at Wikimedia Commons
