Brave Little State is Vermont Public’s listener-powered journalism podcast. Every episode begins with a question submitted by our audience.
Today, we tackle this question from Linda Mullin of Rutland:
“Why are we in Rutland always made to feel like the ugly child?”
Note: Our show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors.
Loading...
‘The ugly child’
Josh Crane: From Vermont Public and the NPR Network, this is Brave Little State. I’m Josh Crane.
Earlier this year, the BLS team visited a bar called The Mad Rose in downtown Rutland to choose the listener question we would tackle in this episode.
Josh Crane: We’re gonna do a final vote to choose our winning question.
Josh Crane: We’ve been traveling around the state hosting events like this. Anyone who comes can submit a question about anything that’s on their mind.
On this night, we got questions about federal overreach and the Long Trail, Vermont’s chances of becoming a Canadian province, and, of course, about Rutland. The local crowd had lots of questions about their hometown. But when it came time for the final vote, measured by how loudly people cheer for their favorite question ...
Sabine Poux: Okay, Is everyone ready? I said, is everyone ready? (Cheering)
Josh Crane: ... there was one in particular that really resonated.
Josh Crane: And finally, “Rutland, life around lakes and mountains. So why do we always feel like the ugly child?”
Josh Crane: I’m gonna spare you the raucous cheering because it literally blew out our microphones.
Sabine Poux: OK, it looks like that question hit a nerve … (laughing)
Josh Crane: Why does Rutland always feel like the “ugly child?” A lot of people at the event seemed to agree with that interpretation — that Rutland has a bad rap, as a place with a lot of crime and all these big-city problems. One of our bartenders for the evening, Nick Capanna, said that’s the impression he encountered when he moved to Rutland five years ago from Ohio.
Nick Capanna: And Rutland, when I moved here, felt like a really classy, nice Akron, Ohio. And I loved that about it! It felt like home, but it also felt like Vermont.
And then I started working in towns around the state and I heard the way people talked about Rutland and I was so perplexed. And there’s just a lot going on. And I was very perplexed by the reputation that Rutland has in this state. (Cheering)
Josh Crane: BLS producer Burgess Brown went back to Rutland a few months after our event to get to the bottom of Rutland’s reputation and see the side of Rutland that locals say most people are missing. Burgess takes it from here.
A lay of the land
Burgess Brown: I want you to close your eyes for a second and picture Rutland.
Got it? Okay. If you’re not from there, I bet there’s a particular section of town that you’re envisioning.
Burgess Brown (driving): I’m passing Burger King on my right and Wendy’s and there’s Five Guys.
Burgess Brown: Route 7. On either side of Rutland, on Route 7, there are long stretches of bucolic, postcard Vermont. But the bit of the road that cuts through the city of Rutland is different.
Burgess Brown (driving): Here’s the Domino's Pizza, KFC, Dunkin' Donuts intersection. A couple of auto shops, the Bowlerama ...
Burgess Brown: Fast food, box stores and car dealerships. This is very any-town-USA. Not very Vermont-y.
Burgess Brown (driving): There’s Honda over on the left. Dodge over here …
Burgess Brown: Maybe you know Rutland by its nickname, RutVegas. A moniker born out of a booming nightlife scene in the '80s. These days, it’s associated with the less savory aspects of Sin City. A sort of commercial trashiness.
If you’re just passing through, this may be all you see of Rutland.
But today, I’m not just passing through. I’m turning off Route 7 and on to Center Street. As it so happens, the Domino’s, KFC, Dunkin' corner is not the heart of Rutland.
Nick Grandchamp: Yo! Welcome to Rutland.
Burgess Brown: Thank you.
Burgess Brown: I meet Nick Grandchamp here in the “real” heart of Rutland. Mom-and-pop stores, locally owned restaurants. A historic theater. We’re currently standing in Mountain Music right downtown.
Nick Grandchamp: This store is f****** awesome. My favorite store in Rutland by far, my favorite record store in the state of Vermont by far, and probably in the world.
Burgess Brown: Nick’s got presence. Black skinny jeans, black jacket, black beanie and a huge smile. When I told people I was working on a story about Rutland, so many of them said “Oh, well, you’ve got to meet Nick.” One of my colleagues called him “the unofficial mayor of Rutland.”
Nick Grandchamp: That's the nice thing about Rutland. It's really, it's a really community of people who care. And dude, I just, it's working class people for working class people.
Burgess Brown: Nick works around the corner as a manager at the co-op. And he’s a pillar of the punk scene here. He’s been playing in local bands since he was 13.
Now, he’s the guitarist for local punk band Dead Street Dreamers.
[Dead Street Dreamers song]
He hosts an annual Punk Rock Flea Market. And he’s done a bunch of DIY art projects around town. Like a vending machine that dispenses local art. Or this repurposed pay phone here at the record store that plays clips from TV shows and musicians.
Nick Grandchamp: I just do it for fun. I do it because I want to hopefully inspire someone to do crazy stuff. That's why I do it.
Burgess Brown: Nick and I head out into the chilly rain for a quick tour.
Nick Grandchamp: So this is downtown Rutland. This is Center Street, and this is kind of the start of, like, the main downtown, so to speak. And there's a lot of different places kind of opening up. You've got, like, this huge tea shop that's pretty cool. Not a huge tea drinker, but …
Burgess Brown: Rutland’s downtown has experienced a similar ebb and flow as a lot of American main streets. The Diamond Run Mall pulled a lot of business away from the downtown core in the '90s and aughts. But over the last decade, the pendulum has swung back. Diamond Run is scheduled for demolition and mom-and-pop shops have returned to downtown.
Nick Grandchamp: You have everything you need to live a life here, right? You can find plants, books, records, food, you know, dance studio, yoga studios. You have everything you would need.
Burgess Brown: Everything you need. It sounds pretty good. But Rutland still struggles to shake its bad rap. Nick says that’s partly to do with class.
Rutland was an industrial center of Vermont in the 19th century, built around a railroad hub and one of the largest marble producers in the world. The quarries brought a wave of immigrants and blue-collar workers to Rutland. It became a proper Vermont city. That in itself is enough to distinguish it from surrounding rural towns.
Nick Grandchamp: You know, I just feel like that spirit of working class is still echoing in this town, and there's a lot of respect for people among each other that are trying to make, you know, ends meet for their families.
Burgess Brown: But Nick says that respect doesn’t always extend beyond Rutland’s borders, whether from Vermont’s quaint villages or our largest city.
Nick Grandchamp: Burlington was always been the glory child.
Burgess Brown: This is a sentiment I heard echoed throughout my reporting. A chip on the collective Rutland shoulder as Vermont’s other city.There’s a sense that Burlington gets all the attention and has advantages that Rutland doesn’t: the waterfront, Church Street, universities. Our question-asker Linda Mullin says Rutland feels like the ugly child. Others referred to it as Vermont’s “red-headed step child.”
Nick embraces this outsider mentality. Here’s how he describes Rutland’s ethos:
Nick Grandchamp: I think passionate underdog, that's very real and sincere. You know, they're the underdog, they're the team going in the Super Bowl that, you know, people are, like, they're not gonna win, you know? And like, we've always been that. You can see, you know, the makeup of Rutland, like, if it had a face, you know, it would have a couple black eyes and a, you know, a missing ear or something, you know. (Laughter) And I kind of like that look.
Burgess Brown: It’s a pretty rough image. Nick says Rutland’s always been an underdog. But if we’re going to continue his city-as-a-face metaphor, Rutland took some particularly brutal blows over the last 15 years.
Christopher Louras: It was a kick in the gut that nobody expected and nobody saw coming.
_
The opioid epidemic
Arlie Davidson: My name is Arlie Davidson. I'm 49 years old, And you know, I’ve been currently struggling with homelessness for about three years,
Burgess Brown: I’m at the Speakeasy Cafe in downtown Rutland with Arlie Davidson.
Arlie’s story is all too familiar in Rutland. It’s rooted in something that’s impacted just about everyone in the city and cemented Rutland’s bad rap around Vermont and the rest of the country: The opioid epidemic arrived in Rutland 15 years ago and ripped through the community.
For Arlie, it led him to homelessness. He’s been staying at a hotel in town through the state’s emergency housing program for the last two weeks.
Burgess Brown: And where were you before?
Arlie Davidson: Was outside. I was camping. Yeah, wherever I could really until it got really cold, it started getting kind of scary about where I was going to stay.
Burgess Brown: Arlie grew up in Western Massachusetts. He went to art school and then he became a chef. A really good one. While he was living in Tennessee he won a cooking contest at a big gala event.
Arlie Davidson: It took like two days straight to make that sauce.
You know, I was pretty happy back then. And things just kind of, I think things took a turn after my mom died.
Burgess Brown: Arlie’s mom died when he was in his 20s.
Arlie Davidson: And she died in a car accident, pretty much kind of died in my arms at the hospital afterwards, and it wasn't really the same since then.
Burgess Brown: Arlie’s drug and alcohol use snowballed and he’s been in and out of treatment for the last 25 years. One of those treatment centers was in Underhill.
Arlie Davidson: When I was leaving, they wanted you to have somewhere to go. You know, it was a halfway house here in Rutland called the Grace House.
Burgess Brown: By the way, this is another thing that sets Rutland apart from its more rural neighbors. This is where a lot of Vermonters in the region come to find social services when they’re struggling with addiction or homelessness or hunger. Issues that face the entire state become concentrated and much more visible in a place like Rutland.
Arlie came to Rutland in 2011. And he’s been here ever since. He arrived at a pretty inopportune time for an addict trying to stay clean.
Arlie Davidson: And when I came to Rutland, it was like the tail end of the OxyContins. They're becoming really expensive, and the FDA was taking them off the market. And then, you know, there was a street, street drug they call heroin. But I think that was right when it wasn't really heroin anymore. It was like this, fentanyl, you know, mixture designer cocktail.
Burgess Brown: The opioid epidemic tore through communities across the country. But it was felt acutely early on in Rutland, thanks in part to its proximity to cities in New York and Massachusetts. Out-of-town dealers could sell their drugs at exorbitant markups in a place like Rutland with minimal local supply.
Christopher Louras: It was a tumultuous time with the community. It was not a fun time to be mayor in 2012, I can tell you that.
Burgess Brown: Christopher Louras was Rutland’s mayor from 2007 to 2017.
Christopher Louras: And it wasn't fun to be a citizen in Rutland at that time either, a resident. To many people it felt hopeless.
It was Oxy. Period. It was an opioid that people never would have picked up a needle to inject, but it was easy to swallow a pill. And once they were addicted, then they picked up the needle. And created a problem that no one was prepared for, nor had ever experienced before. It it was, it was a kick in the gut that nobody expected and nobody saw coming.
Burgess Brown: A few years later in 2014, then-Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin devoted almost an entire state of the state address to the, quote, “full-blown heroin crisis” around Vermont. And he cited an increase in treatment for opiates of 770% in Vermont since the year 2000.
Governor Shumlin’s speech made national news — and if Vermont was at the forefront of the country’s opioid crisis, Rutland became the poster child. The New York Times put out a piece about Rutland’s troubles later that same year, and quoted one resident who said, “There’s probably not a person in Rutland County whose life has not been affected by opiate addiction in one way or another.”
Christopher Louras says that, in the early days of the opioid epidemic, the way the city tried to address the problem only made it worse.
Christopher Louras: Clearly, there was a recognition by our police department that there was a lot of criminal activity associated with drugs, and we policed the community far too hard, and they then continued to police the community harder and continued to degrade that trust to the point where the community felt that neither the city nor the police department were trying, much less being successful, in attacking the crime associated with the burgeoning drug problem.
We were becoming the type of community where people didn't want to be.
Arlie Davidson: It wasn't very hard to find drugs in Rutland.
Burgess Brown: Arlie Davidson stayed clean until he stumbled across a cigarette pack while he was working at a nearby ski resort. It had five bags of heroin stashed inside. He says he tried to turn them into his boss, but was told to just keep it quiet.
Arlie Davidson: And that was, that was enough to get me looking for more. It was just downhill from there. I just met one person after another that knew, you know, where to get stuff.
Burgess Brown: Arlie has seen first hand the toll the crisis has taken on the people of Rutland. In spite of his own struggles, he’s done what he can to help others.
Arlie Davidson: Over the past couple years, I probably, probably saved maybe 30 people from overdose.
Burgess Brown: Nick Grandchamp, Rutland’s unofficial mayor — he’s seen it too.
Nick Grandchamp: Yeah, a lot of people in Rutland I've known have OD’ed and passed away, sadly.
Burgess Brown: He’s turned to a punk subculture that actually completely abstains from alcohol and drugs.
Nick Grandchamp: I'm straight-edge, kind of by choice, because I've seen a lot of my family and friends deal with addiction.
Burgess Brown: Even the family of Christopher Louras was touched by tragedy. His son became addicted to opioids. And after battling addiction and mental health issues for years, his son ended up killing his cousin — Christopher’s nephew — and then was killed himself by police shortly after, during a shootout.
But Christopher cites a different tragedy with ultimately changing Rutland’s trajectory.
In 2012, a local high school student, Carly Ferro, was leaving her job at a grocery store near downtown when she was struck and killed by a driver who’d been huffing aerosol inhalants.
Christopher Louras: Carly's death was an inflection point, and it was an absolute and is an absolute tragedy. And as with any inflection point, you know, that was a fork in the road where Rutland could have gone either way in its response.
The ‘real’ Rutland
Burgess Brown: It’s a Wednesday night in downtown Rutland. I’m at the Hop’n Moose Pub on Center Street. There are probably 30 people here, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the back of the room with beers in hand. Everyone seems to know everyone and they are all excited to talk to me about their city — like Sarah Allen.
Sarah Allen: I love the culture. I love the Paramount Theater. I love the restaurants and the bookstore and the fact that I live one mile from, like, three grocery stores, so I have options.
Steve Costello: We've done some things no one dreamt possible.
Burgess Brown: Steve Costello is one of Rutland’s loudest cheerleaders.
Steve Costello: We set the national record for the largest blood drive in American history, right in this little, tiny town. We've created a sculpture trail with 14 sculptures that tell the story of Rutland and its history. A lot more to come…
Burgess Brown: This Rutland is a far cry from city that was profiled in national newspapers at the height of the opioid epidemic.
After 2012, when Carly Ferro was killed by an intoxicated driver, the city created a group called “Project VISION.” Its goal was to address Rutland’s social problems and make it a safer place to live. It was made up of elected officials and law enforcement, but also local service organizations, religious groups and other concerned residents. The project is credited with helping to open the city’s first methadone clinic in 2013, and with broadening local law enforcement’s approach to policing, to include things like better support for mental health. They even hosted a block party near where Carly Ferro was killed. And more than a decade after its inception, the group is still meeting regularly today.
Because the problems aren't solved. There’s still plenty of work to be done here and in the rest of the state. I heard over and over again from Rutlanders that they’re proud of their city not because it’s perfect, but because it’s a place that looks its problems in the face and works together to address them.
There’s been a lot of momentum to improve Rutland, and to improve Rutland’s reputation.
Like tonight at the Hop’n Moose. Steve Costello, the guy who talked about the blood drive, he gathered all these people to welcome a couple that moved to Rutland a few days ago. It's through a “concierge program” put on by a local economic development group called Real Rutland. Basically, local volunteers help people interested in moving here find housing or jobs and just generally connect with the community.
The idea here is if you can show people the real Rutland, instead of the Rutland you see in the news or read about in Facebook comment sections, they might actually move here for the long-haul.
According to the group, more than 225 people have moved to Rutland County through the program. And the latest have just arrived.
Rutland ‘renaissance’
Casie Hardin-Tidwell: We got here Saturday night, and today is Wednesday, so just a few days ago.
Burgess Brown: This is Casie Hardin-Tidwell. She and her wife Brendy just moved here from Longview, Texas.
Brendy Hardin-Tidwell: I'm the Tidwell and she's the Hardin.
Burgess Brown: They got married and honeymooned in Vermont and felt like it was a place they’d eventually like to move. Then, they came across this contest put on by Real Rutland. People considering a move to Vermont could win a weekend getaway in Rutland. And Casey and Brendy won!
Rutland was just one of the cities they were considering as places to move. And its reputation preceded it.
Casie Hardin-Tidwell: We had heard that there was some crime, drugs and crime, for Rutland city.
Burgess Brown: They say they heard that they should move to a smaller town near Rutland and stay out of the city. But they pushed through the noise.
Casie Hardin-Tidwell: Once we came and actually saw Rutland with our own eyes, we just kind of fell in love with it. It's a great size town. The downtown is happening. And really all the people that we've met have been extremely friendly, and we've spent the last couple of days just kind of going around town, checking out places that we might be interested in, and we basically walk in and we go, “Hey, we're new. We got here on Saturday,” and people always, “Oh my gosh, welcome. Thank you so much for coming. This is great,” you know. So it's been, it's been really wonderful so far.
Burgess Brown: As I was returning to my high top to start packing my things up and head out, I found Kiana McClure waiting for me. She heard about the question we were investigating and told me it’s one she thinks about all the time.
Kiana McClure: The people who live here, who love it here, are the loudest and proudest and happiest people to tell you about how great this community is. But there is this negativity. And I think a lot of that negativity that still circulates comes from a history of a community of people that have been so hurt and are struggling to heal.
Burgess Brown: Kiana is the city’s youngest elected representative. She got elected to the board of Alderman 3 years ago when she was just 23.
And in a place like Rutland that’s kinda become associated with being stuck in a rut, the city’s supporters who’ve gathered here at the Hop’n Moose tonight — from Kiana to Steve to new arrivals, Casey and Brendy — they do seem to represent a different sort of future.
Kiana McClure: And now we sit on the precipice of this amazing resurgence, this Rutland renaissance, where so many great things are happening, because our reputation is changing.
_
Loading...
Credits
This episode was reported by Burgess Brown. Editing and additional production from the rest of the BLS team: Sabine Poux and Josh Crane. Our intern is Camila Van Order González. Our executive producer is Angela Evancie. Theme music by Ty Gibbons; other music by Blue Dot Sessions and Dead Street Dreamers.
Special thanks to Nina Keck, Phil Edfors, Joey Palumbo, Hannah Davidson, Sam Lucci, Paul Gallo, Barbara Giffin, Tom Giffin, Tom Fagen and Jacob Houser.
As always, our journalism is better when you’re a part of it:
- Ask a question about Vermont
- Sign up for the BLS newsletter
- Say hi on Instagram and Reddit @bravestatevt
- Drop us an email: hello@bravelittlestate.org
- Make a gift to support people-powered journalism
- Tell your friends about the show!
Brave Little State is a production of Vermont Public and a proud member of the NPR Network
