Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island should be commended for putting up what is actually a very attractive modern building in downtown Providence. It's alluring night and day.

Kudos to architects Symmes, Maini and McKee Associates, and Blue Cross CEO James Purcell's crew.

Its beauty offsets a tad the two hideous Soviet-style apartment and/or condo buildings next door.

But, in a display of John Kenneth Galbraith's line about "private wealth and public squalor'' in much of America, the walls around the Amtrak Station close by are crumbling. Embarrassing, especially since the station itself is a fine piece of work.

And why, oh why, can't they fix the clock on the station tower!?

"Maine XXI,'' painting by GRETCHEN DOW SIMPSON

That Mainers rejected a plan to allow gay marriage is a reminder that many New Englanders remain socially conservative, especially those in the rural parts of northern New England. (Actually, most of the real estate in northern New England is rural!)

The liberals in Maine are mostly strung along the coast from Kittery to Bar Harbor -- especially in the summer. Inland, except in college towns, it's like rural New Hampshire, or Wyoming.

But everyone understands physical, as opposed to a more psychic, pain, so a medical-marijuana plan won in the Pine Tree State. Pot dispensaries may soon be as frequent a sight as lobster boats and canoes.

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Very rich, but recession-battered Yale, needs to sell $1 billion of notes to pay expenses. Weeping at the tables down at Morey's

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Will New England someday have as dense a passenger-rail system as it had in 1950? Maybe. Consider that Plaistow, N.H., officials are pushing to get commuter rail service to their part of southern New Hampshire.

Townspeople want to plug the region more into Boston business, education, technology, art and culture.

Of course, they don't want to pay the taxes or deal with the congestion of living in the real Boston area. They want exurban sprawl and close-at-hand city pleasures.

Commentary and Photo by WILLIAM MORGAN

The small Narragansett Bay-side community of Buttonwoods is a jewel that comes as a complete surprise, deeply hidden as it is in Warwick -- a strong contender for Rhode Island's and perhaps New England's ugliest bit of suburban sprawl.

This bucolic enclave was once a modest summer getaway for city dwellers. They'd close up the house in Providence and head down to the shore for the summer.

Not all the houses in Buttonwoods are special; goop has seeped in here, too. But there are still a few delightful gingerbread cottages. The 19th-century Carpenters Gothic confections bring to mind their more famous brethren at the Methodist camp meeting at Oak Bluffs, on Martha's Vineyard.

And as we hunker down for winter, these treasures also remind us that summer will come again. Then there will no better place to be than on a porch near the water.

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-- Photo by ANDREA LEGGE

This is the Lincoln Street green strip in Boston's Allston neighborhood (much of which Harvard has bought up through sneaky cover companies).

Artist team Legge Lewis Legge worked with the Allston Brighton Community Development Corporation (ABCDC) to transform a strip of trash-filled land on Lincoln Street into public green space. They installed installed decorative planters and sculpture into the landscape.

This project was supported by Art & Community Landscapes, a partnership of the National Park Service, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New England Foundation for the Arts.

What a wonderful project to emulate in urban areas all over New England.

-- Photo by KI-EUN KWEON

This is part of a sustainable-design project at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design with artist Thomas Whittlesey

A grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts' Fund for the Arts lets the Massachusetts College of Art and Design plan for a public art project featuring sustainable design on its Boston campus.

West Barnstable-based artist Thomas Whittlesey was selected to create an art/landscape installation in conjunction with MassArt's sustainable-architecture course. Whittlesey's proposed design features a pedestrian-powered sculpture that captures force exerted by footsteps on a kinetic stairway.

Each step will turn a generator, illuminating a field of lights above. Whittlesey is working in residence with students. The sculpture is scheduled for completion in 2010.

-- Photo by GRAHAM NEWHALL

You'd be alarmed too if you were an old mill building in Providence whose renovation into pricey lofts was stopped by the credit crunch and recession.

-- Photo by CHARLES PINNING

Giving up on October in Providence.

Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman's opposition to the "public option'' in the health-reform program couldn't be at all connected to the fact that he's a long-term water boy for the insurance industry, much of which is based in Connecticut, could it?

Or maybe the good senator, probably unlikely to get re-elected, is angling for a $2 million a year lobbying job for the industry. Louisiana Congressman Billy Tauzin did everything that Big Pharm asked when he was in Congress. He then got a big job representing his campaign paymasters.

Other than a review of his career, nothing would lead me to suggest that.

Ah, the insurance industry, which once made Hartford one of the most placid, if boring, cities in America -- indeed, to be an Hartford insurance man was the quintessence of public staidness. (What these mild-mannered people were doing in their private lives, of course, was often far more exotic and exciting. Wild sex, booze and drugs, or Charles Ives writing great music and Wallace Stevens great poetry.)

Anguished actuaries!

Now, with much of the industry having fled the cities for the burbs, the city, whose population has plunged in recent decades, is a disaster area of shootings, stabbings, vandalism, abandoned buildings and a mayor indicted for corruption. There is still, howver, the wonderful Wadsworth Athenaeum, Trinity College and a few other great cultural holdouts.

But that's the Nutmeg State for you -- bad cities, rich suburbs (outside of Fairfield County, in search of cities) and some of the loveliest countryside in America, especially in Litchfield County. and the state's northeastern corner.

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Inadvertently weird headline of the day:

The lead in The Boston Globe:

Diocese alterting rituals in swine-flu precaution.

Mt. Monadnock, in southwest New Hampshire, in a Novemberish painting done about 1900 by Williiam Preston Phelps.

The peak is only 3,165 feet high but that's higher than any mountain nearby, and it rises semi-dramatically 2,000 feet from the surrounding plateau.

The name of the mountain, derived from the local Native American language's phrase for something along the lines of "rising alone,'' has been given to isolated peaks all over the world -- one of New Hampshire's gifts to the English language and geology.

Monadnock remains one of the world's most climbed peaks, but then, it is very easy to climb and near big cities. The top is mostly bald rock, probably because of old forest fires.

The Monadnock Region, as the tourist people call it, still has, in places, a Currier & Ives look, though it has become to some extent part of Boston's exurbia.

Mohegan Sun, the huge (but not as huge as Foxwoods) casino in eastern Connecticut, which, like many casinos, has been hard hit by the recession, is, like many a supermarket chain, pushing for more customers.

When your profit margin falls or disappears, try for more sales while firing your older workers and getting cheaper, younger ones without benefits! And don't ask to see their passports.

One way for Mohegan to expand is to open a casino in Palmer, Mass., conveniently near the Mass Pike, which is exactly what they want to do.

How much cannibalization of its Connecticut facility this would involve I do not know. The Mohegan people must assume that they can get lots of people off the boring highway traveling between Boston and points west, bored tourists from the Berkshires and some desperate jobless people from Springfield and other area mill towns betting all on one last toss of the dice. Or maybe people fleeing a flooding Connecticut River.

Mohegan's push is not unrelated to a recession-fueled drive to have full-fledged (indeed, massive) casino gambling in the Bay State as a way to get more money for state whose politicians naturally don't want to raise taxes any more, although maybe fiscal prudence says they should.

Run with permission from The Ripon Forum