GREAT BARRINGTON — Attarilm Mcclennon woke up on Tuesday morning to see a man standing on the fire escape and talking on the phone outside his apartment building in Barrington House.
When Mcclennon stepped out into the hallway that connects Main Street with the Triplex parking lot, he saw another man lingering there.
Mcclennon, who works at his family’s Momma Lo’s Southern Style BBQ downstairs, said he stepped outside to the unfolding commotion in the parking lot as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested two immigrants who live and work in the building.
But soon Mcclennon realized something — the man on the fire escape and the other one in the building looked a little familiar.
“I realized those two dudes have been walking through this hallway all week,” he said, adding that it was during the daytime.
Mcclennon’s brother, Ahmed Mcclennon, said that he also noticed a similar type of surveillance of the building last summer that he believes may have been ICE or other law enforcement.
Attarilm Mcclennon right, saw the arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Tuesday morning unfold at the Barrington House apartments where he lives and works.HEATHER BELLOW — THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE
The May 6 arrests are the latest to rattle the Berkshires as federal authorities pursue President Trump’s aggressive mission to deport or otherwise remove undocumented immigrants. A March crackdown resulted in the capture of at least 10 people in the Berkshires — and 370 statewide.
While the administration has said it would target undocumented people with criminal records, there have been numerous examples of agents detaining people who have never been charged with a crime.
It is unclear why ICE targeted these men. An ICE spokesperson did not respond to requests for information.
Tuesday’s raid took place on a busy morning in the heart of downtown. It shook bystanders and drew people out from Rubi’s Cafe and The Triplex Cinema.
Videos shared with The Eagle show people videotaping the arrests and asking ICE officers questions about warrants and due process. Others taunted the officers, most of whom were masked and heavily armed. Avery Ripley, who works at Rubi’s captured video, including that of a drone overhead.
As officers walked one of the men they arrested down the fire escape from his apartment, one person was heard saying they “love America,” and thanked the officers for “doing their jobs.”
Mcclennon said that one of the men arrested works at Fiesta Bar and Grill, which is across the hall from Momma Lo’s, and asked the Mcclennons to call his boss.
Great Barrington Police Chief Paul Storti said the department received a phone call from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security around 5:30 a.m. to let them know that they were in the area.
Barrington House owner Richard Stanley said he did not know the tenant personally, and expressed dismay at what he called “gestapo” tactics he says are meant to “intimidate.”
Ben Elliott, a Select Board member who works at The Triplex Cinema, was arriving at work when he saw the commotion. He also videotaped one of the arrests.
Elliott said he had heard that ICE also may have also arrested someone off Bridge Street near Quick Print and the Berkshire Food Co-op around 7:30 a.m.
The ICE arrests involved multiple unmarked vehicles, some heavily armed law enforcement officials and a drone.
Seeing that one of the officers had a battering ram to break the apartment door down, the building’s maintenance director Sean O’Brien got his keys ready. But that turned out not to be necessary, he said.
“None of that came to pass,” O’Brien said. “They knocked on the door and he opened the door and surrendered himself.”
Some bystanders confronted O’Brien, thinking he was helping ICE — which he and witnesses and Barrington House tenants said that was far from the truth.
“They turned on me,” O’Brien said. “It just ruffled my feathers up a little bit because they had the completely wrong idea of what happened."
“A woman was screaming into the window, ‘You called them, you called them,’” O’Brien said of the accusation that he had called ICE.
O’Brien did call local police to keep the peace and stop the trespassing.
Hearing this, Mcclennon’s brother Ahmed Mcclennon, said of O’Brien, “He’s the coolest man in the world. He would be the last person to do that.”
And O’Brien said that ICE officers were “very polite and professional to [the tenant],” and “were not abusive or anything like that.”
He also said that one of the men arrested is, “to the best of my knowledge, a very, very nice guy and a hard worker.”
“I would be very surprised,” O’Brien said, “if he were guilty of some extra crime that brought their attention to him.”
Heather Bellow is a reporter for The Berkshire Eagle.
Dan Baker, left, and Daniel Latzman at Barrington Hall in Great Barrington.
The partnership behind Barrington Hall began long before the building itself. Both Baker and Latzman grew up on Long Island, spent more than a decade in New York City, and eventually found their way to the Berkshires, drawn by the desire for something different. What they didn’t realize at first was just how closely their lives had already mirrored one another.
They were born in the same hospital, a year apart. Their families had distant connections. They even played on the same soccer team — never meeting, but moving through the same spaces. It wasn’t until they became neighbors in Egremont about five years ago that those parallels came into focus.
“In hindsight, it feels inevitable,” Latzman said. “But it was actually extremely random that we ended up here.”
From the beginning, Barrington Hall was meant to be a place people return to, not for any one event, but for the experience of being there. On any given week, the space might host a jazz performance, a dance party, a songwriter circle or a children’s event. Some nights bring in touring acts. Others highlight local creatives. The variety is intentional and so is the atmosphere.
“It’s about people,” Baker said. “It’s about being present.”
Inside Barrington Hall.Provided
Baker and Latzman are keenly aware of the world outside with its constant barrage of information, political conflicts, a culture that pulls people deeper into their screens. Barrington Hall offers a way out of that noise.
“A little bit of a bubble,” Latzman said. “A place to step away from everything else.”
During a recent event, they noticed something telling: a full room of people dancing, talking, engaged — and almost no one on their phone.
“That’s when you know something is working,” Baker said.
Taking over a beloved local space comes with responsibility, one Baker and Latzman have met by honoring the building’s traditions while also expanding them.
“We didn’t feel obligated,” Latzman said. “We felt honored.”
Part of what makes the space distinct is its versatility. Large enough to host more than 250 people, yet intimate enough to feel personal, it fills a gap in the local landscape, serving a wide range of people and bringing different groups together in the same space.
“We want people to feel like, if something’s happening here, it’s worth checking out,” Latzman said.
They are carefully balancing community access with the realities of running a business, with an eye toward the long term.
“We want this to be here in 20 years,” Latzman said.
Inside Barrington Hall.Provided
That vision extends beyond the building itself — future collaborations, expanded programming, a growing role in shaping the cultural life of the Berkshires. But at its core, the mission remains simple: to create a place where people can gather, a place that feels alive.
And perhaps most importantly, to create a place where, if only for a few hours, people can step away from the noise of the world and enjoy being together.
When asked who they’re most excited to host next, their answer was immediate: The Mammals on April 10 and Lee Ross, a one-man party band from Massachusetts, scheduled to perform on May 1.
For more information and tickets, visit
barringtonhallgb.com
Gail Rothschild with her painting “Dead Sea Linen III (73 x 58 inches, 2024, acrylic on canvas.
Her work begins, often, with something small: a scrap of linen from the Judean desert, dating “to a time before the notion of ‘Israel’ or ‘Palestine;’” a fragment so diminished it barely registers as an object; or a rare indigo-dyed child’s head cloth from Tutankhamen’s tomb.
“I call them portraits of ancient linen,” she said.
Rothschild grew up in Greenwich and studied drawing and painting at Yale University. “That was kind of my first love,” she said. But she quickly veered toward something more collective, working with Peter Schumann at the Bread and Puppet Theater, building papier-mâché puppets and participating in a kind of performance-based activism that blurred art and politics.
“After Yale, I got out of school and thought‘Wait a second. I don’t want to paint anymore. I need to work with people in communities and make things.’”
She moved to Brooklyn and began working in public schools, developing projects rooted in collaboration and local history. The projects were ambitious, research-driven, and often confrontational. At the University of Massachusetts, she recalled asking students: “Did you know that Amherst was named for Jeffrey Amherst, who was responsible for giving blankets infected with smallpox to Native Americans? Why don’t we look into that?’”
There were sculptures, letters to watchdog groups, installations. She worked on four such projects a year, she said, until the pace became unsustainable. “At some point I just said, ‘I’m exhausted. I’m going back to the studio.’”
What brought her back was a book, “Prehistoric Textiles ” by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. Inside, she encountered an image of a 7,000-year-old textile, unraveling.
“It said to me, ‘this could be a great big abstract painting’,” she said. “What does it mean that this textile, this thing that used to be a Cartesian grid and over time has gone back to nature?”
That question became a kind of axis for her work. “There is this cusp between nature and culture,” she said. Early on, she avoided textiles with imagery, drawn instead to the raw language of fiber itself. But eventually, even that boundary softened. A project with the Godwin-Ternbach Museum introduced her to Egyptian textiles — Christian, pagan, Greek, Roman influences colliding in woven form.
Gail Rothschild’s “Esquina Decorada” (52 x 52 inches, 2022, acrylic on canvas)Gail Rothschild
What followed was a deepening relationship with museums and, crucially, with conservators. Institutions like The Metropolitan Museum of Art and collections in Berlin and Paris began sending her images of textile fragments, sometimes pieces she has still never seen in person.
“It’s almost easier for me to transform it when I haven’t seen it,” she said.
Her process is both precise and intuitive. She grids the canvas and the source image, drawing freehand to “honor what the object is.” For a time, she works closely from the photograph. Then something shifts. “At some point I’ll say, ‘It’s a painting. It’s got to talk to itself,’ and then I stop looking at the photograph.”
What emerges is layered, luminous and muscular. “Sometimes people say, ‘Do you miss making sculpture?’ and I say, ‘I never stopped.’”
You feel that in the surfaces: the tension of threads pulling apart, the sense that something is both forming and dissolving at once. Even the backgrounds — often ambiguous, atmospheric — are not neutral. “It’s really more about feeling the space around the object,” she said, especially as she considers how ancient fragments are mounted on modern fabrics. “I get to invent an entirely other language.”
Some of her most arresting work is on the monumental textiles of The Met Cloisters, where medieval tapestries, some towering more than a dozen feet, are slowly, painstakingly conserved. It’s in the conservation labs that Rothschild has observed the physical reality of these works: their own weight pulling them apart, threads breaking under centuries of strain. Conservators insert new threads to stabilize them and Rothschild documents this process. “There’s a kind of poignancy to their work,” Rothschild said, “because as hard as we work to conserve the objects of our past, in the greater cosmic scheme of time, it’s only temporary. There’s something beautiful about that.”
Time operates on multiple levels in Rothschild’s work. There is the time of the object —thousands of years, in some cases — and the time of the painting, which unfolds over months. “Once I start working on something, I can’t stop,” she said. “But then it’ll rest for a while and I may change it, add layers.”
And then there is the time of attention itself, the way looking can tip into obsession, into pattern-seeking that doesn’t quite turn off. Rothschild is aware of that edge.
“I have to make myself stop or I just see patterns everywhere and I can’t stop, really,” she laughed. “That’s why I’ve built in other things I need to do in my life like take the dogs for a hike or, you know, volunteer at the Sharon Land Trust… otherwise I go a little nuts. And it wouldn’t be good painting either.”
A painting session, for her, has its own its own arc. “There’s kind of a trajectory for every work session. I might be repeating something and suddenly it looks linear. The language I started painting with may change by the end and I think, ‘Oh God, I’m gonna have to go back and repaint that.’”
But then, she said, there is a pause.
“I kind of step back and say, ‘No, this painting can hold both. That’s part of its history. There’s the history of the object but then there’s the history of the painting.’”
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