Windowless views of Scribner Place

As previously noted, I attended the outdoor press conference in early October during which New Albany Mayor James Garner unveiled plans for Phase I of the Scribner Place downtown redevelopment project.

Envisioned by Garner’s predecessor as a bold stroke on a grand scale, the Scribner Place project has been subjected by the incoming regime to a stringent editing process that has left much of the original proposal on the cutting room floor.

All portions of the Scribner Place plan that might require heavy lifting (i.e., hotel, retail, condominiums) have been discarded or deferred, rendering it fiscally responsible and far better suited to the current administration’s signature lack of imagination.

The YMCA, swimming center and parking garage slated for the first phase can be financed in large measure by annually mandated guilt abatement kickbacks from Caesar’s Indiana, whose million-a-day gross continually reminds us (a) that we’re all in the wrong business, and (b) that ordinary people are incredibly stupid.

In a press conference replete with unintentional humor, one of the funniest moments came when a representative of the Louisville media grew tired of waiting for the New Albany Tribune’s Amany Ali to ask a significant question and quizzed Mayor Garner as to his comments to the effect that that Scribner Place would bring people to live downtown.

With no housing plan in sight, where will these new residents live?

A confused Garner could do no more than mumble and point to the perennially unoccupied second and third floors of nearby buildings as if to suggest that their owners would miraculously see the light after decades of willful negligence and begin creating condos overnight.

It so happens that one of the structures standing behind Garner was the majestic Schmitt Furniture building, which hasn’t had windows above the ground floor since some time during the Johnson administration. In fact, on the entire length of the Schmitt Furniture block running along Main Street, there are no windows above the ground floor on any of the buildings.

If anyone is to live there, they’ll not be enjoying a very good view of Scriber Place.

During his speech, Garner insisted that the citizens pf New Albany should be thankful for certain “families” (among them the owners of Schmitt Furniture) who agreed to sell their properties to make space for the Scribner Place project.

These properties, located between Main Street and the flood wall, contain warehouses of no architectural value built atop brownfield areas where forges and other 19th-century industrial enterprises once operated.

So, if we are to believe Garner, families running businesses in buildings without windows, and who sell virtually worthless properties in need of some measure of toxic clean-up to the city at somewhere close to market value are patriotic.

Opportunistic businessmen, perhaps. Patriots? Name a street after them, and get on with it.