Should have known better: Philistines, purse strings and postcards in New Albany

In today’s Louisville Courier-Journal, reporter Ben Zion Hershberg describes “New Albany, Indiana: A Postcard History,” a soon-to-be-published book that will feature views of more than 200 historical postcards collected by David Barksdale, Floyd County’s official historian and the President of the Floyd County Historical Society.

Barksdale’s collaborator on the project is writer Robyn Sekula, who notes the importance of what remains of the city’s architectural heritage, but laments the loss of so many other “gems” such as the Federal Court House and the Post Office, both gone from the local scene by 1970.

“By that time,” Barksdale adds, in what NA Confidential has selected for its Thanksgiving 2004 Quote of the Day, “we should have known better.”

By now, in 2004, we should know better, but as one surveys the state of New Albany, this is open to sincere debate.

In fact, Barksdale provides a timely reminder that while millenniums come and go, New Albany’s political and civic leaders remain utterly bereft of forward-thinking vision when it comes to making use of the part of the city that once was its vibrant commercial center.

Politics in the local sense ceases to be the art of the possible, and instead displays a congenital inclination for business as usual. Business as usual prefaces insularity, and insularity dooms us to repeat past mistakes because as a reflexive habit, it stubbornly fails to acknowledge (and in fact actively fears) modes of thought that splash outside the lines.

And yet, creative thinking outside the accepted boundaries is precisely what New Albany and cities like it need to reverse decades of chronic neglect.

Evil and malevolence are not at the heart of this neglect. It is institutional, persisting because it is rewarded by political and civic elites for whom the elements of business as usual are more predictably profitable than the alternatives, which would require the elites to surrender some measure of their control, financial or otherwise.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and in some places, it isn’t.

Compare New Albany’s record with that of Columbus, Indiana, a community of similar population. For a half-century, Columbus has pursued an enlightened urban development strategy that is the envy of cities many times its size.

Meanwhile, in New Albany …

In the late 1960’s, New Albany undertook an aggressive, thoughtless program of historical demolition, erasing key components of the city’s architectural legacy and replacing these priceless structures not with ambitious modern architecture, as in the case of Columbus, but with a series of drab, gray and downright atrocious public buildings that might have sprung from a central planner’s drawing board in Communist Eastern Europe.

Where the Court House stood at the corner of Spring and State? A bank building that was laughably obsolete before the glue on the Formica had dried. The post office? A parking lot.

One questions how the important buildings still standing managed to survive this architectural Holocaust, which was authored by local luminaries according to a terminally shortsighted policy of civic and cultural assassination masquerading as fiscal rectitude.

There should be no statute of limitations governing the culpability of these pillars, who if still living, should be apprehended, charged and pilloried publicly.

Their successors still reign. As noted here previously, the current administration’s sliced ‘n’ diced first phase of the Scribner Place/YMCA project, while attainable by New Albany’s standards of foot-dragging, itself springs from the same ingrained habit of community pillar-led conventional thinking with respect to development that resulted in a previous generation not having “known better” as it joyfully bulldozed the old quarter.

Here’s the link to Ben Hershberg’s article:

http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2004/11/25in/B1-hist1125-7827.html