The Gary: An excess of pure, unadulterated ego? Perhaps tolerable in the exurban sprawl, but not relevant to downtown New Albany.

That the ubiquitous sprawlmeister Gary McCartin looks lovingly into the mirror each morning and sees Donald Trump glowering back has never been in much doubt.

That the same Gary McCartin belongs in the Siamese Councilman class of willfully ignorant philistinism pertaining to the many viable principles of New Urbanism that are successfully motivating downtown redevelopment projects all across America, and that are entirely applicable to New Albany’s own inner city, also is beyond all doubt, at least if we are to believe the developer’s own words, as reported by Amany Ali in the Sunday edition of the Tribune.

“A ‘Place’ to build from; Designs for redevelopment of Scribner bearing completion” (Note: The Tribune’s random archive generator has not placed the article on line as of Monday morning).

Ms. Ali noted that “the final design for Scribner Place” is 85% complete,” and proceeded to outline the steps being taken toward the commencement of construction later this spring. Turning to the future impact of Scribner Place:

(Mayor James) Garner is among a group who hopes Scribner Place will play a vital role in bringing life to downtown New Albany.

“This is the first piece,” Garner said. “It is a catalyst for exciting things to happen downtown. It will attract people.”

The hope, according to Garner, is to get people to live in the downtown -- particularly in apartments above businesses. Having such housing would then require services to locate within walking distance of those who live in the area. Garner thinks the downtown will be suitable for boutique and other small retail shops.

Obviously, the scope of the Tribune’s article was not intended to be a comprehensive survey of the tenets of New Urbanism, but Mayor Garner’s comments aptly hinted at the conceptual basis of the movement, which is described in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

New urbanism is an urban design movement that became very popular beginning in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The goal of new urbanists is to reform all aspects of real estate development and urban planning. These include everything from urban retrofits, to suburban infill.

There are some common elements of new urbanist design. New urbanist neighborhoods are walkable, and are designed to contain a diverse range of housing and jobs. New urbanists support regional planning for open space, appropriate architecture and planning, and the balanced development of jobs and housing. They believe these strategies are the best way to reduce the time people spend in traffic, to increase the supply of affordable housing, and to rein in urban sprawl. Many other issues, such as historic preservation, safe streets, green building, and the renovation of brownfield land are also covered in the Charter of the New Urbanism, the movement's seminal document.

(See also the New Urbanism Marketplace: NEW URBANISM).

Returning to the Sunday Tribune article …

Like any good reporter, Ms. Ali sought a counterpoint to the viewpoints of the mayor and downtown businessman Bob Caesar, who echoed the Mayor Garner’s thoughts, and she found it in the gray eminence of The Gary, who last was seen downtown in performance at the January 9 city council meeting.

There, he had berated both the council and officials in planning and redevelopment, charging that they had failed to make good on promises that council approval for an ongoing project was a mere "formality" and that he'd be given the "benefit of the doubt" based on who he is and all he has done to turn empty farmland into exurban asphalt.

"This is the most ridiculous rezoning I've ever been through in the United States of America," thundered The Gary at the council, as CM Dan “Wizard of Westside” Coffey – glowing recipient of McCartin’s financial largesse last Christmas when it came time to throw Coffey’s annual party for the people he’s done so much to keep underprivileged – hastily groveled to apologize for the sad indignity of anyone so presitgious as McCartin being forced to submit to council scrutiny.

In fact, stated CM Coffey, he could not recall a previous instance of such temerity on the part of a councilperson, perhaps forgetting his own disjointed dissertation on drainage issues during a debate on the Kenzig Road patio home proposal last June.

Perhaps the Kenzig Road developers should have paid closer attention to CM Coffey’s party schedule. Should a councilperson thus compromised abstain from votes involving a donor? Food for thought, eh, trogs?

Alas, we have again digressed. Ms. Ali:

Not everyone is convinced that Scribner Place will be the great catalyst for downtown New Albany. Longtime developer Gary McCartin doesn’t think people are interested in living downtown. And he doesn’t think a YMCA will entice people to do so …

… Instead, he thinks people would rather have a yard and live near their church and other conveniences …

… McCartin reviewed the plans for Scribner Place when they were originally introduced by former Mayor Regina Overton.

“My expertise told me it was not a winner,” he said.

McCartin thinks there is hope for downtown. He thinks city officials should use their power of eminent domain to tear down some buildings and determine what would be best to erect. He thinks some part of the downtown could be utilized for discount-priced retailers.

“It’s (about) getting the right facilities,” he said.

We’d be wasting precious column inches to dissect The Gary’s views line by line; instead, let’s consider just one of his assertions.

Between the foot of Silver Hills and the Silver Creek watercourse, using the Ohio River as the southern boundary and Culbertson as the northern, how many churches are in operation?

Our guess is somewhere around two dozen, ranging in size from St. Mary’s (Roman Catholic) to a handful of tiny, storefront Protestant congregations.

Therefore, according to The Gary’s own stated “logic,” there should be several hundred people desirous of residency downtown, to be “near their church.”

But that’s not what The Gary was saying, is it?

Isn’t he really speaking in the exurban demographic code, with class- and race-based implications fairly obvious?

We think so.

What Trump -- uh, McCartin -- is saying with such transparent inelegance, smirking whilst pretending to dispense “expertise” to the same city planners and public officials he is maligning because he feels they aren’t permitting him have “his way” in pending development cases, most prominently that of the Green Valley Road medical office complex that has run afoul both of the decidedly residential neighborhood where it is to sited and the local officials in charge of planning and zoning, is that people just like HIM want houses just like HIS close to the church that HE attends, with quick and easy access to chain stores HE built and the Interstate highways connecting the sprawl that HE and his ilk have engendered.

Obnoxious? Yes. Arrogant? Perhaps.

But fair enough when it comes to the way of life in the exurb. Our advocacy of those principles that have coalesced under the “New Urbanism” banner does not preclude a fundamental “to each his own” when it comes to a preference for ideological conformity and suburban sprawl – and there are any number of Gary McCartins lining up outside our doors to help these cookie cutter dreams come true.

But McCartin’s self-aggrandizing profession and the precepts that he wields like spiked clubs to help further it mean little or nothing to those who prefer the urban experience and seek its expansion and improvement, and for McCartin to blithely assert that the best solution for revitalizing downtown is to cast it in the mold of his trademark projects in the suburbs and exurbs is the height of self-inflated folly – and, given the proofs afforded us by the successful growth of urban communities elsewhere, it is palpably untrue.

In the end, The Gary probably knows this just as well as the rest of us do.

The words he spoke to Amany Ali were not offered with any sincere intent to contribute to a solution, or even to be an honest broker in any accepted sense of the idea, but as a means of jousting for advantage with his perceived enemies, while providing our local Luddite obstructionists with a convenient pull quote to wave in the air during public speaking time at council meetings.

In the end, The Gary turns out to be little more than another playground bully, and as such, small wonder that he and Councilman Cappuccino have formed an alliance to denigrate downtown New Albany’s best hope for success in many decades, understanding that a guerrilla war of petty obfuscation and delaying tactics might somehow succeed in halting projects like Scribner Place, leaving an expanse of open ground where the buildings already have been knocked down sans the need for messy eminent domain actions … in the councilman’s home district … just a big, empty place to build a big, new building or two of the sort that people like The Gary really want.

Perhaps then, owing to these "advantageous" McCartinesque circumstances, we’d get our big-box discounter on West Main, with an ample pool of Coffeyite customers to be drawn from the poverty-stricken inhabitants of the inner city – confined to living near their churches, and not sullying the neat lawns and social order in the New Albanian exurb, the one that expresses so very well the ethical limitations inherent in growth for the sake of growth -- the ideology of the cancer cell -- taking precedence over the interests of society as a whole.

To summarize, there are many people currently engaged in consideration of these interests as they apply to downtown revitalization, and as The Gary now has illustrated, albeit inadvertently, the single best way to proceed with the plan for this revitalization is to accept that downtown must be remade as differently as possible from the exurb -- which is to say, we must pursue the polar opposite of any path recommended by The Gary.

Hey, thanks for the encouragement, Mr. McCartin. Your "expertise" has proven quite useful, after all.