REWIND: Imagination Atrophy Syndrome, downtown churches, the "right facilities," and the "wrong" developer.

Last week I was part of a conversation between two fellow “improve downtown New Albany” community activists, and one mentioned the numerous opportunities he'd had to network with downtown Louisville property developers while one and all were enjoying arts events at Louisville’s Mellwood Arts and Entertainment Center.

Interrupting was hard to resist, but other than a muffled harrumph, I managed to keep my thoughts to myself:

“Gee, wouldn’t it be something if one day New Albany and Floyd County’s monochromatic, knee-jerk exurban developing caste were spotted congregating at trendy arts events? At look-a-like Cracker Barrels, maybe; at a swill-choked, charred-wiener-laden tailgate party for a football game, certainly; but photo exhibitions, courtyard art displays and performances?”

Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?

But I’m serene, and remain delighted to have provided posterity and future archivists with so many vivid examples of the complicity of New Albany’s and Floyd County’s land and property developers in perpetuating our most enduring collective cognitive civic malady: Imagination Atrophy Syndrome.

Recently I described this affliction in the context of the city's non-existent accommodation for bicycling:

And that’s because New Albany’s collective 800-lb gorilla, and the ultimate source of the psychosis that so degrades all our future prospects, is an utter failure on the part of government and citizenry alike to muster any degree of comprehension as to what is occurring in the larger world that lies outside their own exceedingly narrow comfort zones.

Consequently, it isn’t just that so many drivers don’t ride bicycles and lack any semblance of understanding of the issues explicated so clearly by Daniel Robison, it’s that they can’t even imagine doing so and moreover cannot imagine life outside the confines of an automobile – and if they can’t imagine it, then how could anyone else? It follows that those who are able to imagine it must be mistaken, defective, or both, and any person sighted on a bicycle must be either too poor to afford a car or restricted to riding a bike because of a mental illness, DUI conviction, bad personal credit or contrarian tendencies …

When it comes to the local kingpins of construction, there’s certainly a paucity of constructive imagination to go around ... and around ... and around. NA Confidential gave lengthy consideration to a veritable "Exhibit A" in this January, 2006 essay:

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

While readers are strongly encouraged to navigate the link above and read the original piece in its entirety, I’ll cut to the chase and reprint the conclusion below. Nothing has happened during the 18 months since then that might lead me to doubt the veracity of this assessment, but I do sometimes wonder: Who’ll be the local developer who finally decides to think outside the self-imposed box and is the first to contribute a signature project in the New Urbanist mold to New Albany’s downtown?

Or must we look outside Floyd County to Louisville or elsewhere to find the vigorous imagination necessary for such an overdue event to occur?

Rewind to January, 2006, beginning with an newspaper excerpt from Amany Ali, then a reporter for the Tribune …

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(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.

(NAC) 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 (Donald) 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.