ON THE AVENUES: Concrete or chimera.

ON THE AVENUES: Concrete or chimera.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

In retrospect, it seems highly auspicious that we moved into our newly purchased Spring Street home on Halloween 2003.

In 2013, when New Albany celebrates its bicentennial, our second five-year plan will be concluding. I never imagined how exhausting it would be to simultaneously seek the reinvention of my personal life, my business, and an entire city.

This blog came to life in 2004 as a means of appeasing a motley collection of muses and demons inhabiting my inner world. To silence them, I resolved to write more regularly. Following is a piece published on December 7, 2004: New Albany will be worth the work.

For those who may find it curious that this web site is devoted to life and times in the seemingly inconsequential city of New Albany, let it be understood that NA Confidential is dedicated to the simple proposition that the place where we live is important.

Otherwise, why bother living there?

For many readers, the significance of a place of residence may seem self-evident, but I submit that this reaction is far from universal.

America’s helter-skelter physical and emotional mobility is its greatest blessing – and its most destructive curse. Mobility promotes flexibility, improvisation and growth. And it contributes to a mindset of transience, substituting long-distance anonymity for the intimacies of familiarity and discourse.

To live and work somewhere, to find that place on a map, to plot the route that takes us there – all are mundane compared to the tasks of building and nurturing a community. To so, we must know who we are, why it matters and how we intend to achieve it.

Individuals make up the community, and the community reflects the dreams and aspirations of individuals. Without vision, without a sense of possibility, without a desire to improve, neither individuals nor their communities can be expected to thrive in a world that never has and never will stand still.

The ongoing process of urban reinvention begins with these dreams and aspirations. Public works, feats of engineering, financial prowess – all are absolutely essential, but none suffice as indicators of creativity and imagination because they cannot measure the limitless horizons afforded by an idea.

Without these vital qualities of community self-knowledge, which aid us in knowing who we are, efforts aimed at “renewal” predictably are undertaken in piecemeal fashion, lack unifying direction, and are doomed to mistake the ephemeral attractions of new objects for the lasting benefits of new thinking.

The architectural carnage of the 1960’s and early 1970’s stands as the perfect illustration of the unwillingness or inability (or both) of a clueless generation of political and civic leaders in New Albany to articulate an ideal for the city.

It isn’t that sincere people haven’t worked for decades before and since to make things better. They have.

It is that much of their hard work has been all but nullified by the continuing lack of an overall, unifying community principle in New Albany, primarily because such a principle is erroneously seen as posing a threat to the prevailing political and civic elites for whom the preservation of fiefdoms, however small, represents a principle more to their liking than thinking outside the box for the benefit of others.

Unsurprisingly, genuine political and civic leadership – thinking, challenging, lifting up, providing the plan, organizing the troops, mustering the energy – has all but disappeared from the equation in New Albany.

As embodied by the self-absorbed empty suit currently masquerading as Mayor, local government seems to have abdicated altogether when it comes to any recognizable principle of community leadership.

At a City Council meeting last evening, where citizen representatives of neighborhood associations spoke passionately about the need to create a position of ordinance enforcement officer and thus provide them with some measure of recourse to influence those who do not contribute to the progress of the community, at no time did Mayor Garner avail himself of the bully pulpit to offer encouragement and empathy to the speakers.

Not once.

Mayor Garner may well be in perfect harmony with the citizenry, and after all, the topic at hand involves enforcing existing codes to make the city a better place, to which there is no discernable opposition, and yet presented with an opportunity to lead, Garner could not be bothered.

Our objective, then, is to lead the community-based effort ourselves, to locate the like-minded, the ones for whom life in New Albany need not represent a grudging compromise, one maintained for lack of better options over the long and steadily unfolding period of time that we hope to remain living here.

Rather, we see no reason why New Albany cannot preserve the best remnants of its important historical heritage while providing contemporary elements of the finer things in life, virtually all of which flower from enhanced diversity – culturally, creatively and artistically.

We know who we are. With unity, we’ll see what can be done.

Unity – what a concept. It’s true that with time, I came to regard Mayor Garner in a different light, as one endowed with a sophisticated level of comprehension, though not possessing the communication skills necessary for effective action.

This observation aside, how much progress have we really achieved in seven years? You’ll undoubtedly say: But just LOOK at all the progress! I agree that there have been numerous strides, and yet the most obvious lesson to be learned from the past four years is that dysfunctional paradigms have been slow to change. There has been hard work. Has it been smart work?

I’ve no glib conclusions to offer, just a question: Where are we?