ON THE AVENUES: Solitaire till dawn with a deck of fifty-one.
A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
Since those first ominous rumblings in 2011, NA Confidential has devoted numerous column inches to the downtown/top-down urban design feature henceforth to be known as Bicentennial Park, which is to be formally dedicated on Friday night prior to the first of twelve weekly summer concerts.
Helpfully, and in the spirit of civic engagement with which we’ve so long been imbued here at the blog, we’ve suggested alternate names for the park: Somnolent Estates, Caesar’s Folly and Rent Boy Park, among others.
While (Bob) Caesar remains the Roman centurion of contemporary New Albany caricature, devoting his political half-life to guarding the eroded gates and obstructing any sort of progress that cannot be filtered of novel components unfamiliar (and therefore gravely threatening) to his inner homogenized world of caste and respectability, all roads in New Albany still lead to another political figure, albeit one inhabiting the fringes of semi-retirement: The once and future mayor.
This is my roundabout way of saying that I actually
agree with Doug England, whose most recent temporary departure from the local governmental stage came in 2011, when he curiously lost his nerve, chose not to run for re-election as kingpin, annoyed his own party by hand-picking a presumed successor from the other one, saw this ballyhooed successor brutally crushed, and then was embarrassingly defeated in a foolhardy council bid by none other than Shirley Baird.
In short, the straw that stirs the drink misplaced his ice cubes, and a city sighed with relief. Surely this would be the end of it?
It appears that lately, perhaps in an effort to stoke bored corpuscles into mounting another bid for supremacy, England has taken to muttering (sometimes when actual living people are standing nearby, as opposed to invisible friends and allies) about his scandalously unrecognized, pivotal role in the advent of Bicentennial Park.
In this specific grievance, the former mayor is completely right.
Given the manner by which the park was conceived and developed, it reads like a random page torn from England’s manual of Governance -101, because posterity will note, even if we seldom recall, that from the very start this quintessentially white bread, old-folks concept for the use of precious community space has been utterly devoid of engagement with the community itself.
Too much was paid to acquire the land, too much insularity shielded the design process, and too much money was spent to build it. This particular park place has been made (again) by the few on purported behalf of the many, with the latter being uninvolved in any substantive way.
New Albany might as well have been Falangist Spain or Tsarist Russia when it comes to the way Bicentennial Park came into being.
Or, more appropriately, our city might have been feudal England.
Come to think of it, that’s exactly what it was.
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Consider if you will this series of imagined newsfeed tweets from Radio Free New Albany:
- Former NA mayor England to cut the ribbon and dedicate Bicentennial Park to himself at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, June 7.
- City of New Albany announces the Friday dedication ceremony at Bicentennial Park is moved forward to 4:00 pm.
- Former mayor England says his Bicentennial Park self-dedication ceremony will start at 3:30 p.m., and asks when the bars open on Friday.
- Breaking: In official city announcement, Bicentennial Park dedication ceremony moved to Friday morning at 6:30 a.m., before the bars can be open.
- Former Mayor England now says he will dedicate Bicentennial Park to himself at 3:00 a.m. Friday, just following last call from Thursday. He adds that drinks are on him, and they can be carried from Good Times to the park itself, where the port-a-lets he personally designed can double as water fountains.
- In an emergency city council meeting, Dan “Knuckles” Coffey ramrods a new open container law, to come into effect at 2:30 a.m. on Friday. England vows to persevere with Bicentennial Park self-dedication ceremony on Friday morning, promises to run again for mayor to put those bastards in their place, and says he is pricing helicopter rental fees.
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The scorecard is getting crowded of late. Cafe 27 (a restaurant) and Uptown Art just opened for business. We’re told the fire museum might remain downtown after all, perhaps moving to the old Tabernacle building, and that the Coyle property is about to be sold.
Let’s hope redevelopment comes in the form of market-priced housing of the sort Bob Caesar will permit us to have.
There'll be an occupant (Regalo) for the former Jim's Gun Room at the corner of Pearl and Market, and maybe a Comfy Cow location at 109 E. Market. There is a rumor of a comedy club coming to downtown. The former Happy's and Patticakes are being renovated on the Main Street block between Pearl and Bank, next to Café 27.
The south side of the block remains a disgrace, but at least the north side has improved.
And so it goes.
What connects these varied entities, and the ones already existing as well as the ones to follow? The street and sidewalk grid, that’s what.
However, one-way streets currently functioning as high-speed throughways do nothing to help the prospects for these businesses and attractions. Streets tamed, calmed, made usable by walkers and bikers, and running in both directions, stand to assist in downtown’s ongoing revitalization and that of surrounding neighborhoods.
The former mayor made numerous promises about the street grid during his most recent term, but followed through on very few of them. Ever since, he’s preferred to blame the city council for these failures – but really, how can any ruler such as Franco or Nicholas II, one who regards himself as absolute and answerable only to himself, be justified in whimpering about a legislative body’s recalcitrance?
But we’re more fortunate now, because City Hall during the Jeff Gahan era and our “green” current council are marching forward in perfect harmony toward a better future, so let Doug have credit for the pocket park, and instead, do what he wouldn’t.
Complete the street grid. Now.
