The Fire Museum is gone. Now, what happens to the Coyle property?

Walking westbound on Spring Street yesterday afternoon, I noticed the temporary message board at the Vintage Fire Museum being loaded atop a trailer, and Curt Peters stacking boxes into a pickup truck. A glance behind the windows at the former Coyle Chevrolet showroom revealed -- nothing. The museum's apparently gone to Jeffersonville.

We've covered this ground previously, but it's worth recalling the gist of it: In and of itself alone, the Vintage Fire Museum never would have been a game changer downtown. However, as a component of an organized downtown economic development strategy, it surely could have played a role. The museum's departure to Jeffersonville tells us:

1. As yet, the city of New Albany's downtown economic (and overall) development strategy remains piecemeal at best, and non-existent at worst. Entities petition for money and favors. Sometimes they get it, and sometimes not.

2. The city of Jeffersonville, though still quite capable of ineptitude, at least has such a strategy and has funded it. In the past, I've been approached quite informally and casually by Jeffersonville officials, so as to let me know what their city could do for a business like mine -- downtown. I thank them and carry on, all the while thinking: But why not the same in New Albany, apart from an absence of will to implement it?

3. The Vintage Fire Museum's departure informs us: It's time for vigilance with respect to the future of the Coyle property's vast asphalt expanse, both because an historic building is at stake, and owing to the nature of frequent hints that development there would come in the form of housing -- thus suggesting that cynics like me establish up front just how much the inevitable, giveaway parking garage will cost us. Earlier this summer, the Green Mouse overheard city officials and the 6th district banker/councilman discussing the future of the historic showroom building, and whether it would survive a development deal or be demolished; when asked about it, the councilman ominously replied: "Just a rumor. Though all options should be considered when redeveloping a property."

But all options should NOT be considered when voting on a non-binding resolution. It's a curious world we live in, and an even stranger city. While enjoying today's holiday, remember the Thrasher axiom: "We're all here because we're not all there."

A brief, open letter to the Redevelopment Commission.

...via a partial and paraphrased transcript of a semi-private, spoken reflection. I admittedly didn't ask my friend Rory for permission to share it, but he knows as well as anyone that I'm not worth suing.

Let me start with hospitality...

Culture is not just about meaning in some kind of abstract way. It is about the ways in which we make spaces for one another, the way that we are hospitable to people... I think of this in terms of making homes, making homes as guests..., and of making homes as in some ways the most basic work of culture, of civilization. The hearth, in the Indo-European traditions, is a very, very important thing. The fire is a worldwide thing and very important, certainly for native peoples on this continent.

How do we make a home for ourselves? What are the ways that we can come into a relationship with one another in a home... It seems to me that this a theme: a theme of home and displacement, a theme of how we make a home, how we can make a hospitable place for one another in settings where many feel displaced. And, in a sense, there's the other side of it which is hospice and hospital, the healing of trauma and the recognition and affective grace of mourning, which is also the work of cultural sustainability because we need to let some things go as well as hold on to them. - Rory Turner, January 18, 2011