On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 7:53 PM, Karen Allen <kallena...@msn.com> wrote:
> > That's absolutely true: Penn sent a representative to a Cedar Park > Neighbors board meeting in 2005 or '06 (somewhere in there) and the woman > told us that Penn was going to "trade" the island where a gas station had > been (closer to the VA hospital, where Baltimore and Woodland branched) to > the City in exchange for closing the roadbed of Baltimore Avenue where it > intersected 38th St, directly alongside the Vet School. She said they were > doing it to reconfigure the intersection to improve traffic flow. Nothing > was ever said about wanting the roadway of Baltimore Avenue to build a > building; I only learned that well after the fact, and not from anyone > connected with Penn. > Strictly speaking, the roadbed doesn't have a building on it. It's a pedestrian sidewalk between the old and new Vet buildings. But I simply cannot believe that Karen's reporting this accurately. What did she think-- that the project was _just_ a road reconfiguration? Didn't people see the announcements, the artists' conceptions, the maps, the website? I sure did. It was _always_ to accommodate a new Vet building. Artists' conceptions were always part of the presentations. Every presentation I saw, every web site, every announcement, said that a new Vet building was going up. This bit about 'they told us it was for traffic flow" is hard to believe. What is Karen saying-- that they kept a _whole building project_ as a _secret_?
