Also a sound account.
But the most important discussion of neighborhood development, of
course, is always whether the development is good for the neighborhood
or not. Correct?
I gassed up and repaired my vehicle at that garage many a time. But it
posed a pollution problem due to an elderly leaking tank, I heard. It
takes big bucks to fix a brownfield problem like this. Fortunately, Penn
has big bucks. So an elderly gas station was replaced with a shining new
vet-school facility. The vet school has always been an asset to UC; now
it's even more of an asset.
Where's the problem, neighbors and neighborettes? Why are we now whining
about a neighborhood improvement that has no apparent downside?
I suppose Penn could have led with its Dark Side. It could have said:
"We plan to build a Big Building that will Forever Change the Essential
Character of the ordinary West Philadelphia neighbors who live a
peaceful life at 39th & Baltimore, entirely unaffected by the large
university that just happens to be next door, that they all hate,
because all good progressives hate universities, just like the GOP does."
But it didn't. Instead, it simply got the building built, bypassing our
neighborhood's pseudo-radical nonsense by any means necessary. How else
could it accomplish anything?
Dialog is, by definition, a two-way street. If UC leftists wish to be
accepted as equal, rational partners in community planning for this
off-campus neighborhood, they need to quit foaming at the mouth every
time a university tries to solve a festering real-estate sore for us, as
it did at the 38th & Woodland gas station and again at the 40th & Pine
nursing home.
-- Tony West
On 5/18/2010 8:21 PM, Brian Siano wrote:
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_?
