I’ve done a couple installments of "Not in the Brochure," both
along Cherry Street, a strip of Columbia I often walk along, parts of which I
much enjoy, even though I tend to like the time-cracks and signs of human use more than the
Master-planners would prefer. And I miss that pair of trees with purple blooms, which Mike tells me might have been
New Mexican Locust.
Ok, let’s pull back from beauty. You’ll start suspecting me of being
sentimental, perhaps even charitable.
Let me erase those suspicions.
Here’s another little strip of land in the heart of the District. See it down there, those lines scribbled on my borrowed map? That blue line is the sidewalk behind the newly built Brookside Apts., one of the dull additions to downtown Columbia.
Those new buildings face out to Tenth Street, across from the big red-door Methodist Church, which has bartered off its parking lot to the new deluge of downtown denizens. On the other side, there's now a parking lot, a space that used to hold Bambinos, an Italian place that after it got booted out briefly moved to the restaurant-corner-of-doom, 10th and Broadway. There was also, across the street from that, a too-exclusive-and-dress-coded-for-me nightclub, Athena, where a friend who knew the owner took me in one afternoon for the top shelf ouzo (me) and tequila (her). This side, there's now an MU Theater annex building, which once was a Greek restaurant, and before that, once a laundry, and before that...oh, I forget. This one last remnant, and parking...
A lot of virtual-image space for this, you think--but parking is a big part of this story.
On the site of the new building itself, once there was...ah, I have a memory blank here, too. That erasure is already effective. We begin to live in Dark City.
In any case, between the new parking lot and the new Brookside building, there's this little strip of marginal land, part back walkway, part gravel-undesignated. We're going to focus on this.
On the up side, there is/was a bit of greenery here, taking care of itself...
A courageous morning glory venturing out, and some fellow-travelers...
And here, some sort of stalky vine, which I liked, even if Matt winds up telling me it's some hideous invasive. It was sure trying to claim a place here.
Not many people actually stroll along this bit of ground. From the city parking garage, just north on 10th and Cherry, I've seen a guy
Here’s the less-green view of this little bit of marginal land:
Here, a guide to stadium seating. Let's suspect this was not discarded by the homeless. Those same folks who don't usually drink designer tea.
That space down beyond the new walkway is likely used by street folks, whether homeless or kids who manage to snag some cheap butt-kicking stuff to
drink. I suspect they scavenged those benches. I rather like that:
* * *
A week later, someone, whoever claims this strip, made the
worst of all decisions. Best would have been to clean up the trash, and let things grow, let a weedy if healthy green strip create itself, one of those micro-wilds that keep us from all being serial killers or lobbyists for Big Oil. (Here, I'm making the untested assumption that every bit of the world we participate in affects us. Neither mere consciousness nor ethical engagement is required for this to happen.)
Next best would have been to clean up the trash and design a growing space, fill it with precious little shrubs
and too much mulch, sad roses and an occasional tree sprout. The worst choice—leave the trash in place and assault what’s there
with herbicide, making this a cursed dead zone.
And yep, that’s what they did, choice three...
Treating any spot like this is a signal to everyone who passes by, just as healthy greenery is. What the dead zone signals is that this is a place to abuse. And so it is abused...
* * *
And then comes move-out day for people who live in the
cloud palace, who can float above the rest of us, most of them, let's assume, University students, operating on the calendar of semesters.
These are the folks who
aspire to life in that condo in Miami that has elevators for their cars--no need to ever touch the earth itself.
Porsche Design Tower Miami Condo - Updated Car Elevator Sequence
And so, they depart, and more trash appears...
Let's not let this be innocent. The people doing this are the ones who will grow up to be the oligarchs fighting the peasants in Woman on the Edge of Time, will be the
compound-elite in Year of the Flood,
the Stewards of LA in The Fifth Sacred Thing… Ok, my obscure book references don't work. Let's re-label these people as the ones who will run the Soylent Corporation, or fund the military-corporation in Avatar. The chemical company directors in Erin Brockovich. Ok. Gordon Gekko. Mr Potter. President Snow. Cruella De Vil. Real-er life? That dentist from Minnesota. The ones who put all those incinerators in the Bronx. The folks Eisenhower warned us about.
Ah, you're getting carried away, your inner-web-critic says.
Well, consider. What happened in this tiny little marginal bit of land took hundreds and hundreds of individual decisions, and shows steady evidence of detachment...
"Keep Connecting" it reads...
Oh, there are probably a few saints who live in the
building. But evidence says that most who live there and go back and forth to their cars are not saints. Those, every single one that thought nothing
about tossing a can, a bottle, a fast food sack, a beer can, a water bottle, a candy wrapper, a couch--every single one of them that sees nothing between
apartment and car door, that rejects all connection with the earth beneath them, every one of them should be expelled from the University, banished from Columbia. These aren’t the people who need the privilege and power gained from a
university education.
http://www.whitecoffeemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Film-Review-Elysium_Lest-5.jpg
Minions, indeed.
later, bob
http://ordiate.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Elysium.jpg
later, bob
