Sunday, November 12, 2006

Now You See It, Now You Don't!



I spent 6 years of my life on this corner.


I just have a couple things to fuss about this morning for my Sunday Sermon:

At nearby Town Center Mall in Kennesaw they are beginning work on a new addition to attract new customers. According to the architect’s drawing the new addition will have a small home-town look: A Main Street with a row of unique stores and restaurants on each side. It will probably have a central fountain and park benches. According to the drawing it will take up a whole big segment of the parking lot. So, they are building something to attract more customers, but taking away their parking accommodations?

I spent from age one to age seven of my life in a low rental housing project called The Clay Homes. The Clay Homes had 135 apartments. Last year they relocated the dozen or so families living there and bulldozed The Clay Homes off the face of the earth.

Probably “relocated” is more polite than methods actually used.

This coming Tuesday morning the mayor of Marietta, Bill Dunaway will hold a ceremonial-meeting, at the corner of a certain two streets, which is the same corner our apartment unit was on, and will make an official act of creating a new park. After the apartment buildings were erased or deleted it looks like maybe between ten and fifteen acres of bare land, which will soon be a park.

I think the city fathers asked themselves, now which is less of an eyesore – rows of brick apartments with laundry hanging on lines or a beautifully landscaped park with possibly someday a statue of them?

The heck with the poor that lived there because they couldn’t afford any place else, we all have problems!

The name of the park will be “Meeting Park”.

What kind of meeting? Drug dealer meetings?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ed, cant you see they're IMPROVING things by getting rid of the "undesirables..." after all, if we can't see them anymore, they must not exist.

Anonymous said...

every time we go by our old place in NC, we always look to see how things are going.

Eddie said...

Bird,
That's right, the best way of getting rid of a problem is "getting rid" of the problem.

Steve,
My mother-in-law is in awe everytime I take her someplace - it is not a direct shot from point A to point B, it involves detouring to points C,D, & E, of my old haunts.

Suzanne said...

(I'm shaking in my head in disapproval and disgust.) At least they didn't bulldoze the affordable housing so that they could build luxury condos and town houses. That's what they do in Chicago.

Eddie said...

Suzanne,
However, they did bulldozed the afforable houses about 2 blocks away and are building more expensive homes as replacements.