|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
On Feb. 13, 1945, the Royal Air Force, in a catastrophic
raid that killed 35,000 people, reduced the city of Dresden to a massive mountain
of bricks and rubble. What was once a city that epitomized the apex of aesthetics
in terms of urban planning and architectural excellence came crashing down in
one night of unrelenting attacks and interminable firebombs. These undoubtedly are the wages
of war. Yet Dresden is coming back, albeit brick by brick. And those who have
planned her restoration have been just as mindful of the architectural beauty
of the past as the urban necessities of the present. There are in fact many places
in the world where the marriage between aesthetics, growth, and
reconstruction has produced not only something pleasing to the eye, but
environments in which people travel and work with some pride in their
surroundings. Unfortunately, James City is
not one of them. Take, for instance, the section
of Richmond Road that runs from Williamsburg to Toano. What was once a pleasant highway bounded
by farms and groves of trees has become nothing less than a garish nightmare
of ugliness, a morass of eyesores, and a maze of stoplights. In addition to a slew of
hideous, architecturally uncoordinated shopping malls, it is now home to an
auto body shop that resembles a cross between Mad Max’s thunderdome, a
multiplex theater gone terribly wrong, and an alien spaceship. Beyond that is
a squalid shopping center, which looks as though it’s been transferred en
masse from a third world country. Luckily, its drabness has been marginalized
by the boxy mattress store that now sits in front of it. Farther up the road is the new
Restoration Center, squatting adjacent to the highway and eerily resembling a
circular Noah’s ark with its dove-covered portholes. Just to the east of
Norge is a new auto dealership that looks as though its owners eschewed the
plans of an accredited architect in favor of those sketched by a student of
Freudian psychology. And then there’s Lightfoot.
Remember Lightfoot? That sleepy little town with its massive oaks on each
side of the highway and a tiny post office for all of its 15 residents? Well, in case you haven’t noticed, that’s
been replaced by one of the choicer sections of Jefferson Avenue. In fact, if
county planners are consigned to hell, they will quite properly wind up in
Lightfoot. So much ugliness has mushroomed
so quickly in Lightfoot that you wonder whether prospective developers just
wander into the Planning Department and say, “We’d like to put up an ugly
circular white thing with gaudy signs plastered all over it.” And the
Planning Department responds, “How fast can you do it?” Or, “We’d like to fill up that useless
farmland across from the Pottery Factory with hundreds of bulky retirement
homes.” And the Planning folks say, “What can we do to help?” Nor are things going well
farther up the road, in Toano. Not only has it become the industrial dump of
the county, but several houses along Richmond Road have been abandoned by
their owners and left to rot or to be eaten by the hungry octopodal vines
that envelop them. Yet the county does nothing. In the middle of town sits
Burnt Ordinary, a fancy name for another architectural nightmare designated
as low income housing. What I’m wondering is where in the books of the
Planning Commission it says that low income housing has to be as drab and
unimaginative as a bunch of row houses in a West Virginia coal mining town? To its credit, however, the
county, in its comprehensive plan, has designated Forge Road in Toano as a
“community character corridor.” That
is, our planners have realized that areas of greenland and farmland in the
county are so preciously few that they should be only minimally developed. Yet even now there is an
application being filed with the Planning Department to allow all of one 20
acre parcel on Forge Road to be designated for moderate density use. If this
is approved, as many as 240 residences could be constructed on the plot, thus
flooding Forge Road with even more traffic and making a stoplight at its
junction with route 60 almost a certainty. Even worse is the prospect that
this will open up the floodgates, and that all of Forge Road will be susceptible
to such outrageous development. This would be nothing short of criminal. While Richmond Road has already
been lost to the demons of development, let our county planners at least have
the grace to retain what’s left of beauty in the county and preserve
corridors like Forge Road as a reminder of the farms and other greenlands
that once made this a gentler place to live. Let us remind our planners and
supervisors that, when it comes to further development, we will no longer
accept their three blind mice approach to things. And let us look to Dresden,
not Newport News, when it comes to preserving what little aesthetic quality
of life we have left in the county. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
lewleadbeater.com Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved
email: LWL@lewleadbeater.com |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||