So we are home from our latest trip to The Ohio's.
The project that had lead me to the brink of insanity, teetering over the edge of despair, has been delivered safe and sound into the hands of my cousin. For the first time since last summer - I am project FREE.
I was, again, shocked to find Columbus, the city where I had lived for 30 years, has changed beyond all imagination. Sometimes for the good.
Mostly not for the best.
But there is major construction going on, everywhere. Everything is being widened, elevated, exploited. Ohio State is the worst of them. What used to be a University with endless fields for agricultural research is becoming as congested as the main campus.
There are hipsters everywhere, and they are all living in these cheap, banal, mid-rise wooden structured apartment buildings that seem to spring up like Lesser Celadon and mated to concrete parking garages that grow like Bitter Watercress.
The major downside to this is that the city is becoming cluttered with the bland.
And there is even a news source, Columbus Underground, that has become nothing but a pimp for developers, publishing one sided pro development stories.
I am beginning to better understand Chrissy Hynde's song, My City Was Gone, a bit better.
The roads were good and the new Prius delivered good mileage.
But I have found that the trip seems to take longer because I tend to stop more frequently to stretch my legs and walk around a bit more. Two and three hours behind the wheel tend to make my joints ache. So I am hunkering down for a couple days of rest before the invasion of the in laws commences, on this coming Thursday.
You are getting old, Cookie. And life goes on with you, and without you being there, too.
Your home town sounds like it's becoming like everywhere else - building for the bloody sake of it. One can inevitably expect it in a place like London, where you can blink and one ugly block disappears to be replaced by an equally ugly block... but even in the sticks, it seems, developers are all over like a rash. Jx
ReplyDeleteJon, I have a friend who travelled several times to London but hasn't been back for many years. He shudders every time he sees images on telly of the development in London.
DeleteEven though he was born here in Canada, he says, "That's not MY London."
He'll love "Britain's ugliest building" - the so-called "Walkie_talkie" - as much as we do. [And yes - that is the Tower of London overshadowed by the brute!] Jx
DeleteI can't sit for long periods either, or the arthritis gets to me. lucky for me, I am on the move constantly at work.
ReplyDeleteI get the same feeling, in small increments, each time I come back to visit Cleveland. Add them all together, and one sees the major transformations that have erased so much of the city I remember.
ReplyDelete--Jim
Did you see that that have leveled Van Aken Shopping Center? Not such a bad thing - it always was a nightmare. But now its going to become "New Urbanism". Too bad they can't make the old urbanism along Chagrin Blvd. work.
DeleteVan Aken--Cedar Center--Severance. All gone, and replaced with cheap lowest-common-denominator development. When I go back this summer I'll check what's going on at Van Aken--I'll have time to take a gander because I always get stuck at that monster intersection!
DeleteIf it's any consolation, I've had to make frequent pit stops all my adult life.
ReplyDeleteI've long been saddened by the homogenization of the world. The blandness is soul-crushing. And to think that the youngest generations don't know the world ever looked different unless they look at vintage pics on Instagram.
Rest dem bones. I know the feeling!
ReplyDeleteColumbus and Ohio State don't nearly look the same as when I lived / went there either. Campus and off-campus are fairly unrecognizable for many portions of it. And I'm ok w the demolition of Van Aken Center.
ReplyDelete