Time marches on, so must we

This is the Lynnfield Rapid Station in Shaker Heights, taken around 1927. Waiting for the rapid are what appears to be three or four males, all wearing caps - a hallmark of boys and young men into their twenties in that era. We are looking East-Northeast.  The building is there - a bit of a community touchstone - but the wide open spaces are now full of four and five story luxo-apartments and mondo condos from the 1940s and 1950s.

In Shaker Heights, the light rail has always been called the "Rapid" because when it started, it was the fastest way to get downtown.  There are two lines of Rapids serving Shaker, the Van Aken line, which is where the Lynnfield station is, and the Shaker Boulevard line which terminates at Green Road.   I have no idea why it's called Green Road, it just is. 

Beyond the Green Road terminus, is miles and miles of right away to the east that once served the Nickle Plate Rail Road.  The Van Swearingen brothers, who founded Shaker Heights bought the Nickle Plate just to get the right away for Shaker commuters.  Eventually, the line was to extend east, but the Depression, the death of one of the brothers - they were not twins, but they were everything to each other that if one didn't know better one would have thought they were Siamese Twins - the collapse of the Railway empire they built and then the death of the second brother ended that hope.

As I type this in, the Van Aken line has its own temporary "green" goal - the rebuilding of Van Aken Center is clad in green sheathing as the new building go up.  Eventually, the new complex will try and meld offices, retail and condos together into the "New Urbanism" mold so popular today.

After seeing people bickering online with one and other over this mass of "green" materials, on an uncompleted build out,  Cookie is simply annoyed with people who cannot see that the project is unfinished, and the holes for windows haven't yet been cut on the rapid side of the development.

Cookie really would like to kick some people's ass over their freak out on this project.

The city bent over backward to hold public forums to get input on what people wanted for the site, and the residents went.

The people who didn't go these meetings are the Shaker ex-pats, like Cookie, who don't live there any more, but boy ol' boy, are they the ones who are complaining the loudest.

Jesus H. Christ, the griping, bitching blame casting is grating on my nerves.

Grow the fuck up people.

Or, put another way, the Husband, always a bright and cheerful sort point out that Cookie is, in 2018, 5X and born in 196X.  If we subtract my age today from the year of my birth, that puts me back to the 1905 to 1915 era. That's kind of scary* when you think about that as a scale of time when you play "what-if's" and "imagine that".

Look, for as much as I loved Shaker, a city cannot live on the memories of what once was.  It has to progress.   If things could be kept exactly as we remember it in our era, then the people who are standing in this picture would have wanted the area to remain as they remembered it - say in this picture.

Now you are asking, Cookie, what the fuck are you talking about?

Well, remember at the top of the post how I mentioned that this picture was taken about 1927.  Remember what I said about taking your age, and subtracting it the year of your birth?  Think about.  The guys in the pictures are wearing caps, not hates, so they are young men.  Say born about 1905ish.  Would they expect all the brick apartments and luxo-units to be torn down just to accommodate their memories of this part of the city?

Change is going to happen.  It's OK not to like it.  It's OK to embrace it.  But bitching about a half complete project in a town that you've left behind?   Look, you either get with the program or you get left behind.

So sayeth Cookie.

*Cookie's mother was born in 1924 and died in 2010 at 86.  If we take 86 from 1924, we get 1838.  She would freak out over that.