Tripod Home | New | TriTeca | Work/Money | Politics/Community | Living/Travel | Planet T | Daily Scoop
POLITICS & COMMUNITY
DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS:
June 28, 1996
Adolf Redux: Buchanan's Basic Instinct Forget China: America Gets Rich on Slave Labor The Other Primary: Democrats Choose Their President My Teen Daughter Is a Lesbian Lap Dancer: In Defense of Trash Talk TV Cashing In On Irony: Dole's Secret Youth Strategy Revealed Hose-Down Economics: Why Settle for a Trickle? Have to Die Before I Get Old: Generation X Faces Old Age Payback Time: The Unabomber on Ice Joe Pulitzer and Me: Flirting With Fame Standard Deviation: America as Cost-Benefit Analysis You Can't Be Too Rich, Too Thin Or Too Litigious: An Ode in Awe of the Law Let Them Eat Averages: A Personal History of Wage Stagnation |
The only cool thing about the neighborhood where I grew up was an empty lot. Actually, the dozen acres at the northwest corner of Route 48 and David Road were anything but vacant. The Woods, as we kids called it, was a cluster of hundreds of overgrown apple trees, unlikely fields of tall grass populated by jackrabbits, woodchucks, dragonflies, birds and an incredible array of butterflies that somehow never visited the suburban sprawl of perfectly manicured brown grass and tract houses where we lived across the street. I spent half a dozen summers exploring the Woods. I thought nothing of trespassing through this three-by-five-block square next to Groby's Garden Center. No one remembered how old Mr. Groby came to own the neighboring plot, and the space occupied by the garden store had always been more than adequate for its needs. So there was never any talk of expanding into the Woods. No one cared about the place, and each year it fell further into a splendid bucolic state of disuse. My house was one of hundreds of identical, ranch-style, three-bedroom boxes built by a Dayton, Ohio developer, Donald Huber, during the 1950s. Even by 1975 the maples and sycamores they had planted in front of each house were still too short to provide significant shelter from the sun, much less entertainment for us children enjoying our summer vacations. The city never built a park in my part of town, so the 'empty lot' was the only place to go. Over time I came to know all of the Woods' landmarks. A big groundhog resided under the roots of a fallen tree, glaring and hissing fiercely at anyone who came near. The huge apple trees were vestiges of a 19th century orchard -- if you looked carefully you could still see that all of their trunks were in a straight line. Nothing remained of the old farmhouse but its foundation and chimney-it had obviously burned down ages before-but you could still walk down the stairs to the cellar, which teenagers littered with damp, half-rotten porn mags and empty Gennessee beer cans. Someone had inexplicably dumped a pile of big pumice rocks by an ancient shed; my friend Robert and I lugged one of these volcanic oddities back to my house, where it still sits in my mom's garden. The Woods was more fun than a park designed by a city civil engineer could ever be. Then Mr. Groby died. After a few years of probate, the Groby kids decided to unload the vacant lot. They sold it to a land developer, who promptly announced his intention to build a shopping center on the site, one of the last two "underutilized" areas remaining in the city. The Kroger's chain agreed to add a big grocery store to the Arbor despite the fact that there was already another Kroger's less than a half mile away. Within weeks the wealthy homeowners who lived on the Mad River Road side of the Woods allied themselves with the working-class renters across Route 48 to oppose the Arbor plan. The NIMBYist doctors and lawyers feared for their property values; we Huber residents just wanted to keep our unofficial park. Because the Woods was zoned for non-commercial use, the Arbor developer applied for a zoning change from the Kettering City Council. The guy posted a sign on the property announcing "The Arbor! Coming Soon -- Spring 1978." But the Ad Hoc Committee's expensive lawyer repeatedly prevented the zoning issue from coming to a vote. The fading sign was changed to read 1979, then 1980, 1981 and 1982. During this period, no city resident ever spoke out in favor of the Arbor project. The notoriously pro-business Kettering-Oakwood Times was choked with letters from Arbor opponents, and even editorialized against the proposal. In a democracy, however, unanimous opposition -- even well-financed opposition -- doesn't stand a chance against a well-placed bribe. Eventually the developer must have slipped the right money to the right councilmen, because they held a rare closed-door vote and quietly approved the zoning change without holding a public hearing. Bulldozers moved in on the Woods the next week. During the next few months, nearly every last tree fell. Confused moles, raccoons, rabbits, opossums and squirrels scurried in flight across David Road and Route 48. Every morning the residents of Kettering's West Side awoke to roads stained with blood and shreds of matted fur. The subtly rolling landscape of the Woods was graded perfectly flat. The dead trees and shrubs were trucked away. There were noticeably fewer birds around. After asphalt and sod were installed, the city provided an access road at taxpayer expense. The Arbor developer had promised "to maintain the natural integrity of the area." In fact, a dozen trees remain on the outskirts of a laughably large, empty parking lot. A decade later the strip-mall-style shopping center remains vacant, with the exception of a video store and a wicker furniture shop. Kroger's decided its previous store already served the area well enough; no anchor store ever moved in. The Arbor is a financial, ecological and social disaster. Lately the Republicans in Congress have been ranting a lot about property rights. If you own land, their logic goes, you have the right to do whatever you want on it -- even if it means paying off some third-rate politician for a zoning variance over the complaints of an entire city. You can build a facility that nobody wants and that no one will use. You can destroy the only decent thing about a neighborhood, and get the government to build you an access road. Sometimes I think Bob Dole's posse has a point -- after all, the Founding Fathers rebelled against the English primarily over property rights. We're not legally entitled to woodchucks or butterflies or jackrabbits -- no one ever proposed a Constitutional Right to Quality of Life. What's the point of owning land that you can't develop? But mostly, I wonder whatever happened to that big groundhog. Ted Rall is a syndicated cartoonist and freelance writer based in New York City. His columns have appeared in The New Haven Register, Los Angeles Times, Harrisburg Patriot-News, The New York Times and numerous other publications. © 1996 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.
|
Map | Search | Help | Send Us Comments
