the self-reflection of a blogger
Submitted by scharton on Mon, 04/24/2006 - 08:11.
There is something called "my best self." Life's really great when that is the part from where I choose to operate. I truly believe that it is nothing but laziness that keeps me from living life in "best self."
Symptoms often arise to say "hey, what the heck's gong on," that doesn't seem like the kind of thing your BEST SELF woud say or do. Then I have to go inside for a deeper look.
On Friday I lashed out at one of our Fresno Famous regulars. I am sorry that I did that. It has bothered me throughout the weekend. Frustration is something that exists, but is not an excuse for being mean to others. So, Anti-Musick, I apologize for being an FA.
Now, the difficulty with this apology is that it is for my behaviour, not for the frustration that is getting to me. But it is incumbent on me to find ways to deal with or express my frustration in ways that are helpful, rather than mean, or hurtful to myself or others.
So here is my frustration with my hometown: Many people have formed opinions about downtown revitalization, without testing them against the experiences of other places. This would be okay, if we were on the cutting edge of the effort, but the fact is, we are decades behind other cities. Another frustration is that while we are so far behind the rest of the parade, it doesn't seem like we are in a particular hurry to catch up.
As a community, we appear to have a very low level of knowledge about revitalization practices & policies.
We accept opinion as fact: We need more parking downtown, we need a lake, we need to clean the sidewalks, we need to rip out the mall, we need to preserve the mall, downtown is safe, we need cleaner sidewalks, we need an anchor store...opinions bouncing off of opinions.
Now, I'm positive that I've been guilty of having unfounded opions about a variety of topics. Hopefully my frustration with others will help me to correct this flaw in myself, that I will catch myself. Hopefully I will remember that as I'm sure that I have been guilty of holding unfounded opinions that I will be understanding of others who are doing the same.
But back to the topic of revitalization, we can't afford to have so many unfounded opinions at this point in time. We have examples of success and failure to learn from. We need to raise our corporate knowledge in this area. Pay attention when you visit other cities, ask questions, read about revitalization topics and examples on-line. Every person who becomes a little more educated about the process of revitalization will be helping to raise our collective IQ, and helping the effort tremendously.
There are so many really smart, experienced folks out there to learn from, and they are generally very giving of their knowledge and experience. Pick a city that you are interested and learn from it, and then see what parts of that knowledge could be helpful to our 'burg.
5 whole blocks?
To get appliance parts? What an outrage! I'm fuming.
You guys suck.
How about any other major city? I mean, this is ridiculous. I have to drive for 5 blocks to get appliance parts. Is this normal? I'd very much like a store nearby. Even if it's a small one.
Two SoCal Downtowns to Look At??
I lived down in Los Angeles for seven years.
There were two interesting (to our discussion)
malls. One was the mall in San Fernando (old
Mission town in the north part of the San Fernando
Valley), and the Third Street Mall (now the 'Third
Street Promenade') in Santa Monica.
I found both interesting, because when I first moved down
there (1986), they both resembled our Fulton Mall in condition and style. It's also interesting, because San Fernando is a not-so-affluent area and Santa Monica is a fabulously wealthy tourist/movie star-ridden place, yet they both looked a lot like the Fulton Mall —40's, 50's or 60's era-looking shops, no through car traffic,seen better days... All three of the mentioned malls
looked a little worse for wear, a little lonely, a lot under-used.
[For a non-realistic look at Santa Monica's mall at the time, look at the dressed-up-for-the-movies version in Pee Wee's Big Adventure.]
Maybe someone with more city-planning background could draw some
informed comparisons using these two SoCal malls, but here's what I saw:
I'm not sure how the San Fernando mall is doing now. Maybe somebody
else here does. I haven't been there
for almost twenty years. But sometime in the early 90's Santa Monica's Third Street Promendade went KBOOM and turned all fabulous.
Sure, they are an incredibly
wealthy town with tourists who flock there by the thousands, but they also did a clever thing or two. They put a bunch of restaurants
and a bunch of movie theaters in there(and places like Borders). [Soon after moving back to our fair
Central Valley, Riverpark appeared---the pretend neighborhood with all the spffiy new movie theaters----it hurt like another nail in the coffin.]
Helena, Montana
Hey Joe,
It's kind of funny, it's harder to think of cities that are failing. I'm having toruble thinking of a downtown that has fewer people on its main street, at 7:30 on a Saturday night than we do. I haven't been to Bakersfield for years. I'm sure that there are cities in the L.A. and SF metro areas that don't work well.
Helena MT has a pedestrian mall that they're still arguing the traffic, no traffic issue. But it has more business foot trarffic then ours (especially for a town of less than 100K people).
Does anyone out there know about Tacoma?
Philadelphia reportedly has more vacant homes than homeless people (that's kind of weird), they also have many, many old vacant factories.
I can't think of a bad city/downtown on the coast of California. I can't think of a bad city/downtown in Oregon. Montana was great except for Butte. Arlington, Virginia was an example of all housing with no retail center. Indianapolis has downtown issues because they relied heavily on big projects like a indoor mall, sports arenas and convention center, so they lost much of their sidewalk level charm. I read that Cleaveland is slipping after they put so much effort into the R&R Hall of Fame. Cincinatti didn't have much nightlife, but Kentucky sure provides it right across the river!
Let's put it this way...if you and I went out to Fulton and Mariposa on Saturday night, from 6-9pm, and did a count of pedestrians, how many people would we count?
How many would we count if we went to the Main Street of: Hanford, Visalia, Merced, Kingsburg, Reedley, Modesto, Tower District, Ripon, Lemoore, Tulare, Los Banos, Madera, ? The onlly two that I'm not sure that we could lose to are Madera and Tulare, but I'm not sure that they wouldn't beat us too. And these are just our neighboring valley towns.
Does it honk anyone else off that Ripon and Lemoore have more downtown, weekend, evening foot traffic than we do?
It's a good question Joe, let's burn up the braodband lines to see if we can find the worst downtowns or pedestrain malls that are unchanged, but are working.
Craig
What is an authentic community?
self reflection
Scharton, your blog is humbling and honorable.
I wondered about the feelings that I saw, and then, after thinking and praying about it, realized that I was reading the views of people who genuniely love where they live, genuniely love each other, and want to see things go well.
Without sounding all sappy,,,, dude, I came here under really bogus circumstances... and had every reason to just load up the truck and head back to NY.
--even when home with (all of my,) family, over the holidays, I was, by weeks end, really looking forward to returning here.
(And believe me, there was a lot I didn't want to think of that brought me here to begin with...)
But the people of Fresno, their hearts and honesty, as well as the beauty and weirdness of the place is what keeps me here...
There are a few creeps,,, but they are so few...
And there are people who are talented, caring, creative, -and seeking to make the place better for the rest of us, --as well as those who are growing here, ---like you--- that make living here more a case of creating something cool every day.
You and your flame-warrior friend did a good thing... you cared enough to write about it, and you've cared enough to write about it and explain your heart, --and win the respect back of those who read such things. I find this here (both on Fres Fam, Mindhead, etc...) and in local life all the time.
Folks don't think like this and write back East... they just don't.
I applaud your thinking, look forward to reading from all of you more, and appreciate knowing that folks like you live here and care about this place.
credit is due where it is due, so I'm writing this.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch, (even if this is not Lake Wobegone.)
What about other cities that are failing downtown?
We often talk about looking at other cities that have been successful in their downtowns, and I agree that's very important, most important in fact. But what about other cities that are failing, maybe even worse than Fresno? We can learn perhaps just as much from those failures, and comparing them to ours, as we can from other cities successes. For example, you mentioned the other cities with pedestrian malls that have changed them, either in ripping them out, or re-configuing them. Well, my question is, are there any other cities with 1960's era downtown pedestrian malls that haven't been touched at all, and are they 1) better than Fresno currently is, or 2) worse than Fresno. If they haven't touched them, why? And what else have they tried to do and failed at?
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