Written by Jordan Baer.  This article is posted by the City County Observer without opinion, bias or editing

If you surf the City-County Observer quite frequently like I do, you’re probably well aware that those in the driver’s seat at the Civic Center have been no stranger to making mistakes of epic proportions. Such mistakes as the Homestead Tax Grab, Earthcare, and Global Blade Technology are silent but violent. Due to these mistakes being mostly financially related, they show very little tangible remnants of failure outside of a building that has been looking for tenants long before Earthcare and GBT became household names.

The only thing worse than the above financial disasters have been the tangible urban planning mistakes whose negative consequences are already beginning to set in. For quite awhile, we’ve watched the city, the chamber, and now one of our universities focus on an “innovation corridor” along I-69 while the Hercules Motor Plant district located in the northwest corner of the Lloyd Expressway and U.S 41 sits rotting despite the fact that the entire area enjoys great road access, great rail access, and great road and rail access to our airport and ports.

We’ve seen a complete lack of transparency during the hotel project as very few people have seen all the competing proposals. We’ve also watched the Great Lawn of Lies be exposed time and time again for what it is and was- An excuse to tear down an arena that didn’t need to be torn down. And finally, we’re now watching the ECVB prepare to construct sprawl fields in a lot far away from the city’s inner core, while a current ball field lot sits open just across from Don Mattingly Way, Bosse Field, a neighborhood that openly embraced the project, and just down the road from the Ford Center and a lot that just might turn out to be a hotel someday. If only this was all just a wicked nightmare.

With all these failures in tow, it appears the city is now ready to make yet another mistake that will prove to be a mistake that creates a legacy of mistakes. Just a few weeks ago, we learned from the City-County Observer that the city is now focusing on using the Old Greyhound Bus Station lot in their bid to lure the I.U Medical School to Downtown Evansville. This decision, if followed through, is a losing proposition. Like all of the previous failures listed above, there is a better alternative, and it’s an alternative that has now been available for roughly 40 years.

Back in 1971, the city of Evansville’s school corporation made a terrible decision. They decided to vacate their only downtown high school in favor of the current one that for many years was farther north than North High School. This decision resulted in demolition of Old Central High School in 1973. Thanks to those at HistoricEvansville.com, we also know that this decision didn’t just affect the city’s urban planning, it also destroyed what could possibly be argued as one of the best architecturally designed buildings in the school corps profile…

http://historicevansville.com/image2.php?id=educational%2FOld+Central+-+postcard+6.jpg

Of course, by now you’re saying, “that’s great but why pick a lot just because of past architecture?” The answer to that is that this isn’t picking a lot just because of past architecture. You see, some of the effects of Old Central High School being on the lot are still intact for IUMS to benefit from such as the YMCA (Old Central Gym). Let’s take a one on one look at the advantages of the site compared to those of the Old Greyhound Bus Station Lot…

Old Central- Directly Across from the METS Bus Terminal

Old Greyhound- On Lot of Previous Bus Terminal

Old Central- Directly Across from the YMCA

Old Greyhound- Directly Across from the YWCA

Old Central- 2 Blocks from the Victory, 3 Blocks from the Ford Center, 4 Blocks from the Hotel on the Same Road

Old Greyhound- 4 Blocks & 1 Over from Victory, 4 Blocks & 2 Over from The Ford Center, 4 Blocks & 3 Over from the Hotel

Old Central- Down the Road from Deaconess Hospital and a Jacobsville Area Desperately Needing Revitalization

Old Greyhound- Down the Road from Tropicana Casino- the Last Place You’d Want a University

Old Central- Across MLK from over 3 Historic Apartment Complexes

Old Greyhound- Across from a Bank, Office Space, and That’s About It

Old Central- Catty Corner to a Public Parking Garage

Old Greyhound- Across the Street from a Private Parking Garage

Old Central- Would Serve as a Gateway to Downtown With Future Expansion to the Northwest & Northeast

Old Greyhound- Is Landlocked, in the Middle of Downtown, and Stuck in the Entertainment District

Old Central- Has the Opportunity to be the Focal Point of Downtown with a Reconstructed Bell Tower

Old Greyhound- Let’s Just Hope They Don’t Tear Down the Historic Bus Station

According to the unofficial report on the Vanderburgh County Assessor’s website, the two parcels of land that make up the lot Old Central High School sat on are owned by the YMCA and Vanderburgh County. I can’t imagine negotiations with either of these two being as rough as they have been currently. Not to mention, a fuse of cash coupled with a med school neighbor would do wonders for the YMCA.

Back in 1969, USI, then ISUE, made a TERRIBLE decision. They moved all of their campus out of the former Centennial School Building on the corner of 12^th & W. Illinois St. and onto the current campus (http://historicevansville.com/site.php?id=centennial). This decision has no doubt been the catalyst for sprawl on the far Westside while contributing to the decline of Franklin Street before the Franklin Street Events Association took over. Having grown up in a house just one block from the old Centennial School lot, I can’t help but wonder just how different Franklin Street and the area around it would look today if USI had made the right decision and stayed.

Now, as IUMS seeks a new campus, we must make sure we don’t repeat the USI mistake. In an era of New Urbanism, now is the time to put together a genuine plan for Downtown Evansville, and that starts with IUMS. Since the demolition of Old Central, there’s been a void left in the middle of Downtown. As I listened to the bell tower above Oak Hill Cemetery roar with music last month (thanks to cemetery superintendent Chris Cooke), I fail to understand why the city doesn’t recognize that now is the time to build back Downtown Evansville’s iconic bell tower image.

With a little under four weeks to go, the city still has time to undue what’s been done. For once, I would like to see our city leaders do the right thing and put together a proposal that addresses multiple needs and advantages of Downtown. This broken record is heading around again, will the fourth verse be like the third, second, and first?

Owsley County, Ky. – There are lots of diversions in the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread–hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in eastern Kentucky, the last redoubt of the Scots-Irish working class that picked up where African slave labor left off, mining and cropping and sawing the raw materials for a modern American economy that would soon run out of profitable uses for the class of people who 500 years ago would have been known, without any derogation, as peasants. Thinking about the future here and its bleak prospects is not much fun at all, so instead of too much black-minded introspection you have the pills and the dope, the morning beers, the endless scratch-off lotto cards, healing meetings up on the hill, the federally funded ritual of trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best cigarettes and good old hard currency, tall piles of gas-station nachos, the occasional blast of meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, the draw, the recreational making and surgical unmaking of teenaged mothers, and death: Life expectancies are short — the typical man here dies well over a decade earlier than does a man in Fairfax County, Va. — and they are getting shorter, women’s life expectancy having declined by nearly 1.1 percent from 1987 to 2007.

If the people here weren’t 98.5 percent white, we’d call it a reservation.

Driving through these hills and hollows, you aren’t in the Appalachia of Elmore Leonard’s Justified or squatting with Lyndon Johnson on Tom Fletcher’s front porch in Martin County, a scene famously photographed by Walter Bennett of Time, the image that launched the so-called War on Poverty. The music isn’t “Shady Grove,” it’s Kanye West. There is still coal mining — which, at $25 an hour or more, provides one of the more desirable occupations outside of government work — but the jobs are moving west, and Harlan County, like many coal-country communities, has lost nearly half of its population over the past 30 years.

There is here a strain of fervid and sometimes apocalyptic Christianity, and visions of the Rapture must have a certain appeal for people who already have been left behind. Like its black urban counterparts, the Big White Ghetto suffers from a whole trainload of social problems, but the most significant among them may be adverse selection: Those who have the required work skills, the academic ability, or the simple desperate native enterprising grit to do so get the hell out as fast as they can, and they have been doing that for decades. As they go, businesses disappear, institutions fall into decline, social networks erode, and there is little or nothing left over for those who remain. It’s a classic economic death spiral: The quality of the available jobs is not enough to keep good workers, and the quality of the available workers is not enough to attract good jobs. These little towns located at remote wide spots in helical mountain roads are hard enough to get to if you have a good reason to be here. If you don’t have a good reason, you aren’t going to think of one.

Appalachian places have evocative and unsentimental names denoting deep roots: Little Barren River, Coal Pit Road. The name “Cumberland” blankets Appalachian geography — the Cumberland Mountains, the Cumberland River, several Cumberland counties — in tribute to the Duke of Cumberland, who along with the Ulster Scots ancestors of the Appalachian settlers crushed the Young Pretender at the Battle of Culloden. Even church names suggest ancient grievances: Separate Baptist, with the descriptor in all-capital letters. (“Come out from among them and be ye separate” — 2 Corinthians 6:17.) I pass a church called “Welfare Baptist,” which, unfortunately, describes much of the population for miles and miles around.

Here is a link to the entire article that is 4 pages and appeared first in the National Review authored by Kevin Willamson.

http://nationalreview.com/article/367903/white-ghetto-kevin-d-williamson