Monumentally Bad Design
Editorial Page
Guest Column
Published: Thursday, September 04, 2008
Updated: Thursday, September 4, 2008 4:27 AM EDT
Having left 15 years ago, it’s a rare occasion when I wind up padding the Scranton streets. I don’t always get the news of Scranton in a timely way. So excuse me if my tirade is old news to you, but I have only last weekend experienced the “renovations” at the Lackawanna County Courthouse Square for the first time. Somewhere there is a highway missing its dividers. Somewhere a mine pit needs to be filled.
Since it is likely that the courthouse will be attacked by terrorists, some sort of massive protection system is no doubt a necessity.But must such a buffer look like a wannabe’s wannabe version of a Maya Lin sculpture? Had the architect seen the Neo-Gothic Romanesque masterpiece made of warm local West Mountain stone that the blah granite bumpers are intended to protect?Or did the county fathers simply unpack a Protection-R-Us blueprint stamped by Homeland Security as a cost-saving measure to ensure that there would be plenty in the budget for kickbacks?
It’s clear that the commissioners didn’t hire people with a grasp of local nature or history to select the quotes for the grey adder. Nor did they —gasp! — solicit input on who or what should be honored in the most visible public space in the county. They seemed to rely on blindfolds and darts.
The commissioners could have redeemed some integrity if they had at least hired a fact checker. How is it possible that Gen. George Patton could relay such a poignant quote two years after he died?
The memorials around the courthouse have always had a random quality. John Mitchell stands out among Washington, Sheridan, Kosciuszko and Pulaski as the only man honored with a statue who had ever set foot in Lackawanna County. The GAR monument and the more modest monuments for more recent veterans have more of a universal soldier feel than the small monuments about town that list the names of the fallen, such as the one at the former North Scranton Junior High School that lists the fallen of North Scranton, including my great-uncle.
Expansion of the universal soldier motif to cover every wall and crevice of the square obscures the role that local veterans have played in serving our country while leaving little room for celebration of the natural, civic, cultural and economic history of the county. Visitors will assume we lean on the general because we are short on specifics.
Now that the renovations are near completion, it is time to inaugurate the process of taking them down.Dismantle the anachronistic wall of generic platitudes. Use the fresh-faced stone to repair the spray painted, broken, toppled, acid-rain-washed tombstones of the Avondale mine disaster victims and the Civil War veterans that lie among the weeds and litter in the Washburn Street Cemetery. There, among the heroes of Scranton, as many gravestones lay fallen as stand erect.
In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” Central High School alumna, former Scranton Tribune writer, and matriarch of modern urban planning Jane Jacobs wrote, “It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.”
September 04 2008 | undoing violence and mining and personal writings | No Comments »
