Posted 1:24 PM by Gene

Today, being too lazy to save the time to go to a closer post office to mail some bills, I went to the soon-to-be-largely-vacated landmark at 30th Street (it's being turned into a glorified hospital wing, or something), and trodding there I saw the John Street Memorial Schuylkill River Park, nearly completed: a patio, two long wheelchair ramps, sixteen pillars and long walls and prettified fences. I can imagine it in five years: graffiti all over, Thoreaus on the ground, the ramps graveled by skateboarders, the fences ripped open, and all so our beloved mayor can hold a press conference. That's what I like about GUVMENT: it spends millions on urban improvement schemes and ZERO for maintenance. (And I say this as a mu-ni-CI-pal worker.)

On the other side of the gate is a CSX right-of-way, one side strewn with garbage. It stretches the imagination to see how the same hooligans who play on railroad tracks won't do their duty in a "park." While passing by a long container train ambled at 15 or 20 mph, a symbol of how America's declined in some ways, for all Dubya's dyslexic talk. Once there was a B&O passenger station on Walnut Street; though the railroads surely specialized in the bundling and mistreatment of commuters, the most elegant of their stations belie that, and their first-class trains still live on in the memory and the imagination. Now these same passengers are stuffed in aluminum-clad flying bombs, eating stale peanuts, and the four railroads we're stuck with haul mostly boxes -- and today CSX carted a container train of refuse, evidently its regular shipment (the Waste Management logo appeared on every container I saw) -- and at the end, a forlorn little telemetric box sat above the coupler where the caboose used to latch.

Meantime a cement-box condo has gone up north of the site; and the old Convention Hall, a Art Deco landmark that once emceed three political conventions the same year (1948), has been demolished for more non-profit empire building. Perhaps life was once much worse, but how can we feel that way constantly haunted by our past?