convulso

gonna second this. i lived in the lakeview / southside area for a couple of years. been out of the state for the past four months until this past friday night, when i passed through tuscaloosa and then bham on my way home. never before have i seen police close the five points section of 20th street unless there was a specific event (new year's eve) going on. a portion of 19th was also closed - there was that much pedestrian traffic. it seemed exactly the opposite of a dying district - despite any businesses' fears to the contrary.

i meant to post about this a while back. here's a link to the organization that is trying to sway public opinion about the demise of the strip: http://savethestrip.com/ i was in tuscaloosa this past friday night, passing through from a looong-ass drive home from tucson. i was surprised at how alive the entire town was - not just the campus area. the downtown, which is sometimes not quite so lively on a saturday afternoon, had every parking space filled and people walking everywhere. maybe it was event-related, but it was impressive. i thought my current AL town of residence (auburn) had tuscaloosa beat on the walkable community thing, but - echoing druidcity - i think T-town has a lot going on...right now. what happens in the future may piss a lot of people off, though, and transform the univesity corridor into a 'family-friendly' dead zone. 'bama is trying to do one or two things that could help...they're even implementing something auburn has had for a long time - a campus transit system. unlike auburn's sytem, though, the UA's buses only run right around the campus - more convenient for getting students from one building to another than for getting them from home to campus and back again. auburn's system, meanwhile, covers much of the city and almost passes for an in-town transit system in the process. i hope that, as UA works out the kinks with its new buses, it sees the need for expanded routes that take people to and from where they really need to go, instead of just making a campus taxi service. so many more off-campus dwellings seem to exist right around campus at alabama than at auburn, so expanding routes in tuscaloosa wouldn't entail taking them miles and miles away from campus, as they do here. it wouldn't be a difficult upgrade, and it would diminish the car-oriented mentality that is apparently driving some of the recent land-use issues at alabama. parking decks don't bother me, though - parking lots do. until recently, tuscaloosa had auburn's ass kicked in that respect. auburn still has a long way to go, but they just opened a new four-story (i think) deck near the stadium. more decks with more levels decreases the demand for open parking lots, which cover the perimeter of auburn's campus in abundance.

i had read (and i have no idea where) reports that the expansion was going to be much more costly - somewhere in the $1 billion range. at least i remember reading that. has this been revised, or do i need to cut back on the drugs? *edit* - it's the drugs. i re-read the post and realized 60,000 to 600,000 is a one thousand per cent expansion in capacity. that's what i remember reading. i knew it had something to do with a nice, round, impressive number. and while i'm making a fool of myself, how geologically / topographically feasible would it be (money no object) to deep-channel a navigable commercial waterway - from wherever the farthest-reaching in-state waterway is now - to somewhere in the bham metro area (say, a spur of the black warrior connecting with the tenn-tom to the west, near tuscaloosa; or a spur off the alabama / coosa river system to the east, near pell city)? forgive me for my ignorance on this topic (my terminology is probably inaccurate - 'spur,' etc.) - i don't know, other than the tenn-tom & tennessee, how many commercial channels we have or how far they extend, or where to even look for such information. my main reason for asking is that it seems that, if alabama is really going to be a heavy industry state going forward (car plants and the prospect of the massive thyssen-krupp steel project), a massive investment in our rivergoing infrastructure could help connect mobile bay with the interior of the state. if mobile to montgomery to bham to huntsville could be connected by a commercial channel deep enough to accommodate river barge traffic, it could help promote a river system that does not have such a problematic delta region (in terms of shifting geology and outdated flood control mechanisms) as the mississippi has in southern louisiana. aside from money, there are probably a milliion reasons why this wouldn't work (environmental issues; reconciling 'piggybacking' commercial traffic with the ecological/ recreational / gov't / private uses of existing waterways the big boats would have to travel, simple topographic challenges and dramatic elevation changes...) just a thought - the kind you have when you're a kid and drawing rollercoasters and skyscrapers.

workplay heading the way of the dodo? i hope not: http://bhamweekly.com/blog/2007/03/22/venu...or-sale/#more-7

oh, and here's joel montgomery's bad-ass mug shot: http://bhamweekly.com/blog/2007/04/07/apb-...gomery-pinched/

interesting...anyone seen this store yet? it's an ultra-cheap grocery on green springs, near publix. german efficiency to the extreme. story: http://www.al.com/business/birminghamnews/....xml&coll=2 wiki info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi ...i just want a legitimate grocery either downtown or somewhere between downtown and UAB. compared to many cities, though, i'm glad we have at least a couple. the western on highland avenue used to be a daily stop (along with tom & jerry's chevron) when we lived in highland.

lots of talk for what will likely be very little actual development (as your predictions indicate, colin). there's been much written in all the local rags of late about the need for more high-end accommodation downtown (and much bemoaning the flight of the annual waste management convention from tucson to phoenix for the next 5 years, mainly because of the dearth of accommodations). i agree that more high-end rooms are needed, but i would add that there definitely needs to be a greater concentration of them right downtown and not so near the freeway exits. the arena thing is a little confusing. i was pretty excited about it - at least as excited as i might get about a new arena - until i read how few people it's supposed to seat. i know it's got a dedicated purpose to serve an existing need, and from the downtown tucsonan i learn that the bigger problem, facilities-wise, is the need for smaller 'break out' convention space (small meeting rooms, etc.), but it seems that the arena thing could be more. it's like they thought big in terms of design and in terms of committing rio nuevo money to something concrete, but not in terms of making an arena that could wear many hats, say, 15 years down the road (though that's well into a facility's life cycle, in many cases). and yeah, i don't see the turtle thing, except in that way that somone points it out to you and you nod vaguely. i guess downtown's destined to become a megalithic desert menagerie, with the snake bridge and the tortoise arena. what next? mountain lion street cars?

there are plenty of great urban gas stations that wear many hats, depending on the weird needs of the neighborhood, but this doesn't sound need-based at all. $150 jewelry? whatever, dude.

no specific comment - just thanks for posting a lot of quality information on this and other threads in the AL forum. you've brought a lot of interest back to this section of UP, of late. most of what you post isn't inaccessible to the average person, but you seem to have the initiative and interest to find these good pieces of information (not to mention all the photos) and put them in front of other people - and that's what makes this forum a pleasure for me. thanks. and if half of the projects mentioned in your various montgomery postings come to fruition, i may find myself, in a decade or so, in the utterly unique position of actually looking forward to visiting this long-maligned city. leadership there really seems to have their heads on straight, at the moment. the downtown / riverfront stuff is almost too good to be true, especially to one such as i - wearied, over the years, of having to deal with montgomery in my professional and academic life. columbus, GA seems to be undergoing some similarly encouraging enhancements/urban growth.

god, this was so effing dumb. probably the dumbest thing i've seen coming from the city, primarily because passing it would have been so painless. there are some portions of bham that are very welcoming of gays - but the city as a whole, being hijacked by both its in-town population (and their crappy representation) and its metro population (rapists), will not admit that truth to the rest of the world. failing to pass what ought to be boilerplate measures such as this one are great indications that sitting bham council members, as well as those to come, will not go gently into a prosperous future.

not sure if congrats are in order - i'm guessing they are - but good luck. where is the biltmore area? i was in phoenix a lot this weekend, and i kind of came to the conclusion that, if one were inclined to undertake a density-based way of living in downtown phoenix, one could actually have a pretty nice life - if one's work and residence were within walking distance of one another, and if one were willing to choose from among very limited options for after-hours leisure (downtown is not exactly party central.) sure, it's comparatively dead, but it therefore seems comparatively safe for pedestrian traffic after hours. wages are higher in phoenix, allowing for some flexibility in securing some nicer rentals in the area; there's a grocery (!) and, well... ...well, i dunno - i've been trying to learn a little more about downtown phoenix on a couple of recent trips, and i've just slowly gotten the feeling that much of the misery of commuting that seems to go hand in hand with life in phoenix could be replaced by the boredom (as of now) of living in an inactive, but new - and safe - walkable area. not for everyone, to be sure - especially not for the culture-starved or nocturnally restless. but i think there's something of an empty canvas feeling to the urban fabric downtown, and perhaps ten or so years from now there might be enough leisure diversion in the area to actually offer a pretty well-rounded and convenient urban living experience - though i think, due to its lack of history, it will always be pretty soulless. kinda like san jose.

i just read both of those this morning. the first article tried not to be condescending, but some of the proprietors they talked to basically said some version of - 'we don't want to seem coldhearted...but homeless people are keeping us from making money.' it's true, of course, but there's no way not to make it sound very crass - human dignity versus a profit-shearing nuisance. i guess if you're gonna do an article about homeless people living in roof tents, the only way to stick any genuine compassion in there is to give city leaders the chance to go on record with plans for a funded agency to provide a systematic and accountable transition program, along with non-criminal enforcement to channel future transients into said program going forward. i read an article in another city's paper a couple of months ago that dealt with something very similar, but the city in this instance had just implemented a sweep program, with the essential ongoing funding, to remove homeless people from rooftops and underpass enclaves and stick with them during a long-term period of habituation into a settled life (or to channel them toward medical treatment for those with physical and especially mental disabilites). idealistic, yes, but the financial commitment to the program, coupled with a social services approach (as opposed to a prosecutorial approach) to relieving vagrancy gives the program a real shot at achieving a high success rate. this was in a city about the size of tucson's metro, but the homeless population was estimated at fewer than 500, whereas tucson's is - what did it say in the article (laziness!)? - more than 4,000? with those kinds of numbers, if there isn't a serious well-funded and ongoing program in place that ends the revolving door here, there definitely should be. imho, it's crucial to the success of our downtown's attempt at image rehab.

thanks so much for taking the time to respond so thoroughly. it helps, and confirms what i already suspected - that tucson's downtown is totally livable for someone like me, and that it's not the daily sh!tpit some (mostly those who never stray there) make it out to be.

colin (and any other tucsonans, if there be any, ever, on here): i was responding to your quote in another thread and got so far off track that i just copied the off-topic part and put it here - it boils down to being a long-winded question about what it's like to live in downtown tucson: we aren't timid about living in a downtown area - we've lived in plenty of sketchy areas that other people seemed to think were crime zones. from what i can tell, most of the perception of crime in downtown is of the property type, which doesn't deter us. violence is everywhere, but i haven't sensed that downtown tucson is as violent, even late at night, as some places i've lived (and enjoyed). downtown's proximity to pockets where violent crime has been a problem is a little unsettling for some, though. but as for just general seediness / hustlers / tweekers / thieves - well, i like for sketchy homeless guys to try to hustle us - it's actually something we have a lot of fun with every time we go into the heart of a big city. we ask them to elaborate on their stories (where did your car break down? we can walk to it!), and the fact that we aren't dying to get away from them confounds their expectations. there have been a few places where we've questioned our judgment in willfully tempting fate. i've had to get aggressive to the point of being physical in memphis and montgomery before, and we've had a couple of tense moments on the outskirts of new orleans. but oddly, nothing even close to that level of tension has happened to me in NYC, baltimore, atlanta, and the CA towns. i guess it's just the luck of the draw. most street hustlers are not the sort of criminals that bother us in the least, and once you get set up in a neighborhood, they become...well, if not your friends, then your...acquaintances. i like a certain measure of seedy street life, and i know that tucson's downtown has a reputation for that. at any rate, we both developed a mentality a long time ago that you can only be so scared of other human beings, regardless of their circumstances. we just aren't gonna be afraid to engage in an activity as civic as walking down an urban street. what makes us a little reluctant to live in downtown tucson - unless we stumble across something too good to pass up - is the lack of rewards in exchange for negotiating that seediness. in tucson, there's no grocery store, not much going on in the core late at night, not a lot of hope of working within walking distance of home (at least for the type of work we'd be doing), etc. the street life that is enjoyable if you have those amenities just becomes tiresome when you live amongst all of the grit but few of the perks. since you live in the area, colin, you see firsthand what i'm only surmising. i'd be interested to hear your take on how real the threat level is (to seasoned city dwellers, not suburban pansies) versus the mere perception of that threat - a perception that seems a little overblown here in tucson.

i've just never seen a state allot a city so much money (and a financial structure for obtaining it, to boot) without prior assurances of accountability: X amount of dollars is committed to go to Y, and it should be finished by 200Z. how did tucson manage to score this measure of tax siphoning without some very concrete plans for the money? tucson, the stepchild to the capital city? i'm a fu<king pessimist.