Fully agreed. Living downtown since 2011, & learning how the grid looked in the mid / late 1900s, 2011, then an aerial of today's landscape , a sad tone plays in my head & I realize downtown Little Rock has been getting slowly erased away and I feel has hit a point of no return. Butler Center of CALS in the River Market will show you how everything looked over the years.
I would obsess over new construction and when some of these surface lots had a possibility of being filled in, then the polar opposite when something was slated for demo, even it it's the last building on an entire square block.
Vanessa Carlton sings it perfectly, they've paved what I feel was a paradise and turned it into what eventually will be just a giant parking lot & I keep forseeing this in the future... (Big Yellow Taxi)
That crater from Spring to eStem is so nasty. When VCC (HA! Excellence in Construction (DESTRUCTION) & law office / annexes were removed across from Stephens, it really irked a nerve, adding to what's already a big gaping hole near the middle of the CBD. The sadness I feel may really anger and rage masquerading as sadness. I now agree with the fellow bchris12 or whatshisname that was crapting on LR on either here or City Data maybe 10 years ago for being so backward and podunk. He was right.
My hopes won't completely fade, but there;s just something about watching the area around you fizzle away. I can only imagine the sentiment of those much older that have lived down here since the 60s or 70s watching buildings get deleted as if someone was playing Sim City & wanted to start over.