We did.

That’s the answer Stephen Dare offes in his most recent post on the Metro Jacksonville, The Decline and Fall of the Jacksonville Downtown.

Anyone who knows Stephen will tell you his writing style is, at times, obtuse and heavily peppered with long forgotten words of the english language. Take this passage for example:

a long but fatal convalescence in the care of the professional resuscitators and consultants who sucked the marrow out of its bones before cauterizing all the patients vulnerable parts.

Yes, classic Stephen Dare. The passage above was the third in a series of points Stephen uses to illustrated the things that led to the fall of downtown. What he describes as the blasted, broken, burned, and all but leveled by 6 decades of graft, corruption, incompetence, and unbelievable numbskullery.

Three ways we destoryed our urban core:

  • First, the municipal busybodies
  • Two generations of merchants and politicians united in greed and corruption
  • a long but fatal convalescence in the care of the professional resuscitators and consultants who sucked the marrow out of its bones before cauterizing all the patients vulnerable parts. Translation: neglect by the very people tapped by the city to revive our downtown.

The post goes on to graphically illustrate the rise and fall of the city by showing before and after pictures. The before pictures depict a dense, vibrant downtown with store fonts on the corners. The after pictures show just the opposite. A sparsely populated downtown, anchored by parking garages instead of retail stores.

Have no fear I say. I feel that Downtown Jacksonville will once again be restored to its formal dense, vibrant self. Given the current movement away from sprawling urbanization to living in more dense urban areas, Downtown is well on its way to rebuilding. The national momentum towards urbanization and prices for urban/downtown property have pretty much sealed that deal.

In addition we have downtown advocates with a voice like Stephen and a platform like blogs and message boards to promote the movement of revitalizing downtown. If we continue the revitalization effort and provide checks and balances on those elected to make the decisions we can return downtown to its former glory.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 8:24 am and is filed under Downtown Jacksonville. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.