Ooh! Finally my year and a half of Latin came to good use!

I’d meant to comment on this article in the D&C, but Exile > stlo7 beat me to it. The source of my post’s headline is “emboldened” below:

Are problems emerging in Razing Midtown Plaza? Only if this is 2010 not 2007 || rochesterturning.com: turning the tide upstate

Geez, let the first doubt be cast. Reading the D&C this morning one would think that there are problems. I mean HUGE PROBLEMS. How could you not with a blaring headline - Problems Emerge in Razing Midtown.

I think what might have stayed my keyboarding fingers was all the pointless drivel in the comments section of the D&C article: there seem to be those in the habit of commenting at the D&C who will simply bitch reflexively whenever any government body spends any money at all. You can’t reason with that kind of logic. So, my mood for blogging on the issue was soured.

But Exile > stlo7 is right: the D&C seems to be lunging at the chance to pour cold water on the PAETEC project. And their eagerness to do so will doubtless have an effect on the public’s patience for the new start. So in the absence of anything approaching fairness in our major publications, its up to us lowly bloggers to fill in the gaps.

Well, I won’t say that the lack of a gaurantee from PAETEC doesn’t make me a bit uneasy. At the same time, why would PAETEC promise anything if they can’t count on the city to deliver? Nothing against the city, but “politics is politics,” and shit happens. Meanwhile, everyone agrees something needs to be done with MidTown, and the plans are almost all to knock it down one way or the other. So, aren’t we going to be in this situation regardless of what the plan that follows will be?

Personally, I’d hoped that the community nature of MidTown - maligned though it might be by your average suburbanite - could have been maintained. When I was at the “charrette” thing last winter, I saw a whole lot of community involvement. Not from local businesses or from all those people so concerned that they feel the need to comment in the D&C, but from locals who’ve depended on MidTown and for whom it really is a community center, however rundown it might have become.

In fact, to be honest, the plans to knock down MidTown make me quite maudlin.

But in the end, I agree with Elliot Spitzer’s logic, inasmuch as having cool stuff downtown means nothing if your not attracting people to the area. Attracting people to downtown means changing the mindset of suburbanites with good jobs like those found at PAETEC, so bringing the headquarters to MidTown is a great idea, actually.

As for the breathless discussion of “problems” in the MidTown project, the bulleted list cited in the D&C don’t sound like “problems” at all: they’re “challenges” perhaps, “details of construction” maybe, “hurdles” if you’re into sports metaphors, but not “problems.” Let me provide some insight:

1. What happens to the skyway system? Allow me field this one: who gives a fuck?
2. Would Midtown’s Euclid Building, . . be left alone and razed later? If I may interject, what the hell does it matter?
3. What happens to the Citizens Bank and former Wendy’s buildings? Pardon the intrusion, if we’re already knocking down the current home of Taco Bell, Luca Pizza and Seattle’s Best Coffee downtown, why should we give a rat’s ass in a red wagon about the “former Wendy’s building?”

It’s exactly these types of questions that got me started blogging in the first place. Golly! I feel like a journalist.

OK, so enough snark. The point is that these are beyond minor issues, and in the meanwhile, we actually have money being invested into our city that will make *something* happen after years of nothing. You would have thought that this was a project everyone could get behind. You would have been wrong. Instead of hailing this as an opportunity to do something constructive rather than another Fast Ferry misadventure, the doubters are out in force to make sure that “shitty Rochester” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Technorati Tags: MidTown, Rochester, Revitalization, Economy, PAETEC