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Sunday, May 18, 2003 |
"when I was seventeen, London meant Oxford Street"
The Madison Trust for Historic Preservation is offering architectural tours of State Street. State Street is the anchor of a beautiful downtown. It's been closed to automobiles for years, with access only for buses and delivery vehicles, and it's remained the kind of street that people go to just to hang out and see other people at: a destination in and of itself, while many other downtowns have gone way downscale, and the middle classes have taken their business to cookie cutter shopping malls with the same stores: The Gap says "everybody in khaki" this year.As a child, going downtown was a treat. We'd go down for Halloween to see the store windows that art classes from various schools had painted with soap-paint mixes in fall themes; go back for the Christmas displays; go to Easter sales and to parades for Memorial Day and for Armistice Day. It was an exciting treat to go down for "Moonlight Madness" night: stores were actually open after dinner. Once, when travelling in California, I was in a store in Livermore. It had an old wooden floor that squeaked as you walked on it. All of a sudden I heard birds chirping, and I remembered that when I was a kid, department stores all had pet departments where we'd go watch fish and birds and kittens and puppies (okay, now I know that these were often horrible environments for the animals, but this is nostalgia, okay?). I walked over to where the chirping was, wooden floor echoing exactly like a downtown department store from my childhood, and found the department selling...digital, battery powered plastic singing birds.
Shopping malls have no excitement at all, and a real downtown is one reason I live here and work at the University (despite the economic disadvantages such as the effectively negative pay raise I'm getting this year, thank you Republican Party). Madison has often chosen to do something different, and it usually pays off.
show me the money
Friday I got to hear our Chancellor make some impromptu comments about the University's budget. He noted that a cut a quarter of a billion dollars meant we had done well in the budget process. There had been fears that the Republican controlled budget committee would cut the state's educational system even more than the Governor's proposed budget called for.He was right - things have been so poorly managed in this state that cutting a quarter of a billion dollars is considered good. Hundreds of people are being laid off, and academic staff are getting no pay increase at all but are going to be hit with an increase in health care deductions (so we've all effectively taken a pay cut).
Later on Friday, the same Republican committee proposed that road building should be exempt from any cuts whatsoever. I wonder how many of them would be in favor of spending half a billion dollars on new roads if the construction industry was barred from making political contributions to their campaign coffers?
