Block Club Meeting

I went to a block club meet­ing for Tremont res­i­dents last evening. It does­n’t mat­ter which block club because appar­ent­ly I can go to any block club I want to go to and every­one will wel­come me. As expect­ed, most of the mem­bers there were old­er, the youngest prob­a­bly being in the late 30s to ear­ly 40s, except for the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Tremont West Devel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion, who was prob­a­bly around 27 or 28.

The meet­ing was held at Luck­y’s Cafe, home of a cute but bored barista. It seems like a nice and qui­et place, I might need to go there more often. The art on the walls reminds me of some sort of car­toon but I can’t quite think of it. There were eleven peo­ple total at the meet­ing, includ­ing myself. That was more than I had expect­ed. Top­ics of dis­cus­sion includ­ed co-chair assign­ments, crime and safe­ty, neigh­bor­hood busi­ness devel­op­ment and the sum­mer block par­ty.

Appar­ent­ly May­or Camp­bell is giv­ing us back our police offi­cers since this is an elec­tion year, and most of the peo­ple want­ed our mini-sta­tion to return as well. I did­n’t know that we used to have one, but Al and José [the old mini-sta­tion offi­cers] were described as “the heart and soul of the neigh­bor­hood.” So we are all going to give our City Coun­cil­man, Joe Cim­per­man a call to ask for the return of those two offi­cers and of the mini-sta­tion itself. So if you live or are going to live in Tremont, give him a ring and ask for it!

Since it was my first meet­ing, I did­n’t raise any ‘Oth­er Busi­ness’ since I like to feel things out first. One thing I would like to orga­nize is a lit­ter cleanup on a street by street basis. If this could be done, and if every­one in the neigh­bor­hood helps out on every street then I think it would do a lot to build rela­tion­ships in the neigh­bor­hood and fur­ther the sense of pride in our com­mu­ni­ty that Tremont has. While I am still dis­cov­er­ing sites about Tremont, I also think a com­mu­ni­ty blog or BBS would add a bit of punch and involve­ment on a more per­son­al, inter­ac­tive lev­el than just the sta­t­ic and face­less pages I’ve found so far. Those are ideas that can ges­tate a bit longer though. I am still far too igno­rant with the work­ings of the area. Hm. Although… if an utter­ly igno­rant igno­ra­mus starts doing things maybe that would inspire the intel­li­gent intel­li­gentsia to do more? Maybe more is already being done?

Also, the Tremont school is slat­ed to be closed, it only has 400 stu­dents. We were try­ing to come up with ideas for keep­ing that build­ing as a school or as a learn­ing facil­i­ty in the event the school clos­es. I also heard that the two oth­er ele­men­tary schools not a mile or two away are over­crowd­ed. A few peo­ple voiced the idea that we could move them to Tremont school. That does­n’t sound so bad. Anoth­er idea was that the school could be divid­ed in half and that one half could con­tin­ue as a pri­ma­ry school while the oth­er could become a con­tin­u­ing adult edu­ca­tion, trade, or tech­ni­cal school. This is pret­ty excit­ing. Every­one told me to come back, I don’t think they have very many renters attend the meet­ings.