April Professor-Thurman-Valley View Block Club Meeting

This was a big meet­ing last night and the upshot of it is that I final­ly dis­cov­ered which block club I’m sup­posed to be going to, offi­cial­ly. It ain’t this one. No big deal though, because both block clubs have stuff to do with my street and I’ll take any excuse to vis­it Luck­y’s.

There was a lot of talk about con­vert­ing the Tremont school into a swing school for high school kids. Pret­ty much every­one at the meet­ing was in agree­ment that Tremont does­n’t need high school kids being served lunch from carts between class­es and hav­ing to use restrooms and class­rooms built for ele­men­tary chil­dren in a neigh­bor­hood that has lit­tle enough park­ing space as it is. So, we signed a let­ter, a peti­tion might be com­ing around and we’re sup­posed to make phone calls.

Then Pro­gres­sive Urban Devel­op­ment put forth the plans for a town­house devel­op­ment on the cor­ner of Fruit, Bray­ton and W. 9th. I was a bit leery of it because mere­ly look­ing at the vinyl-sided town­hous­es on the North Ridge fills me with ennui. But they said it had an “excit­ing” archi­tec­tur­al design. It turns out the “excit­ing” design isn’t much more than an out­er wall cant­ed at a 15 degree angle over the street. The town­hous­es will be vinyl-sided and have cor­ru­gat­ed met­al on the cant­ed part. Also, the only green-space will be hid­den on the hill­side and not vis­i­ble from the street. Basi­cal­ly it sounds ugly as hell. [Hon­est­ly, look at the town­homes on their site. Ugly.] They said the per­mit­ting process has­n’t begun yet, and I know my land­lord is unhap­py with the project. I won­der how the neigh­bors on Bray­ton feel. No one else from Fruit was there. Maybe because they pre­sent­ed it to the wrong block club.

In slight­ly less antsy news, a fourth grad­er art show is planned in Lin­coln Park in the upcom­ing months. I think I’ll prob­a­bly help out with it if I can.

My land­lord called me up after the meet­ing to tell me that I’m sup­posed to be going to the Auburn Block Club which is appar­ent­ly the first block club in Cleve­land and has some polit­i­cal clout [I don’t real­ly under­stand how a spe­cif­ic block club can have clout, but I’m an igno­rant bas­tard]. The Auburn block club meet­ing is tomor­row and appar­ent­ly it is often quite, erm, live­ly. I’m going to go and see what I can see. I brought up the idea of a Tremont dis­cus­sion site [did­n’t use the word blog because I did­n’t want to explain it to the old­er folks] that is unaf­fil­i­at­ed with any of the local busi­ness or polit­i­cal inter­ests. There was a lot of crick­et-like silence and a few mur­murs from you-in-the-back but we’ll see how the Aubur­nites feel about it.