Many of us made an interesting decision in our choice to live in the inner city. If you made that choice more than twenty years ago it was certainly a sketchy decision.
If many of our leaders and developers in those days had their way there would now be massive destruction of historic buildings and a four-lane freeway running through my neighborhood. It would be much like the CPR, still running ugly through the hood without any community contribution.
However, community warriors stepped up and the oil tanks were replaced by deer herds and slowly we became funky and popular. Artists and musicians were the new settlers. Even in this change, the voices of urban progress still wanted to tear down institutions like our old school.
So, the warriors made babies.
The babies needed to learn to swim and so they lobbied for a pool.
The babies grew and learned to swim and get along. Remarkably, our inner city, instead of slipping into the American style ghetto model, began to emerge from a sketchy cocoon into the much-desired butterfly of cool.
There was always music, art and funky commerce here and now more and more of our
suburban neighbours are realizing they love artisan beer to mall beer and are bringing their dogs into Cold Garden.
I spent my working life trying to save public institutions. In my early years I wanted to get rid of them but some hard work and elder sense made me realize that like an old Ford truck, we need to consider repairing our cherished and vintage institutions, not call for their demise.
We live in times where anger, mistrust, fear and bad information lead many to believe our
institutions need to be taken out. Public service, public safety, public education, public health and even public democracy, has some folks believing they are so broken we might need our own commercial real estate mogul and a slick car salesman to create a better new world.
I need convincing.
My old heart just wants to help fix the vintage.
The Music Mile is neither an organization or an institution. It is simply a place. There was
always music here living, dancing and breathing life in old theatres, brick buildings and Quonset huts. All we did when we started the Music Mile was shine a light and hook up some metaphorical speakers to what always existed.
It worked for the last ten years and so did the pool.
But funky quickly folds to finance, doesn’t it? Commercial real estate now worth a few million dollars can easily crush a Quonset.
And a swimming pool.
Just pull the plug and bring in the dozers and say good bye to soul and laps.
It’s always heartbreaking to see any community that thrives on music, art, dogs, kids, parks and good food fight for its life. But all those things do not really have high profit margins, do they?
It’s not a fair fight as we see when a swimming hole or a music venue is worth millions.
To end more positive, we have seen hybrid victories in our hood, where vintage met
contemporary and survived. The King Eddy was classic vintage with dirty blues, Export A smoke and Saturday afternoon harmony. The numbers guys saw it as a teardown, but I would love to shake the hands of those folks who convinced the developers to hand bomb the vintage Eddy brick by brick and load it back up with fine music once again running through its veins.
Excuse me, the pool is also vintage.
The pool is community.
However, the pool is sitting on millions of dollars worth of commercial real estate.
It will either go down like a vintage Quonset or be integrated back into the community like the treasure it is.
I can swim under water pretty good but I am not holding my breath.
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Thank you, Bob, for sharing some thoughts we can all reflect on. 'The Mile' is passionate about supporting a diverse community that supports the arts, wellness, health and human connection. There are many sharing in the efforts to save the Inglewood Pool, and you can find out more here.
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