NEIGHBORING PROGRESS

(PHOTO: The view west from the courtyard of my apartment complex)

I’ve been thinking about my neighborhood, its scars and potential. For the last several weeks, I’ve been walking from my apartment to my office on campus. As I've walked, I’ve noticed just how much “progress” has changed our landscape. The construction and its possessive nature, the ways in which a company can come in and fence us out of our own neighborhood, has been difficult to ignore. The harsh colors of warnings, from the “road work ahead” to the “Danger: Hardhat Area” signs have become prolific and traffic cones seem to emerge from the asphalt with the same tenacity as dandelions in a front lawn.

The Antelope Valley Project is a huge infrastructural undertaking by the City of Lincoln. Though I can see the merits of the project, including lawmakers’ goals and ambitions sought on behalf of the citizenry, all that recognition requires a “future vision” that blinds many of the present. Construction on the project displaced many of my neighbors. Though they were “paid well” for their homes according to a Lincoln Journal Star story, this compensation has done little for those of us still calling the neighborhood home.

Debris, machines, and chain-link borders have begun to seem like permanent landmarks in my neighborhood. Walking to campus in the morning, the din of construction and the snarling commute traffic are an assault to one’s ears. At night, with so much of the landscape darkened after the loss of so many streetlamps, my neighborhood takes on a post-appocolyptic movie set aesthetic.


(PHOTO: The parking garage project at Antelope Valley Road and Vine streets, yet another UNL construction project)


(PHOTO: UNL parking garage project site at Antelope Valley Road and Vine streets)


(PHOTO: Antelope Valley Project, on the south side of Vine across from the UNL garage project)


(PHOTO: Just beyond the project sign, a vast darkness unfolds)

It now feels dangerous to walk home alone, something I didn’t feel before developers tore up so much of my neighborhood. Building on this sense of loss and displacement, UNL began work on the Whittier School just beside my apartment complex. For months now, the sounds and sights of a large-scale remodeling project that includes a geo-thermal power experiment beneath its eventual parking lot have been my neighbor.


(PHOTO: Traffic blurs by on the 21st block of Vine)

Again, the progress is promising, but the present is rather depressing. Residents of my student-housing complex lost their playground early in the project, so families with children have lost their place to take their children in the afternoons. We also, in the name of “good drainage” lost a beloved, 30 year-old crabapple tree that once stood in our courtyard. Between our buildings is a sea of cement, void of any vegetation or life.


(PHOTO: The courtyard between the two family housing units, where our tree used to be).


We will never again see its bold pink flowers from our balcony. Every spring for five years, my daughters and I could look out our third-floor sliding door and see nothing but blossoms. It was beautiful, and we loved all the color it brought into our whitewashed apartment, with its industrial carpeting and blank walls. This summer, we endured the blinding glare of lime and the radiant heat of concrete. Many nights, as we sat down for dinner, we expressed how much we missed that tree.

Each nice day we’ve had since “phase two” of the project began, opening the windows and doors for “fresh air” brought far much more than we wanted. The noise, the smell of tar and diesel, wafted through the windows as did the silt of progress as bulldozers moved earth all day. I’ve spent far too much of my time trying to keep up with the dust that has settled on everything in my apartment. Even with the windows closed now, as November chill settles across the land, the dust works its way indoors.


(PHOTO: The Whittier Project at night, as seen from the sidewalk at 22nd and Vine streets)

Everywhere I walk, the city and the university are working on infrastructural improvements, from the new physics building at 16th and W, to the new traditional student housing on 17th and R, to the valley project at 18th and Vine, to the Whittier project at 22nd and Vine – all is under construction.


(PHOTO: Traffic blurs by at 22nd and Vine streets)

I sometimes feel lost in a sea of concrete, dirt, and rubble. The road slicing through our neighborhood, the Antelope Valley Highway, is designed to make getting from the industrial north side of town to the suburban and comfortable south side of town easier. It’s a project designed to support economic development to the north, and neighborhood developments to the south. It’s clear, having lived in this mess for the last three years, that it’s not a project for this neighborhood.

There are no plans to construct a grocery store or support local businesses. Even the MoPac bike trail goes over 27th street, my neighborhood’s business district. Whenever I see the bridge, though I’m a cyclist myself, I think of Robert Frost and a line from one of his poems: “The only way over is through.”

As the city works to bridge its industrial north with its residential south, I wonder what will become of those who live between these two goals, the rabble of low-income residents I call neighbors and friends. What will become of this section of town, long after north and south residents have been given the path over it instead of the invitation to travel through it?

What will residents be shielded from seeing, from accepting? How will my homeowner neighbors feel years from now, when the highway hum of those traveling to more privileged places is constant, and unyielding traffic of thought?

Walking as I did last night, I noticed one sign tossed down at the end of the construction fence bordering my apartment complex parking lot. Some signs have been around so long, you don't even have to read them. The reality is obvious without a sign - the signified meaning unfolds "always already" under construction.



Even so, as overwhelmed as my neighborhood seems to be, others are paying quiet costs. The Matt Talbot Kitchen, has been turned into an island among the construction path. The kitchen served 105, 702 meals in 2008 to near-homeless and homeless clients, and is a crucial support center for those seeking outreach. Before “Phase II” of the construction began, MTK clientele could get to the kitchen easily. Today, spray-painted signs point the way to the center in what could be an imperiled path now that the light of day ends before supper.

I'm not sure what I'd want to tell city officials or university planners. They knew they would disrupt the neighborhood and environment. Homeowners, which represent a minority of those affected by the project when compared to renters, were paid well. But those of us lacking such privilege must live here, among this debris, and somehow call it home.