Comment 84563

By t.w. (anonymous) | Posted December 30, 2012 at 19:49:17 in reply to Comment 84555

I agree that the park should be better used, although I'm interested to hear why food trucks and carnivals are bad... they seem like good attractions to bring out the community to me!?
But Gore Park is our town square. It was intended as such by George Hamilton himself—who actually sued the city successfully when they threatened to develop it. Since Hamilton’s death, the citizens of his city have fought against city council on numerous occasions to protect the park... even raising some of the money for the fountain and other fixtures themselves. And the importance of the relationship between Gore Park and the buildings on either side, I think, can be illustrated by the petition of the shop owners in 1898 to extend Gore Park from Hughson to John Street. When responsible landlords ran respectable businesses out of those storefronts, the public life in the park and the downtown store frontage worked like an inseparable organism, and they would today as they do in healthy cities around the world.
Regardless of whether we’ve forgotten the importance of civic gathering places or whether the internet has actually made them less important, this has only been the situation for a few decades out of the two centuries that the Gore has existed… we would be fools to irrevocably diminish our town square because we assume that the way we live now is the way it will be forever. Stewardship is about taking care of things for the people around you and the people who will come after you. There has been nothing but the weakest of hearsay to justify the loss of these buildings forever, to destroy them under current circumstances would be a complete abandonment of civic responsibility.

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