Sunday, February 10

July 15, 2006: The LCCC's Battleground 5

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For that past four days I showed you views from the roof of that parking garage that slashes horizontally across the top of this picture.

But this time I wanted the fourth wall to fall away, so I stood in front of the Lancaster News Paper's printing building and looked back, first to the left and then to the right. You can see that developments created the gap in a hockey player's smile on the other side of South King Street. Up to the left is the front of the Watt&Shand department store whose facade the designers hoped to preserve to wrap around the front of the new hotel, while in front of me the convention center was planned to rise within the gap. See down there to the right, some buildings were getting stripped away to leave those buildings on the corner. More to tell about them tomorrow.

I can tell from analytics tracking that visitors are coming from all around the world to watch this cultural and economic struggle in Lancaster. And from your private e-mail I know a lot of you are now wondering how this battle's come out. You're wondering if everything in that image up there was brought to a halt, leaving that hockey smile broken into the city's center.

And you should wonder because as I took this picture the contractors were expecting that some judge would issue an injunction to the two county commissioners who were spending tax dollars as if they were their own. No... no... people like that never spend their own money. In fact lots of the actors in this drama expected those commissioners would get an injunction they could use to stop all of this.

"Jump forward Ted," a writer begged me. "Come on... stop the tease. How's this story end? Are we watching a tragedy or a triumph? And for whom?"

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