A Little Less Green Space

-
Downtown Construction near Courthouse
I saw this coming. Back in April of last year I came across a bit of greenspace next to the courthouse, bounded on three sides by North Magnolia, East Livingston and North Rosalind Avenue. It was a small one acre park. It was notable for all of the big old oaks that gave it a lot of cool shade. Unfortunately, it had started to go to seed a bit, and there was a for-sale sign on the Rosalind Avenue side. It didn't look good.

I photographed it, filed it away for later, and continued on with life. Then, sometime around December, when I started to go to RDV for physical training, I happened to spot a crane over the general vicinity. When I got there today I found the beginning of a $63 million 23 story luxury apartment complex. Gone were all the old oaks, all the cool shade.
Former Green Space
The park from April 2012
Downtown Construction near Courthouse
Downtown Greenspace for Sale
There's not much more that I can say that the photos can't convey better than I can write. There is, however, one more important fact to this story. Out of the acre of land on which this apartment is being shoe-horned, the developers are generously donating 0.12 acres (yes, 0.12 acres) back for a "pocket park." Green-washing at its finest.

Technical

I used the E-M5 with the Panasonic 14mm, the E-PL2 with the Leica 25mm for today's photos. For the older photos I used the venerable E-P2 with the M.Zuiko 17mm.

Comments

  1. AlexJanuary 14, 2013

    Who is selling a park without anyone stepping in?
    Here, there are riots over felled trees to build a railway station and in general, germans are considered very law-abiding. They will loose anyway, but thats not the point.
    (Do a google by picture with "Stuttgart 21" and you will see)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. BillJanuary 15, 2013

      I found this: Stuttgart - a city in conflict. We have nothing like that here in Orlando. Instead we have lethargy, and a lot of money changing hands.

      Delete

Post a Comment

All comments are checked. Comment SPAM will be blocked and deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

A Decade Long Religious Con Job

-
Image
I rarely write inflammatory (what some might call trolling) titles to a post, but this building you see before you deserves it. I've been seeing this building next to I-4 just east of Altamonte/436 and Crane's Roost for nearly 12 years, and never knew who owned it. Today on a trip up to Lake Mary with my wife I saw it yet again. That's when I told her I wanted to stop by on the way back and poke around the property, and photograph any parts of it if I could. What I discovered was this still unfinished eighteen story (I counted) white elephant, overgrown with weeds and yet still under slow-motion construction. It looks impressive with its exterior glass curtain walls, but that impression is quickly lost when you see the unfinished lower stories and look inside to the unfinished interior spaces. A quick check via Google leads to an article written in 2010 by the Orlando Sentinel about the Majesty Tower. Based on what I read in the article it's owned by SuperChannel ...
Read more

Ten Reasons to Ignore Ten Reasons to Dump Windows and Use Linux

-
There is a tradition amongst the hard-core Linux aficionados to extol Linux's various virtues as a list of 10 or more reasons to substitute (as in "dump") an existing Windows installation with Linux. There's no reason to point them all out; a simple Google search (" 10 reasons to use Linux ") will provide you with such lists stretching back through the years, as well as hours of entertainment. One very recent list caught my eye over the weekend, published by PCWorld. Their article, " Ten Reasons to Dump Windows and Use Linux ", seems to have hit a nerve with me. Normally I just ignore such journalistic pap, since the majority of it comes courtesy of one ill-informed blog or another (such as this one). But in this instance a "real" publication put some time and journalistic "credibility" into this list, which places it in front of a wider audience than the typical blog poist (again, such as this one). So let's consider al...
Read more

Former Eclipse user re-evaluates Eclipse 3.3M5

-
Image
I've been using NetBeans for a while now, starting with version 4.2 in beta. One of NetBeans' key selling points (in my not-so-humble-opinion) is Java GUI building with Matisse . That feature continues to be quite powerful and unrivaled, especially for a free-as-in-beer IDE. I even wrote a lovely paean to the wonders of NetBeans and why I moved away away from Eclipse to NetBeans . Now, it looks like I may have to eat some of those tastefully written words. What you're looking at above is a complete Ruby on Rails project hosted and running within Eclipse 3.3 Milestone 5 on Windows XP. Milestone 5 was released this past Friday, February 9th. I installed it Saturday, and then went on a plugin hunt to fill out additional features and capabilities. Why did I decide to re-install Eclipse, especially a milestone? So that I could get a complete integrated development and test capability in one convenient package for Ruby on Rails. Like a lot of other folks I've been playing ...
Read more