The Attention-Getting Device

As I was dropping off kids for Art Camp at the Dairy Barn this morning, Dairy Lane was half-blocked by construction work about halfway between Richland and the Dairy Barn.

I guess the mess has begun!

As much as I've appreciated your NCR analyses, I'm also enjoying your forays into some new areas.

After 29 years, and until last week, I lived at Carriage Hill Apartments whose property line, to the north, abuts that of the Summit at Coates Run construction site.

Just to the west of Carriage Hill is an O.U. parcel. That land, which also abuts the development site, is now the recipient of those billions of cubic yards of fill which were in the developer's way.

Until construction started, my west-facing apartment looked down into that university land and the verdant little valley carved out by Dairy Run, the small creek which parallels Coates Run and Richland Ave. For years, I watched the trees and the grass which were home to deer and turkeys and songbirds. Now they're gone, everyone of them.

In place of the vanished vegetation and wildlife, there now sits a huge flat-top mound of fill. From my former third floor apartment's windows, the view is now up, no longer down. Atop the mound, trucks, too big to be street-legal, bearing names like Deere, Hydroax, and Komat'su, spend twelve hours each day kicking up dust while roaring, banging, and beep, beep, beeping.

As I understand it, the university has great development plans for the top of that mound, and while it may offer some small future benefit for the university and the city, it is, today, a hideous visitation upon the 72 poor resident families of those west-facing apartments.

Does the university care about this nasty act perpetrated upon this group of the city's least? If they did, they never would have allowed their name to be associated with the victimization of the disabled residents, or the single-parent households, that comprise the residents of these out-of-sight-out-of-mind apartment buildings.

Before I moved from there, I invited Mayor Wiehl and Service-Safety Director Horan-Mosley to visit my apartment and to see, hear, and smell what it was like to live, if only for the few minutes of their visit, with specialized construction machines operating ten feet outside one's open windows. (Air conditioners are beyond the budgetary reality of most of Carriage Hill's residents.)

Speaking for himself, and implicitly for the best interests of the city, the mayor apologized for what was being done to me and my neighbors by distant developers and the not-so-distant university administrators, surely none of whom have ever lived at Carriage Hill. The mayor explained to me that all the signing-off required of the city before such action could be begun, had been done by the previous city administration.

In June, just after the grass and trees and wildlife had been eliminated, I submitted my 30-day notice to my landlord and ended my 29-year residence at Carriage Hill.

In that span of decades, I had worked hard to fix problems at Carriage Hill. With the assistance of some of my neighbors and sometimes with that of attorneys at Southeastern Ohio Legal Services, Carriage Hill did improve. Long term Athenians will remember the late seventies Muni. Court case, Stewart v Kalman, which brought about wholesale changes to the complex. Now, Carriage Hill is a well run, but nowhere near luxurious, residence for more than a hundred of the county's poorest and least affluent, many of whom are children.

Sad to say, for many of those children, when, as adults, they hear the word "university," they will remember the taste and smell of construction dust in their mouths, and recall how, during their formative years, their lives were changed for the worse by insensitive short-sighted administrators in distant air conditioned office suites with dollar signs where their hearts should have been.

E.K.

Eliot Kalman co-chaired the now-defunct Carriage Hill Tenants' Union, founded the Federation of Athens County Tenants, has served as president of the Appalachian Chapter of the A.C.L.U., and as Vice-president of the Athens Area Chapter of N.O.W. (National Organization for Women).