The City’s latest plan for renewal…

Step 1: Pay $2.1 million for a small city block on 1st Ave. South. Step 2: Kick out the locally owned businesses that have been serving downtown for 30 years. Step 3: Lease that property to corporate developers for $10 a year so they can demolish the buildings and build new condos and offices. Also, leave the option open so the developers can buy the property in a few years and not have to pay to exorbitant lease amount of $10/ year. It just sounds ‘off’, doesn’t it?
I know this kind of stuff happens. And I know it happens in the name of “urban renewal”, but this time it’s personal.

They’re messing with Scott’s Koneys.

Scott’s is the perfect workday lunch spot. It’s two blocks away, fast, friendly and cheap ($4 lands you two loaded dogs, chips and free refills). After 30 years of serving lunch to the ‘viaduct crowd’, Scott’s is being kicked out, along with neighbor Jim Reed.

Reed Books is an amazing trip into the past. If you could take that one box in your storeroom/garage/attic, that houses all of your prized books, records, cards, posters, magazines, toys, etc. and expanded it to fill a half city block, you’d have the enough stuff to fill just the stairway leading up to this bookloft.
All this is a five minute walk from work.

My workplace is located on 1st Ave South in downtown Birmingham. I have been amazed at the amount of revitalizing and clean-up that has gone on for the past three years. It’s very exciting to be a part of all this “reclaiming of old-spaces”. Some folks around here have been very creative in how they handle and use their spaces.

In a former life, our office housed a machine shop for plumbing parts. Now, it’s home to publishers, design firms and architects. It’d be nice if everyone practiced this ’same bricks, same floors, just new guts’ philosophy.

I’m all in favor of progress and pumping life into downtown. We need it and it’s a lot of fun.

But I do wish that people would excercise a little more imagination in doing so. Imagine what these deep-pocketed folks could do if they would just slow down and take, the admitedly more difficult road, of preserving the older businesses and refitting the buildings, rather than demolishing them.

Plus, all of this added thought could help keep our locally owned long standing businesses right where they belong (and deserve to be).

Since the City is so willing and able to help the developers, maybe they can put the same effort into helping Scott’s relocate someplace close?

By the way, all of this info was sifted from the Birmingham News and a pretty informative (even if a little slow to get started) article in the Birmingham Weekly and word on the street.