The Square Speaks...

The owners of some local businesses that are in the block north of the square feel strongly that the new curbs and whatever it is that ends up inside the curbs will be a detriment to their businesses.  They decided not to engage us directly in these discussions.  We should try to find a way to make the dialog across the community direct rather than mediated.  A specific point of concern expressed in this disengaged population is that the new public work will limit service access to their businesses in a significant way.

As we've discussed in class, the location isn't even really platted in the city as a "place".  Across history its been a non-site, an empty white spot on maps and an expanse of asphalt in space.  It is undefined--neither the space of a street or the space between streets that Georges Perec speaks about in the chapter "Streets" in his book SPECIES OF SPACE:

The buildings stand one beside the other. They form a straight line. They are expected to form a line, and it's a serious defect in them when they don't do so. They are then said to be 'subject to alignment', meaning that they can by rights be demolished, so as to be rebuilt in a straight line with the others.  The parallel alignment of two series of buildings defines what is known as a street. The street is a space bordered, generally on its two longest sides, by houses; the street is what separates houses from each other, and also what enables us to get from one house to another, by going either along or across the street.
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Contrary to the buildings, which almost always belong to someone, the streets in principle belong to no one. They are divided up, fairly equitably, into a zone reserved for motor vehicles, known as the roadway, and two zones, narrower obviously, reserved for pedestrians, which are called pavements. A certain number of streets are reserved exclusively for pedestrians, either permanently, or else on particular occasions. The zones of contact between the roadway and the pavements enable motorists who don't wish to
go on driving to park.
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The junction of the roadway and the pavements is known as the gutter. This area has a very slight incline, thanks to which rainwater can flow off into the drainage system underneath the street, instead of spreading right across the roadway, which would be a considerable impediment to the traffic.

In our initial analyses we noted that this location doesn't fit into the traditional sense of street and building relationships and its a condition we generally perceived but really only now politically realize that we should have more closely engaged the business owners and residents whose properties abut the site about what we will  propose to mark this historical spot in history and to celebrate today's Mobridge.  

Though we watched this importance of the location in action from the roof of the Burns Brothers Building (1909), we didn't ma it out into the list of common and cyclical uses of the site--the everyday life (construction materials and trades) of the vast open asphalt.  To have noticed this use and to have addressed it from the start would have been more professional, more considerate, and would have understood better what this location means to these businesses.  

There's a thin layer of industrial function at the former end of Main Street in Mobridge because it was once primarily an industrial zone--the privately held properties closest to the rail yards of the Milwaukee Road, though the land that is now the south edge of the lumber yard was as recently as the 1950s housing like the house on the NE corner of 1st Ave and 1st Street East house next to city hall.  

We don't think that the "End of the Line" project is any less valid.  It would be good for us to find out specific issues that the changes hobble in business practices.  Problems in a project like this are like the sand that an agitated oyster turns into a Pearl.  They're where we find the crux of a project.  The use was overlooked in our discussions and we just now can see that we haven't appeared as democratic and civically minded as we could have been in this moment of project introduction.  Saying these property owners should have been at the city council meetings is correct in a legal sense or as a calibration of their civic role in the community but there's clearly a voice here that feels left out of the decision making process.  How do we move and amend and adjust to this?

We were in town this Friday to incorporate community ideas into our thinking and to get more people to see and understand the "site".  We talked to anyone who would give us time.  Anyone in town could have said, "Hey, I'd like to talk to you people from SDSU about this project you are working on."  Its a school project.  Explaining how it will affect business, at the least, could be an indelible lesson about economics, politics, property rights, and the line between public space and the value of private enterprise.  We hope people will consider the door to this discussion still open.  Needs of all sorts can be accommodated.  The curb isn't too steep or very fragile to cross but it is a curb.  That much is done.  Nothing else is there yet.  

How, at this juncture, do we sensibly engage these citizens and find a way to work with them?  That would be the professional, public, and civic thing to do.