In spring this year the city started its attack on our ability to drive anywhere with a major assault on Michigan Avenue, one of the main corridors of town and two blocks north of us. This isn't planned to end until midway through 2025, but even in its first steps, they were making drastic changes in the landscape. Let's take in a dozen pictures of me walking around the neighborhood and see if I managed to get a clear picture of even a single individual anywhere in it.
Intersection just a bit away from the house. The hipster bar is there, hard to notice, but easier to see now that ... you see what's missing?
Looking westward here, to see the office supply shop that the landlord kicked out in favor of higher rents that never came.
And here's The Venue, the four-storey mixed-use building they tore down the oldest restaurant in Lansing for like eight years ago, and which only finally got filled months after this picture was taken.
But here's what makes the difference in all this stuff you can see: they cut down the trees! Part of the road reconstruction and sidewalk reconstruction demanded, for some reason, cutting down all these decades-old trees. They're planting new ones but those are saplings and won't be robust for ages.
Here's some torn-up road near the community center, although what you're looking at there is the Quality Dairy. Also a lot of water that don't you dare pot on them! It's forbidden!
Looking eastward --- the direction reconstruction started from --- and you can see on the right the Fish and Chips that got shuttered in early 2018(?) when the landlord raised the rent and since then it's been occasionally opened by a new restaurant that doesn't last.
The current incarnation of the former Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips is ... the Sea House Fish and Chicken, which makes it seem like this whole gentrification thing is a lot of bother that's not actually accomplishing anything.
Getting farther east, into the strange zone between Lansing and East Lansing known as Lansing Charter Township.
They've dug up some old streetcar tracks in all this work, although I've never seen any myself. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger snagged a spike or something from one, though.
And here's the makeshift memorial to where Malcolm X's father died in what was absolutely a streetcar accident or a suicide or something and not at all the white supremacist group Black Legion shoving him into the path of the streetcar after having already burned his house.
Notice anything else here? This stretch of land used to have three dilapidated, abandoned homes that I shared pictures of ... oh, I don't know, sometime ago. They were finally demolished and you can only infer their existence from the driveway skirts left behind. Note the lottery sign showing my camera lens was open during the 1/30th of a second that the Powerball LEDs were off.
Oh, and here's another front in the Department of Transportation's war against us getting anywhere: they've closed off the path onto the highway from here and it's still, seven months later, closed.
Trivia: A ``geared'' container cargo ship is one that carries its own equipment --- its gear --- for loading and unloading containers. Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 48: No Stone Unturned, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
