Singer songwriter night at Gene’s. Billy Matheny, Haley Slagle and Jeremy Batten.
Fixing The Real Problems: Food Vendors
If you need evidence that our city government apparently has way too much time on its hands, consider its proposed crackdown on late-night food vendors. Just consider it. Just think about the fact that somebody somewhere decided that the biggest challenge facing our city in this current moment is that drunk kids are buying tacos and hot dogs after midnight.
It’s not a horrific traffic problem. It’s not undermined neighborhoods. It’s not a city’s whose tax-base is being decimated. It’s not insane over-development in the surrounding county. It’s late night tacos and hot dogs.
The people responsible for ginning up this not-at-all-a-controversy should be ashamed of themselves. Threatening the livelihoods of local entrepreneurs on trumped up charges of impeding downtown’s non-existent post-midnight traffic?
Perhaps it makes more sense to wonder what we’re really seeing here. Is this truly an issue of safety? Given the proposed solutions - which involve moving the disparate food vendors into a single, isolated location, a scenario puts more drunk people in close contact with one another as they await their opportunity to eat - the answer is almost certainly no. Spreading drunk people out reduces the likelihood for conflict; packing them into enclosed places increases it.
But again, if the issue isn’t safety, what is it? Is it that downtown eateries are mad that they have to compete for business? Is it that somebody somewhere complained for reasons that we’re just not privy to? Or is it that local officials too much time on their hands are looking for a way to give off the appearance of doing somethingabout something, whether or not those actions make any sort of sense?
Unfortunately, the food vendors are now bound to plead their case in front of our City Council, a collection of people who tend to respond negatively to things that our local student population might embrace. Given that this is the language currently being used by one of the vendors, it isn’t difficult to imagine a bad situation getting worse.
Election Season Is Nearly Upon Us
Morgantown’s City Council - that pit of despair which ruins most Tuesday nights - is coming up again upon election season and so, in the half-assed way we usually do things around here, we’ll be covering things as best we can.
That will mean contacting each of the candidates with a set of questions that matters to us. The last time we tried this, we failed spectacularly, as most of the candidates either don’t know how to use email or didn’t bother to respond. Such is life.
But this year’s election seems meaningful enough to try again. The City Council’s two distinct blocks (Jim Manilla, Wesley Nugent, Ron Bane, Linda Herbst versus Bill Byrne, Jennifer Selin, Marti Shamberger) have each gone looking for candidates and so this year’s election will be heavily contested. What remains to be seen is whose slate of candidates will be worth voting for, assuming of course that any of them are worth voting for. Given how disappointing it has been to see the City Council operate these past two years, seeing all seven Councilors replaced doesn’t seem like it’d be the end of the world.
This house is at the intersection of Sixth and Beverly. The original photo was taken roughly 65 years ago; the second one last Thursday. Not much has changed, saved the boarding over the odd windows there on the basement. I’m not sure what really explains those windows incidentally; why so many on a basement level?
Kudos also to one of the (presumable) students renting the place. He saw me photographing his home but never stopped to ask me what I was doing.
(Photo from West Virginia History On View.)
This is all getting destroyed soon. Many of the houses in this area are empty and boarded up. These may be amongst the ones slated to go. The landlords who presided over these properties got paid, so the University owns them and will soon replace them with something better.
The top photo was taken between 1944 and 1955. These homes are on University, across the street from where Beverly Avenue begins.
Sunnyside was beautiful once. It had a school and a supermarket. It was a place that mattered. Then, a combination of negligent landlords, destructive renters, and a local government that simply didn’t care let an entire neighborhood rot. We’re now promised that things will improve, but so much history will be casually destroyed as part of what we’ll pay to see things get better. Maybe that’s good; maybe not. But it’s unfortunate that the worst offenders - the landlords - managed to profit from all this.
(Photo courtesy of West Virginia History On View.)
This is from Beverly Avenue in Sunnyside. Some of this is being torn down in the coming weeks but it’s worth remembering that Sunnyside was once a thriving community filled with city residents who valued the neighborhood. That’s all gone to pot of course, but these historical images are fun to look at, especially the top one, which shows a date of 1923, 90 years ago. Note that almost everything is the same in the picture I took earlier today: the houses on the left are as they were. The siding has changed in some, but this block is historical. And trashed.
In case you’re wondering about the third picture: if you look at the first photo, you’ll see a home on the right side of the image; that home is still there and is shown in the bottom image. It is blocked by the new something-or-other that’s been bult on the triangular corner of Beverly and University Avenue. The windows though are the same, as is the brick.
(Vintage Photo from West Virginia History On View. It’s the best.)
This image was taken at the Morgantown Ordnance Works (or what’s left of them). The MOW is visible across near the fracking site off the River Road, across the river from Aldi.
This was taken in 2007. This ladder has since been removed. It was though once possible to climb to the very top of the structure. Which I did. Which was terrifying. There’s very little left of the building that used to be there and obviously, nature is reclaiming what is there. Some of the structures that surrounded this have been torn down in recent years; I imagine it will all be gone at some point.
This is the view from Lorentz Street (first from 1945, then from last Thursday). Lorentz is one of the lower places in Wiles Hill; the dividing line as I always understood it was Jones, the street right below Lorentz. When I was a kid, Lorentz was where the college students were living. Everything further up the hill were neighborhoods for city residents. Students have now consumed almost all of the housing up the hill to Highland Avenue. That’s neither here nor there I suppose.
The obvious difference (besides it being a different season) is both all of the new construction (including the new bridge over the Monongahela River and, beyond it, the Lock and Dam), but also the landmarks that still survive, including Woodburn Circle (obviously) and the Hotel Morgan (above Chitwood Hall) in both images.
(Photo from West Virginia History On View.)
These are photographs from the Morgantown Ordnance Works. That’s the building you can see across the river from Aldi, high up on the hill. The fracking site is nearby. The factory functioned during World War 2.
I’ve lightened the newer photos (one I took several years ago) so more of the confirming details were visible. There are the vents on the walls and the rows of circular lights throughout the ceiling. The pinpricks of light in the fourth photo are the result of the building’s roof rusting out.
That building is now gone, torn down to make way for whatever it is that has replaced it.
(First Photo Courtesy of West Virginia History On View.)
