I did a little eye pop when I finally cracked the Trib today. On the Editorial page below the sensible column by Lars Fladmark is one by “retired professional civil engineer” Gene Shull decrying the County Board’s lack of “good faith” in selling off the beautiful, out dated, white elephant, County Jail. Mr. Shull’s column is countered in the fair and square way with one by County Commissioner Chris Dahlberg who explains that the preservationists have had their chance to sell the jail.
I don’t care about the issue one way or another. The School District has sold dozens of old schools since the baby boom went bust and lots of them have taken on new lives as apartment or office buildings. The Jail is a beautiful old building but if no one wants it the County Commissioners have every right to balk at maintaining an empty building decade after decade while their budget obligations climb to the stratosphere.
So why did my eyes pop?
I served on the School Board for eight years. During that time the homeowners around East High raised Cain about high school kids who left the school and wandered around the neighborhood smoking cigarettes and leaving debris behind them. My son was one of those kids.
Mr. Shull lives in the notable home of a locally famous philanthropist that sits right opposite the high school. His corner has an ugly trash can on it now where it is hoped conscientious kids who mill around his house will place their debris. It must be a pain to have to pick up so much trash on his carefully tended lawn.
Mr. Shull was the only East High School neighbor that I got to know when the neighbors began demanding the enforcement of a “red line” over which kids would not be permitted to tread during school hours. He was persuasive and I was sympathetic. But sympathy doesn’t resolve issues the way unhappy people want. I was not surprised when I ran for the school board two years ago to find that Mr. Shull’s home sported the campaign lawnsign of the person I was running against who wanted to have Ordean High School take East High School’s place. A lot of East neighbors had her lawn signs in their yards as well.
The Ordean neighbors are beaten up regularly by the folks who no longer bother to look at the merits of the Red Plan because they shrug off the Red Plan’s flaws by saying “no plan is perfect.” In their irritation the Red Planners call Ordean neighbors NIMBY’s “Not in my back yard” people. I doubt that Mr. Shull would use this hypocritical argument.
Mr. Shull stands to get a much quieter neighborhood if the Red Plan is adopted at a cost of $300 million. His home will suddenly appreciate overnight. Meanwhile his neighbors in Ordean will take on Mr Shull’s miseries like Hercules did when he was tricked into holding the Earth by the god Atlas. Hercules tricked Atlas back so his misery was short lived but the Ordean neighbors will be stuck with their new high school for the next fifty years.
Maybe the preservationists should take note that Duluth has a lot of well maintained schools which, unlike the county jail, are actually being used and full of children. All the arguments about maintaining them as a piece of Duluth History could apply to these schools as well except that they were designed by less eminent architects than Daniel Burnham.
If preservation was being used to defend keeping East High across from Mr. Shull I can’t help but wonder if Mr. Shull’s column wouldn’t have read more like County Commissioner Dahlberg’s. I’ll be eager to see which school board candidate’s lawnsigns end up in the yard of the old Eddy House this fall.
The Trib’s editors sensibly seem to agree with Mr. Dahlberg. None of their friends will make any money on the jail.
