Making New Things look like Old Things.

The town in which I live, Orchard Park, has recently been expending a lot of effort to make its village center a lot more attractive. (Orchard Park is a fairly affluent suburb of Buffalo. It happens to be the town where Ralph Wilson Stadium is located, and thus, a lot of Buffalo Bills players end up living here.) They've built new sidewalks, planted flower beds and commissioned sculptures along the main streets, given pretty much every building a fresh coat of paint, and in one case even demolished a crappy 1960s era building that had been on the town's main streetcorner and replaced it with an attractive building of red brick that actually blends in with the older style buildings around it, including the 1910-era red brick building across the street. I don't know if they've read David Sucher's book City Comforts, but they seem to be putting a lot of his ideas into practice: building to the sidewalk, putting parking behind the buildings, putting a lot of benches about for people to sit, et cetera.

There have been a couple of mis-steps, though.

First, there are these really pretty new streetlights, the ones that look like old gaslights but aren't. Problem is, the bulbs they're using in these lights are those same horribly bright, amber/orange color you'll see in the streetlights along I-90 in Cleveland, for example, or on a thousand other big highways. The light from these is horribly garish, and doesn't enhance the town's attempts at the picturesque (which, during the day, are very effective indeed).

Second, it seems that the town might have gone wrong in its selection of contractors for certain aspects of the work. During the early summer, all of the crosswalks in the town center (basically those reflective strips on the pavement) were replaced with red-brick crosswalks that were really nice-looking when they were done. But as the summer wore on, the concrete or whatever is underneath those crosswalks turned out to be too soft, and many of those brand-spanking new brick crosswalks became somewhat buckled from all the automobile traffic crossing over them. So, guess what: today I drove through the town center, and observed men at work pulling up the "old" new crosswalks for replacement. Not six months after they were laid down.

I don't know if the original contractors did a bad job, or if they didn't figure on the wet summer we've had, or what. But it reminds me of that line in Armageddon when one of the guys says, just as they're about to lift off for space, something like: "Did it occur to you that we're all strapped into a machine built by the lowest bidder?"

(EDIT: Broken link rendered unbroken.)