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Downtown Bacchanal

There’s nothing like a meeting of the Charlottetown Downtown Residents Association to make you feel like gathering a bunch of your drunken  motorcycle-racing friends, finding the highest, ugliest, most architecturally unsympathetic building in the city, climbing to the top and making mad passionate love to Tim Banks while the hooligans pee in the bushes and pull wheelies on their muffler-less dirt-bikes.

Being trapped in a room with that bunch of frightened curmudgeons makes me want to renounce every curmudgeonly thing I’ve ever written in this space in favour of an endless, lawless bacchanal: bring on the crows, the miscreants, the graffiti-writers and heck, even the developers of obscene buildings. It’s better that we have a downtown that’s chaotic and vital than the sedate 1950s utopia envisioned by the downtown livers.

That is all.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - 9:24pm
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Comments

Andrew MacPherson's picture
Andrew MacPherson on July 17, 2009
I have never gotten involved in my community association for this same reason. What is actually good for an urban community doesn’t always equal property values. It may be a differrent outcome in downtown livers are but its driven by the same instinct. My answer especially here in Calgary is that there are vast swaths of suburbs where they can live. I’m not usually an anarchist but…

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