This idiotic exercise in civic mis-design is called a "green space." The Saratoga City Council strong-armed the property owner into scraping off a strip of parking lot in order to put this in. It's supposed to be a "solution" to a particular problem of poor civic design -- i.e., the fact that there is no building on this important downtown site. What has been delivered is a cartoon of a park. If you ask for an abstraction, you'll get an abstraction. By the way, this stupid "green space" is right across our main street from an 11-acre park by Frederick Law Olmsted.

Previous Month

Copyright © 1998 James Howard Kunstler