by Jim Barton on Friday, February 10, 2012 at 11:54am ·
Towns laid out on a grid like Kingsville have no soul. Everyone living there is a perfect square. Brownsville is to Kingsville as Rio De Janeiro is to Brazilia, natural as opposed to man-made. A river does a wiggly meander around Brownsville. It can be west, south or east of some parts of town. Before electronics made us mentally lazy, an inner GPS told us where we were in relation to the Rio Grande at any point in our travels through Brownsville.
The streets that got you around town in 1965 work today, although the freeway slicing the town in two adds several degrees of difficulty. Central and Palm Boulevards, Elizabeth St., Boca Chica, 13th and 14th are still my streets of choice to get most anywhere. Los Ebanos St. used to be the perfect diagonal shortcut connecting Central Blvd with Boca Chica east until 77/83 amputated it. There are certain streets one uses shamelessly to impress visiting family or friends. Palm Blvd., with its namesake trees along both sides and bouganvilla decorating the median is one of those.
You point out what used to be the Bishop Madeiros residence before he replaced Cardinal Cushing in Boston, where Tom Robinson was raised, Nena's old King St., where Minimax used to be and, of course, Brownsville High School.
Ringgold can be useful to get from Palm to Southmost. Then, there's the little curvy shortcut from Boca Chica to Palm. Before my cars had air conditioning and the houses on 13th and 14th didn't either, the music and aromas justified using those corridors whenever possible. I still recognize the smell of beans, and occasionally, burned beans.
The insult of the freeway is that's its only purpose is to get past Brownsville from the north or the south or to get to the mall. It has nothing to do with getting around the town. That seems like an odd approach when your country stops at the edge of town or, technically to you geometrics, the middle of the river. The weather gods tried to stop freeway construction back in '65/'66 by filling every hole dug with muddy water, but bulldozers are clueless. The town was severed.
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I think the Brownsville traffic engineer is a blind idiot....at least a man who never drives on local streets. The traffic patterns in this city are unbelievable. We have an excessive number of "No Turn on Red" signs throughout the city which are ignored by drivers and by the local gendarmarie (police). We have drivers that cut through driveways to avoid lights...but no enforcement. Botton line, our police chief refuses to have his officers give attention to traffic laws. Then let's get rid of the laws that the police refuse to enforce. Let's rid the books of laws and ordinances that we don't intend to enforce.
ReplyDeleteIn total agreement with you (except for the part of getting rid of the laws). My question to the police chief, police officers and city commission: WHY are they afraid of enforcing such laws? Could it be that they are also guilty of breaking them? You cannot face an individual to enfoce a law when you know you are guilty of the same.
DeleteBrownsville began with a typical Spanish city design...checkerboaard streets and avenues eminating from a central square and the Cathedral. Then, things went hairwire. As the city expanded the street builders and planners had to deal with the resacas....it meant expensive bridges or going around them. Seems like the latter was the case. Or, then we hired a "traffic engineer"...probably someone's relative who couldn't spell "traffic". Things went haywire and our "traffic engineers" of today haven't done any better. We now have streets and roads that have several names (Coffeeport, for example), Old Alice Road starts downtown and skips over large expanses to emerge on 511. Alton Gloor is another example of a road with many names. Its amazing how our planners seem to plan to confuse people. And, to add insult to injury, we have Cameron Park and a large section west of Cameron Park that is part of Cameron County, but surrounded by the City of Brownsville....our own little doughnut hole...which gets little infrastructure support from Cameron County and is ignored by the city. Perhaps it is time to hire a professional city manager and city planning staff....people trained in urban planning....not just "old cops" who know where the city skeletons lie. Maybe this is why all progressive roads in the RGV lead to McAllen...because we are so far behind the power curve in Brownsville. Brownsville is like the Cameron Park of the valley....waiting for a hand out and a miracle.
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