Bye-bye shotgun house, hello downtown stadium.
Tears and sick stomachs over the demolition of a historic shotgun-style house to make way for the $22.6 million taxpayer-financed stadium.
I can’t help but note the irony of this quote from a Winston-Salem developer:
DeWayne Anderson, a developer and former member of the Housing Authority of Winston-Salem’s board of commissioners, said that moving the house should have been a no-brainer.
It didn’t have to just sit as an empty relic, as a pair of preserved shotgun houses at Happy Hill Gardens do. It could have been adapted for a modern-day use, such as an after-school computer lab for children.
“They’re doing this all over the country,” Anderson said. “Is there something wrong in Winston Salem? Is there something in the water here?”
Yeah, well, they’re doing something else all over the country: Building downtown stadiums with public money. So whatever’s in Winston-Salem’s water is obviously the result of some strange interbasin transfer.
And just for the hell of it, the Journal throws in a little guilt trip:
Shotgun houses get their nickname because a narrow hallway goes from front to back door, with rooms built on the sides like ribs. One could fire a shotgun into the house through the front and not hit anything.
The house on Watkins Street is being dismantled with other houses and a church in the neighborhood to make space for the ballpark.
If it is built on schedule, baseball fans can see Winston-Salem Warthogs games there starting in the spring of 2009. As fans buy Cracker Jacks, hot dogs and beer and crane their necks to see after-game fireworks, some may not understand what stood in that area before the ballpark.
Oh well. If only such a lack of understanding was the price of progress in Winston-Salem.
