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Dear City of Richmond,
I think it's fantastic that you finally scrapped the idea of a new baseball stadium in Shockoe Bottom. Fantastic! But did you really need to come up with another let's-build-a-new-stadium plan, like, two days later?
Heads up, city: YOU HAVE A STADIUM. THE DIAMOND. HOME TO THE RICHMOND BRAVES.
OH WAIT.
Your baseball team LEFT.
The Richmond Braves, as I understand it, ran away from home. You know, last year...
But you, Richmond, like a confused and troubled parent unsure why said child has run away from home and has yet to return, are...talking of building the child a new bedroom. In addition to the bedroom they ran away from. It's like you're trying to woo that runaway back home by giving them something they already have, but better! Except let's be real here, Richmond. Once the kid comes back to their Brand New Bedroom!, are we going to go to their games? Or are we going to just let them stew in the new bedroom and let the old bedroom rot, and go right back to square one?
Newsflash: let's fix up the old bedroom (hint: The Diamond) and revitalize the area around it so people WANT TO GO. We can move the Greyhound bus station that's right across from the Diamond and we can -- in the process -- move the bums who live on the sidewalks there. The area is already getting nicer -- Movieland (a Bowtie cinema) just moved into the abandoned factory down the street and it's pretty posh. We can then add some nicer sidewalks, maybe some grass, maybe some nice fountains and birdies, add a fresh coat of paint to the Diamond, and a Starbucks (maybe a Trader Joe's right where the Greyhound is?) and voila! You're in business! We can use the money that would have been spent on building a whole new stadium somewhere else that would entail flattening neighborhoods and land and getting rid of the old stadium, and instead spend MUCH LESS (I would assume...?) city money on FIXING WHAT WE HAVE. Repaint the bedroom, don't just leave it to rot while you build a new one.
But first, before we build or fix anything, I think that we need to re-examine the need for baseball fixings right now in the first place. If our team were to come home, would any more people go to the games than they did before? Even if a new stadium were built across the James, after the hype settles down and it becomes a normal everyday part of the city, are more people going to go to (hypothetical) home games, or is it going to dwindle down to the same ten people who were going to the Diamond?
Seriously. This is just silly, Richmond. Maybe, at the end of the day, we should call off this dream of stadiums, and, hell, build a monument for Monument Ave. of a stadium that could have been. We can put it with that other really bad idea. You know what I'm talking about -- that Arthur Ashe statue that makes it look like Arthur Ashe is beating children with a tennis racket and a book as the children hold up hands to defend themselves from the beating. Seriously Richmond, who gave that the okay for production? (The same person who's doing this stadium stuff?)
Bemusedly yours,
Hayley, your new self-appointed city planner
Anyway, it's a nice lazy second day of the three-day-weekend. :) Went grocery shopping, read some more of A Little Princess (a very charming read!), and am watching The Duke of Chutney flop lazily about as well in his cute bunny way.
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