A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 

who's in charge here, anyway

Don't leave home without your American Express. You'll need it to park downtown. Except the parking garages don't take American Express. They don't credit cards, period. What they take is a barrel of money. Believe it.

It now costs $11 to park in the Seneca Street garage for the day. Leave your car overnight and you might find it would have been cheaper to fly first class to Detroit. Yeah, and throw in a complimentary bag of peanuts.

Last week, parking for the same period cost $3. People living through the Depression of the 1920's in Germany understand this kind of hyperinflation. It meant loading a wheel barrow full of deustchmarks to buy a loaf of bread. In those days it took fifteen minutes to count out change for a newspaper.

It's deterrence, says the parking attendant who has the worst job in Ithaca right now besides Ezra's. This is the guy who has to take all the shit from those clueless people like Ezra who, when they drove in that morning, had no idea parking would cost the same as a meal for 4 at McDonald's.

This guy was at the tail end of a really bad day when he explained all this to Ezra. The high cost of parking in the garage, he explained, works as a deterrent to prevent people from parking there all day. Due to a limited number of parking spaces (the city, in its infinite wisdom , decided to renovate the Seneca garage at the same time it was tearing up the lot behind the library for the Cayuga Green project) that means more people get a chance to park.

Those Pavlovian sons of bitches. This is what it comes down to in America's "most enlightened city", eh? Treating people like herd animals? Like laboratory mice? If you want folks to change their behavior, just ask them straight out.

Be that as it may, the message the City of Ithaca is sending comes across loud and clear. Don't even bother coming downtown.

Find somewhere else to work and shop like Manhattan or Syracuse, Muskogee or even Eugene, Oregon, for that matter. People who work retail on the Commons now have to pay a minimum of two hours wages to park for the day. Imagine that. Maybe Ithaca's enlightened employers will throw a couple of cots in the stockroom for their employees to sleep overnight. Or let the staff take a longer lunch so they can pick cans or bottles out of trash receptacles on the Commons to pay for parking? When the officer prods you with his stick at night and tells you to move on, just say you work at Autumn Leaves or Leather Express.

That kind of public policy may have worked in the former Soviet Union or even Manhattan. It doesn't work in Ithaca.

Call it yuppification, call it progress , call it whatever you want. Ezra thinks it's municipal suicide, pure and simple. It's not like it's worth $11 spending a day in downtown Ithaca, is it? Would you call that a value? Who needs to shop at April Cornell, Decorum, 10,000 Villages, Jabberwocky, 3-D Light? How many times a year do you need to buy something at Leather Express anyway? Unless, you're into some serious S&M and go through leather teddies that fast?

So what if usership at the Public Library starts to decline? Just hang out at Borders or B&N, snag some latte, make yourself comfortable in the soft seating with thousands of books and magazines.

Wait a minute. Hold on a second. Does Ezra detect the outline of some kind of sinister, machiavellian conspiracy in all this?

The City of Ithaca wants people to shop somewhere else, is that it? Mayor Cohen wheeled and dealed, lied and connived for six years to turn Rt. 13 into a gold strip. He and his cronies got into bed with so many big box retailers, they started getting bedsores. They had to move all the drugstores down to the Elmira Rd so they could get a little relief.

Do you ever see Mayor Cohen or Common Council members shopping downtown?

Hey, when the last struggling, gasping boutique gives up the ghost on the Commons, the City can turn downtown into one vast parking lot for the businesses on Rt. 13.

Imagine that.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 4:50 AM