Yesterday, on Columbia Street just west of 8th Street, three days after noticing one pair of paid parking signs dangling from a meter pole and another pair completely fallen off an adjacent parking meter pole also in the 700 block of Columbia, I came across yet more evidence that no one at HPD -- absolutely no one -- is supervising our new ambitious paid parking system or even cares if it fails miserably.
Get used to the lovely frosted windows on the funky basement storefronts at 726-728 Warren; they may be around for your lifetime. According to what I witnessed yesterday and what can be seen through the unfrosted windows, it appears that the hotel across the street is renting both of those potential retail business spaces as STORAGE SPACE, primarily for stuff related to their restaurant and bar.
Thanks to two dangerous sections of sidewalk that were recently removed from the Public Works Board's SID list*, mayor Ferris announced that the city now has enough money to install a pair of stop signs and stop lines for Front Street traffic approaching the intersection with Warren Street, an improvement that should have been part of last year's DRI project that wouldn't have cost the city a dime. (The I in DRI stands for IMPROVEMENT, of course.) Instead of much needed stop signs and stop lines at that intersection that even a blind person knew were needed decades ago, the DRI and an engineering firm from New Jersey gifted us with three new painted pedestrian crosswalks, two new trees obscuring two new PEDESTRIAN CROSSING signs, and three new painted arrows and three new RAISED INTERSECTION signs that all belie the unraised intersection. The latter should all be removed, and the former will have to be relocated to make way for mayor Safety Ferris's stop signs. And, of course, the nearly dead trees will have to be taken to the dump or burned (they might be diseased!).
By 6pm yesterday, the clear signs of a disgracity sunk to abysmal levels had unfolded on Columbia Street for all to see, walk by, and scan with their phones.
(Non-existent editor's note and apology: This piece was written over 4 weeks ago but never got published. I forgot all about it. Hey, there's a lot to keep an eye on these days, and I've only got two eyes.)
I took the first three pictures late yesterday morning. The lead picture is particularly notable because this is at least the third instance in the past 4 or 5 months where HPD's plastic paid parking signs have fallen off the repurposed parking meter pole in front of lovely 720 Columbia. As of today, HUDseen has featured all three instances, though it's entirely possible I missed one or two. First, it was the original sign, installed in early February. Then, one sign became two back-to-back signs, their tops secured with a pair of binder clips designed for holding sheets of paper together. Now it has been another pair to fail, these two being "held together" with a screw or two.
Yesterday at noon, I came across yet another pair of broken scannable parking signs barely hanging on to the meter pole on the south side of the 700 block of Columbia nearest Park Place. This is the third, possibly fourth, such instance at this pole since signs went on poles in early February of this year.
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