Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 26, 1993 TAG: 9312270294
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But jeesh, it's Christmas Eve. I've got to start my holiday shopping sooner or later.
If I am able to shop in the Roanoke Valley, it is only because my car has sprouted wings or I began my sojourn in October. For such a small city, Roanoke has become in the past few months an impossible place to reconnoiter - particularly for those precious few of us who still work downtown and not in some mirrored-glass-and-steel monstrosity out on Virginia 419.
As an integral part of the economic revitalization of downtown, the city has hemmed in the sprinkling of center-city humanity with construction projects that now threaten to cut the City Market and city hall apart from all civilization. That is nothing new for city hall - long since cleaved from civilization - but it is disconcerting to the rest of us.
For a while there, you couldn't leave via Franklin Road, because that was being dug to hell and rebuilt. Now, several billion dollars and a year later, we have two lanes leading into a gasoline station and one lane carrying traffic precisely where its predecessor carried traffic - into one lane.
The Hunter Viaduct is still the city's second-most-prominent amputee.
The First Street bridge - which will need a ski lift if it gets any steeper - is occasionally taken out of service for narrowing and steepening. First Street's a goner - chewed up.
Elm Avenue over Interstate 581, also known as "the 48 traffic lights so out of sync that you can pass through the intersections with your emergency brake on," is avoided daily by thousands.
Main Street through Wasena is being dug up for a new water pipe that will help the folks in South Roanoke more quickly draw their Jacuzzi baths.
Salem and Campbell avenues were recently resurfaced.
The Fifth Street Bridge has been removed and is being replaced by a series of frighteningly slender abutments.
A bridge on Shenandoah Avenue was removed, rebuilt and recently reopened - but there's scant reason to use it without the Fifth Street Bridge.
Wells Avenue and Jefferson Street near the Hotel Roanoke are torn down to the hardpan, so forget that escape route.
There's always the Second Street grade crossing to whisk us out of town, but that's the most useless road in all of Roanoke.
David Goode, the Norfolk Southern Corp. chairman, scolded Roanokers nearly a year ago, counseling us to sit up straight and look beyond the mountains, to stop looking at the railroad as our sugar daddy.
But Mr. Goode insists on parking - parking! - his coal trains across one of the most vital intersections in town. It's hard to see to, or beyond, the mountains when you're staring at the steely flank of a coal car, waiting for it to budge. It's hard to forget about sugar daddy when his logo is always in your face.
Forget Second Street.
Forget Riverland Road and Bennington Street, forget Orange Avenue - it's too crowded, nobody drives there anymore.
Downtown Roanoke is surrounded by a moat of infrastructure reconstruction that will bar your escape in every direction.
There are worse places to be trapped, I suppose. None comes to mind.
by CNB