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Health & Fitness

A Few Brown Spots Aside, Royal Oak is a Shiny Apple

Composite Question
What's happening downtown? Former commissioners Mike and Chuck are no longer publicly active. The person or persons you called "ye olde towne crier" have been quiet. The newly revised Patch online no longer serves as a vehicle for long, rambling but interesting chains of comments like it used to. Drunken weekends aside, has downtown become civilized or have people grown tired and resigned themselves to having lost downtown?

Reply
"Having lost downtown?" Boy, is that a biased question. "Drunken weekends aside," Ill offer a reply based solely on my own experiences.

In the early 1980s, a period when I was active in the Chamber of Commerce, my wife and I used to ride our bicycles down the middle of Washington and up Main on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. No car traffic. Only a handful of parked cars. Two handfuls of pedestrians. One Sunday, Holiday Market owner Tom Violante pulled up along side of us and teased, "Why are you two peddling (not "pedaling" I'm sure) your asses around town?"

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Fast-forward to last Friday.
Coming south on Main from Crooks, I drove -- slowly, it was busy -- just past Barnes & Noble -- the meters were all taken -- and parked in the metered lot just south of that building.. Walking north to B&N, I passed open windows and exchanged nods or smiles with, mostly, people I don't know who were having lunch and a drink. For a second or  two, I was surprised to feel a touch of that irritation and resentment that arises from thinking about "all those bars and restaurants" which have replaced . . . not t thriving retailers, but the empty store fronts that Muriel and I used to bike by.

The neighborhood in which I lived in the 1980s and the one in which I live now have neither benefited from nor been harmed by a dead or a vibrant downtown. I don't buy the argument that downtown's having become an entertainment district accounts for the rapid rise, and still relatively superior, value of residential real estate. The complaints from condo dwellers and in-close neighborhoods about weekend problems are valid. Just as valid is the delight at seeing the hustle and bustle of pedestrians and cars parked at every meter, even of seeing several motorcycles occupying a couple of meter spaces just outside Barnes & Noble.

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We haven't lost downtown.
Admittedly not as some of us might have liked, we have restored and reinvigorated it.
And, for the most part, we continue to live safely and comfortably in our neighborhoods.

During decades of management consulting, I used to open the first meeting with a company's employees with something like, "Think of your company as a shiny apple with a brown spot on it. We will be working on the brown spot, but we must not forget that the shiny apple is still there."

Chronic bitchers to the contrary, Royal Oak remains a shiny apple.

Frank Versagi is the editor of Versagi Voice.

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