Despite expensive and extensive efforts at improvement of our capital city over recent years, the place continues to be untidy and, in its untidiness, ugly.
Independence Square, National Heroes Square, Jubilee Gardens, and the Wickham-Lewis Boardwalk have all benefited but these places are still pockmarked with litter and garbage despite the efforts of workers assigned to keep them clean. Vagrants continue to rummage about during the night and make visitors uncomfortable during the day.
Wherever you go polka dot sidewalks reflect the unhealthy Barbadian habit of spitting chewing gum.
Peter Laurie, with whom I share this space on Sundays, has again offered, free of cost, a cornucopia of ideas in a piece titled Managing Bridgetown. Is anyone listening?
Eminent historians like Professor Henry Fraser, Dr Karl Watson, Professor Pedro Welch, Trevor Marshall and Morris Greenidge have all sung the praises of this fine metropolis, but the decline continues.
The blame must fall on the backs of all those who live and work and have any interaction with Bridgetown.
Decay in any form is slow and unrelenting. To the undiscerning eye, it is unnoticeable. Then suddenly, you wake up to the loss and run around helter-skelter to do something about it.
We talk, talk, talk . . . and then we forget all about the matter.
Take the two bridges: Chamberlain and O’Neal. We rebuilt the Chamberlain. No longer a swing bridge, it’s now a lift bridge, but its utility is less than it used to be when I was a boy when vehicular traffic wobbled over its wooden roadway.
Unregulated vending near and around the impressive Independence Arch sullies the ambience of the area.
Now, all the vehicular traffic is confined to the O’Neal, forcing it to take the full load of Barbados’ burgeoning traffic in and out of Bridgetown. Although it never achieved the iconic status of the Chamberlain, the (Queen) Victoria – since 1969 the Charles Duncan O’Neal – is again the workhorse of the bridges over the Careenage.
A bridge’s greatest enemy is corrosion. The only way corrosion can be fought is by constant and painstaking maintenance. I’m not so sure that we Barbadians are very good at that. We’re poor at maintenance.
Now that the entire load has been transferred to the O’Neal – and some genius has decided to place traffic lights at the southern end – it takes no Einstein to know that that bridge will have to work so much harder.
Bridges that are badly constructed (Tay, Quebec, Tacoma Narrows), or badly maintained, have a most dramatic way of calling attention to their neglect. They collapse.
More than enough has been said and written about the decrepit Empire Theatre. The abandoned Carnegie Public Library is not too far behind.
Spectacular artists’ impressions have appeared recently of a new cruise terminal and a marina. We’re about to widen the Constitution River after narrowing it a few decades back.
Meanwhile, we allow a festering carbuncle of a shanty town to graft itself on to upper Fairchild Street, all in the name of the small man, as if the small man is not entitled to clean and attractive surroundings.
I support Laurie’s suggestion that if the UNESCO inscription of Historic Bridgetown And Its Garrison is to have any real meaning – and won’t be withdrawn – the renewal of The City can only be achieved if placed in the hands of competent action-oriented individuals. Not Government.
Then there’s the vexed question of vehicular traffic. There’s not enough space left for me to mount my hobby-horse, so all I’ll say for now is that we must relieve Bridgetown of the gridlock that is choking it.
Every morning, Monday to Friday, all ten of our highways funnel traffic into and through Bridgetown, polluting the place and running up blood pressure through stress. Eight hours later it happens again – in the opposite direction.
Let us start building another city in the north. I again recommend St Lucy.
• Carl Moore was the first Editor of THE NATION and is a social commentator.