Changing Horizons

I walked to the hospital today, but the hospital is crumbling. The stalwart building that used to tower over the old "plan A" section in Radford is now a tangled heap of mortar and steel. We knew this before we went, and our reason for going was to see the wrecking cranes at work. My two year-old son, despite his father's disinterest, likes the machines. But today he seemed turned off by the display, or should I say the carnage, and instead found delight in poking his stick in the snow melt. Meanwhile, the concrete scalpel came down, and down, and the skeleton that used to hold the healing and infirm gave way, revealing the patient’s insides. The hospital in middle of Radford is dying, and it's a rather sad sight to see.

As we stood outside the chain-link fence, many people in cars slowed to gape. Were they also saddened to see the building reduced to rubble? A colleague of mine says she can't drive by it anymore because her daughter was born there. With her daughter in the car she would make a special trip on the way home to point out where Sara was born. Now she's coping with loss. As all of us were, I suspect, that took time out of our day to watch the hospital being razed. What of the work that went into building it, brick by brick? What of the events that took place there, the surgeries and stitches, births and deaths? That hospital is not as old as many of the town’s residents. Should our buildings be more ephemeral than the people they take care of?

I have another colleague who has been walking the sidewalks near that hospital for some ten years. He was recognizing the patterns of the people who worked there and becoming intimate with the human landscape. With the demolition of the building, his whole horizon has changed.

Then there's the incredible waste of resources. Couldn't those components be recycled or converted to other uses? Couldn't a former hospital become a nursing home? Earlier today I walked to another civic center, the post office, but the post office has moved out of the attractive WPA building downtown to a sprawling warehouse farther out. Neither move, hospital nor post office, is friendly to the pedestrian, nor to the sense of the place.

I almost made a third trip, to the recreation center, but didn’t. However, if I did go, I could walk. Then I read that city officials want to build a new recreation center at a different site from where it now resides. I suppose we have to build new facilities when the old ones wear out (though I wish we could build them to last), but it does seem the community is suffering from a bad case of out with the old and in with the new. The move to list the "East End" of the city on the National Register of Historic Places almost seems a counter response to the trend, though certainly a step in the right direction. But why must the new recreation center be far from civic centers, mostly accessible by car? We already squander enough time in the contraption. Our kids--the ones we are building this for--can now walk across the street from the school to the present location. Most likely, they will have to be driven to the new site by mother/chauffeurs.

And town officials talk about selling the present location to a commercial developer, as if we were suddenly short on office space.