Alejandro Prieto
The other day while waiting for friends at the corner of Gran Via and Catholic Kings, I unintentionally got to see the difference between planning a both sides. Catholic Monarchs to the sidewalk looked like going down to the elegant design combined grids of white and gray, with margins parallel to the houses with their pots and lamps integrated into the architecture, creating a beautiful picture. Saw the smiling tourists enjoying the charm, personality and harmony surround that space. It's amazing how subtly turning head one discovers that the sidewalk becomes a uniform gray mass, looking grubby and dirty, dilapidated street lights and tacky, with its screens birrazas caught by one end, where the dirty water collects in the bottom corner. Observed as geraniums placed on the floor, mixed with cigarette butts and bags of potatoes, pray for not being trampled by the first clueless to not notice his presence. Without knowing that corner invited me to reflect on two very different forms of action. Of how you can make things right, with care and affection, with lofty goals and ambition, wanting to leave a beautiful legacy for posterity, and how they can do things fatal, reluctantly, without any criteria. Loaded with mediocre ideas and demonstrating absolute contempt for this city.
The sad thing about this case is that the city with the most tacky and vulgar tastes that Grenada has had many years thought to have the "divine" mission to transform the entire downtown. Now it's the turn of the Street Angel Ganivet and this club in planning expert has amply demonstrated that they can charge anything and then say we are very proud.
already turned the Constitution Avenue in the "Voulebard of filth", anyone who has been there have felt disgust when looking at the floor. And at night the feeling is much worse: The kitchen light the lamps with blue LEDs mixed land them look soulless.
also turned downtown streets into a uniform mass of gray and monotonous without personality, without grace, without any aesthetic nod. Would be over before pouring cement and let it dry, the effect would have been the same. Now they are pedestrian streets, yes, but far from the urban center that combines the appeal of the stores with the aesthetic attraction, the charm and magic that is the center of a city.
Walk With the Pump Room and more of the same, yet reform do not know if it was necessary, because they have contributed almost nothing but money to a few pockets, street lights or the occasional ramshackle stroke style "super-modern" which in reality are nothing but details of teen pimp, which only serve to kill again the magic of a place that was authentic, unique and that we do not know how to define it. The funny thing is that half of the ride suffers a kind of hemiplegia, because it is closed since the works were completed long ago. Another example of "clarity" over City Hall: We do things and then not know what use him.
So, little by little, neighborhood by neighborhood, Granada has suffered in recent years a wave of destruction of historic streets and spaces that are not known since the 60's, when some of the parents of those who now rule were devoted to speculate and build cement Mazacote unblinking ravaging the magic and charm of this city.
I think it is high time that Granada speak loud and clear, we demonstrate that we are not worth all that we love this city and that we refuse to continue to be "tuned" by ignorant barbarians are far more than Granada deserve.
