RECENT STORIES

'Haunt with No Name Yet' appears again ( Janet Baas )
CSUN music professor records original compositions ( Carmen Ramos Chandler )
CSUN Film Festival explores globalization ( Carmen Ramos Chandler )
Canoga Park Elks donate dictionaries ( Peter De Santis )
City recognizes County Supervisor Yaroslavsky ( Brian Haworth )

share a story | more postings »

YourHub.com \\ The Valley \\ Stories \\ Sound Off \\ General Sound Off

Understanding the mysterious ways of our city

e-mail to a friend | print this | link to this

NEXT › ‹ PREVIOUS

Contributed by: David I. Karp on 7/10/2007

How does one understand the mysterious ways of our city? I refer not only to the methods of our city in doing anything, but to the roadways and the parkways ... and the city's sudden attempts to care for them.

In our very quiet corner of Sherman Oaks, the city recently re-surfaced our street. That was fine. I did not think there was anything wrong with the street before. It has no traffic and never did. But the street does look nicer now.

Then our parkway trees were trimmed. Butchered is a better word for it. We had purchased our home on the street years ago for the shade of the mature parkway trees. We loved the trees for their shade. There seemed to be nothing wrong with the trees.

But now there is no shade, just tall trunks and hacked limbs with small tufts of green.

I conduct my mediation practice from a home office in the front of my house. I loved having an open window and a tree-leafed view. But now the drapes must remain closed. It is too bright outside. It is summer. Why was this done now?

That is not the worst of it. The city removed the sidewalks and replaced them. The work was just finished in front. I did not think there was anything wrong with the sidewalks either. They had few cracks and were mostly level. But they are now nice and new and smooth. And they continue to be level.

This was hardest to understand. There are streets close by where the sidewalks remind me of roller coasters. They go up and down. Our street was not like that.

But we do have new sidewalks.

With all of the improvements that appear unnecessary, we continue to have one problem for which there are no known plans of repair.

In front of our house, there has always been a problem with the curb. From the adjacent parkway tree, the curb has risen above the street surface to such an extent that we worry daily about tire damage when we park there.

I learned from the street workers that there are no plans of which they are aware to fix the curb.

Thank you, city, for the nice street, the newly trimmed trees, and the pretty sidewalks. I am certain there is a good reason for all this work (probably to retain our urban forest of parkway trees).

But would you please fix the curb?

--

David I. Karp is a full time mediator who assists in the resolution of real estate and business disputes and is a regular contributor to valleynews.com.

[Report this as objectionable content.]

SUBMIT COMMENT

Rate the above story