South Street makes us want to friggin’ cry. Really. Every time we turn around, there’s some piece of news that only hammers home how The Hippest Street In Town has given up some other piece of its once towering, now thoroughly faded, identity. But once… once, there was a time when a Saturday afternoon trip to South Street in search of Manic Panic, a copy of the NME and a Love & Rockets 12″ was the only thing worth living for. Hell, there might have even been some trace elements of teenage Philebrity DNA on the beloved Gross Gum Tree outside Ishkabibbles and what used to be, sigh, Veem, and before that, God bless us, Skinz. (Hi Brett! Hi Phil!) But last week, as part of a $3 million sprucing-up project by the South Street Headhouse District, the gum tree went down. But when South Street God closes a door, he opens a window: The project will also…

-Replace all traffic signals and control boxes
-Replace all sidewalks with concrete tinted light gray
-Handicap corner ramps highlighted with darker gray
-Replace all pedestrian lights
-Install bike racks
-Reposition granite curbs to correct height
-Install approximately 10 trees per block
-Mill tar on South Street and repave.

To all of which we say, yay, with the chains (and now everything else) mostly gone, maybe South Street can back to being South Street… for the first time since roughly 1990. Sigh.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 11:18 am.