PennDOT To Use Eminent Domain To Once Again Displace Northeasterners Who Haven’t Left Their Neighborhoods Since 1980?
Walk with us for a minute here. Up here where the wild things grow, there is a very specific kind of disgruntled white person. And they hold grudges. So when I-95 built itself a long strip straight through parts of Fishtown, Port Richmond and Bridesburg back in the 1960s, many of these grudge-bearers were but young, grudge-bearing saplings. The neighborhood has never been the same, they will tell you. And in many ways, they are right. In more, however, they were wrong: The perception that the government and I-95 ruined their perfect sunny hamlet has only reinforced the xenophobia that has been seemingly present in these communities since the beginning of time itself. Which has nothing to do with the actual highway, of course, but everything to do with the culture of eternal grievance that now exists here.
And guess what? It’s all starting all over again.
“As lifetime residents, I think we’re entitled to more than just a couple of maps. We heard rumors they are going to go eminent domain,” said Diane Wilson.
PennDOT is proposing to reconstruct some ramps and widen the highway from three to four lanes in several locations. PennDOT says it is still early, but it predicts it will probably acquire at least 25 properties.
“What we would tell them is that we want to settle their property or acquire their property amicably; Make sure they’re paid fair market value for their properties,” said a PennDOT spokesperson.
“I don’t want our houses being taken. When I was a kid growing up, they took the houses behind us for I-95 and now they’re slated to do it again. I am just here to make sure it doesn’t happen,” said Vera Mailone.
Will it happen? Could it happen? Well, it may have to happen. But it certainly won’t happen the same way: Today’s Port Richmond schlub knows how to do things that yesterday’s did not. Things like calling lawyers. Things like alerting the media. Things like email blasts of righteous indignation. Our point is this: Get used to this story. If we were betting folks — and just wait until this story dovetails with the construction of SugarHouse — we’d say this is going to be a controversy for the next five years at least.
ActionNews: Seems Like, And Is, Old Times
April 25th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
What about the multiple ideas to bury 95 in the city? i can only assume that will not happen that far north, but it’s a must below the Ben Franklin Bridge. The elevated sections are scheduled for replacement in the next 10 years anyway, and we saw how some parts may not even make it that long.
Let’s just NOT hire those contractors from Boston.
April 25th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Well, it’d be less complicated than Boston’s big dig, since you would be doing as much, if any underwater construction. Yeah, things got more expensive than they should have been when contractors say, read the blueprints upside down so installed some parts of the underwater tunnel backwards, and people have died because of contractors going on the cheap with faulty ceiling sealant. All that said, underground construction is still mighty expensive, and they’d probably still have to grab some land to widen things. It’s hard to build new tunnels underground and expect a residential structure to stay standing. The cool thing is 95 could be turned into greenspace, like the ground above Boston’s tunnels.
April 29th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Actually a lot of the problem in Boston was flat out shady contractors. They took old concrete and cement, smashed it up, and mixed it in with the new concrete. When somebody was doing the math on how thick to make walls and ceilings, they based it on using actual concrete…. not concrete mixed with trash.
People major in Materials Engineering because they try to optimize the strength to weight (to cost?) ratios. Those formulas are not supposed to be fouled with by some creep trying to make a few extra bucks.