As reported yesterday in “Poised for the Next Phase of the Farmers Market-Williamsburg Street Demolition” a total of ten trees, not eight, have recently been destroyed in the Williamsburg Street block between Richland and Park Avenues.
The number is clearly documented in the photos, below, taken between May 31 and June 25.. Each tree has its own designated number from 1-10. Different street perspectives are offered to help orient the location of the stumps/chipped remains of the trees along the street. Click on photos for full-size views.
As I have said before, citizens of Aiken put a stop to the tree cutting fifty years ago, led by my mother, Nancy Wilds, and Laura’s parents, Art and Maxine Dexter. The only way to stop it is
(A) stand in front of bulldozers and demand the City to stop work until it goes (perhaps again) before City Council. They will agree to that.
(B) Get EVERYONE you know to show up at the meeting and demand they stop. They will.
If you do it, you will succeed, and they will quit cutting trees for another generation, or until another bozo like Osbon gets into office.
Thank you so much for commenting, Alex. Just yesterday, I read some of Nancy’s words from back in the day. She spoke of “lovely little white-haired ladies ready to stand in front of the bulldozers,” and of children climbing any trees the City tried to cut down.
“What they don’t understand,” she said, “[is] we are not going to cut those trees.”
I love that.
The citizen protest that Nancy, Dr. Lipe and others led to that August 1974 City Council meeting, with attorney Julian Salley to represent them, and such notables as Jane Vaughters speaking in protest, was 100 strong. Ah, those were the days, my friend.
Today’s notables, who own the power and stature to easily defeat malignant development, are tripping over themselves to ensure they stay in good stead with the destructionist-profiteers who are destroying Aiken and remaking it into some 21st century developer’s model of what an authentic small town should look like. Today’s equivalents of the 1970s malls are being peddled, just as the malls were, as imperative to the city’s survival.
Regarding the recently-destroyed Williamsburg Street trees, what most Aikenites have yet to realize — and it took me a few minutes — is that the destruction of that parkway, the butchering and killing of those 10 trees, was no accident. It was right there in the City’s plans to destroy those trees.
The City threw us a red herring on June 12th, claiming that the destruction was all a terrible, horrible, distressing mistake that will never happen again.
The way the City does things nowadays, is to plan major redevelopment projects in stealth and secrecy, behind closed doors. Being invisible tends to keep pesky questions, citizen input, and potential protest to a minimum. Citizens are the last to know and, then, it’s only to give the appearance of participation, by asking our opinion on how to rearrange the deck chairs on their titanic project.
When it comes to destroying trees, the City just swoops in and does it. People might wonder, in passing, “What looks different here? The sky seems so much bigger, the ground so barren. What happened?”
Here, the question applies — if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to see it….?
Had an observant person not alerted us all, via photos, to the Williamsburg Street massacre, we would have been hard-pressed to document just what transpired in that parkway. The City’s policy on trees is to destroy now, ask forgiveness later. Acting in stealth tends to keep complaints to a minimum.
I have started a file of photos of healthy, mature trees inscrutably felled by the City and hope that others will continue to share their photos.
By the time I arrived to the scene on May 31, I thought the damages had already been done. Had I known that there was still one beautiful, mature post oak tree standing, that was slated to be destroyed, I would have gotten word out to all the lovely, little white haired ladies and the children to protect that tree. How could I know, on May 31st, that I was taking photos of a tree about to be destroyed?
That’s the beauty of keeping citizens in the dark. We can’t effectively push back against things we don’t know.
With so many of Aiken’s present-day notables profiting second and third-hand from the destruction — or suffering from the sort of brainwashing that describes destruction as *heavy sigh* the cost we must pay for “progress” — the pushback today is much smaller than it was for the South Boundary-Chesterfield protests of 1974. The City treats us dissenters like pesky gnats to wave away or, alternately, paint us as being opposed-to-everything, anti-progress, lunatic conspiracy theorists.
But we’re a pretty smart lot, and we’re getting smarter — and our numbers are, in fact, growing. I hope that those who are standing on the sidelines, hoping someone else will fight their battles for them, will rise up, and soon, to join the good fight.
Also, it bears mention that the battle Nancy fought involved, not just the South Boundary area, but also Chesterfield Street, all the way to Hampton, which the City insisted needed to be turned into a 4-lane thoroughfare to solve a drainage problem. This would necessitate removing part of the parkway and destroying 30 trees.
As Julian Salley sagely advised, according to the City Council minutes, the City didn’t need “to build an interstate highway to solve a storm drainage problem.”
What seems common sense today wasn’t so common back then.
Julian Salley also pointed out that “engineers, think of concrete and paving, not about the preservation of the beauty of Aiken,” and he “felt very strongly that the people should be heard before a decision is made on the removal of any trees. He felt that there should be a notice to hear from the people before any decision is made, which involves the removal of any trees in Aiken.”
More of that commonsense that’s so hard to find these days. He was certainly on the right side of history, and so are we.
Has the Aiken Corporation taken over this project? Take a look at their 6/14/2023 agenda. An item on discussion and at item regarding an update.
https://edoc.cityofaikensc.gov/WebLink/DocView.aspx?id=2800081&dbid=0&repo=City-of-Aiken-LF
It would certainly appear so, Kelly. Looking at this and reading through Aiken Corporation minutes over the past year-plus, it would be difficult to arrive at any other conclusion. I look forward to learning more from your research into this.
In days of yore, I recall seeing signs at construction sites that read: “Caution, Men at Work.” Signs for the Farmers Market destruction site should have been prepared that read: “Caution, Conspicuous Stupidity on the Job.”
And from what I understand, we can look forward to 270 days of destruction and conspicuous stupidity or, as Aiken’s own professional destructionists call it, “revitalization.”