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| Middletown Community News |
| Roosevelt Elementary School is going GREEN! |
| Monday, August 9, 2010 2:00:36 PM - Middletown Ohio |
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Roosevelt Elementary School is going GREEN!
The Board of Education has decided that it is time to remove the building to create green space on the Roosevelt Elementary School property. The decision was based on the outcome of a community-led review group that determined that the high cost of bringing the building up to today’s standards, renovating the building, is not possible.
The demolition process begins with abatement, which is a process that is done inside the building. You will see that the building will be contained during this timeframe; approximately August 16, 2010 through September 24, 2010.
When the abatement is complete, the property will be cleared for the structural demolition to begin. This should occur around September 27, 2010. A construction fence will be around the demolition area. A space, outside of the construction fence, will be designated for souvenir bricks. Please feel free to take one.
The anticipated completion date for the project is Dec. 3, 2010.
During the time of this project, Middletown City School District officials will work diligently to keep the community informed of any changes in the timeline of the demolition of Roosevelt Elementary School.
District representatives will be available in front of Roosevelt on Monday, August 16 at 11:30 AM and Wednesday, August 18 at 5:30 PM to respond to questions or concerns.
Please contact the Business Office at 513.217.2863 with any questions. |
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Archived Comments
| 8/10/2010 7:15:47 PM | Ty | The headline grossly misuses the term "going Green." This refers to the implementation of sustainable principles (ie. energy efficiency, alternative stormwater management, gray water recycling, green roofs, etc.) --not the leveling of a building.
Roosevelt is being demolished, not deconstructed (which means most materials are recycled), so this is not a green project by any stretch. Reuse the building, and then you would be green. | | 12/8/2010 6:21:37 AM | SWD | | Middletown remains a nest of trivia-obsessed fools whose only growth indutry is demolition. You're the 10th-fastest-dying city in America. Can't you think of any higher priority than reducing architecture and history to rubble? You drove me away with your small-minded, short-sighted crazes. Small wonder the Boston Globe cites Middletown as the epicenter of the second-largest concentration of psychotics in the nation, New york City being first. Go ahead. Tear down the rest of the town. Ruins are all any lazy, self-centered, unimaginative generation of wastrels ever leaves to mark their wake. It takes intelligence, creativity, morality and vision to build; any drug-crazed idiot can knock down what their betters constructed. Fools! | | 12/8/2010 9:18:55 AM | MUSA ADMIN | SWD,
We are unable to locate the Boston Globe article you mentioned.
Please reply with a link or other verification of that statement.
Thanks!
MUSA Admin | | 12/9/2010 6:08:44 AM | SWD | Middletown was my home for more than 40 years. I ultimately left because of the interminable wrangling over the City-Centre Mart, Lake Middletown, a school system that refused to take NO for an answer regardless of how many times the voters spoke it clearly, a paranoid police force suspicious of anyone but criminals, a greedy, exacting insatiable city government income tax and, most of all, absolutely no sense of history, the mark of arrogant self-centered youth.
A city cannot help it if nothing historic ever happened there. But it can preserve what little meaning is found in what little did happen there. Not Middletown. In the 10th fastest-dying city in America, there are millions of dollars to be spent knocking down and rebulding every school in the ghost town. (Have you been to the Ghost Towne Mall lately?) The empty field was needed so desperately on Charles Street that Jefferson School had to be demolished. Apparently the urgent need for more Nothing on Central Avenue now means Roosevelt must be reduced to bricks.
The schools join dozens of other vacant lots with yellow tape around them. The Carnegie Library downtown sits in decay awaiting the wrecking ball. The historic U.S. Hotel is a flop house for the unfortunate homeless and for drunks. A real city with real government would restore the Sorg Mansion (not reduce the paper mill to ash)and convert it into an industrial age tourism asset. Not Middletown. It remains nothing but private low-rent sleeping rooms.
The original hospital building met the same fate as any other built before 1960. Vail Middle School will have to come down next---because one-foot high letters scream from its walls to the public "RELIGION AND EDUCATION ARE THE SAFEGUARDS OF OUR NATION"...because a gutless board of education can't bear the implications and because neither religion nor education are present inside. That sundial in front on Girard will have to go, too: "God's in His Heaven, all's right with the world." Taking them down is too obvious a show of prejudice and cowardice, so the whole building has to be brought down to mask the quaking fear of an ACLU challenge. MEN raised those monuments. It is termites that take them down.
Outed before the world by Forbes Magazine http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/08/towns-ten-economy-forbeslife-cx_mw_1209dying_slide_2.html as teetering on the brink of self-extinction, Middletown yet has the gall to sell itself as "The Center of Opportunity". Are you even kidding YOURSELVES any more?
The Boston Globe article I mentioned was cited from memory from May 2008 study by Cambridge University, no less. As such I misremembered the nature of Middletown's hang-up as psychotic.
In fact, the term was neurotic, if that really makes anyone feel any better. One website says, "The terms neurosis and psychosis are sometimes used interchangeably with neurotic and psychotic disorders." But, yes, neurosis is milder.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/04/where_do_all_the_neurotics_live/
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/05_04_08_personality_maps/
The same study showed the Middletown area as NOT characterized by a population describable as agreeable, conscientious, extroverted or open-to-experience.
But maybe there is hope yet. Not for the history, of course, which has already been hauled off in Rumpke trucks. (Somebody's got a brother in the demolition business...) Does anyone know that the composer of "The Stars and Stripes Forever", John Phillip Sousa himself, led the Middie band in the anthem once at the depot? Maybe. But in Middletown, no one CARES. And that is the essential root problem.
I don't hate my hometown or its citizens. My family are buried there. My memories of a lifetime are buried there under the rubble as well. Middletown exists because of Daniel Doty and Stephen Vail. The latter has only one block of pavement named for him in town. Doty---the first settler and man who built the first home there---has nothing whatsoever to mark his historic contribution. not a street, not a park, not a school. Even Doty House had to be upvamped to "Abilities First". No, all Mr. Doty has today is an obelisk in the old Pioneer Cemetery no one visits. An obelisk that, naturally, was broken off and ham-handedly stuck back on (at an angle) by Middletown's inimitable hack amateurs...and duly forgotten again. As ever, anything they touch is left worse than they found it and is a disgrace.
The only museum in town is a fake one built twice the scale of the one it's supposed to historically represent---and it's always closed. One has to ask to have it opened.
A city with no history is a city with no future.
I'd suggest you move. Get out. BEFORE AK Steel and whatever they're calling the paper company on Charles Street this week does. While there's time. There's a whole world out here, folks. Life is too short to spend in Middletown, Ohio.
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