Misfire Ideas In Evansville Modern Day History

Evansville is a great place to live.  I have been here all my life and know where the skeletons are buried, y'might say.   Evansville has done lots of things right, but there's a few moves made over the past 50 years that made me scratch my head.  For instance...

The Lloyd Expressway

Great idea to put an East-West Expressway through town.  Really bad idea to put in stoplights.  It should have been built with the overpasses and cloverleafs they are building now.

Building an arena downtown

I know there's a push to revitalize downtown, and building a state-of -the -art arena squeezed into downtown with no real plan for parking and traffic makes me think that they should have built the new arena right behind Where Roberts Stadium was.  When the new venue is done, tear down the old one an use it for parking.

Letting the old mall and Lawndale slide to the point where few people go to either one

Washington Square Mall was the hot spot for young kids, as I was in it's hey day.  After Eastland Mall was built I feel like the management of the old mall and Lawndale across the street did next to nothing to fight for business.  These days, both locales are full of empty spaces.

Plans to squeeze the IU Medical School into an already jammed downtown

To me, it would have made better sense to build the medical school near a state of the art facility like Deaconess.  Some thought about doing that, but city government's push to put in downtown, part of which will be where I'm sitting, has been a strong push.  The deal's not done. Let's see what happens.

As I said, lots of great things are in Evansville.  Plus there's always something new happening like reviving the Haynie Corner Arts District, and The West Franklin Street are.  Both have plenty of diversion to offer.

That's my list...purposely I left a few things out so I can write another blog like this.