Traded for Parking Lots

From glancing at older posts of his, it’s clear that, regardless of subject matter, Jason McDowell writes with a dry sort of brevity. In his piece, “These buildings were demolished for soulless surface parking spaces”, this manifests as a dry wit, albeit maybe a touch macabre. When discussing the potential dangers of more parking lots, with creating more driveways, McDowell notes that, “The smaller the chance a person is going to get run over by a car, the safer and the happier they’ll be.”
 
Beyond that though, he seems to write with an air of history. Milwaukee, as a city, has a deep history with tearing things down and building shitty things over them, and knowledge of that fact is reflected throughout this piece. “Historic buildings are razed for any number of reasons, some more honorable than others, such as forces of nature, or simply being in the way of a new, exciting project, or — most unfortunately — poor stewardship and decay.” “Installing freeways through big cities was a destructive process, razing entire swaths of land. This literally paved the way for more cars, which literally means paving the way for more parking, which further destroys the city’s history.”
​

​It brings to mind the loss of the Notre Dame convent, which once took up an entire city block for little over a century. Demolished in 1960 due to age damage, all that’s left of the historic monument is a bell tower stranded in the middle of a parking lot, and a glass display case in the lobby of the building that replaced it.