McDowell Reading

McDowell Article Analysis
​ Old buildings are now replaced with parking lots. Spaces filled with cars are like ghosts of the previous building. This guy is really against the parking lots and talks about the love for historical buildings. These spaces are very personified in a way that passionately captures his feelings towards the situation. Every time this writer talks about a building, it has the phrase, “turned into a surface parking lot” which tells me that he really wants to create repetition for effect. There’s another concept the artist talks about that’s important in this article. He talks about the “bigger and better” idea. Milwaukee tried to implement this idea in modernizing the city scape but has ended up failing. In the name of increasing locations for parking but ended up destroying historical landmarks. To the writer this is soul crushing.
 
Does McDowell’s Article fit into OnMilwaukee?
 The difficulty with this OnMilwaukee website is that accessing specific articles may be difficult. Because of the infinite possibilities to search up any topic by putting in “on/” along with whatever key word can be overwhelming. Therefore, searching out for McDowell’s article was not easy. It’s almost like the website would benefit in a category. Relating this back to McDowell’s reading makes me feel like the search engine is the soulless parking spaces since I feel like we can’t find specific articles of the past. For me, I would use this site for events, places to eat, and weekend activities, or current news. I think McDowell’s article was heartful and sentimental so that felt displaced with it being in OnMilwaukee. The guy’s article is filled with historical locations which would be great for a site that has a category for Milwaukee’ citizen’s concern with the city scape. His article conveys to the reader that parking spots erase the history and replace them with spaces that can create more danger and more soullessness in the city. Sincerely, I think his article feels too good to be in OnMilwaukee since it’ll be covered up by newer posts and impossible to find. For example, when he talks about concepts like “bigger and better” and the aspect of “soulless parking lots” feels out of place in OnMilwaukee. This article hold so much of a personal connection to the a part of Milwaukee that it sticks out like a sore thumb (and not in the good way) in the context of the type of topics that OnMilwaukee presents. McDowell piece is wonderful and filled with the wonder of the city’s historical building that deserves to be placed on a platform that can be found through a categorical system.