LET TERS
SE BUSCA AYUNDANTE
While walking down a narrow aisle at a
local store, I passed a young Latino family.
Dad moved aside and mom clutched her
young son. Fear was in their eyes.
Based on Trump-incited anti-immigrant
behavior and new immigration policies,
their fear is reasonable. Any encounter that
may draw attention — a false accusation,
a traffic ticket, a misunderstanding or a
cheating employer — could lead to jail,
deportation and family separation.
During the election you couldn’t miss
the Trump signs in rural farm areas. If I
were a Latino worker, undocumented or
not, the last place I’d go would be a farm-
er’s field, or a processing plant, or a site for
day laborers — fish in a barrel for federal
immigration agents.
Last year, before Trump’s new, stricter
and broader deportation rules that could
victimize millions of immigrants, I read
national stories of farmers forced to leave
thousands of dollars worth of crops rot-
ting in their fields since they couldn’t find
enough workers local or otherwise for
picking or processing. Farmers lost money
and produce prices increased. And few La-
tino families spent money in local stores.
Perhaps all those Trump signs could be
painted over to read: Help Wanted!
You reap what you sow.
Leslie Weinstein
Eugene
STOP THE REGRESSIVE LEFT
As EW’s letter’s section reflects, many
people are either pro-Trump, intellectually
dishonest and insane, or anti-Trump, intel-
lectually dishonest and insane.
Cooler heads are reminded of how rac-
ist and crazy the right was when Obama
took office. Apparently, everyone is a Nazi
and it’s okay to physically assault people
for exercising their right to peaceably as-
semble and freedom of speech.
At the F17 [Feb. 17] march down-
town, rumors spread like wildfire that I
DESIGN MATTERS
am a white supremacist because I dared to
criticize Black Lives Matter for calling for
violence and because one of the patches on
my coat is the German flag.
So-called “hate-free zones” are full of
hate. Many who preach tolerance are ex-
tremely intolerant. Many who claim to be
against racism and sexism are “reverse”
racists and sexists. But apparently, igno-
rance is strength, freedom is slavery, hate
is love, violent authoritarians are peaceful
anarchists, speech is violence and it’s okay
to violate civil liberties because hysterical
mobs are good and wise enough to know
who is a Nazi and who is not. Sure.
All of this is severely discrediting the
left. Stop the witch hunt. How? Start by
heeding the words of Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. who, despite what propagandists
like Talib Kweli have recently claimed, un-
ambiguously condemned riots.
Most importantly, be an individual: Re-
fuse to simply believe what you are told,
to give in to fear, hatred, hysteria and peer
pressure. Love, not hate, is the way.
Justin Antitheist
Eugene
SILENCE=CONSENT
There is no mercy in the current wave
of dream-crushing selfishness and hate.
Time to focus on a vision that includes
the needs and voices of women, children,
people of color and indigenous peoples,
the under- and unemployed, financially
struggling and medically fragile, immi-
grants, veterans and so many others who
have become fodder for religious, financial
and political gain.
Our hearts must remain open to those
who view things differently from this vi-
sion. The Dali Lama said “we are all one
— all the same.”
Love but resist, and advance a new vision.
We must draft ourselves into a revo-
lutionary movement to salvage what little
democracy remains and bring that original
vision of liberty and justice for all to a new
BY JERRY DIE THEL M
The Turning Point Downtown?
THE PARK BLOCKS AND KESEY SQUARE
W
hen people come to Eugene for
the 2021 World Track and Field
Championships, they will, like all
tourists, spend a large majority of
their time in our outdoor public
spaces. The most charitable way to describe our pres-
ent situation is that we are not yet quite ready for them
downtown.
A year ago last December people filled the LCC
downtown center to express their revived hopes about
improving our downtown park and open spaces and to
let city officials know unambiguously that they didn't
want to sell Kesey Square.
The upshot was that we needed help with our open
space planning, and so the city hired The Partnership for
Public Spaces from New York City. For the past 30-plus
years, the firm has developed and successfully applied
the ideas of William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small
Urban Spaces to cities around the country and the world.
So PPS came, consulted and emphasized that we
weren't going to be able to realize our significant poten-
tial for vibrant and healthy downtown places until we
came to grips with the negative social dimensions of
our present situation. Successful placemaking, as they
called it, needed to be understood as a socially driven,
physical design process. Here is a partial critique of two
of their proposals.
The Park Blocks
The PPS proposal for the Park Blocks is in happy
agreement with the city’s most recent decision to re-
store the northwest Park Block and build a City Hall
that crowns it along 7th Avenue. Their “big idea” here:
to restore the Park Blocks to central importance as “the
civic square for all Eugene,” overlaps perfectly with
what has become our own idea.
We’d already made it easy for them by deciding that
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March 2, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
this was the right place for a more permanent home for
our farmers and Saturday markets, and that it was time
to retire the “butterfly” parking lot. On PPS founder-
president Fred Kent’s first trip to Eugene, he looked
down on the Park Blocks from the Hilton and said that
this was where we should place our City Hall.
More controversial are their recommendations for
the existing Park Blocks. We've grown used to their
presence as passive park space downtown, our pastoral
downtown green. In a word, they recommend that this
is the time to reassess their potential and change from
predominately passive to much more active use: the
West Park Block to be redesigned for families and chil-
dren; the East Park Block to better support programmed
activities and events. Keep the trees, they say, but open
them up.
The social strategy behind this is to enliven our
downtown spaces with more regular round-the-clock
and calendar use and to design them to purposefully
serve a wider diversity of people.
The Park Blocks are great assets on market days,
just as Kesey Square is just what is needed when events
fill it with purposeful and passionate people. But our
downtown spaces need to be transformed from empty,
passive receptacles at non-event times and managed to
become the social, political and commercial centers of
our downtown living.
If there is an obvious missing element in the PPS
plan, it is bathrooms. Ice cream doesn’t just go in one
end and stay there. No one is going to bring their kids
downtown to play in the East Park Block if there is no-
where to take them nearby. The Eugene Public Library,
which now bears the brunt for those in need of bath-
rooms and shelter downtown, is just too far away and is
sorely in need of help in this regard.
This is of course a basic need for everyone, but it is
important not to forget to design for the retired and the
elderly. Support for their growing presence and partici-
pation downtown should be much more present in the
plan. They also serve who sit and watch.
Kesey Square
The PPS consultants said, “We’re going to call it Ke-
sey Square,” and so should we officially and soon. Ru-
mor has it that Dan Egan, of the Wildish Community
Theater, is actively conspiring to steal the Kesey name
and sculpture over to Springfield.
Here the proposed social strategy echoes the Park
Blocks. The space needs to have a “24-hour” anchor,
a built-in café or restaurant or beer garden, to keep it
alive at non-event times. They show a number of ex-
amples where this has been done successfully, includ-
ing possibilities for temporary cover.
The PPS proposal has essentially replaced the food
carts, which reduce the impact of the high brick walls,
with more permanent structures. The problem is that
the carts can fill up too much of the square, reducing
the center’s flexibility and use for events. The obvious
answer is still to open up the flanking walls to connect
and overlap business with the square.
What is wanted is a better balance between commer-
cially active, penetrated walls and flexible inter or space
for tables and events. The Kesey sculpture doesn’t want
or need PPS’s remodeled base, but it could be moved a
bit closer to the corner to help form multi-useful central
space.
Resolving the zoning, right-of-way and fire code is-
sues that are needed to make wall penetration possible
and economically attractive to the owner could still use
a bit of an outside push. But what are consultants for?
I’ve heard of a New York minute, but never about New
York timid.
Jerry Diethelm is a Eugene architect, landscape architect and planning
and urban design consultant.