Friday, August 01, 2008

The Hand of Hamm

click to enlarge
I’ve been going over the numerous exhibits on the Columbia Town Center website put up by GGP. I enjoy it when I uncover a little detail that I missed when I first started seeing these drawings a few months ago.

My latest discovery is the “Hug” statue park. In the first pubic presentation of GGP’s town center draft plan, a new “street” was shown running through the little park between the American City Building. This immediately raised the ire of CoFoDoCo among others.

One month later, Doug Godine was replaced as the General Manager of Columbia with Greg Hamm. Greg arrived in his new post just as the poinsettia tree dust up was going on at the mall. In one of his first official acts as the new sheriff in town, Greg restored the poinsettia tree tradition and immediately earned himself some serious Columbia brownie points.

The poinsettia tree was saved by the hand of Hamm.

Now it appears that the Hug park has been saved by the same hand.

If you look close at the drawing, you will see that a street no longer runs through the little park. Compare this drawing with the one that Doug Godine showed back in November.

True, there are many more changes from that earlier version as well. This one just seems to have a strikingly familiar “community gesture of goodwill” feel like the poinsettia tree decision. I’m calling it another save by the hand of Hamm.

And, in all fairness, the saving of this little park should also be attributed to CoFoDoCo.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Only people who consider vacant lots devoid of construction activity to be wildlife refuges would ever consider that patch of grass to be a park.

Anonymous said...

Keeping it as open space with trees is a much better idea than running a road through it that would both disturb and endanger families enjoying adjacent lakefront movies and concerts in the summer evenings.