Wednesday, July 01, 2009

On the old Wagon Trail

Mary Catherine Cochran likes the Forest Diner but not the new Miller Branch library in Ellicott City. Mary Catherine is the president of Preservation Howard County. For the past eight years her small group has been getting attention by publishing a list of Howard County’s Top Ten Endangered Historic Sites. Each year some sites are added while others are removed for a variety of reasons. According to this story by Larry Carson in The Sun yesterday, this year she has singled out the design of the new Miller Branch library in Ellicott City for some particularly harsh criticism.

"The new library will be a looming post-modern structure completely out of place along what used to be the wagon trail that pioneers traveled during the great westward expansion,"

Huh?

In the same article she lauds the Forest Diner as “a real piece of Americana”

Okay, I sort of get that, but I doubt that those wagon trail pioneers she so fondly recalls would have recognized the Forest Diner any more than they would the new library. If anything, the new library building is a vast improvement over the existing library.

5 comments:

Freemarket said...

It is frustrating when the county starts building unneeded Taj Mahals. Mrs. Cochran, like the rest of us taxpayers, is paying for this library so any complaint that she has should not be summarily dismissed.

A lot of noisy people claim to like libraries, but strangely, none of them are willing to pay to use libraries. Libraries are nothing more than a redistribution of wealth from all of us to a certain few. Over $100 million dollars are being earmarked to build an operate libraries over the next 5 years in Howard County. We are not talking peanuts here.

Anonymous said...

i hope GGP builds a new children's library in Symphony Woods!

Bob O said...

"Cochran said she did not discuss the library design issue with her sister, county councilwoman Courtney Watson, a Democrat who represents the area. Watson was out of town and unavailable for comment."

What? Now, that's ironic, on several levels.

wordbones said...

boborama,

Here's another interesting twist. Mary Catherine and Courtney are the daughters of former County Executive Ed Cochran. It is no secret that Courtney would like to follow in her fathers footsteps and become CE after Ken Ulman moves on to bigger things.

-wb

Tom said...

Buildings on CA's Symphony Woods died a tragic death in April. Neither the County Executive nor the librarian ever stood up to ask for a building on Symphony Woods.