We've got a 'walkability' problem

Singers and violinists aren’t the only people who can have pitch problems. Men and women who like to walk for a living can, too.

As a Lynchburg resident who was raised in New York City and who thinks often about buying or renting a loft overlooking the James, not a day goes by when I don’t ask myself, “How can our downtown be more like Manhattan? Were money not an object, what would I do from the river to Federal and from 12th to Fifth to make this charming but underutilized city a miniature version of the greatest metropolis on Earth?”

Reading reporter Rachael Smith’s article in The News & Advance on April 10 about The Lynchburg Symposium on downtown development and admiring the architectural drawing of what one half of one block could look like one day, it hit me.

All we have to do to make this downtown more like Manhattan is … level it.

Think about it.

Most of us, no matter where we grew up, have not only visited New York, we know midtown well. We’ve shopped at Macy’s, and we’ve seen a Broadway show.

Let’s say we’re at 34th and Broadway right now, and we get a text from a friend who wants us to meet her at Planet Hollywood on Times Square. What do we do?

We walk the flat eight blocks and meet our friend in minutes.

Conversely, let’s say we’re at the Renaissance Theater, and a friend calls who wants us to meet him at the Lynchburg Museum on Court Street. What do we do?

We say into the phone, “You’re funny! We’ll end up at Lynchburg General before we’ll make it up that hill. This place ain’t called Hill City for nothin’!”

This is not a letter of “resignation & concession.” I’m not saying downtown development symposia should cease. I’m not suggesting investors should restore theaters and hotels of historic and irreplaceable architectural value in other flatter cities. I still believe downtown Lynchburg is the only pocket of this region that has a discernible aesthetic identity and an appealing, if (currently) manic depressive character. For those reasons alone, it must, at all costs, be preserved.

But for a city to more than exist, it must have apartment buildings, grocery stores, schools, churches, parks and transportation, i.e. buses, light rail or (affordable) 24/7-Uber-for-all.

For a city to be fun and livable, it’s gotta be flat and walkable (or planned and constructed, from day one, the way San Francisco was). The amphitheater in that talented artist’s drawing is beautiful. But all my mind can see upon its cement surfaces are passed out, if not passed away, pedestrians.

Until downtown can make itself “seem” flat (with escalators and little solar-powered trolley cars zipping about?), our city will remain best suited for boxers in training and Led Zeppelin fans in search of the final and anything-but-metaphorical stairway to heaven.

DOUGLAS THOM III

Lynchburg

Pardon Jens Soering

Jens Soering should get a full pardon. He had nothing to do with the 1985 Haysom murders. He also confessed because he was in love with Elizabeth Haysom.

She was the guilty one. She killed her parents probably with the help of another girl.

Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted for the 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother. But “Lizzie Haysom” was convicted of killing Derek and Nancy Haysom in 1990 and sentenced to 90 years in prison.

She will receive a mandatory parole in 2032.

A lot of years have past because an innocent man was bit by the “Love Bug.”

ERNIE IRVAN

Lynchburg