Sidewalk Turmoil: City Councilor’s War on Bricks Continues

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To a preservationist like me, anytime a city councilor decides that brick sidewalks have to go, that’s a hurricane season alert that awakens deep, dark thoughts in my soul.

I’m not going to argue here about the pros and cons of traditional brick sidewalks that are a core aesthetic element in Newburyport’s historic streetscape. I propose that as a given. Ward 2 Councilor Jennie Donahue would probably disagree, but her tack avoids the unwelcome baggage of history, architectural integrity, the value of tourism to the local economy, and so on. She’s ignoring all of that as peripheral: let’s concentrate on safety, accessibility, ADA specs, and other emotional levers, and ignore the rest of it as mere handwringing on the part of Newburyport’s elite over their “precious” sidewalks (her descriptive, not mine). So, with considerable reluctance, I and a handful of other deluded utopians attended a recent subcommittee meeting of the Public Safety Committee, called to discuss Donahue’s proposed alterations (read “gutting) to the city’s regulations concerning sidewalks.

Let’s just summarize what the certain result of her revisions mandate: the use and encouragement for homeowners to use brick as their sidewalk preference would be downplayed, both professionally (as in, recommended by the city), and financially (no help from the city, as in the past, towards their installation). Concrete becomes the word of the hour (if you want to see a preview, look at the just completed sidewalks at the intersection of Fair and Middle Streets. What a bungled mess).

Donahue started things rolling by making a few convoluted and circuitous justifications about the proposed changes to the regulations, which mostly ignored her true mission, which is to bury city walkways under concrete. Under the guise of being “responsible,” she tried to conceal her true intentions, which are messianic, spending time instead exaggerating the costs associated with brick, complaining about maintenance issues, and the purported preference of DPW workers here in town to avoid its use. Then came some remarkable comments by someone from DPW (I think, not sure I heard the ID right), who said concrete was great; UPS and Amazon delivery drivers really prefer concrete, he said, when they have to park on sidewalks to dump their packages on your doorstep and mine. That’s great, I thought, let’s make Newburyport Jeff Bezos friendly. He then gratuitously remarked that brick prices will soon jump to astronomical levels never seen before in the history of mankind. Get ready to spend a hundred thousand dollars for your next brick project. I was glad to see Councilor McCauley, who chairs this subcommittee, shut this guy up right away. What isn’t going up in price, he asked? Let’s move on.

And move on we did to Little League Time, a parade of four or five 8 or 10-year-old kids who all read prepared statements excoriating brick sidewalks, which, from the point of view of simple common sense, I doubt they wrote themselves. Exhibit A: They all had identical sheets of typewritten remarks to read from, with each paragraph delineated by a different color. I assume each kid was assigned a color. “Johnny, you take red, Billy, you take yellow,” so on and so forth. It’s great to see youth involvement in city affairs, though I never knew there were this many kids interested in sidewalks.

Then, finally, came remarks from the grandstands, maybe 10 or 12 people. I won’t go into what they said, it was all the predictable lament that we were even talking about bricks in the first place, what a waste of time, and who would be crazy enough to tamper with them? A great deal of learned passion, as one might expect. One woman had even written a poem about bricks specifically for the occasion. She held her poem in one hand, and a brick in the other. For a moment I wondered if she might throw it in the direction of …. oh well, let’s not go there.

The evening’s finale … the piece de resistance, as it were … was Councilor Donahue’s Last Stand. You know, akin to Custer at Little Big Horn, alone on the top of a hill, battling the array of foes determined to drag her down. I wish I could say that her remarks rose to the occasion, but alas, they were mired in incoherence and grievance. To the oft-repeated statement of fact from several speakers that brick sidewalks, when properly installed and maintained, are ADA compliant, Donahue went into a truly incoherent spiel that they are only compliant the first day of their installation. By Day 2, they are no longer in compliance, according to her. You know, it might rain, and EVERYTHING changes, the drift into dangerous physical deterioration begins its inexorable slide. I was reminded here of pretzels, for some reason, and corn mazes like at Colby Farm. How do you get in, how do you get out. The mind is a seriously complex mechanism. I don’t profess to understand it.

The audience by this point was getting restless. Donahue claimed, in an impromptu complaint to McCauley, that people were muttering obscenities in her direction. “I have excellent hearing,” is what I think I heard her say. The chair seemed incredulous, as in, “What on earth are you talking about?” Donahue, of course, knows about inappropriate language being used during city council meetings, having dropped a few choice words herself on June 3, for which she had to apologize in a lugubrious letter to the Daily News.

The brick saga will continue, unfortunately. The committee voted 2-1 to give Donahue time to rewrite her regulation language to the point where it is intelligible. Can’t wait for the next meeting. I’ll start composing an appropriate poem for the occasion right now.

James Charles Roy
Newburyport resident

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