Many decades ago an intellectual pioneering collection of noble earthly pilgrims and sages, united in aspiration, courage and vision, faithfully built downtown.
Lead by a curious exploration, I walk up and down 30th Avenue and its adjacent streets and back lanes. With universal disillusion and a grave smile of complete conviction. Harbouring confidence - boosting thoughts, quant feelings and draped insights.
Presently, I see wrinkled structures struck by a mired contrivance score of mediocrity, marinated neglect, bloodied beaten dilapidation, not, smirched layers of paint and apocyphal renovations. Gloomy sordid impressions. Some have captured a moment in reflecting the ethos of their faded age. There are many dusted corners in these old buildings. It is necessary to wave our dusters as a flag of revolt. I hold my equipoise sniff with a gasp of dismay of the buildings bile, vapid, vulgarities.
In the background are calendar frosted shadows of spiralling sadness. Dark eye-catching corridors amongst legacy nestled, basking insalubrious, flint, errant, platinum vagabonds. Overindulged, weathered, stooped, sauced, ravenous, addiction specialists. Whiff of awful and mixed night soil are overwhelming in some areas.
Each building my apprehensive watery eyes visited tells its own phantasmagoria variations of a secret disappearing theme of its forgotten history. Any architecture they may have had has disappeared. Swept away in its stream of old vanished memories. Forgotten about its beginnings.
Vernon's architecture suffers. It lacks imagination and heedlessness. We need skilful architectural inventiveness. Integrated with innovating inviting polished monochromatic sculptural bold design. It needs to distinguish itself from all neighbouring communities.
Good architecture will propel away homelessness, poverty, despair and mental illness. Along with other ailments this city appeared to be sooted in and possesses. Vernon is still recovering from the Puritan hangover.
With binoculars looking to the south along the railway lines that dissect this city I am smitten with a comely true beacon of light inside a dust bowl. In the lens I see Vernon's best architecture. It is found in the surrounding beauty of its infinite depths of the earth's truest. Harmonious nature is its jewels splendour. Stainless grace, virtue and beauty upon which the firm foundation of all authentic, true, pure architecture should be shaped, built and celebrated.
Ed R.R. Wtizke,
A devotee of elegant architecture and cultural history
