Good-Bye, Trees

    

    The end of our street where it runs into Hamilton Road and the face tree.

    Hamilton Road is a 25-mile stretch that runs north-south through Franklin County, Ohio, and dead-ends a few miles north of Gahanna.
    Though it is for the most part a busy thoroughfare as it bisects Columbus and the contiguous suburbs, by the time Hamilton Road reaches my neighborhood in Gahanna it's a fairly bucolic road

 lined with trees and houses with deep front lawns.

...Or rather it was until the construction equipment arrived a few weeks ago and began clogging up  the traffic,

gouging out the lawns,

...and cutting down the trees.

 
      Soon in place of the trees and lawns we’ll have a brand-new state-of-the art 5-lane highway.  Is there enough traffic on this stretch of Hamilton Road to warrant a 5-lane highway?  No, but after all, roads are made by fools like we,

though I expect there will be plenty of traffic once the new apartment complex is finished,

    ...and the remaining houses and yards have been bought up, torn down and replaced by stores, office buildings,

                ...and cars.

    There was a time we thought we could keep this day from ever coming, when we thought we could save Hamilton Road.  Sadly,  that time has passed.
    But we did fight hard and long.
    In fact, it was just about 20 years ago when the residents of our neighborhood, a Gahanna subdivision known as Foxboro, were informed that the perfectly adequate two-lane section of Hamilton Road that connected our subdivision to everywhere else was going to be widened to 5 lanes.
    And so the people of Foxboro grumbled, grouched and kvetched until one person decided to step up and organize an effort to stop the 5-lane widening of Hamilton Road.

That person was Tom Liszkay.
_

    Tom motivated the residents to attend city council meetings and make their voices heard.  He ran off flyers to keep the neighborhood informed and updated about the status of the Central Hamilton Road Project, as it was called,  and to announce times and dates of upcoming city council and planning commission meetings.  He recruited me, our children, and our neighbors to walk house to house  handing out the flyers to and answering questions of the residents of Foxboro.
    He bought a mailbox which he spray-painted white and set our front porch as a drop-box so that people could pick up updates and leave any questions or communications they had for Tom.

    The old white mailbox is now rusted with age but still used occasionally as a message drop-box by friends and neighbors.

    Meanwhile Tom became a friendly nuisance down at Gahanna City Hall and, good-natured, sociable, and savvy guy that he is, was soon on cordial terms with - if on the opposing side of-  the city engineer as well as the mayor, members of city council, the zoning board and the planning commission.
   These grass-roots efforts succeeded in getting the Central Hamilton Road Project delayed for almost 10 years. 
   But 10 years is too long to keep fighting the same battle.  By the end people had gotten tired of the fight , grew resigned, gave up, gave in, moved away, died.  In the end Tom was fighting a battle with a handful of loyal troops, and in the end we lost on a  Monday evening when the Gahanna City Council cast the final vote to widen Hamilton Road to five lanes.
   So finally we all laid down our arms and went home to await the inevitable.
    Which didn’t happen right away. 
    Maybe it was funding issues, the onset of the recession,  bureaucratic slog, or something else, but after the climax of that city council vote there was a 10-year denouement during which nothing was done to our section of Hamilton Road, so that after a while those  residents of Foxboro who still cared ceased wondering when the construction would start.  We went on with our lives in our quiet neighborhood, dropped the Central Hamilton Road Project from our collective radar,

   ...and forgot that the lovely trees lining Hamilton Road were merely enjoying a prolonged stay of execution.

    That is to say we forgot until last year when the  heavy construction began on a new apartment complex in a cleared field a block from my street.  And then last month the flyer was distributed throughout Foxboro informing us of the upcoming starting date of the widening of Hamilton Road.

    Now here we are.

    It's enough to make a Lorax cry.