Letters to the Editor
Scharmen Scores Again
Dear Bay Weekly:
Audrey Y. Scharmen touched on a sensitive matter in Bay Reflections (Vol. XI, No. 18, May 1). She said our veterans are often overlooked when wars are over. English poet Rudyard Kipling said this about the British Tommy: “Chuck him out, the brute, but it’s the thin red line of heroes when the guns begin to shoot, when the guns begin to shoot.”
It is writers like Audrey Scharmen and great editors who have made your paper outstanding. I wish you many more years of success.
— Tom Gill, Rose Haven
No More Malls Without Parking Beneath
Dear Bay Weekly:
Your editorial “The Malling of Chesapeake Country (Vol. XI, No. 16, April 17) asked “How many more malls do we need?”
I have lived her for 27 years, and my answer is for sure none in Anne Arundel County! Stop the sprawl of malls that kill the Mom & Pop country stores in rural areas!
It is beyond comprehension that the county planning department would time and again allow the under-utilization of the available space for malls when issuing building permits.
If, for example, Wal-Mart wants to open a Super Center in the abandoned Parole Plaza, the permit should have the following conditions/stipulations:
- The entire store should be on the first floor (and on the second floor if they need more space). The ground floor should be for parking only. Escalators and elevators for the handicapped will provide easy access to the store. Art students and teachers can paint murals of Chesapeake Bay scenes on the familiar Wal-Mart cinder-block walls outside.
- From Parole Plaza, two pedestrian bridges across Solomons Island Road, to the ‘plaza’ where Value City, Shoppers Food Warehouse etc., are located, must be constructed to provide more parking spaces and easier access to both plazas. Eventually, this smaller plaza can also be transformed into a first-floor-only store area with ground-floor parking.
Instead of ‘puddles’ of malls and plazas here and there, we could have an eye-pleasing concentrated mall area interconnected with pedestrian bridges and with first-floor stores and parking under the first floors.
Imagine if one could stroll above ground from Parole Plaza to Annapolis Harbour Center above Forest Drive and above the woods next to the former Hechinger Plaza. And imagine if all the stores in Harbour Center were on the same first floor. Wouldn’t that be lovely!
I have seen such a pedestrian walk way above the trees in the valley below, namely in the Hong Kong Aviary in the middle of the city!
Companies will argue that the cost will be prohibitive to put stores on first floors while reserving the ground floors for parking. But any aesthetic work will require extra expenditures.
The other alternative is deforestation to create more and more town centers and malls surrounded by cars milling around and jostling for an unoccupied parking space.
— Eddie Tecumseh Yo, Davidsonville
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