Council Votes to Rename Washington Blvd.

[irish_mafia]

MIRepublic,

Have you ever had the stomach to listen to even a part of a Detroit city Council meeting on cable?

Its like a bad episode of the View. They aren't taking a few minutes away from relevant issues. they never touch relevant issues of the city except to drop little bombs on any potential progress [[preferably spiced up with racist banter)

[Retroit]

MIRepublic, I don't think it is the re-naming, per se, that many find offensive. It is the racist, or otherwise ignorant, comments made by councilmembers.

Having a secondary name to honor a congressman is one thing. Changing the name of a street named after George Washington because he was a slaveholder is another.

Let's say there was a Martin Luther King Street in a white neighborhood [[I know, unlikely) that was going to be changed to George W. Bush Street because MLK was a known womanizer. Don't you think that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would be in town crying foul?

[dexterferry]

can we please have a moratorium on the whole "if _____ happened in a white suburb, what do you bet Al Sharpton would come to town" construction.

it's beloved by the freep forumers and that should be enough to end its usage by any sane person.

[Fury13]

I think we should do something to get Al Sharpton to come to town. The entertainment value of such a visit cannot be overestimated.

[Diehard]

If this was a fark.com thread, the head would start with "Having solved all other problems in the city, ..."

And of course, we all know that Washington and Jefferson did absolutely NOTHING noteworthy other than being of European descent and owning slaves.

[Rocko]

Actually, back on the topic of streetsigns, as anyone noticed a lousy job the signage department does of installing streetsigns on corners? Normally, they're attached to steel or telephone poles with metal straps which are tightened to the pole kind of like a zip tie. I know the brackets which hold the sign up have holes for screws, a much more premanent solution would be to drill screws into the telephone poles for the brackets. If the guy on the cherry-picker doesn't get the metal strps tied tight enough, the brackets just spin around the pole due to the wind, or worse, just fall right off. I've seen several intersections where the signs are facing the same direction..... might be confusing for those of us who know to expect something like that in Detroit.

AND, perhaps even worse than the wind doing this, why do they install streetsigns [[especailly the large ones along major thoroughfares), with the sign blades toward the streets? Detroit streets are narrow and many have semi's traveling them. If a truck can't make a tight turn, they often bump up onto the sidewalk, and the trailers frequently "grab" the streetsigns, knocking them askew and bending them around poles, or, again, pushing them to face the wrong streets. If the blades of the streetsigns faced away from the corner, a truck would have to take out an entire pole [[which happens on occasion, too, I wonder who gets the bill for that?) for the streetsigns to get messed up.

Just a small rant, but it seems like such a simple thing.