Turning over a new...cheek?

Oct. 11 – Lubbock, TX

I knew something funny was going on when I first looked at Lubbock on Google Maps. Between Texas Tech University and Avenue Q, from Broadway Street to 4th Street, the aerial view clearly showed that some 49 city blocks had recently been razed to the ground. Throughout this area, new construction is popping up with incredible alacrity. A Wal-Mart across the street from our hotel (actually two blocks away across a vast, windswept plain of a parking lot) is so new that it doesn't yet appear on the map. And the walls of a new pharmacy were erected between the time I went to bed and the end of my breakfast the next morning.

I wondered why such a huge swath of land had undergone so complete and concerted a transformation. I assumed there had been existing development that had suffered some calamity and had to be condemned. I imagined a huge fire, industrial accident or, quite possibly, a tornado.

As it turns out, there was a tornado here, on May 11, 1970. It struck North Overton, a neighborhood once comfortably average but by then already on the decline. The tornado was probably not the reason for North Overton's fate, but it certainly shattered whatever hope may have existed for the neighborhood's rehabilitation. By the end of the twentieth century, North Overton had become notoriously destitute and degenerate, boasting only two per cent of the city's population but more than a quarter of its crime. It was dubbed the "Tech Ghetto", and university students were warned not to cross University Avenue into this dangerous area.

A local real estate mogul by the name of McDougal therefore decided to purchase, demolish and redevelop the entire Godforsaken place, and after nearly a decade of title searching, tenant relocation, asbestos abatement and demolition, new blocks of planned residential and retail development are finally starting to appear. North Overton is now Overton Park.

And who knows, in another forty, fifty or hundred years, the faux-wrought iron lampposts, terra-cotta Spanish roofs and brick-lain sidewalks may represent such an abomination upon the flat face of Lubbock that some benevolent patron will see fit to wipe them off the map altogether. Or, quite possibly, a tornado will do the job instead. And Google will be there taking pictures.

Much of the information I learned about Overton Park is contained in this thorough, if biased, article.
(http://tinyurl.com/2knuzk)


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Two postcripts:

1) Apparently they weren't satisfied with anything in Lubbock and decided to remodel it all at once. 4th Street is being turned into a freeway at the moment. And our hotel, a clean and comfortable Clarion, is being revamped aggressively and entirely into a clean and comfortable Radisson. North Overton becomes Overton Park.

2) I can't ever see or hear the name "Lubbock" without thinking "buttock". I'm just saying.