Commentary
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes
Made of ticky-tacky,
little boxes,
little boxes,
little boxes
all the same” — Pete Seeger
Just whose idea was it that all those apartments and high rises sprouting like weeds in this backwater boomtown should evoke the latest in minimum security prison chic?
Gloomy places beget gloomy people. The ambient architecture of today’s mucky Truckee Meadows can best be described as Nouveau Communist East Berlin.
In 2015, the bi-partisan and bi-polar Sparks City Council watered down construction quality standards as part of destroying corporate welfare Victorian Square and handing it to some developer. (Barbwire Special Edition 12-14-2015)
The order of the day was “do something, even if it’s wrong.” Their wish was granted.
As with developments all over the region, Sparks design standards are basically Early American Cardboard Container. If exist any standards at all.
Victorian Square had been Sparks’ contribution to the theme-casino madness spawned in Gomorrah South starting in the 1960s.
Apparently nobody recognized the grotesquerie in the concept of turning an old west railroad farm town into a bad copy of old London when Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson walked the earth.
I wonder what their chronicler, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, would have thought of goofy Last Chance Joe gracing Queen Victoria’s capital.
The original idea included costuming Sparks police as British bobbies wearing Conehead hats walking around downtown Victorian Blvd.
Fortunately, that never happened. The closest the renamed “B” Street ever got to looking like London was fancy streetlights. (And it hasn’t even been a boulevard since the nice trees lining it were cut down many years ago.)
Reno quickly got into the act because the gambling industry immediately glommed onto this new way of generating redevelopment funds by skimming casino taxes and earmarking them for downtown districts.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a government agency that would come over and give your place a new paint job or build an extra room for the kids all for free? Never in your wildest dreams, but the gambling-industrial complex makes its own avaricious fantasies come true.
Parks, roads, school, police and fire protection have always been underfunded in the High Desert Outback of the American Dream. Siphoning taxes away from the general public good led directly to the car-choked mayhem of today.
Charting the growth of Nevada corporate welfare tax giveaways over the past half-century would take more than this entire edition of the Tribune. (For depressing chapter and verse, access the Barbwire Corporate Welfare Archive at NevadaLabor.com)
One example will suffice. About 30 years ago, I asked the Nevada Dept. of Taxation for a list of all government tax breaks and freebies. I got about a dozen pages in the mail.
Today’s jungle book requires an inch-thick bound volume studded with all-star names: Tesla, Panasonic, Cabela’s, Apple, Switch, Scheels,
Target, the Sparks Marina, the Reno Aces, the Oakland A’s, the Las Vegas Raiders and major hotel-casinos from here to Gomorrah South. And don’t forget the LV and Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors authorities, the original freebie queens.
In short, billions that could have gone to communities simply did not, while governments acted as corporate welfare collection agencies.
Nevada voters apparently approve of all this tax ugliness because they keep electing politicians who allow vacuuming the public purse for the greater good of the wealthy few.
With all that government money subsidizing these bandidos, why must we also allow them to add insult to injury by constructing ugly buildings?
A short jaunt around town leaves observers besotted with unguents of ugliness. If we must be condemned to choking in traffic jams on pot-holed streets, shouldn’t we at least occasionally get something nice to look at?
Alas and alack, many taxpayers are condemned to coming home to overpriced monochromatic rabbit warrens designed in Victorian Blah Modern.
I suppose such cookie-cutter crackerbox colorlessness reflects the claptrap imaginations controlling boomtowns which attract transitory populations.
Driving around these days is like living inside an old Humphrey Bogart movie.
Bogie told Ingrid Bergman that “we’ll always have Paris,” but even Paris looks boring in black-and-white.
Look at the bright side. If Hollywood ever needs to find a movie location that looks like Soviet-era Bucharest, maybe today’s investment in boxiness will pay off.
Betwixt now and then, when traveling Truckee Meadows byways, I will continue to long for the occasional dark pleasure of beholding creative, colorful graffiti.
PARTING SHOT: Have you recently noticed how a newly bombed-out city looks black-and-white and bloodless?
Stay safe, get vaxxed and pray for those cruelly afflicted by the cruelly small minds on this small planet, especially victims of our perpetual wars.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Quarantino Barbáno is a 54-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com and Rentvolution.org/ Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988. E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us
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