The War Over MLK Drive

Where Have I Seen This Movie Before?

Near Manchester, Vermont, 1988.

My favorite range war drives the plot in the movie Shane, which came out in 1953 and is my personal pick for Best Western Ever. The structure of the movie is fairly simple. Basically the sodbusters are moving in - President Lincoln's Homestead Act, you know. They're bringing their families with them and - gasp! - plowing the land and planting crops. 

The cattlemen are aghast - particularly the ranch owner, who at one point gives a speech in defense of the open range, claiming that he has a superior right to the land because he had come to a place that was wilderness and made it fruitful. 

The sodbusters aren't terribly interested in conforming to the expectations of the cattlemen. They keep on plowing and - gasp! - even building fences to keep the cattle away from the crops. 

The rancher boss decides it's time for sterner measures, so he brings in a gunslinger played by Jack Palance, who delivers a performance that is a distillation of pure evil. I remember as a child practicing putting on gloves the way Jack Palance did.

Unfortunately for the cattlemen, Alan Ladd has been working as a hired hand for one of the sodbusters. He's also a gunslinger, but he's been trying to retire.

And things go on from there.

So what does all this have to do with MLK Drive? Simply that the struggle over MLK, which has been going on for decades now, is a range war. 

On one side we have the people who live in neighborhoods adjacent to Fairmount Park, where Martin Luther King Drive is located. On the other side we have people from all over the city - and the region - who come to walk, bike, run and otherwise make use of the space. 

There's a nice story in PlanPhilly entitled "Change is hard." A resident of Wynnefield told the reporter that traffic on Belmont and Parkside avenues is up as people try to avoid the Schuylkill Expressway. This person also mentioned that local residents like the convenience of using MLK Drive to get to Center City and added  that older neighbors, in particular, want to avoid the Schuylkill. I don't blame them. I hate the Schuylkill.

But underneath all this, I sense a deep feeling that was memorably formulated by my son when he was two years old: "I want it the way it was."

That's simply not going to happen. The world is changing. 

I have no desire to push octogenarians onto the Schuylkill Expressway. But there are better solutions than a knee-jerk reversion to the status quo ante. 

I understand that members of City Council, like all politicians, have a strong interest in reelection, which involves a strong focus on pleasing constituents.

However, in public life there used to be an interest in balancing politics with policy. Many current politicians seem to have moved away from that formula, to the detriment, I would say, of both our country and our city.

See also Is It a Park, or Is It a Traffic Sewer?