From: "steven
lesser" <stevenlesser@hotmail.com>
hello! thanks for
thinking of me as a riverside denizen, im in a lurid farcical adventure
with an 8000 pound gorilla by the riverside; i moved to the spot im
in, by the river, to fulfill my quiet dream of having a sculpture studio,
where i could work till i died creating beauty. i picked the most derelict
abandoned part of town, where they would find bodies and where no one
would visit me cuz it was scary, i worked for the place by taking care
of gunshot victims at a charity hospital ....the conversion of a civil
war confederate cannon factory, paid for with the cries of anguish of
victims of the socioeconomic warfare that we wage on the poor and ignorant,
who float the lifestyles of the more fortunate....i plugged away and
plugged away, nights weekends through the death of my parents and through
lots of life passing by and a few days before the big switch, when i
was to be a fulltime stonecarvin and steelweldin sculptor this behemoth
the convention center, a board of incestuous greedy selfserving downtown
businessmen, using a cloak of supposed public good, used the power of
the state to seize the studio offering a check for less than the place
is mortgaged for and a demand to be out in 2 weeks, to allow for the
construction of some awful plastic building that completely closes off
access to the river for the population that actually lives here....they
use a "feasibility study" paid for with public funds. to determine
a huge number of square feet that they need. the studies are all the
same, even written by the same groups, all saying that we must expand
the convention center as a panacea to all of the cities problems,
sucking tax money from the schools, studies using flawed logic with
no mathematics all coming to the same conclusions...expand expand, if
we don't expand we'll lose our "market position". the board
that hires out the study is the same folks that own the downtown businesses
that benefit from the out of town crowds, not anyone else in the town
that gets bankrupted by the "bonds" passed for construction
that are decades of debt for the city...you cant see the river from
the convention center, their army blocked off the streets around my
place, then ripped them up, bought and left open and abandoned the building
around me so that vagrants have free access, my water and power get
shut off on on the left environmental contamination unaddressed, made
false statements, about me to the state, realtors, even a death threat.
i had their study analyzed the one which determined this magic # of
needed expansion feet and its senseless, hired an architect to
show that THE Expansion THEY WANT WILL FIT IN the land that they already
have, had the building declared a monument, and more, all of which will
fall on deaf ears in the court house, by a judge who's worried about
if he'll get elected again, forbidden by state law to have a jury.