The local corporate media is playing all coy about the recent demolishing of the historic canal wall. They keep referring to it as if it was an accident and was bound to happen. (It was not. There were witnesses.)
Not me (and yeah, this is marked as editorial).
I believe somebody, despite knowing the many concerns of our neighborhood and larger Richmond community, thought they could sneakily order and get away with, under the lingering goodwill glow of the folk festival, and before the Riverfront Plan comes up at City Council, the destruction of an important part of Richmond’s history (built with slave labor, designed with the help of no one less than George Washington). And, I guess they figured this sort of thing has been done before in Richmond, so they did think they could get away with it.
As others have pointed out, the work crew did not even bother to put up erosion controls as required by the Chesapeake Bay Act, before beginning this work that included a deep bulldozer rut down the side of the canal.
Imagine if a regular citizen tried something so arrogant, so pernicious. This was not like a kid spray painting a monument, this was someone destroying a large swathe of historic artifact. I don’t care how big or small of a figure the guilty party or guilty parties are, or which corporations they are leaders of, somebody should be going to jail.
Corporate accountability should mean something and not just political buzzwords. Speaking of which, where’s our Councilperson on this? After all, he was very recently quoted- “We need a council to do the people’s business of being watchdogs over the public purse, to be watchdogs over waste, fraud and abuse, to be watchdogs over massive mismanagement,” Jewell says. Really, Marty, then why aren’t you publicly calling for a criminal investigation?
