On the Boulevard

March 2003

Marine Parade, the street in front of my house along the sea, is being made into a boulevard. Acquaintances visited from out of town this week. We had our drive around the city and came back to the house. Despite the wind, the veranda was pleasant. Thank goodness the machines were not working on our stretch of the new boulevard.

 

Filling on the sea side of the new boulevard progressed from opposite directions and finally met in front of my house. Yesterday a new machine worked for a couple of hours destroying the seawall that sticks up between Marine Parade and the rough rock fill. Quiet it was not. They finished only a few yards and apparently have gone off elsewhere to torture other residents today.

 

Wednesday it happened. We had very strong winds from the southeast with a high tide. When I looked out that morning, Marine Parade, Hutson Street, and my yard were flooded with golden muddy water. The new fill for the boulevard was almost completely under water. Waves washed over the rocky fill, past where the sea wall had been demolished, and into the street.

The next day, work began on a deep drain between the pavement and front fences. The walls of the trench are reinforced with concrete-block walls. It looks as if the drains will be topped by a sidewalk. This is all very nice, but I have yet to see a drain line from the new trench under the road and fill to the sea.

At this point, I am terrified that they will decide to build all of Marine Parade a foot or so higher than it now is, which would drain rain and high tides directly into my yard.

 

All the equipment used in the street-widening project has complicated traffic in our block of Marine Parade. Thursday I pulled out of my garage and turned onto Marine Parade as usual. Halfway down the block, a huge cement mixer and some other machine stood side by side, completely blocking the street.

I backed up and temporarily parked crosswise in my driveway. Meanwhile, two other cars had come down Hutson Street behind me. The policeman stationed at the corner to prevent people from using the unpaved extension of Marine Parade, came over to my car to tell me in an ugly voice that I could not drive up Hutson Street the wrong way.

I explained politely that Marine Parade was blocked. He denied it. I asked him to look again to assure me that it was open. He stalked off to deal with the other cars. By then one of them was backing up after not being able to get past the equipment. I decided to hell with him, whipped up Hutson, and turned left legally onto Eyre Street a block away, to cut back to North Front Street by Mirab’s. We have had a lovely, friendly policewoman on our corner for days. It is too bad (for me) that she was replaced by a son-of-a.

At lunchtime, Alex grinned broadly as he presented me with two traffic tickets left by the unpleasant officer with whom I had tangled that morning. Alex said that when he returned to the house mid-morning, the policeman followed him into our garage brandishing the tickets he had issued to me and ranting about my misbehavior. Alex said he tried to defend me to the constable, but it was wasted effort.

While I feel (somewhat) justified, the tickets detail actions on my part that I can’t deny—going the wrong way on a one-way street and deliberately disobeying the order of a police officer. Friday afternoon I paid $525 apiece for my two tickets. I commented to the cashier at City Council that while I had done what the tickets said, it was only because the street was completely blocked, and that the constable was extremely rude when I tried to talk to him about it. She was very sympathetic and indicated that this was a familiar story.

Needless to say, I shall be meticulous about my driving behavior in the future.

April 2003

The construction gang finished work along the street on my side of the garage before they stopped work Thursday noon for the Easter holiday. The new concrete is covered with plastic to protect it as it dries. Meanwhile, I am leaving my car on Alex’s side while they are away because I don’t want to risk driving over nails in the boards the men used to demarcate the edge of the new concrete on the apron.

It is restful not having any machines rumbling and screeching for a few days. However, the dust continues to blow in, so I spend half my time dusting. The weather is sufficiently cool for me to keep the living room windows closed. However, I spend most of my time in the bedroom and have to keep the louvers open.

May 2003

The new lane of the boulevard from the Hutson Street corner to the park actually shows signs of progress. The fill has been leveled. The seaside edge is lined with two-foot-diameter rocks / concrete blocks holding the upper edge of black plastic intended to act as a seawall.

I have my doubts. I double-checked with Alex and verified that the correct way to do a roadway like this is to build the seawall first, then fill in behind it. He says the supervisor told them they are having to use twice as much fill as originally planned. Of course they are. The stuff slips happily off into the sea as the dump truck deposits more.

Today, for the first time, a compactor was run back and forth all day long on this part of the roadway. Nothing was done about the new mountain of huge blocks along the street to the north of our corner.

When work finally is completed, I may actually miss the endless speculating about why they are doing what they are and why they aren’t doing what I think they should.

 

You have no idea what an ordeal this dry season has been. Not only did great machines deposited tons of rock and dirt along Marine Parade for the new boulevard, but successive massive yellow monsters crawled back and forth over it day after day, kicking up red dust. Our lovely winds carried it hither and yon, playing no favorites.

Dust married the salt spray on the front windows to make them opaque. In desperation, I had my occasionally-available helpers, Elmer and Eugene, spray them down from the veranda. The resulting mud drained down the lower front of the house. A shovel would be more appropriate than the hose to wash off the deck.

The entire inside of the house had a light layer of dust. Everything I touched felt gritty.

When the first downpour broke The Dry yesterday, strangers greeted strangers joyously on the street, in relief at the rain.

July 2003

Last week, a bulldozer moved in and scraped up the carefully leveled, compacted, and steamrolled stretch of new lane from the park to north, beyond Hutson Street. It built a ten-foot-high mountain of the discarded fill that so carefully had been applied to the new construction. The next, day dump trucks carried the mountain away in one noisy trip after another.

A couple of days later, trucks arrived with new fill that was spread evenly along the denuded stretch. When that was leveled, the steam roller reappeared to pack it tightly. I don’t know what you think, but I suspect the most untrained person could have done a more efficient job of organizing this construction.

August 2003

A trench hoe has been progressing to and past my home for a couple of days, digging a trench for the seawall. I need to ask Alex about the engineering efficiency of this. My idea is that a seawall should start at the sea bottom and project above the adjacent land, covering the face of the land’s edge from top to bottom. This one is set into a trench a foot or two deep, four or five feet in from the edge of the new fill. In my view, that leaves the entire new lane protected from the undercutting action of the sea by only a fragile sheet of black plastic extending into the water and held in place by large blocks of cement from the former seawall.

Why don’t people ask me for my advice before they dash off on inefficient multimillion dollar projects or decide how to run a country?

 

The new seawall is so high that it blocks the view of the water completely for all but the highest vehicles. I am heartsick. We never have seas or waves high enough to need a wall this high except in a hurricane. Under those conditions, I predict that the storm would undercut the road, knock down the alleged seawall, and send slabs of concrete careening into my home.

Day after day I see my adored sea view banished from sight. Fortunately my home is high enough for me to see over the monstrosity from my windows and veranda. My only hope now is that when the new boulevard is completed, the government will install “sleeping policemen” (speed bumps) to prevent its becoming a speedway.

 

The new seawall now is well past my home. It changes, but does not really disturb, my view from inside. However, it is so high that instead of a lovely sea view driving along Marine Parade, now all I can see is a concrete wall.

Returning home, my heart used to lurch with pleasure as I turned down either Hutson or Park Streets because of the expansive view of blue water and distant cayes. Now when I turn, I am faced with blank grayness.

February 2004

Just this week, they began in our block on the original Marine Parade (the boulevard lane in front of my house). Layers of dark, messy, rocky dirt were dumped, spread, scraped up, and half of it carted away again in dump trucks. Today, a layer of well broken rock has been laid and rolled.

When I took Raven for her walk, the roller met us part-way down the block. Raven spooked slightly, but stayed close to me. To my amusement and Raven’s horror, the roller backed up and kept pace with us as we finished walking to the embassy corner. A layer of fine gravel comes next, then scraping, taking up excess material and carting it away, rolling, and finally spraying with black stuff. Meanwhile, traffic is directed to the far lane (along the sea), already finished to that degree.

July 2004

In reply to your question about what the government plans to do with the median on the new boulevard, I still don’t know, but they are starting noisily.

I write to the accompaniment of a jack hammer. From what I can see, they are breaking up small rocks in the middle of the two curbs forming the median. No idea what this portends, but I hope they finish this stage soon. This is sound I notice!

August 2004

I write to the accompaniment of several of the large machines whose absence I had appreciated.

The good news is that—allegedly—the boulevard, though not finished, will be open for traffic by the end of the month.

The bad news is that the contractors found their pseudo-paving did not hold up in the tour-bus parking area opposite the park. They dug up the surface and some of the fill, ran the roller to smooth it, laid down heavy plastic over the entire area, topped it with steel mesh, and are pouring concrete over it. From my dog-walking vantage point, it appeared to me that the concrete was too thin a layer.

The last couple of days, a backhoe has been digging fill out from between the concrete walls of the median. Dump trucks haul the fill away. I assume they plan to fill the median with black dirt and do some planting eventually. They also have dug out some of the fill from the curving verges near the park. A great pile of black dirt was dumped near them. All this work may be noisy, but it may be worth it.

September 2004

The boulevard was not opened to traffic by the end of August. However, our part was resurfaced with tar / asphalt and pea gravel. I noticed that Hutson Street, from the end of our little sidewalk to the boulevard itself, was a sea of black. It was near lunchtime, so I walked out to ask the foreman how long it would take to set. I was worried about Alex and María’s getting home.

The foreman smiled and assured me it would take only thirty minutes. Then he suddenly called forcefully, “Mind, mind, mind…” I turned and saw the tar tanker was backing up toward me. The long dispenser was inches away. I was standing in the exact spot where—moments after my leap to safety—the driver began spraying the black goo.

My dog walks were abbreviated that day because the street between our block and the park was being tarred. Again, the dogs seemed to enjoy watching the work and didn’t mind being led home early.

 

The completed boulevard is lovely. I still think the wall is too high, but it isn’t as bad as I thought before they raised the level of the street. The median and various planters bristle with plants that will be lovely as they grow.

You don’t need details of the to-do over renaming Marine Parade. It was to have been named Javier Berbey Boulevard, in tribute to Javier Berbey García, the Panamanian developer who envisioned the boulevard. I had argued to keep the name Marine Parade, which I love. To me, it is romantic and slightly archaic. (I also suspect cruise-ship passengers who stroll along the new sidewalks will feel the same way.) In what I consider a nice little compromise, they instead dedicated the major roundabout to Javier Berbey García and renamed our street Marine Parade Boulevard.

October 2004

On balance, I am delighted with the new boulevard. I still regret that the view of the sea from my living room is not as “right in my lap” as it used to be. And I miss my view of the sea when it is blocked by the higher seawall. Traffic noise has increased, partly because of the tar-over-gravel surfacing. Some nights cars, often two or three together, park on the far lane, turn radios up at top volume, and have noisy parties. They easily could go north the equivalent of a block and enjoy themselves away from any homes where people might be trying to sleep.

However, I love seeing families perched on the wall enjoying the view and breeze. It is pleasant to watch the numbers of early-morning joggers and walkers on the sidewalk alongside the seawall. It is a pleasure to drive the length of the boulevard, bypassing crowded streets. When we have a storm, as inevitably we must, the extra width of the boulevard and the height of the seawall will offer somewhat more protection than we used to have.

 

Yesterday was the formal opening of Marine Parade Boulevard. To his amazement, midweek two men from City Council called on Alex to ask him to speak at the ceremony.

I wish you could have heard him. He did a beautiful job. He admitted in the beginning that he was no public speaker, then went on to give an entertaining, informative, often amusing talk. Afterwards, a surprising number of people came up to congratulate him. One of the sisters from St. Catherine’s spent quite a while talking to him and asked for a copy of the speech.

The ceremony was nicely done. A small stage and lectern had been set up at our end of the bus park, and rows of chairs arranged for guests. Speakers were the mayor, Alex, a representative from the contractors, and the prime minister in that order. The weather cooperated—cloudless sky, but a pleasant wind to moderate the temperature. The ceremony started almost on time around 4:00 pm, and we were home by 5:00.