McIntire project is full of holes

Although I no longer live in Charlottesville’s urban ring, my ongoing interest in the future of the city prompts serious doubts about the proposal to place a new YMCA building in McIntire Park.

This wonderful resource is supposed to serve low-income youth — and in fact is most valuable to youngsters whose families can’t afford transportation, membership fees and other expenses of fitness and educational programs.

Yet, where is the McIntire Park site? At the city’s north end, near its more affluent neighborhoods, not at the center of Charlottesville where the great majority of low-income families live. Lacking rides from soccer moms in the family SUV or minivan, these kids would have to walk to and from the Y, some of them for fairly long distances.

No big deal? Before dismissing this factor lightly, city officials should walk the round-trip distance themselves, perhaps from Fifeville. Oh, and the experiment should be tried when it’s cold and raining. They also should envision having to navigate the major interchange planned at the U.S. 250 Bypass in front of the park once the Meadowcreek Parkway is complete.

Then there is the “green” factor. McIntire Park is a golden example of the green-space ideal that Charlottesville officials are always talking about. With the new Y, even if it were not expanded in the future, the limited and shrinking inventory of open space would dwindle. Instead of going green, the city would go gray — as in concrete.

Paul Goodloe McIntire, whose donation created the park named after him, surely went to his reward with visions of an open, natural space where people could find a bit of a time warp, a place that looked somewhat like the vistas he knew before six-lane highways and apartment complexes marched across the land. Some of that vision has been lost, but much remains — for now.

How about using the old Jefferson School at midtown? Some say it should be a museum, and oppose putting a Y there.

But what better place to have exhibits of a sad chapter in the area’s history, and a proud people’s eventual triumph over apartheid, than where hundreds of young people of all ethnic backgrounds would walk by every day and perhaps pause now and then to read and reflect?