The Connecticut River is so beautiful. I’d love to build a little house on the Portland side, in the woods, and watch the leaves change every year…
I saw a 12-car freight train go over the rail bridge, watched the Middletown high school crew team launch and row up the river, and sat on a park bench and watched as the water in the river passed me by. On the way out, an alcohol-on-the-breath guy who professed to being stoned asked me for some money, so him and his friends could get some munchies.
Middletown really needs to revitalize its historic riverfront and reconnect it to the downtown. It’s a hidden gem that just needs a little work to become a huge driver of tourism and commercial traffic into the city.
5 Comments
It’s so pretty. Sigh. So pretty! I hope I wind up living on the water some day… my apartment in Budapest was a block away from the Danube, but the other side of the building blocked my view of the water. One day… ^_^
Remember that guy Dave who accosted us in Copley and kept asking for money? Yeah. I am reminded of him by this post.
Wow, I can’t believe that you remembered that guy’s name. Good work!
Yes, Middletown needs to reconnect with the waterfront. It will take some serious dollars to make it happen. Like most municipalities it looks to the state and federal governments for funding. This is difficult to obtain and given our current enviroment not likely in the future. Middletown current has $18 million or so in unspent federal monies for parking in and around downtown. This has been going on for four years and still no plan to spend the funds. The problem here is a disfunctional city council whose only function seems to get itself relected. They pander to whomever votes for them. They put serious city funds into a dubious housing project in the North End. They can’t seem to do anything about the derliects and bums on Main Street. They spend way too much on education while ignoring the other facets of what makes a city a great place to live and work such as the waterfront. The Democrat stranglehold in Middletown needs to be broken.
Even outside of the dysfunctional political process, it seems to me that the process itself would just be so funding-intensive that it would take years and much concentrated attention to get anything implemented. Burying or raising Route 9 through the entire downtown area would be an enormous amount of money and probably an engineering nightmare, what with it being so close to the river that floods often enough.
I’m still dreaming, though.