Bengal News West Reporters
Residents of Ardmore Place are
finding that the historic brick they rallied to keep uncovered is more than
they bargained for.
From afar, the street looks smooth and even. But a closer
look reveals crooked, uneven bricks and gaps every ten feet filled with loose
asphalt.
In July, the city ripped up the
road to repave it. When residents saw the exposed red brick underneath the
pavement, they pushed the city to allow them to keep it. Now, that initial
excitement seems to have faded.
“It’s not the way things are today,”
Danelle Castiglia, 68 Ardmore Place, said. “It’s fun to
hang on to nostalgia, but I don’t think it’s practical. There’s a reason they
paved it [40] years
ago.”
“It’s pretty to look at,”
Castiglia said. “But I don’t think it’s going to be practical.”
Kenneth Guidie, whose girlfriend
lives on Ardmore, said he doesn’t like that skateboarding or rollerblading on
the brick is difficult.
“The road is bumpy, you have to
drive really slow when you’re driving over it,” Guidie said. “It’s noisy,
that’s another complaint people have been having.”
With winter approaching, residents
are worried that snowplows won’t be able to go down Ardmore without scraping
the road, and that salt might erode the recently discovered red bricks.
“I like the feel that it brings, the look of it,”
Guidie said. “Other than that, I don’t care for it. That’s going to be a mess
if they don’t raise their plows up a couple of inches, like they should.”
