Listen, we bloggers love conspiracy theories. Who doesn’t.
So here’s a juicy one – albeit a bit dated – that I just heard.
I’d been working on a story for The Sun about the decision to remove the two half-century plus pools in front of City Hall. And while asking around I came across this interesting conspiracy theory about why they’re there in the first place.
Not naming names (confidential sources and all that) I was told that the pools were constructed while civil rights/anti-Vietnam war protests were breaking out all over the country. And that GNV’s City fathers of the time didn’t want pesky student demonstrators laying siege to City Hall.
In their, um, spare time I suppose.
Anyway, I asked the few old timers who are still around and nobody had ever heard that particular conspiracy theory. So I didn’t include it in the Sun story.
Still, that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Casting around I came across this interesting piece in Bloomberg News about why some colleges and universities began to construct campus buildings in the “brutalist style” back in the day.
The story goes that the campus planners of the late 1960s and 1970s responded to the widespread student protests of the era by replacing bucolic quadrangles and learning commons with maze-like modernist compounds in order to stymie the efforts of any would-be agitators.
But myths aside, there absolutely is a relationship between campus design and student activism.
But while Brutalism can be imposing and fortress-like — these buildings want to get in your face — the correlation doesn’t add up to causation.
Which is another way of saying: Maybe yes, maybe no.
Listen, I’m not sayin’ it’s true. I’m not sayin’ it’s not.
What is true is that the new City Hall was constructed in 1968 and was undeniably done in the Brutalist style.
And when you look at it, it does have a sort of, you know, fortress-like fortitude.
Coincidence? I think not.
It is not difficult to imagine that GNV commissioners at the time – mostly Chamber of Commerce booster types – might have figured that, inevitably, protests would break out at the other end of University Avenue.
And maybe, just maybe, they said: OMG! Let’s build a fortress. And if we can’t put a moat around City Hall, we can at least put a concrete semi-moat out front.”
Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking with it, friends and neighbors!
FreeGNV 