To the editor:

I live on a block adjoining the one with the ramshackle building that once housed the Carver Nursery School. Were this building truly worthy of preservation, shouldn’t many people have stepped forward long ago — when the building housed an alcoholic beverage-serving establishment widely regarded as a community nuisance — to foster its preservation?

As a new neighborhood resident attending the hearing in which demolishing this building was first addressed — only by the coincidence of being there for another docket item closer to my house — I was startled by the strong contingent of nearby residents supporting tearing the building down and replacing it with a small-scale development by a micro-developer who lives in the neighborhood.

Tilting at windmills over preserving buildings of dubious historic merit detracts credibility from the main matter at hand: saving our waterfront from City Hall’s redevelopment plan.

The strong neighborhood contingent favoring replacing the former Carver Nursery School — situated in the center of the Durant Center voting precinct — with a nice, low-scale development may explain why that precinct went against the waterfront pro-preservation candidate by about the same margin as citywide. This happened despite it adjoining the City Hall voting precinct, which went for the waterfront pro-preservation candidate.

Elections have consequences (and in my estimate the last local election had unfortunate ones). But an insurgency against the political establishment in a one-party town has to choose its battles wisely.

– Dino Drudi
Alexandria