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Nice plants, scraggly plants: a tale of bias?

By Times editorial
Published November 9, 2006

The pictures don't lie. They tell the story of how one end of Ninth Avenue in Safety Harbor got some very special landscaping from the city and how the other end got something less. The end that got the best of the city's landscaping project, the north end, leads to some of the city's priciest, and predominantly white, neighborhoods.

The end that got the worst, the south end, goes through modest, and predominantly black, neighborhoods.

The north end was lined with Little Gem magnolias, a smaller version of the stately Southern Magnolia that still grows into a nice-sized tree with fragrant white blossoms.

The south end of Ninth Avenue was planted with shrubs - plumbago and golden thyrallis and such.

City staffers say the differences had nothing to do with the wealth, race or political influence of the different neighborhoods. They said the landscaping plan on the south end was merely following the dictates of the CSX railroad, which has a set of tracks through the neighborhood.

Yet when residents of the south-end neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Lincoln Highlands and Lincoln Heights complained to City Hall and this newspaper that their landscaping was noticeably inferior, the city went right out and added crape myrtle trees and other plants.

Just like that.

If it was possible to install nicer landscaping after the complaints, it was possible to do so in the first place. That the city did not is reminiscent of other slights of that community by the city administration. In 2001, for example, the city told CSX not to repair a bad railroad crossing in the Brooklyn neighborhood but made sure that CSX repaired crossings in more upscale areas.

The City Commission does not get the blame for this latest slight. Mayor Andy Steingold, for one, lobbied hard for the Ninth Avenue landscaping and has now expressed his disappointment in the quality of the south-end phase.

With a new city manager and a mostly new City Commission, and the willingness of neighborhood residents to call City Hall now about their needs and concerns, surely more attention will be paid to an area of the city that has long deserved it.

[Last modified November 8, 2006, 23:38:55]