Wonderful World of Woodland Avenue

Now that the 27th Street Bridge over the Paseo is open again and I have a car with a functioning catalytic converter, I am once again enjoying the option of occasionally taking the very hilly Woodland Avenue between 27th Street and Independence Avenue.

These photos are from the last couple of weeks along a stretch of Woodland where a few people decorate and barricade their homes. For the most part, though, it includes empty lots where trash gets dumped.

This is some trash around 26th and Woodland.
This is a view east on 25th from Woodland. Notice the sidewalks and how they seem to call out to litter. [The scene also reminds me of some of the best Missouri hiking days I ever had (with people I love).]
This is a smashed up car full of trash that was on the 2500-block of Woodland up until today. Notice the homes in the background, which were "rennovated" during 2005.
This is a house on the next block; this trailer of yellow bags may become illegal dumping someday, but has been in situ since at least mid-December. I wonder if the truck runs.
This is a view west down 24th (I think). The bus is coming. The house on the south is abandoned.
This is the "newer" trash pile on the east side of the street, on the same block. It's as if someone was evicted from a house that hasn't been there for decades. On a related note, the stairs to these ghost homes are still visible. The Urban Coeur developers tore the ones out on Cherry to built new housing. For some reason, that makes me sad. I didn't even know about this development of theirs. They seem to be following me.
Proceeding on, when you get to 22nd Street, you can look west and see the Vine Street Lofts, looming out of the urban grassland. Downtown is peeking out behind and keeping its distance.
On the southwest corner, there is a house on that was occupied back in 2004. It's been boarded up for most of 2005, but now, the plywood is off the front door and maybe the resident is back? The light on the outside is on, anyway.
Looking to the east and north shows Lincoln College Preparatory High School up on the hill.
Then, after 18th & Vine's eastern edge, Parade Park homes, Parade Park, Truman Road with Weld Wheels, there's 12th Street and public housing on both sides.
Across 12th, things get a little denser and commerical. There's Woodland Elementary School* at Ninth (which the School District is looking at closing), then Century Towers* (apartments and city offices in the former osteopathic hospital), a 7-Eleven and the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences*. After Della Lamb Community Services*, Woodland ends by touching yet another public housing development (Riverview Gardens) and Maple and Kessler/Cliff Drive parks*.

*(Not shown; aren't you tired of photos?)

For some reason, someday far into the future, when (if) this area is "blessed" by the urban renewal fairy and full of new in-fill housing, marketed for its proximity to downtown and Highway 71, I'll miss all the empty spaces and the bleak, isolated drive that reminds me of of some kind of "end times" scenario.

It's not the best land, though, and the extreme hills have already made it a "less desirable" part of the city - at least until there's some kind of Katrina-esque flood that fills up the city's valleys.

I guess Woodland is merely a blatant reminder of itself and the conditions that foster such things.

One day when I was wandering in my car, along 25th Street (approximately) headed downhill and west during a pouring rainstorm towards Woodland, during a time in my life when my eyesight was compromised by my vanity, thrift and laziness against getting a new prescription (the glasses finally disintegrated, long after the last contact was lost), a man in a wheelchair, not an old man, much thinner than I and let's say kind of attractive like Snoop, perhaps not even physically threatening, was mostly sliding down the wretched hill, going who the hell knows where at 8 in the morning in a spring storm on the East Side where hills are high and sewers are apt to be clogged.

This person quite unexpectedly encountered, in a place I seek solitude, didn't indicate any communication in my direction; I didn't do much but maybe catch his eye. One of my thoughts was that my car was full of crap, and I have had grievances about transporting babies illegally (state law; carseats) and trying to accomodate large and/or disabled people into my crappy "I am so clearly child- and friend-less" car in the past - and - I have learned a thing or two about picking up strangers.

So far, nothing terrible has happened.

I once saw a woman in court, a grandmother and none too slim (perhaps at 50- or 60-something that comforting age was her charm, her saving grace - heck, I fell for it) be the subject of a "prostitute gets 10 years" story; the woman was one I had had in my car, on Troost from 18th to 27th Street, and she was up there in court, beyond the rail and being called a career prostitute via a prosecutor's PowerPoint presentation.

One never knows.

She asked me about the music I was playing (back when the tape-deck worked); it was Ani DiFranco; when I asked her what she was up to, where she was going, she only said, "Oh, here and there."

A man once tried to wave me down in the 27th-Street dusk of a summer afternoon, at Prospect. As if a younger woman is going to see Jesus in that situation and help a capable and less-threatening-to-other-demographics person with some kind of mechanical battery thing women don't "do." I must be evil.

Admittedly, I have accepted help from strangers who are male. A number have been neutrally helpful at that stupid QuikTrip air pump, for example. You may know of my nemesis issues with nails and screws and also with males who want something.

I tend to be found in isolated places and sometimes, more often than my parents must have invisioned my being, with people who have records, are high, are pitiably senile or disillusioned, foreign, possibly evil and decidedly "different." A man who won't talk to me anymore about his own humanity once taught me "different is okay," and another priest once made me understand the differering philosophies of the world and hence opened the doorway to the Eastern "liberal" proto-Christ "it's all in your head" trip, where, apparently I've stayed.

Quiz: Name one bad thing about working until 9 p.m.

(Hint: You stay up until 2 a.m.)

Still, what I didn't do still bothers me.