Joe Kennedy

Joe Kennedy is routinely named the region's best writer by readers of The Roanoker magazine.

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Few people in Roanoke imagined that a good thing such as the rising, $66 million Art Museum of Western Virginia might jeopardize the Roanoke City Market, a treasure that other cities seek to emulate just as it is.

We didn't foresee that the ambitions of Center in the Square, the arts and museum complex on the market, might threaten farmers, craftspeople and the Roanoke Weiner Stand.

Nor were many people aware that other plans to change, though not necessarily improve, the market were in the works.

When word of these doings became public and an uproar followed, Mayor Nelson Harris declared that he would hold meetings this month with certain stakeholders in the market controversy.

He neglected to mention that other stakeholders -- the media and the general public -- would be excluded from the meetings.

That came out later.

He has since told the city council, by letter, that he intends to open some meetings to the public, and presumably the media, after holding his private ones.

That's still not good enough.

Watch his eyes

Harris said the media's presence would inhibit the free expression of market stakeholders' ideas.

In reality, the market belongs to the city, and the closed meetings are just an extension of the secrecy that already has prevailed among officials studying ways of renovating it.

Closed meetings hardly inspire the faith of the populace, but our silver-tongued preacher-mayor undoubtedly will concoct a carefully worded, after-the-fact statement of reassurance that should be studied closely lest its meaning, if there is any, be missed.

He issued one such utterance when the rumblings about the market's future began.

It was a beauty: "My desire would be that the farmers and florists on the market remain in the market area as they provide a certain ambience that makes the market area unique and attractive."

Let's dissect this: His desire "would be" -- not is, but would be -- that the vendors and shopkeepers remain in the "market area."

That does not necessarily mean at their current spots, but could mean some other place -- even, one assumes, in the center of a Market Street turned into a pedestrian mall.

Similar threats

Some people may think that Roanoke lags behind bigger, more sophisticated places, but recent events in Alexandria indicate that in some cases, our controversies are just much smaller versions of theirs.

In Old Town Alexandria, 6,000 preserved historic buildings soon may be at risk as new development threatens to bring in visitors by the thousands.

According to a story in Tuesday's Washington Post, Alexandria officials will announce a proposal to redevelop the city's waterfront with "a plan conceived as a way to make the city more of a tourist mecca."

Across the Potomac River in Maryland, a $2 billion hotel and convention project known as National Harbor is rising.

Water taxis will convey visitors back and forth between the two shores.

Alexandria's defenders worry that new visitors may lead to the demise of tasteful shops and the arrival of tacky ones. They worry that their streets will be overrun, their quality of life reduced.

"People don't want to see the destruction of our core historic fabric," Alexandria resident and landscape architect Geoffrey Stone told the Post. "We don't want to destroy the thing that makes us attractive."

This is the sentiment of many, many Roanokers.

Maybe the new art museum will generate hordes of new visitors and demonstrate a need for a dramatic City Market revamping.

But at this point, those hordes are figments and vapors, and there is no reason to assume that if they materialize, they won't like the market just the way it is.

We have a similar issue in the proposal to study the feasibility of erecting a smallish hotel atop Mill Mountain.

In all of these cases, a central question is not whether a valued commodity should be changed to increase tourism and tax revenues, but whether it should be changed at all.

The redevelopment of Alexandria seems foregone. In Roanoke, the citizens are in a wait-and-see stance.

If you have input, you should give it whether it is welcome at this time or not.

That's why we have e-mail and telephones.