We drove up to our friends the Naylor’s Lake Gaston lakehouse this morning. It had been a while since I drove up that part of Capital Boulevard and I was dismayed to see the old Cheviot Hills Golf Course now completely cleared, with few, if any, remaining trees. I’ve known it was coming, as it was bought by car dealers and car dealers do what car dealers do: they build car lots. But do they have to plow over every damn tree to build their lots?
I don’t know why it bothers me so, as I never set foot on that golf course, and the jackass who ran it pissed me off with his late night, drunken hunting. I suppose it’s trading a unique community resource for yet another faceless car dealership.
When the Wakefield subdivision was built on the site of an old plantation, the developers kept the barn and other features as a link of the property’s past. When new homes went up on the site of the old Raleigh Municipal Airport, the streets were named for famous aviators. Each provided a link, however tenuous, to the past. As of today, the Cheviot property is unrecognizable as a former golf course and the street names on its first site plan are as generic as they come.
I put on some music while we were cooking dinner and soon Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi came on.
“They paved paradise to put up a parking lot.”
Too often, that’s the story of Raleigh. This city desperately needs more business leaders who give a damn about their city.