mbarrick | Another tiny step toward the decline of Western civilisation

The city's hertiage committee was utterly useless in helping me prevent a fundamental change to the "Class A" hertiage building I live in. In theory a "Class A" hertiage designation means you cannot make changes to the outside of the building that are a step away from the building's original character, it is, however, alright to make changes toward restoring features.

They started replacing balcony railings last Friday. The new railings have been made to resemble the existing railings, only higher since someone deemed the older ones "unsafe for children" ("Think of the children!"). There are no children in this building. And there are a a half a million other apartments in this city with modern "safe" balconies. And, for that matter, when I was a child I and everyone I knew routinely climbed trees higher than this building, walked on rooftops with no rail whatsoever, explored cliff-tops without the benefit of railings, etc.. By the rationale of the safety inspectors my entire generation should be dead. The new balconies were designed to look like the existing ones in order to preseve some of the character, only the existing ones aren't original, they were put in place sometime after WWII. The original railings were made of wood in a fairly typical Edwardian neo-Classical/Craftsman style with the vertical rods made of turned wood in a sort of elongated pear-shape with square ends. The only thing original about the existing railings is they maintain the original Classical proportions. So the new railings destroy that proportion and replicate nothing but a clumsy post-war "Modernization" effort that destroyed many of the buildings more interesting features.

But what can you expect from a city whose idea of "public beauty" and "local heritage" is randomly plopping fiberglass whales with trees, salmon, bears and mountains airbush-painted on them around town?