Springfield downgrade is an upgrade

Friends in Springfield Avenue are incensed that Council intends to replace their perfectly fine terracotta paving with bitumen -- in the style you can now see in Kellet Street.

Council staff say they can't afford the whole grey ganite treatment so Springfield gets the poor man's version. Why not save the money and just leave it, ask locals? The thinking seems to be that it's gotta be grey. Uniformity is the definition of attractiveness (they call it 'consistency') according to Council's planners who are secret members of an ultra-strict sect -- the New Church of Modernism. These nutters believe in a God with a cubist head and grey skin and are on a mission to transform the world into His image. They believe the Devil resides in Diversity.

Many locals think the beautiful avenue with its Art Deco European ambience has had it anyway -- Australand are proposing twin six-storey cubist apartment blocks on the Village site, with a gaping carpark entrance fronting the tiny cul-de-sac to swallow the extra hundred or so cars trips per day that will be generated. Could this be why council originally proposed turning Springfield Plaza into a road?

One local is objecting to the development on the grounds that the single-glazed windows just a spit from Darlinghurst Road will create a noise problem and we will then see a new bunch of whingers saddled with half-million-dollar mortgages using the noise laws to kill the Cross -- like the wankers in the Toaster who complained about the trains sounding their horns as they entered the tunnel.