What do you think would happen? How would you react if, like your reporting owl, you flew one day by the columns at Founder’s Hall on Athens State University only to find the view tarnished by a giant concrete parking garage built right in front of its four grand columns? Even the most jaded Athenian, alumni or visitor would send up a howl of protest. This has not happened, nor hopefully ever will. But could such a gigantic mistake happen here?

It did happen once, in St. Louis. How the responsible citizens dealt with it is instructive for us. When you make a mistake, don’t make it worse. Here’s the strange story.

Most Alabamians who travel have been to St. Louis, Mo. They’ve all visited Forest Park, one of the greatest, most serene, places in America. There you can visit, free, one of the finest zoos and art museums on earth. You can ride boats on the lakes created during the 1904 World’s Fair or even visit the Science Planetarium. One of the grandest vistas of all is to stand at the western end of the park and admire the looming, Oxford-English-style Washington University. You can sense how its early Missouri architects saw the institution of great learning reflected in harmony with the park laid out before it, extending for miles toward the Mississippi.

Then one fine day, in the 1970s, someone decided to build two “brutalist,” naked concrete buildings right in the middle of the revered Victorian campus. Right between two of the old-English style university halls no less.

“Brutalist” is the right word. You saw such buildings all over the former communist Eastern Europe. These gigantic, concrete eyesores looked like huge parking garages with people in them. The two plunked down side by side on campus were fun-house ugly and vast chambers had no use at all. On “opening day” guests came in to find water buckets spaced about every 20 feet across the entire reception center. The place leaked like a sieve and smelled like mold. It did so for the next 20 years until Washington University decided “this isn’t who we are.” Down came the eyesores on one remarkable demolition weekend, to be replaced by traditional buildings which mirror imaged the historic quadrangle.

When we make a mistake, what do we do? Do we double down, deny what is obvious to any fair-minded person? Do we admit there might be a better way, and adjust our course? Looking around our county, the common theme is “look at all that building going on.” To what end? Once, while listening from my perch on a windowsill outside a government office, I heard a wise comment. “Ladies and gentlemen, in order to accomplish your goals, you have to know what they are.” In other words, when you plan for something, ask yourself, “What does success look like?” Do we who live here in Limestone County feel like we know where we are going? Where is the “plan” we are following? Is our county a collection of communities for people or for developers? Ask where you can go to see the county or city plans for development for the next five years, three or even next year? If you were to write to your county commissioner, or city councilman, and ask where we are going, show me the map for the coming years, what would happen? Would you be invited to go see the planning maps? Are there planning maps for housing, infrastructure and services like police and fire protection? Do we only respond to developers who know what their patch will look like, caring less for how those buildings will impact those around them?

Questions left dangling forever seem to be what will be done with the spaces over the shops downtown. Will they ever be built into apartments for those starting out in life, not able to afford a stand-alone house? Where can otherwise healthy elderly people live who want to be engaged in life downtown, but don’t want to live in a free-standing house? Will we ever have public transportation throughout our county? Our city? Anywhere? That would certainly alleviate a lot of traffic problems, which grow by the day, along with other infrastructure woes. What’s more, a shuttle bus would make downtown in Athens far more accessible. Athens Main Street and the Tourism Office try valiantly to bring people together, when the means of doing so is so readily obvious. Have a bus bring people around our county and towns to events. Why not a park and ride? This owl could go on, but you could fill in the “why not” questions as well as I.

Why don’t we plan better? Why? Those who saved the overall ivy-league look of the Washington University campus, by destroying the eyesore brutalist buildings, were “traditional.” They kept what was good about the past, and got rid of, once and for all, the bad from the past. They admitted the concrete-slab buildings were wrong. They got knocked down the eyesore and substituted a progressive, harmonious vision for the future. We here seem to be haphazard in our building, patching a housing development here, approving a traffic circle there. Nothing works together, because there is no vision of “what success looks like.” Is there?