RFP Staff
♦ Yesterday word got out of Salisbury’s City Hall that Gateway Park AKA “Needle Park” AKA “Panhandler Square”, near East Innes and Depot Streets, “might” get decked out with decorative colored lights. You know “Needle Park” where heroin addicts congregate and litter the ground with syringes, where homeless sex offenders show up after hunkering down for the night in a crawlspace across from the Probation Office, or where folks too high to gain entry to North Carolina’s largest homeless shelter congregate to “nod out” on the concrete benches most of the day.
What better to illumine the human waste floating in coliform bliss in the Gateway Fountain than bright colored lights? Like countless other “promises” City Hall regularly puts out for example about how developers are coming every year to the Bury excited about the derelict Empire Hotel. Or promises about skateboard parks or bike lanes on East Innes or the city’s H.R. duo will be phased out over time. “We’re working on it.”
An early Al Pacino film: “The Panic in Needle Park” could’ve filmed today in Gateway Park:
In a city drowning in violent crime, breaking and entering artists, hard drugs, 27.2% poverty, D and F public schools, an army of registered sex offenders (many not reporting), FBI stats to die for, talk of brightly colored lights on “Panhandler Square” is almost exciting. Maybe not as exciting as teenagers, walking along East Innes and hurling rocks down on street people below in “Needle Park”.
Perhaps next week another “miscellaneous body found” will be located floating in the yellow waters of the Gateway Fountain?
