The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-11-25
The Proposed Extension of Crown
 Street.

To Editor of the Journal and Courier:
 It is a natural delusion, I suppose, for any man who becomes earnestly worked up about any public question to imagine that the great public is on his side. This perhaps accounts for the extraordinary statement of W. B. L. in the Register of last Thursday, that the attorneys constitute the only opposition to the extension of Crown street. If w. B. L. has taken the trouble, as he should have done, to at- tend the hearing before the State com mittee, he would have found that there was a very considerable opposition to the measure, and that the majority of those present did oppose it and only two of them were attorneys. The letter in the Register which presented very strongly the views of the opposition
 was from the pen of MT. William c.
 Sheldon, very we'll known citizen.
 The question is not whetherthe exten- sion of Grown street. may result in some advantage There are thousands of improvements which may be made in the streets of our cities. We could, as w. B. L. suggests, have a great many more straight lines and fewer corners. We could build the whole city over as Boss Shepard did Washing ton. The real question, after all. is,' can we afford it? It is the principal ques- tion in the case of every. improvement, and whether we can afford it or not de- pends whether the advantage gained is at all proportioned to. the Smoney expended, and it is to the very plain case that the advantage is not propor- toned to the expense, that neither w. B. L. nor anybody else has as yet suc- cessfully replied.
 It is not a serious objection that in coming from Wooster street in order to pass into Crown street one must turn down and go one hundred feet on State street. If Wooster street was on the level with State street, just as Crown is, the objection that there are two corners to turn would be a very slight reason for going to the large ex- pense and to so drastic a measure as the closing of one street and the open- ing of another. As W. B. L. says, there are many streets where in coming from the eastern part of the city to the western, you have to turn corners, but the turning of the corners is an in convenience that will exist in thousands of instances and must necessarily eX- ist in any city of any size. The only real objection in the present state of things is the steepness of the approach to the bridge on Wooster street. There is a sudden. steep descent from that bridge down into State street. That, taken in connection with the existence of the street railway on State street, makes the situation an objectionable one. But, the cut Is going to be moved to the eastward where Union street now stands, and the approach to the bridge will necessarily be much more gradual. {. The City Engineers plan shows that it is to be reduced 50 per cent Meanwhile, the electric railroad is to go down into the cut and disap- pear from State street entirely. This disposes practically of all the objec- tionable features in the situation. Should there be an extension of Crown street, the bridge over the railroad on Grown street extension must be just as high as that in Wooster street, and the approach would be just as steep in one case as in the other. So that ab- solutely all that is gained is that we do not turn these two corners any more; and for this inconsiderable gain we are to condemn the. land on which four buildings stand, tear them down, pay damages to the owners of the prop erty, and to the leaseholders and pay damages for the closing up of Wooster street, which latter damages are lfke- ly to be very heavy. It is estimated that the damage cannot fall short of $1OOOOO This appears to be a moder- ate estimate. The damage will prob ably exceed that amount.
 The natural and sensible question, un- der the circumstances, is, can we afford to do it? Can We afford this eXpen- allure for trif1ing advantage when we cannot furnish the money to build the necessary schools, and when we are bonding deficit of $200,000?