MUNICIPAL VANDALISM.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21258, 12 February 1931, Page 2

MUNICIPAL VANDALISM.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —Citizens are usually requested to protect their own property, chiefly because society always seems to be menaced by that utterly despicable person, the vandal. Dunedin has been well protected in the past, and hence its present beauty, but surely it is an evil day when the very elect possessing the confidence (supposedly, at least) of the city proceed to wanton destruction on a scale which no individual malefactor could attempt. On Monday morning a large number of men arrived at the Pine Hill road and proceeded to hack and mutilate a landscape among the most beautiful the city possesses. Neither the city engineer nor any member of the council can state that the traffic on this road necessitated any alterations to it. No one can justify the fact that the first act of this gigantic vandalism should be to close the path up from the George street bridge, a path which many people use every day. The money that is being spent on this road is absolutely wasted, and the waste is rendered more acute when one sees a great strapping man making an elaborate journey with a bundle of foliage which a child could . carry, or sees two men taking an innocent wheelbarrow across the road. Oh, Hercules! It would only require little wooden sand spades to complete this Lilliput. Pine Hill is in process of being transformed from one of Dunedin’s most beautiful parts into an unsightly area. Is the City Council prepared to compensate for the resultant depreciation in tlie values of property? But at the rate this multitudinous army is _ smiting its unfamiliar strokes the citizens still have time to protect their own property. There are not many towns in the world that have roads winding through beautiful bush within their boundaries, and there are not many city councils so mean and pitiable as to order their own city’s beauty to be ravaged without very special cause. We had hoped that the Goths and Huns who sacked Koine had vanished in the shadows of the past, that the German authorities who ravaged the beauties of smiling France had received their much-needed execution, but still their, prototypes are with us. Can nothing move these protectors of our city, nothing tear the mud from their vision and let them see the city in all its smiling native beauty? But no—they must waste money on a road the traffic of which will not justify it amidst property the value of which must suffer, and all to create an unsightly monument to a wanton vandalism which is despicable beyond words. Though Dunedin escapes an earthquake, it still must find comfort in the fact that it has its City Council to fall back upon.—l am, etc., Save Your City.