So far about all I’ve done here is work, visit the beach, visit Mount Trashmore, and shop. Not a whole lot of future in any of those things, so I thought I’d put my overly analytical and obsessive compulsive mouth aside and try something different for a change. I wanted to walk around downtown Norfolk for a change, and see Waterside, so I made my way down to the Afr’Am festival at Town Point Park which oddly enough just seems like the backyard of Waterside. Getting there is easy enough, just get off on the Waterside exit, park in one of the many parking garages in downtown Norfolk and just walk a few blocks. Waited in line for like an hour and paid my $10 and walked right in.

Thus the contradictions of the Seven Cities; first off Town Point Park seems to be a small plot of land in front of downtown sandwiched in between Norfolk and the pier. Everything is like, right there in a very compact fashion. It was a nice backdrop though, with what appeared to be the oldest part of downtown Norfolk. Across the water you see a few high rises here and there in downtown Portsmouth, which trust, has a very, very long way to go in comparison to either downtown Norfolk or Virginia Beach.

There is serious potential here, hell, I wish Norfolk would take over parts of Portsmouth so they could get their act together because the view was seriously underutilized. Billions of dollars later, and perhaps with the brute force of eminent domain, that view could be remade in ways that would boggle the mind. Aside from all of that though there are plenty of holes in Norfolk’s skyline that the city is trying to plug as well.

But it’s all the same old same old, who wants to enforce whose ideas of a metropolis on who, what taxpayers are going to pay for what projects, and what obstacles stand in the way. It still seems like a work in progress, but it has an authenticity and organic nature to it that is missing in downtown Virginia Beach. It’s also more of what I would like to see when I am passing through Hampton or rather Newport News. It was my first time visiting either the park or Waterside, and I finally got to see what the hubbub was all about.

Waterside should be razed; it’s an old paradigm from a failed effort to bring something that was missing to downtown Norfolk. It’s an ugly, hideous sight, an eye sore really, with no real place in a city like Norfolk, though it could work well in a suburb of 50,000 in Southern New Jersey. I flirted with the idea of going in there but then upon realization of what was in there, and how much it reminded me of bland efforts to do something back home, sort of like Quaker Square that was relevant 30 years ago, I had to walk away.

Again, Town Point Park is like really, really small. I mean what the hell you had two like micro-mini amphitheatre like set ups, you know where you can sit in the grass and watch performers from atop a hill. There were like, maybe 30 or so vendors 10 of which were selling food, a lot of which was the same and the other 20 or more selling a variety of things mostly organizational stuff that seemed to reflect a transparent effort of the greek organizations to pawn off merchandise on unsuspecting people passing through. You could either walk down the street and frequent the vendors or walk through the grass, and that was it.