Emancipation Park

You may have realized I’ve been on the road for the past few days. I’m home now!

The reason for the trip was a family reunion, held only every four years, this time in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I don’t recommend the place (wow… so very ugly — though I didn’t really see the main business area and maybe that's better than the endless strip malls and bad signs in the surrounding area — and so many places named "plantation"!), but I did see a bunch of other fun or historic sites along the way.

Today I have just a few photos from Charlottesville, Virginia, which was on the way from one place to another. We didn’t stop for long but I wanted to see the park that was the focus of last August’s Unite the Right rally, where Heather Heyer was killed by a neo-Nazi and so much else happened to “make America great again.”

It’s now called Emancipation Park, and it truly is a tiny bit of green space: just one block, and the blocks in that part of the city are very small, in proportion to the streets, which are maybe two lanes wide at most. In fact, the area is a perfect example of human scale and walkability, which makes sense, given when it was built.

The name Emancipation Park is quite incongruous, given the statue at the park’s center:


Yes, that’s Robert E. Lee, and the park used to be called Lee Park.

Clearly, the city has put up the orange fencing and signs to keep people from doing either pro or anti actions to the statue. It sounds as though they may remove it some time in the relatively near future, but I won't be surprised if it's done without notice, as in New Orleans.

Here's one last photo:


I like to think the horse is lifting its tail to defecate.