Wal-Mart would cause headaches
Regarding, “Put a Wal-Mart at old Levitz site,” Oct. 5, please note the following facts regarding placement of any business to the west of the railroad tracks:
The city limit, between the Ventura (134) Freeway and the southerly Glendale boundary, is the railroad track on the west side of San Fernando Road. (Levitz site is in Los Angeles.)
To bring a big box store, such as Wal-Mart, would likely require millions of dollars in improvements to the surrounding infrastructure and upgrades to the Doran Street railroad crossing.
For years, Glendale has been trying to close the Doran Street railroad crossing, connecting Glendale to Los Angeles, without any success due to protest from businesses in L.A. and their district council member.
So for the sake of better quality of life for the people, forget about bringing another monstrosity of a store such as Wal-Mart to the area.
GEORGE SANDS
Glendale
Columbus kicked off era of discovery
Of late it has been fashionable to paint Christopher Columbus as an arch-villain, a genocidal killer of indigenous people, a destroyer of cultures. He did none of these things. While he may not have been a paragon of virtue, he was a force of his time; and it is the political correctness of our time that has tended to obscure his tremendous achievement.
His discovery of a new world was like an intellectual bombshell in the mind of European culture, cracking open the medieval mind set, made ready by the quickening ferment of the Renaissance. After him, hundreds followed with new discoveries and exploration, events that required the same amazing courage and fortitude as he had to sail into nothingness.
After him, the idea of new cultures and peoples fired the imagination of Europeans to an outpouring of confidence and optimism. After him, the religious dogmas and certitudes of the times suffered an irreversible blow; it was followed by the one-two punch of Martin Luther’s religious protests and the circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan’s armada that proved the Copernican thesis.
After him, the cultural and economic centers of Europe shifted to the Atlantic countries which did the lion’s share of the colonization of that new world. After him, there was no returning to the old stasis, and the modern age (as we know it) was ushered in.
