“Anytime anybody asks our opinion, we tell them what we think, right or wrong.”
–Donald Webb, September 1986.
Twenty-two years ago, Lexington experienced something of a rebirth.
The hard economic times of the 1970s were turning around, Ronald Reagan’s economic policies had created lots of money, the housing and commercial real-estate markets were again booming.
As the New York Times reported on August 31st, 1986, “Lexington has quietly built itself a white-collar service economy dominated by banks, law firms and accountants.”
“As late as five years ago,” said R. Dudley Webb, a principal of the Webb Companies, the developer of the Financial Center, “this was typical Downtown U.S.A. The old mom-and-pop merchants had died. Business had gone away. National companies were locating in the suburbs.”
But the Webb Brothers, Dudley and Donald, turned the city around. Festival Market, Victorian Square, The World Trade Center, Lexington Green, Hilton Suites, and the $55,000,000.00 Big Blue Building. Nearly one million square feet of office and commercial space, cast in concrete and blue and green glass.
They made a killing.
The media seems to shy away from this history two decades on. It’s not easy quantifying the money lost, the promises broken. It takes time to cast the present in the light of the past, even if it doesn’t take a long memory or a lot of creativity to see parralells between our current bubble and that previous one.
And it’s not much fun looking back only to see how little was accomplished, or how odd it is that the fabricators of such vast swaths of empty office space should now be honored as lifetime members of the Downtown Lexington Corporation “in recognition of special contributions” to our fair city.
But it is worth pointing out that perhaps Dudley and Donald’s most special contribution to this city is also their most oddly forgotten.
According to his biography, Dudley graduated law school in 1968 and quickly entered private practice, while Donald — though previously a member of the Kentucky National Guard — served his time in the Johnson White House “investigating riots in various cities throughout the nation.”
No telling what that investigation turned up.
And so it was that in 1972, with the war in Vietnam raging on, the Fear really did sink in: Dudley and Donald Webb entered the real estate biz.
Fourteen years later they had transformed downtown Lexington. But there was still one nagging problem.
Bums.
There were homeless people all over the streets of downtown. Somewhere between the war, the recession, and the short-sightedness of not going to law school, it turned out not everyone was living quite so large as Dudley and Donald Webb.
In a city of 220,000, there was a veritable plague of homeless people — 150 to 200 of them, the Times would report in December of ’86 — roaming the streets.
Some were patients released early from mental hospitals, others were “economic refugees” and, of course, still others were the veterans of the Vietnam war, returned home but homeless.
In trying to address the problem in 1985, the city had opened the Horizon Center right in the middle of downtown — a place where the homeless could stop in and bathe, store belongings and eat a hot meal. But the Horizon Center was a daytime only facility, so as night fell, the homeless throngs would march down Main Street, past the Webbs’ sparkling new palaces to the Salvation Army.
It was unsightly.
In September 1986, the Salvation Army found a reasonable solution — expand its services, expand its buildings. They sent out a fundraising letter seeking aid in expanding and updating their building on the corner of Main and Newtown Pike.
Oh, what a mistake. The September 24th Herald Leader reported:
Lexington developers Donald Webb and Dudley Webb say the Salvation Army should find a new location that will help keep street people out of downtown Lexington.
In a four-page letter written Sept. 17 to Salvation Army commander Capt. Howard Burr, the Webbs also criticize the stance some Salvation Army officials have taken in defending “the actions and rights of at least some of the so-called ‘street people,’ ” and they accuse the agency of failing to maintain its property. The “Salvation Army no longer has a reason to be located downtown,” the letter states.
That’s right. The Webbs wanted the scum out of downtown. Nevermind their infirmaries. Nevermind their plight.
Nevermind their service to our country.
The sight of women and men “unshaven, or shabbily dressed, or sometimes staggering from intoxication, or talking to themselves, or spitting on the sidewalks or cursing and swearing obscenities at people” is “not an accepted social standard for the community.”
But these vagrants didn’t stop at just shoddy garments and mere drunkenness, no, the Webbs had seen them “urinate on the Mary Todd Lincoln home” and, far worse, “the new buildings which we just completed on West Main Street.”
Poor, poor Dudley and Donald Webb.
The solution was clear: Move the homeless to Masterson Station Park. No one goes there anyway.
The Salvation Army “is a blight on the downtown community,” these lifetime members of the DLC argued.
It should, they suggested, be moved to “a more rural site, perhaps on publicly owned property, away from the inner city and away from the opportunity for drinking and gambling and other temptations that contribute toward keeping these people in a rut.”
They had better plans for the Salvation Army’s property. They wanted to replace it with a lake — “Lake Lexington” — they told the paper. They had the designs all drawn up but the future of the project lay in the mayor’s hands.
The saddest part of this sad tale isn’t that we never got “Lake Lexington” and it isn’t even the despicable words the Webbs cast upon the most vulnerable amongst us.
It’s that they got their way in the end. In spite or because of who they are, their vitriol aimed at the sick and the veterans simply rolled off the city’s back.
More projects were handed to them and the Horizon Center was shut down, demolished and left for two decades as an empty lot, one more place to park cars, and a new homeless shelter was (eventually) built.
Just where the Webbs wanted it. On the outskirts of town.
But the homeless are a strong-willed sort. They’ve stayed downtown. They’re still there, probably still pissing on the Webbs’ many cement monstrosities.
And so now, twenty-two years later, the war is back on. CentrePoint, a needless structure in a town full of empty offices, empty condos, empty hotels seeks to plant itself in the middle of our urban center, and, inexplicably, needlessly, seeks to co-opt up to a third of the city’s Phoenix Park within its footprint.
And of course, if you haven’t noticed and surely these Webb brothers have, that’s where the homeless of Lexington congregate when they’re not trudging the 2 miles out to the Hope Center.
They’ll all be forced to scatter, to find a new spot to be homeless in when the Webbs build their monster. But they will assuredly not leave downtown. That much seems clear.
But what of the city. Will we let it happen again? Will we not look back in anger, learn from this past and stop, think. Will we not consider a what if:
What if Donald and Dudley Webb did something constructive with their money instead of simply using our money for construction?
SHE WON'T GO!
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