Dear Editor,
I heard the tail-end of Capitol News on Monday, May 7, 2012 that the private sector were going to collaborate with the M&CC. This is welcome, but then I heard the mention of a proposal to change the names of some town streets to honour citizens who had made contributions to the city. As a citizen who lives in Georgetown and has an interest in promoting its return to the Garden City and Guyana to the Magnificent Province, I would implore the Mayor and his would-be colleagues to rethink this decision to change the names of streets randomly. I agreed with the name change of Murray Street to Quamina Street, because both men were engaged in a historic struggle, with the executioner of the oppressed benefiting from an honourable place in posterity some fifty yards from a place of execution: the Promenade Gardens (then part of the Parade Ground) which is indeed sacred ground and has never been consecrated to the memory of the Africans of 1823 executed there.
A progressive initiative would be to name new roads which are laid out in honour of identified citizens, for instance, ‘Norman Cameron Street,’ ‘Hubert Critchlow Highway,’ ‘Lloyd Searwar Lane’ or ‘Martin Carter Avenue,’ etc. In a new tradition, there should also be commemorative plaques. The act of changing current street names, apart from wiping out significant history regardless of how unpleasant it was, defiles the course of creativity I grew up witnessing. Let us commence ‘new things’ and demonstrate new purposes. I witnessed Festival City, Meadowbrook, South & North Ruimveldt, Roxanne Burnham Schemes even Rasville and Sophia. The changing of street names is as retrogressive as changing old two-way streets into one-ways and widening old roads to curb traffic congestion without building new roads – like the one intended when we took that trek back in 1974 from Kuru Kuru College to the conservancy at Cane Grove, which if built would have sent traffic from the upper East Coast and Berbice on a shorter journey to Linden and the airport and opened vast opportunities for other coastal connecting roadways and housing. Let’s put a law in place to prohibit the changing of any more street names in old Georgetown in 2012, and require those in positions of authority to see a broader landscape.
Yours faithfully,
Barrington Braithwaite
