The new 8th District Courthouse in Lewiston is a showplace, a modern and spacious hall in which to dispense justice.
This building, shrouded for months behind plywood walls, is both beautiful and functional. Designers did not cover every interior wall with sheetrock, but left much of the brick and stone uncovered. The hallways are accented with small glass and wood alcoves, just large enough for private consultations, and there is a generous amount of conference space — something the current courthouse has too little of.
It’s sunlit and sleek. An enormous improvement over the current district courthouse, a Park Street building so small and inadequate that attorneys and clients are forced to converse in whispered tones in crowded hallways.
The new courthouse makes special accommodations to shield children preparing to give testimony, and limits the contact between prisoners and the public. There is abundant storage space and high-tech surveillance throughout the building.
The original estimate for the project, a wholesale renovation of the old Frye Block Music Hall, was $5 million. As construction moved along, the cost rose to $7 million and then $9.5 million, the final $2.5 million of which was financed through state bonds to shore up the roof.
The project was enormously expensive and frustratingly slow as engineers were forced to deal with structural problems, but the end result is impressive. Except, that is, for the unfortunate color and material used to finish the Canal Street side of the building.
This otherwise brick building is now touting 1970s, refrigerator-green rear siding. It’s not quite a minty color, not quite avocado. It’s as if, after painstaking attention to interior and facade detail, the Canal Street side – the supposed gateway to the city – received as little attention as a homeowner might give to painting the back of the house.
This was a state project, and planners might not have been as sensitive to the gateway aspect as city officials may have been.
A project the size of the courthouse does not stand alone. It must be considered from all angles, integrated with its surroundings. While that happened on the Lisbon Street side, it didn’t on the Canal Street side.
City planners must remember this oversight when refurbishing the rest of this stretch of the city’s gateway.
Time for courage
Sherron Watkins. Coleen Rowley. Cynthia Cooper.
Until 2002, most of us had never heard of these women.
These women, named as Time magazine’s People of the Year, are whistleblowers.
Watkins warned her boss, Enron’s Kenneth Lay, that the company’s books were improper.
Rowley wrote to FBI Director Robert Mueller alerting him that his underlings ignored an urging by her field office to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui well before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Cooper revealed to the board of directors at WorldCom that the company’s books were cooked to conceal losses nearing $3.8 billion.
These are women who demonstrated enormous courage during a year of cowardice in the corporate world. They are role models for us all.
jmeyer@sunjournal.com
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