The City Planner

Maria Morales spread the land-use map across the drafting table in the planning office on South Center Street and weighted the corners and began coloring in the block the department wanted cleared, and halfway through she realized it was the block her great-grandfather had settled on a hundred years before.

She was thirty-two. She was the only woman on the professional staff, a junior planner two years out of the program, and she had learned in those two years exactly how much of the work fell to the junior person and the woman both, which was the surveys and the maps and the minutes and the typing-up of other men’s recommendations into the language the commission liked to hear. She did not complain about it, mostly. There was no one to complain to. There was no division for it, no caucus, nothing but a paper a group of women had read at the national conference two years back, condemning the whole profession for what it did to the women in it, and Maria had clipped that paper and kept it in her desk and taken it out on the bad days.

The block on the map was down by the river, in the old Powning end, west of the casino core. It was old houses, mostly, brick bungalows and a few frame places from before the century turned, with a corner grocery and a shoe repair and a rooming house, the kind of neighborhood the plan called blighted and the kind of neighborhood Maria had grown up hearing about at her grandmother’s table. Her great-grandfather Guadalupe had come up from Sonora in 1869 to work the railyard and had settled near the river because the river was where the people like him were allowed to settle, and the family had been down in that bottom ground ever since, the Moraleses, four generations of them, her uncle Eddie still driving his cab out of a stand six blocks from where she was standing.

The plan was three years old now and the department lived by it. It called for the things plans called for in those years. It called for one-way streets to move the cars through faster. It called for parking, structures and lots, a great deal of parking. It called for dressing up the casino blocks on Virginia with wide sidewalks and decorative lighting so the tourists would feel the town was modern. And it called for clearing the tired old residential ground at the edges, the river bottom included, because the federal money was there for clearing and because a parking structure or a new commercial block returned more in taxes than a street of eighty-year-old bungalows where the rents were low and the people were poor.

Maria knew how it went because she had watched it go. She had been a girl when they tore down the old City Hall, the real one, the 1907 building on First Street, knocked flat so the bank could put a parking garage where it had stood. People had been sad about it for a week and then they had parked their cars there and forgotten. That was the pattern. A thing stood for sixty years and came down in three days and a month later no one could quite remember what had been there. The post office down on Virginia was next, everyone knew, the move to the new place by the airport already in the works, and after the post office it would be something else, and the plan had a map, and the map had this block on it, colored the color that meant clear.

Mr. Hendry, the senior planner over her, stopped at the drafting table on his way out.

“Coming along?”

“Yes, Mr. Hendry.”

He looked at the map, at the block she had nearly finished coloring. “Good. Get the parcel counts on it for Thursday. The commission wants the project area defined so we can get the application in before the program money changes over.” The federal rules were shifting that year, the old clearance money becoming something else, and the department wanted its applications in under the old rules while the clearing was still easy.

“Mr. Hendry,” Maria said, and then stopped, because she had not planned to say anything, and now she had started.

He waited.

“This block,” she said. “The river block. The houses are old but they’re sound, most of them. People live in them. There’s a way to write a project that rehabilitates instead of clears. The new program is supposed to lean that way, toward keeping the neighborhoods. We could write it that way and still get the money.”

Mr. Hendry was not unkind. That was the thing she would think about later, that he was not unkind at all.

“That’s a lot more work, Maria,” he said. “And the commission doesn’t want it rehabilitated. They want it cleared. Cleared is clean. Cleared is a number they can show. You write what the commission wants, and you let the commission decide what it wants. That’s the job.” He picked up his hat. “Parcel counts for Thursday.”

He left. Maria stood over the map with the colored pencil in her hand and the block by the river under it, the four generations of it, the corner grocery and the rooming house and the bottom ground where Guadalupe had been allowed to settle because it was the only ground there was. She could do the parcel counts. It was an afternoon’s work and it was what the job was and no one would ever know she had thought anything else.

Or she could spend the next three nights, her own nights, writing the other version, the rehabilitation version, the one the commission had not asked for, and bring both to the table on Thursday, and set the second one down next to the first in front of all of them, and make them say no to her out loud.

She looked at the clock. It was past five. The office had emptied out around her without her noticing. She pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward her across the drafting table, and uncapped her pen, and sat for a moment deciding which of the two things she was going to do.

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