Nephew Joey In Mount Vernon's Lincoln Theater Leads To Texas Theater Eyesores

Incoming this morning, via email, from Spencer Jack's dad, my nephew Joey's big brother, Jason.

Message in email...

In case you no longer subscribe to the Skagit Valley Herald, I’ll share a photo which featured in today’s newspaper.

Well, I am a couple thousand miles distant from the Skagit Valley, and so a delivery subscription with the Skagit Valley's newspaper is not doable.

Hence I had not seen this photo of Spencer Jack's Uncle Joey climbing amongst the rafters in Mount Vernon's Lincoln Theater.

Joey is an electrician doing electrical stuff for Mount Vernon's Dimensional Communications.

I last saw Joey in October of 2015 in Grapevine, Texas. Joey was in Dallas installing some electrical stuff at an Expedia extension office.

I can not remember the precise details, but at some point in time in the last century I found myself sort of in the same location we see Joey, high above the Lincoln Theater seats below.

Seeing this photo of Joey in the Lincoln Theater got me thinking, yet again, about the profound differences between the towns I was familiar with up North and West, and the towns I have become familiar in the South.

In the South the legit concept of using eminent domain to take property for the public good is often abused. Maybe the concept is misunderstood.

Up North and West if a property owner's property falls into a state of dis-repair, as in becomes an abandoned eyesore, a city will take action to fix the problem, enabled and empowered by city ordinance designed to prevent such.

For the public good.

Mount Vernon, in its theater heyday, had three downtown movie theaters, the Lincoln, Lido and Lyric, if I am remembering the Lincoln's fellow theater's names correctly.

Again, if I am remembering correctly, the Lyric long ago was re-purposed with a new non-theater purpose. The Lido, at the north end of downtown, continued in some sort of theater form, I think. The Lincoln, at the south end of downtown, was restored to its heyday glory and received National Historic Site status of some sort.

Meanwhile, ever since I first saw it way back late in the previous century, in the Fort Worth Stockyards zone, there has been an abandoned eyesore theater, the New Isis Theater, with its marquee always announcing a revival which never comes.

Whoever owns the New Isis Theater property is not told by the city to clean up the mess. The mess just lingers, year after year, decade after decade, mucking up the visual appeal of Fort Worth's only tourist attraction.

I don't know why such is allowed in towns in Texas, in towns which will abuse eminent domain to take a person's property, but not to take abandoned eyesore property. This phenomenon has not only been seen in the Texas town of Fort Worth.

My eyes have seen abandoned property eyesores in many Texas towns. And in Oklahoma, now that you are causing me to think about it.

In the current Texas town in which I am habitating, Wichita Falls, there are multiple instances of abandoned buildings of the eyesore sort which would not be allowed in other locations in America.

Soon after my arrival in Wichita Falls I blogged about some of these instances in Hoagie Jackson Leads Me To Tour Eastside Wichita Falls Eyesore Infestation. How many years, or decades, are such things allowed to linger in decay mode in this part of the country?

Such is yet one more question to which I've never found an answer...