Betty, I think we all know what Joni Monroe was implying... Brooks Landing looks like a Homewood Suites motel or any other suburban development project picked up and plopped in the middle of the city. This is because of the design aesthetics, and also because of the building's placement�"up against a surface parking lot instead of the street/sidewalk. It doesn't interface with the neighborhood as any good urban development should. This may be fine for a suburban town (and I live in one myself), but for a city where people want to walk, and window shop, and interact with other people, this is not good urban design. She was not picking a fight with you, or your town.

Yes, who WOULDN'T want the 19th Ward to look like a never-ending pothole-strewn sidewalk-less ocean of strip malls and car dealerships?

Only Sodam (http://rocwiki.org/Sodam_Korean_Restaurant) can get me into Henrietta. Otherwise I stay away.

Ms. Miller:

With all due respect, let's tone down the hyperbole. What Ms. Monroe said is not, by any reasonable standard, "bullying." Furthermore, it is impossible that nothing negative has been written about Henrietta since the 1970s.

Henrietta may be, for you and many others, a great place to live. The Town may have done many successful things over the past decades. What Henrietta has categorically NOT done, however, is plan and design well. And let us leave aesthetics and personal taste out of it. Those are subjective. What we are talking about in terms of community design is layout, connectivity, "user friendliness." And Henrietta is not user friendly unless you own a private automobile. That is not good design. On the few occasions I find myself in Henrietta, I observe the clusters of people waiting for the bus, standing on the muddy, windswept margins of Marketplace Drive, or college students darting across 5+ lanes of traffic on Hylan Drive and think what a failure the Town of Henrietta, through its development review processes, has been to these people.