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Dear Editor: Wow! Are you really talking about the same corner building and the same proposed Jack-in-the-Box as the one I know? If it really seems to you that all along our only alternatives were “a building in disrepair or a parking lot”, clearly you were not very involved in the whole controversy. At one point there was a definite possibility of an offer for the building from within the community, which might have enabled us to keep the building intact.
The primary point of the campaign was to save a valuable center of neighborhood services which we already had, including an excellent Chinese restaurant, a friendly bookstore, and a theatre group. If this isn’t encouraging to other businesses which might consider locating in our area, I don’t know what is. “Stop Jack-in-the-Box” was a means to this end, and a catchy phrase that got us a lot of publicity. Anybody reading the newspapers could see that the negative aspect — stopping Jack-in-the-Box — wasn’t the whole point.
In addition, many of us saw the issue as a larger, symbolic one, and a test case not only for our neighborhood. Could residents of an area have any control over the quality of their lives, when such control would conflict with large corporations, insensitive city government officials, and inadequate zoning ordinances? In other words, is it possible for us to, in your words, “have a say in the character of the business community”?
Your statement, that new businesses would not move into the building because of its bad condition, is misleading, to say, the least. This building was almost completely occupied before it fell into the hands of the Foodmaker Co., who terminated all leases and issued notices to terminate tenancy. Naturally many of these businesses moved elsewhere, but as their spaces became vacant, there were other businesses interested in renting them, including two boutiques and a photography studio, among others. Foodmaker did not even reply to any inquiries, and continued throughout our campaign to discourage those tenants remaining.
At no time since Foodmaker’s purchase of this building, over a year ago, have any of the tenants present had a lease, or had any assurance that they could continue into the next month, in spite of public announcements by both Foodmaker and Ralston-Purina with innuendoes to the contrary.
I think you are confusing cause and effect. It is not that “the present building is in such a state of disrepair that…no new businesses would relocate in it.” It is in disrepair because the businesses that want to locate there are not allowed to do so.
It is easy to get all sour grapes about the campaign since we did not win it — i.e. we have not succeeded in saving the particular location for the particular businesses that occupied it, but please don’t misrepresent what we did.
Yours sincerely, Mrs. Nigel W. Daw. 6347 Waterman.
Originally published in The Paper, March 1971.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1971_03.pdf, printed page 2.
