Untie the Sky

This is a guest post by Ben Askren, a 25-year resident of Lexington and a Systems Architect at Lexmark.

When traveling, I am often fortunate to meet people who know Lexington.  And likely, the first thing they say is how beautiful of a city it is.  Which, quite frankly, I have always found surprising.  Now, before I go any further, I should state clearly that Lexington is a wonderful place to live.  Hands down.  I’ll argue with you if you say otherwise.  But Lexington’s beauty is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of our home.

And why is that?  That has been a difficult question to answer.  After all, Lexington does have many qualities and charms.  When I ask those who say Lexington is a beautiful city “Why?”, of course they talk about the horse farms and Keeneland. And they also talk about the streets lined with mature trees with parks, cottages, bungalows, and architectural diversity. Recently, some have cited parts of downtown as neighborhoods that have been rediscovered and redeveloped.  But other cities have these things. And there are cities that don’t have these things that we still call beautiful. So perhaps, like Justice Potter Stewart, I could never succeed in intelligently defining a beautiful city -  but I know one when I see it.

So back to the question. Why isn’t Lexington a beautiful city? Recently, some of the answer to that question was demonstrated when South Limestone was reopened. When friends and acquaintances were asked what they thought about it, almost all of them said, “It is so wide and open.”  This seemed strange since I had read that it had been narrowed from three lanes to two. So, I went to take a look for myself.  And they were right.

What happened at South Lime was something ordinary and yet remarkable.  South Lime is now “wide and open,” because you can now see it.  Yes, technically you could always see it, but first you had to look through a tangle of wires and poles. Now, free from those tethers, the sky is there without compromise. As well as the city scape. Removing the wires and poles revealed the inherent beauty of the street -as if it emerged from an obscuring layer of dusty cobwebs. Which was remarkable because the city scape, the architecture and the sky were always there. Now they have been dusted off, revealed, … “untied”.

Which leads to the question:  What If we could untie more of our architecture, our trees, our cityscape? What if we could untie our sky? At this spring’s “Now What, Lexington?” unconference, Ben Self gave every participant instructions and just enough structure to create their own sessions. Fresh from my South Lime experience, I got up the nerve and posted a session asking these questions. There, I met David Lafferty, Michael Coblenz, Derek Wingfield, Daniel Rowland, and Graham Pohl – and this was the inception of UntieTheSky.org.

The mission of UntieTheSky.org is to be part of the effort to make Lexington Kentucky the best community in the world for Business and Quality of Life by raising awareness of the negative impacts of overhead lines and visual noise.   Right now this means demonstrating the potential beauty of our city with images of what it could look like without overhead utilities – one intersection at a time. Browse our website and you’ll see what Walton and Winchester, Mill and Short, and Old Vine and Ransom look like “tied” and “untied.”You will also see a number of streets and intersections that are extraordinarily “tied.”

If you would like to get involved, contact myself or Graham Pohl by leaving a comment below – we would like to hear your ideas and insights. Currently, Untie the Sky needs help turning “tied” images into “untied” images. If you have a computer and the time, we will be happy to teach you how to do this at no cost to you.