The Uglification of New Brunswick

Although many cities, so I've heard, engage in beautification projects, New Brunswick's town fathers seem to be primarily engaged in uglifying this once attractive colonial city. So, without further ado, welcome to our new weekly feature: The Uglification of New Brunswick. Here we will chronicle New Brunswick's worst planning decisions, biggest eyesores, and general trend toward making things as ugly as possible. We will debut a new uglification project each Friday.

In addition to marveling at the ugliness, we will try to go beyond stone throwing to provide some commentary on why bad planning and design is harmful to our beloved city and what can be done about it.

Our debut feature is a building on the corner of French and Patterson Streets. But before we get to the uglification project itself, for comparison purposes lets examine what a (relatively) nice city street, exactly one block away looks like:



Note the shops with windows and doors at street level. The antique stores have placed items for sale on the sidewalk to catch business from the pedestrian traffic. Although not visible in this photo, there were actually quite a few people buzzing around the stores and cafes. Now we move one block towards downtown to view the subject of today's feature, brought to you courtesy of Robert Wood Johnson Hospital:



Shortly after we took this the man in the photo shot himself due to depression. We just managed to get away before the building's evil aura overcame us as well. The poor guy's body is probably still there, undisturbed, since no one walks on this part of the street if they can avoid it.

Having driven all the human beings away, the hospital obviously felt bad and put up these fake little people so it wouldn't seem so lonely:



All's well that ends well!

Thanks to Piz and RS for help with this feature.