How o-fence-ive!

Congratulations to the, er, responsible landowner of the empty lot at 21st and N streets. Lately, some misguided souls had taken to cleaning up the weeds and trash in the place and putting up funky little sculptures and Halloween decorations. After a while, people had actually started walking through the lot instead of around it. On nice days, some even stopped and sat on the bench that had been brazenly smuggled into this unauthorized park, just to hang out. They even started calling it “Corner Park.”

Thank you for cleaning up this illegal “park” and putting up a cheap and durable chain-link fence. Much better. Upfront knows you’ll be spared the possibility of somebody twisting an ankle in unauthorized open space and therefore slapping you with a lawsuit. Sure, that hadn’t happened in the thousand years or so that the lot has been vacant, but you can never be too careful.

Upfront knows some weirdos were fond of that little spontaneous park—people like writer Barbara Steinberg, who lives in Midtown and complains that Corner Park “wasn’t hurting anybody. Now we’ll be looking at a chain-link fence until we die.”

But what do they know?