It's done. The new concrete alley is poured and hardened (if that comment were taken out of context, it would sound pornographic, wouldn't it?) and now Hargrove street is modern.

It should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody that I hate it. I'm well known to friends, enemies and readers of this space for my complete inability to adapt to anything that hasn't existed since Christ was a corporal. (Thanks, Blake, for that analogy. Now that you're up there I hope Christ is kicking your ass for that comment.) I have plenty of reasons for hating this stupid repaved alley.

First and foremost, the repaving project farbed up my garage. While ripping up the old brick pavement the crew managed to damage the concrete ramp into the garage, which they had to replace seeing as it's my property and all. They did, and actually they made a nice job of it, except that they also blobbed concrete too high up so that the garage doors wouldn't open, or at least wouldn't until I attacked the concrete with a sledgehammer. (This was really a bit of fun. Score: Dan 1, City of Baltimore 0.)

Then, of course, there's the traffic issue. In most old cities, the natives know how to circumvent traffic jams and other unpleasantness by skirting through the alleys at odd intervals. Nobody did this on my block of Hargrove, though, because it was still brick-paved. It was lumpy and uneven and you couldn't take it at more than five miles per hour, unless you wanted your car's undercarriage ripped out. Now it's fresh white concrete and it's been reopened for two days and the whole planet has discovered it. There are already cars zooming through, doing forty. In the bad old days, you'd hear a car try to take it doing forty every few months, and then you'd hear the grinding crash of the oil pan ripping off. Or, I mean, you'd hear that with a big American or German car. If anybody tried it in a little Japanese econobox, you'd hear one grinding crunch as the smallmobile bottomed out and was swallowed by one of the sunken parts of the brickwork. I remember looking up in a tipsy haze from my garden one summer evening, only to see the sunset glinting off the grille of a Honda as it disappeared forever beneath the Earth's upper crust. Since this area of the city is well known for underground rivers, I didn't fear for the Honda's inhabitants. I'm sure they had a pretty wild ride through subterranean waterways and were then spat out into the Basin (or, as they say these days, the Inner Harbor) , somewhat stinky for their time underground but having beaten traffic on the Jones Falls Expressway by fifteen minutes.

While I surely won't miss the hideous WHONK of the Buick's undercarriage hitting the brick as I drove (gingerly, I'd thought) down the alley, I think I will always miss those bricks. Tatty though Hargrove street may have been, it had a warmth that can only come from our beloved red brick. No amount of progress, speed and convenience can ever replace it.