The Editor, Sir:

The editorial of Tuesday, November 27, touched me considerably. I have long mourned the death of Kingston as a place to shop, for amusement and for relaxation. When I was growing up in Kingston in the 1940s and '50s, my brother and I would take a tramcar and later a bus down to Rae Town where my uncle and aunt still maintained a home, and with our cousins, we would go swimming in the Kingston Harbour.

In the 1980s, I applauded the construction of the National Gallery, the apartment building, the conference centre and the hotel and the redevelopment of that area. I deplore the way this has been abandoned and neglected. The Institute of Jamaica, with its National Library, which started as the West India Reference Library, is in downtown Kingston, as is the Ward Theatre and many historical churches which are slowly being destroyed.

Kingston is set on a plain beside a wonderful harbour, ringed by some of the most spectacular mountains to be seen anywhere in the world.

Neglecting our city

In September of 1998 I wrote this: I am a 'born yah' Jamaican and a Kingstonian and proud of it. If one is born in Montego Bay, one is described as being 'born a Bay', and very often the greater loyalty is to that wonderful town. But we who are Kingston-born and bred often denigrate our city and hanker after other, not necessarily better, environments, neglecting the assets of our beautiful and historic city, which is the largest English-speaking city in the Americas, south of Miami.

If I described to you a mythical city built on a wide plain, planted out with flowering trees, sloping down from the bluest of mountains to the Caribbean sea, with a harbour large enough to contain the whole British Royal Navy, protected by a seven-mile-long spit of land with seven or eight little islands guarding the entrance, with black-sand beaches on the east and white-sand beaches on the west, with a climate that varies from saline desert down by the water to montane cloud forest in the hills above it, and with a racially mixed population tolerant of all races and all religions, you might tell me that I was describing paradise.

City virtually abandoned

Yet, we who live here have allowed the centre, the heart of our city, with its history, its churches, its public buildings, to be virtually abandoned to the lawless and the homeless. We have allowed pimps and prostitutes to take over Ocean Boulevard, where the International Law of the Sea Congress meets, and where our National Gallery of Art is located.

We have allowed the beggars, the sidewalk vendors, the pavement higglers, and the thieves to virtually destroy King Street which once was the premier shopping district of the entire British West Indies. In my humble opinion, the people who work in the city should be able to stroll out from their offices into the open air, to lunch and play and shop every day. But, instead, the car washers and the beggars pollute the place. We who live here make no protest, we merely move out of the city and the beggars, the homeless, the lawless, the parasites of society follow us, and they are now taking over Papine and Constant Spring, Red Hills Road and Grants Pen.

I no longer live in Jamaica and, perhaps, the neglect of Kingston had something to do with my departure. Certainly the lack of safety did.

I am, etc.,

CHRISTINE NUNES

chrisnunes@att.net

Naples, FLORIDA

Via Go-Jamaica