Fizzle: perspective on city video Sizzle.

It's nice that residents are proud of their community and that the municipal executive had a promotional video created:

https://vimeo.com/showcase/the-city-of-white-plains

But come on. It is the essence of what's fundamentally wrong with White Plains, which is a tale of two cities:

- downtown residents living in apartments in buildings most of which in 2020 are the functional equivalent of tenements, needing upgrades in electrical and plumbing;

- ruling elite living in houses and dominating the Common Council with membership probably 90 percent of member time on that body for the last half century.

The house residents use downtown for their convenience and amusement with no practical regard for the quality of life there. The only issue in White Plains is making sure that the house residents can drive to downtown and park in ten minutes. To facilitate that White Plains long ago established 4 and 5 lane one way urban speedways that even the mayor criticized, although not recently.

White Plains is pedestrian hostile in the extreme but the Sizzle video would have you believe just the opposite. It did not show a single mega bus, including the virtually always empty boondoggle Hudson Link buses.

The lack of downtown open space was not just overlooked but obfuscated by the mention of parks, plural, when there is only one real park, that between Lake and Main Streets.

I know, this seems needlessly negative, especially if you live in a White Plains house neighborhood and not in a downtown apartment. But apartment residents are not extras in a video and White Plains is not Disney World.