- FileVendors attracting customers with their produce.
Erica Virtue, Staff Reporter
IF YOU knew nothing about the style and grandeur that once characterised downtown Kingston, this is what you are likely to see today.
A significant part of the city is occupied with stalls, untidiness, road-side selling, noise, excessive emissions of the poisonous carbon monoxide from vehicles, and an overriding smell of filth.
Piles of garbage and dirty, running and stagnant smelly water is also a feature of the area. Dilapidated and old buildings are evident in downtown Kingston, along with a large number of apparently homeless and mentally ill persons, who roam the streets.
Vendors are a fixture in the city and although pedestrians can now negotiate their way relatively freely, it was much worse, years ago. But, the over-riding feeling one gets when travelling in the area is one of confusion, fear, and intimidation. "Uptowners" say they are afraid to venture in the city because they are 10 times more likely to be robbed than if they were uptown. They also believe that they are safer refusing to buy something uptown, than downtown.
Driving space on some streets is limited and bad driving and illegal parking is the order of the day.
But that too is much better now than 10 years ago, when driving space on some streets was not available. Some store owners were unable to enter or park their vehicles in front of their business places.
It was a time when downtown was vendors town.
Downtown is not a place for the blind and the sidewalks are not safe and neither are the roadways. It is a problem for those with good vision, much more the visually impaired.
An uptown mother said she took her 10-year-old downtown for the first time this year, despite protestations from her father.
"Don't carry mi daughter down to that place. Don't carry her," she said her husband shouted angrily.
She nevertheless took the child, she said, because she wanted her to see how children her own age had to scrounge for a living while she enjoyed a life of "relative luxury" in upper Constant Spring.
"Her first words were, 'Mommy, how downtown stinks so'," her mother said.
The mother requested that, her name not be used.
"It was my sentiment too, because the stench was particularly high on that Friday," she said, adding that the congestion too was also unbearable.
The original plan was for them to take the bus from Constant Spring, to downtown, and then walk for about 200 meters.
It was aborted on Beckford Street, shortly after exiting the bus, as congestion from vendors and vehicles forced them to stop.
She said, however, that the lesson was learnt.
But, somewhere in the midst of all this confusion is a business community that is struggling to survive among a field of bad weeds.
Some prominent institutions and companies still have offices and headquarters downtown in the city that was once a former place of English pride. The Jamaican Parliament is there, so too are Air Jamaica, National Com-mercial Bank, Scotia Bank, Bank of Jamaica, Jamaica Conference Centre, the Electoral Office of Jamaica, and Duke Street is still the street of lawyers.
Some fast food companies have set up shop downtown, but it is still a merchant's town.
Wholesale goods, domestic supplies, haberdasheries, cloth, furniture and a host of goods are available in the structured business sector. The city has no problems with them.
But efforts have been made over the years to streamlime the number of vendors in the area and to establish control over where they sell. Nearly all these efforts have borne no fruit and the illegal occupation still exists.
Even children are caught up in the wave of selling that is a feature of the busy business district, breeding another generation of sellers.
Nine-year-old Taskeka has three small bottles of body deodorants and three wash-cloths (rags).
"Mi modda sey me must go sell dem fe mi lunch money," she said. She does not shout, she pushes the goods in your face, with a simultaneous "nice lady, buy someting from me nuh."
Ten metres from her in the Parade area, a youngster in khaki uniform darts into a Jamaica Urban Transit number 32 bus to sell bag juice.
The Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation (KSAC), the body responsible for vending in the area is often seen as the aggressor, as it has to use the might of the law to move vendors. In many cases it ends with bitterness vendors declaring they have nowhere else to go, while officials force them to move.
It's a game of tit for tat, aggression, hard words, and choices, while downtown stinks.
