Hideous redesign in Oak Bluffs

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To the Editor:

Can someone please explain to me what has become of Oak Bluffs center? With its tastefully remodeled Steamship Terminal, it seemed poised to become the new gateway to our Island. Instead, we seem to have been blessed with a profusion of everything that is dreadfully wrong with urban planning.Debarking the ferry in O.B., one is magically transported directly onto the tarmac at Candyland International Airport. The streets are now festooned with more glow-in-the-dark paint than the Haunted Mansion in Asbury Park, and not even William Shakespeare himself was as reflective as the surface of Lake Avenue is now. It is hideous and, at times, something just short of terrifying.As for the genius in charge of the signs, I’ve got a sign that I would like to plant directly in front of their home on Beacon Hill or wherever it is that he or she hails from. A big red octagonal one, with but one word emblazoned on it in stark white sans-serif caps. ‘STOP’.I have always wondered what it would be like to stand inside one of those old Bally pinball machines, dodging oversized rolling steel in a ghostly shimmer of brash luminosity and reflection. Now I know.

Jack RyanOak Bluffs