90th in a series of posts on 2 W. Market St 
We are coming up on another in the long march of meetings by the Zoning Hearing Board on the 2 W. Market case.
Note that this is the 90th post on this subject. See “2 W. Market” under Topics on the Gadfly sidebar.
Not a case for the faint-hearted.
But fighting for your neighborhood, as Gadfly always says, is a good thing.
Gadfly does not expect his followers to remember all the details, especially because of the long gaps between action on the case.
Nor does he expect his followers to have the overflowing nerdiness to be as engaged in the argument of the case as he is.
Gadfly loves this stuff. Gadfly loves a good argument.
Some followers will remember that, after painstaking consideration of the case presented by both sides (charts, lists, audio, video), Gadfly sided with the neighbors who were protesting the right of the owners to run a business out of their 2 W. Market property in a zoned residential neighborhood.
Gadfly came to feel that the decisions to approve the business running through City committees up to and through City Council were egregiously wrong-headed.
And the Court has agreed when the neighbors appeal to higher authority.
But the owners of 2 W. Market are not faint-hearted either. In the latest phase of this struggle, they proposed a text amendment to the zoning code to allow their business, and that amendment was approved by the City, again rather astonishingly to Gadfly.
Now the neighbors are appealing again. That’s where we are.
The neighbors have the means and the will to continue to fight what they see is a commercial incursion into a neighborhood that is bent on maintaining its residential nature — allowing us to see full chapters of judicial processes.
The beauty for Gadfly in the fact that this phase of the case is moving so slowly is that it is easy to focus on each stage of argument and think along with it.
That’s what Gadfly is inviting you to do.
The 2 W. Market case is important because it is about the control of and the quality of life in a neighborhood. And we all live in neighborhoods.
But the case is also engaging as we think along with the contestants. Playing lawyer is an intellectually fun thing to do.
And maybe most of all the case is compelling because it has produced wonderful models of thoughtful residents fighting City Hall. Such as the examples of Paige Van Wirt and Martin Romeril as portrayed in Gadfly’s previous posts.
We all have to be ready to play those roles if our time comes.
So Gadfly invites you to hang with him for the next few posts as he thinks through the December 11 meeting of the Zoning Hearing Board on 2 W. Market St. in preparation for the January meeting on the horizon.
