Ventura County Civic Alliance update for Nov. 15

Often we don’t fully appreciate things until we no longer have them.  That is certainly very true in my case.  Allow me to explain.

In the early 60s, I grew up in a city that only much later did I realize was one of my all-time favorites of all the ones I’ve lived in or visited over a lifetime of some 60 years.  This was not because it was a spectacularly beautiful city, or happened to be near a world-renowned natural landmark, but because it held many of my best childhood memories.  The city was Saigon, now officially renamed Ho Chi Minh City after the North Vietnamese leader who headed a regime which adopted a brutal Communist dictatorial political system, and completed their military conquest in a 30 year civil war against South Vietnam.

The city was loosely labeled as the “Pearl of South East Asia” in many pre-war travel books and flyers about Saigon, perhaps more of a marketing ploy by travel agencies to attract tourists to this capital of the former French colony than a true reflection of realities on the ground.

Indeed, Saigon was planned and built by the French during their almost century-long occupation according to planning principles at the time:  large boulevards for important thoroughfares with signature focal points at one end or the other, usually a monumental civic building in nature or sometimes a large park full of trees.  In the case of Saigon, these monuments included the all white French Governor’s Palace, which later was converted into the South Vietnamese Presidential Palace, and the city’s Notre Dame Cathedral.   The rest of the city was laid out as a grid occasionally cut by a diagonal boulevard.  The city blocks were very small, fronted by very narrow streets.  All streets and boulevards were lined with tamarind trees, which, in a tropical climate, eventually grew up to 80-100 feet.   Even though some of their roots eventually also grew very big, the 20-25 foot wide sidewalks allowed them plenty of room to grow without creating too much disruption.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the French had planned a highly pedestrian-friendly city.  Private individual cars hardly existed, and didn’t start to make their appearances until the late 60s-early 70s.

During that period, transportation in Saigon came in a wide variety of modes:

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