To the editor:

I’m writing to condemn the misguided assault on the historic core of Lawrence’s original town site, disingenuously labeled an “arts corridor,” led by corporate thieves and their hand maidens. It’s a collusion between the Lawrence Arts Center and downtown developers — supported by millions in taxpayer largesse, and a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based nonprofit.

East Ninth Street, in Old East Lawrence, has been rechristened “Free State Boulevard,” in an LAC grant from ArtPlace. A brainchild of developers of a hoped-for bar and restaurant enclave in our neighborhood’s quiet northeast corner, the taxpayer-subsidized “Warehouse Arts District” demands a vehicular thoroughfare to bring revelers through our 160-year-old residential neighborhood, which local banking and real estate has sought to clear of its working-class residents and dwellings for decades.

The LAC, in exchange for developer’s commitments of cash and land, has prostituted itself as a front for creation of a commercial corridor through the heart of a district which first bore the brunt of the pro-slavery terrorist attack on Lawrence on Aug. 21, 1863. Their treachery aims to take advantage of the fact that the vast majority of the lions of our community’s preservation and heritage movement of the late 20th century are indisposed — or dead.

These interlopers seek to turn our historic north end into a circus of “banners, buskers and bars,” completely unrelated to the “arts,” as a gift to local one-percenters, and the satisfaction of their own hubris. I call upon our newly elected governing body to reverse the previous commission’s support for this atrocity.