The bottom line: Steve Fulop is too busy running for governor to care about saving Newark Avenue. He just plain tanked one of the potentially nicest streets in the Northeast and is letting the property owners turn it into soulless bar lane.

He isn't even making a serious effort to save the old buildings under modern ugly facades. He's just letting them be torn down.

I know the old machine idiots are out to get him and are jerks, and may have contributed to these problems, but at least that had the excuse that they were provincial dorks who didn't know any better.

The whole shtick with Fulop is that he might be building his own corrupt machine, but at least it would be a smart, worldly machine that would make downtown pretty.

Instead, he's helping to kill off our green grocers and our historic buildings.

His master plan will probably end up just adding casinos to the bars, in a spiral of poorly planned projects, until all of the projects implode and we end up with millions of empty square feet of crumbling casino space.