Sidewalks Torn Up and Abandoned

X Street residents are about to do some hard kicking over the way contractors are tearing up the sidewalks on that street. As soon as the contractors get a job to put down new walks, they tear up the old ones, regardless of when they will be able to start the new work. For an entire block on both sides of the street between Fifteenth and Sixteenth yesterday, the sidewalk was torn up. As if that were not bad enough, the old planks were piled along the side of the road and the way barricaded so that the only way people could get through the block was by walking in about four inches of dust in the middle of the street. On both sides of the sidewalk line there is a strip of hard ground from two to four feet wide, which would have made a good footway for the time being. The contractors, however, with the usual consideration shown the people on this street, put up their barricades in such a way that these strips were not accessible. There were no lights on the barricades last night and several people who did not know that the walk had been torn up came to a realization of the situation only after they had bumped into a pile of old planks. The same condition prevails in other parts of the city. In some places, the sidewalks have been torn up for two months.