Sunday, March 26, 2017

Happy 100th Birthday Rufus!

On the happy occasion of Rufus Thomas' 100th birthday, I wanted to posted this interview that my friend Dan Hopper and I did with the World's Oldest Teenager in 1989.

The was a class project I made as a film student at Memphis State, predecessor of University of Memphis. The project was supposed to be of the form you do for a news interview, with b-roll cut in. In the summer of 1989, they were in the process of demolishing the Capitol Theatre, aka Stax, on McLemore Avenue. For a short period, activists were able to stop the demolition after it had started. We decided we were going to try and interview Mr. Thomas for this project.

How did I make contact with Rufus? I found his number in the phone book and called him cold. That's right. Rufus Thomas was in the phone book and he answered his phone. Giants did indeed walk among us.

Rufus was awesome and agreed immediately to the interview. Very scary and very exciting for us. However, on the day we had set for the interview, I had a wisdom tooth flareup and I had to reschedule the interview. I called Rufus. Mr. Thomas was as cool as you could ever want anyone to be and he agreeably set a new date.

On the rescheduled date, Dan picked me up and we headed out to our appointment with this legend. As bad luck would have it, our car broke down on the way. !!! Rather than risk another phone call to Rufus for another reschedule, we called a friend who swung by in his Cadillac and we headed to Rufus' house. This is the result.


What a great privilege to meet and interview Rufus and have him talk about the great place called Stax. And seeing it again, what a dead on thing he said about Stax vs. Sun and White vs. Black.

If you don't know it, the story had a unhappy, then happy, ending.  The owners of the property at the time completed the demolition within a few months of this interview in 1989. However, 14 years after the demolition, a separate ownership group rebuilt and recreated the entire complex, and christened it the Stax Museum, in 2003.

Happy 100th Birthday Rufus Thomas!

Friday, October 07, 2016

Control Rooms and Womb Rooms

In 1978 I became a disc jockey at WEVL. 2 years after the radio station's founding in a ramshackle 2 story house on Court (the only of WEVL's 5 locations that's been demolished), 2 of my high school friends and I hiked down from my parents' house near Overton Square and walked up to the radio station. No phone calls. No appointments. Cold. We walked up the porch and knocked on the door. We wanted to be part of this place.

We had seen a cover story in the Sunday Commercial Appeal's Mid-South section about this volunteer radio station with a funny name, WEVL, and funny slogan, Radio Free Midtown. The cover photo of the story was a shot of the beautiful house, an unusual 2 storied porch house, with a pack of smiling people clinging to it, upstairs and down. They looked like weirdos. We wanted to be a part of those people.


We knocked on the door and someone let us in. I don't remember who it was who let us in but they were welcoming. They welcomed us to a house full of used furniture, dirty carpet, scary plumbing, weird smells, shitloads of vinyl, and a control room. Exactly as we imagined.

Within a couple of months, we had a show on WEVL. It was a Saturday morning show since we were still in high school. We played it eclectic as shit. WEVL had 10 watts of power and probably even fewer listeners so we played and did what we wanted and very rarely did anyone yell at us. Often my friend Joe the writer would create or produce radio plays ("Tarzan Goes to Memphis", "Ubu Roi") and my friend Phil the techy would record them. And I helped. In between, we played an almost random soundtrack of stuff as we found it in WEVL's record collection. If nothing else, we filled empty airtime and didn't break FCC rules.

Early on we realized we could stay out all night long by taking a late night "shift" at WEVL on a Friday or Saturday night. We would tell our parents, truthfully, that we were going to do a radio show and they could tune in and listen to us. But we knew they wouldn't listen so we also used the shows as a time to drink. During our late night Halloween show in 1978, we read Edgar Allen Poe stories while Stravinsky's Firebird played in the background, all the while taking vodka shots. At some point in the proceedings, Joe the Writer went nuts in the control room and we had to wrestle with him for a bit before he finally passed out on a grody, soon to be grodier, living room couch.

As we had hoped, WEVL was a place of weirdos -- pot-smoking granddads, paranoid banjo players, grumpy activists, wisecracking technicians, sexy hippies, brain-damaged engineers, remade Rastafarians, faux FBI agents, tripping high school misfits. It was fun. It was freedom. We could do what we wanted, within our ability to imagine it and make it happen.

In early 1979, WEVL made the first of many moves. Since its founding, the station had been sharing the Court Street house with its founder, Dennis Batson. WEVL had the bottom floor; Dennis had the top floor. However, sometime early in their still short life, the board of WEVL had a falling out with Batson and he unamicably left the station. But not the house. By the time we showed up, Batson was already out of the station but still upstairs. I don't know whether it was this unusual living arrangement or the horrible physical state of the house that caused the move, but we did, to the Exchange Building in downtown Memphis.

The Exchange Building was a step up figuratively, and 16 floors worth of steps up literally, for WEVL. Although it was a little rundown when the station moved in, the Exchange Building was sturdy and had good bathrooms. The station's quarters were more spacious. And way up in the sky. The control room was in the northwest corner of the building and had beautiful views of the Mississippi and downtown. Those without fear could even stand on the wide ledge outside the control room window. It had a small ornamental railing giving those without fear even less. No one fell off.

Our fun continued in the new digs. Where we were limited to the 2 or 3 rooms of the house on Court, the half-empty Exchange Building was a place of exploration and adventure in between shifts and records. Where we had only the living room to dump drunks on Court Street, we now had half a building. Someone got too crazy, we'd put them on a dolly and take them up to an empty floor and leave them there.

One of my favorite incidental experiences during that time was a conceptual art exhibit put on 2 floors above WEVL in the spring or fall of 1979. The whole floor had been turned into an experiential art gallery for a month. I particularly remember the Womb Room, a dark warm space that you would walk into through a narrow passageway. The show blew my mind. When the show finished, that empty-again space was like a fairgrounds after the fair decamped.  It had been a perfect extension of the creative possibility that WEVL had welcomed us into.

But my all-time favorite experience was the day we took a holiday shift during the spring of 1979. Maybe Good Friday. Since it was spring, and WEVL may or may not have had air conditioning, the windows were open.

As we played records, we started hearing music coming up from Court Square. It was raucous. We decided to check it out. We put on a long record and went reconnoitering downstairs to see what the disturbance was. We walked up to the Main Street Mall stage at the intersection of Court and saw the band. There were 3 people playing -- 2 guitarists and a drummer -- and 2 or 3 girls dancing, and no one else. No audience. The Mall was empty except for them and us. The music was cool. Raw and fun. And the fact that no one was there to hear them didn't stop them.

We hurried back to the control room to beat the end of the record. On the way up we came up with a plan. Maybe, maybe, maybe we could run a cable down the building and put them on our show. Live. There was only one thing to do -- ask Brian!

WEVL's program director, Brian Costello, was a tall, long-haired, Frank Zappa/Groucho Marx hybrid look-alike, with a dry, inpenetrable, random, hilarious wit. I don't remember his ever getting mad at us, but he always gave the impression that he was just enduring us. But on this day when we came to him with our idea, he said, "okay, let's do it." With his technical guidance, we began hooking cable to cable to cable to cable...to microphone, until we thought we had enough to reach the stage. And then a couple of us went downstairs while the other one of us got out on the 16th floor ledge and began lowering the cable. When the cable end got to the ground, we started pulling the it towards the stage while the ledge guy kept feeding cable. When we got up to the stage, we asked the band if we could put them on the air. They said sure and continued playing. We secured the mic, now fixed to a giant arc of cables descending 16 floors and diagonally across Court Square. Brian manned the control room and the feed at this point, so we decided to enjoy the show and our handiwork in person.

I had no idea who these musicians were, but they were showmen. The fact that no one was there to see the show didn't phase them. Between songs the lead singer introduced his band to the absent crowd as the unapproachable Panther Burns. His name was Tav Falco. He introduced the other guitarist as Axl Chitlin. The drummer he introduced as the Baron of Love, Ross Johnson. And the dancers were no random members of the public but the Burnettes, the dancing sidekicks of the Panther Burns.


My mind was blown. I still had no idea who they WERE but now I knew their names, their weird names. They were playing wild, beautiful music with a showman's flair, with pretty people dancing, and no one was watching or listening except for us and our 10 watts worth of listeners. It was so cool. I have no idea how long the show lasted after we showed up, but whether it was 5 minutes or 2 hours, that show was eternal.

This Panther Burns show became one more passage into an alternate Memphis, like our welcome into the WEVL house and our trip up into the Womb Room. My friends and I hiked out of the banal, suburbanizing Memphis we grew up in, and walked into a future Memphis. A Memphis of creativity, of imagination, of personality, of new spirit and old bones, all executed with a DIY flair.

That we were crossing over into a new world was a lot of wisdom for a teenager, which is why I didn't have that wisdom. But I did have an intuition of that wisdom. I wish I could have had more than that because it would have helped as I struggled with what the hell I was going to do with my life in the years after. It took me a long time to figure out I always had these great models in front of me, of what I wanted from life and from Memphis.

But even if you were to follow such brilliant models, you have to keep them going.  Sustaining fun and creativity and dreams is very hard, for cities, for individuals, for institutions. I've seen good friends, some of whom I met at WEVL, die trying to keep the fun and dreams going. They never made it out of the Womb Room. Luckily, WEVL not only made it out, it has thrived. I don't know much about WEVL's history after I left for college in 1980, but I do know they were able to tame the Wild-West-as-Reenacted-at-Spahn-Ranch culture, to survive and flourish, while keeping some of that essence.

I wasn't there at WEVL's birth, but I was lucky enough to be there, for at least a short time, during its toddlerdom. We can be thankful that mad toddler is all grown up now and respectable. But I think at least part of WEVL's enduring greatness is the soul is still the same.

Happy 40th Birthday, WEVL!

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16 Floors of Cable

In 1978 I became a disc jockey at WEVL. 2 years after the radio station's founding in a ramshackle 2 story house on Court (the only of WEVL's 5 locations that's been demolished), 2 of my high school friends and I hiked down from my parents' house near Overton Square and walked up to the radio station. No phone calls. No appointments. Cold. We walked up the porch and knocked on the door. We wanted to be part of this place.

We had seen a cover story in the Sunday Commercial Appeal's Mid-South section about this volunteer radio station with a funny name, WEVL, and funny slogan, Radio Free Midtown. The cover photo of the story was a shot of the beautiful house, an unusual 2 storied porch house, with a pack of smiling people clinging to it, upstairs and down. They looked like weirdos. We wanted to be a part of those people.


We knocked on the door and someone let us in. I don't remember who it was who let us in but they were welcoming. They welcomed us to a house full of used furniture, dirty carpet, scary plumbing, weird smells, shitloads of vinyl, and a control room. Exactly as we imagined.

Within a couple of months, we had a show on WEVL. It was a Saturday morning show since we were still in high school. We played it eclectic as shit. WEVL had 10 watts of power and probably even fewer listeners so we played and did what we wanted and very rarely did anyone yell at us. Often my friend Joe the writer would create or produce radio plays ("Tarzan Goes to Memphis", "Ubu Roi") and my friend Phil the techy would record them. And I helped. In between, we played an almost random soundtrack of stuff as we found it in WEVL's record collection. If nothing else, we filled empty airtime and didn't break FCC rules.

Early on we realized we could stay out all night long by taking a late night "shift" at WEVL on a Friday or Saturday night. We would tell our parents, truthfully, that we were going to do a radio show and they could tune in and listen to us. But we knew they wouldn't listen so we also used the shows as a time to drink. During our late night Halloween show in 1978, we read Edgar Allen Poe stories while Stravinsky's Firebird played in the background, all the while taking vodka shots. At some point in the proceedings, Joe the Writer went nuts in the control room and we had to wrestle with him for a bit before he finally passed out on a grody, soon to be grodier, living room couch.

As we had hoped, WEVL was a place of weirdos -- pot-smoking granddads, paranoid banjo players, grumpy activists, wisecracking technicians, sexy hippies, brain-damaged engineers, remade Rastafarians, faux FBI agents, tripping high school misfits. It was fun. It was freedom. We could do what we wanted, within our ability to imagine it and make it happen.

In early 1979, WEVL made the first of many moves. Since its founding, the station had been sharing the Court Street house with its founder, Dennis Batson. WEVL had the bottom floor; Dennis had the top floor. However, sometime early in their still short life, the board of WEVL had a falling out with Batson and he unamicably left the station. But not the house. By the time we showed up, Batson was already out of the station but still upstairs. I don't know whether it was this unusual living arrangement or the horrible physical state of the house that caused the move, but we did, to the Exchange Building in downtown Memphis.

The Exchange Building was a step up figuratively and 16 floors of steps up literally, for WEVL. Although it was a little rundown when the station moved in, the Exchange Building was sturdy and had good bathrooms. The station's quarters were much more spacious. And way up in the sky. The control room was in the northwest corner of the building and had beautiful views of the Mississippi and downtown. Those without fear could even stand on the wide ledge outside the control room window. It had a small ornamental railing giving those without fear even less. No one fell off.

Our fun continued in the new digs. Where we were limited to the 2 or 3 rooms of the house on Court, the half-empty Exchange Building was a place of exploration and adventure in between shifts and records. Where we had only the living room to dump drunks on Court Street, we now had half a building. Someone got too crazy, we'd put them on a dolly and take them up to an empty floor and leave them there.

One of my favorite incidental experiences during that time was a conceptual art exhibit put on 2 floors above WEVL in the spring or fall of 1979. The whole floor had been turned into an experiential art gallery for a month. I particularly remember the Womb Room, a dark warm space that you would walk into through a narrow passageway. The show blew my mind. When the show finished, that empty-again space was like a fairgrounds after the fair decamped.  It had been a perfect extension of the creative possibility that WEVL had welcomed us into.

My all-time favorite experience was the day we took a holiday shift during the spring of 1979. Maybe Good Friday. Since it was spring and WEVL may or may not have had air conditioning, the windows were open.

As we played records, we started hearing music coming up from Court Square. It was raucous. We had to check it out. We put on a long record and went reconnoitering downstairs to see what the disturbance was. We walked up to the Main Street Mall stage at the intersection of Court and saw the band. There were 3 people playing -- 2 guitarists and a drummer -- and 2 or 3 girls dancing, and no one else. No audience. The Mall was empty except for them and us. The music was cool. Raw and fun. And the fact that no one was there to hear them didn't stop them.

We hurried back to the control room to beat the end of the record. On the way up we came up with a plan. Maybe, maybe, maybe we could run a cable down the building and put them on our show. Live. There was only one thing to do -- ask Brian!

WEVL's program director, Brian Costello, was a tall, long-haired, Frank Zappa/Groucho Marx hybrid look-alike, with a dry, inpenetrable, random wit. I don't remember his ever getting mad at us, but he always gave us the impression that he was just enduring us. But on this day when we came to him with our idea, he said, "okay, let's do it." With his technical guidance, we began hooking cable to cable to cable to cable...to microphone, until we thought we had enough to reach the stage. And then a couple of us went downstairs while the other one of us got out on the 16th floor ledge and began lowering the cable. When the cable end got to the ground, we started pulling the it towards the stage while the ledge guy kept feeding cable. When we got up to the stage, we asked the band if we could put them on the air. They said sure and continued playing. We secured the mic, now fixed to a giant arc of cables descending 16 floors and diagonally across Court Square. Brian manned the control room and the feed at this point, so we decided to enjoy the show and our handiwork in person.

I had no idea who these musicians were, but they were showmen. The fact that no one was there to see the show didn't phase them. Between songs the lead singer introduced his band to the absent crowd as the unapproachable Panther Burns. His name was Tav Falco. He introduced the other guitarist as Axl Chitlin. The drummer he introduced as the Baron of Love, Ross Johnson. And the dancers were no random members of the public but the Burnettes, the dancing sidekicks of the Panther Burns.


My mind was blown. I still had no idea who they WERE but now I knew their names, their weird names. They were playing wild, beautiful music with a showman's flair, with pretty people dancing, and no one was watching or listening except for us and our 10 watts worth of listeners. It was so cool. I have no idea how long the show lasted after we showed up, but whether it was 5 minutes or 2 hours, that show was eternal.

This Panther Burns show became one more passage into an alternate Memphis, like our welcome into the WEVL house and our trip up into the Womb Room. My friends and I hiked out of the banal, suburbanizing Memphis we grew up in, and walked into a future Memphis. A Memphis of creativity, of imagination, of personality, of new spirit and old bones, all executed with a DIY flair.

That we were crossing over into a new world was a lot of wisdom for a teenager, which is why I didn't have that wisdom. But I did have an intuition of that wisdom. I wish I could have had more than that because it would have help as I struggled with what the hell I was going to do with my life in the years after. It took me a long time to figure out I always had these great models in front of me, of what I wanted from life and from Memphis.

But even if you were to follow such brilliant models, you have to keep them going.  Sustaining fun and creativity and dreams is very hard, for cities, for individuals, for institutions. I've seen good friends, some of whom I met at WEVL, die trying to keep the fun and dreams going. They never made it out of the Womb Room. Luckily, WEVL not only made it out, it has thrived. I don't know much about WEVL's history after I left for college in 1980, but I do know they were able to tame the Wild-West-as-Reenacted-at-Spahn-Ranch culture, to survive and flourish, while keeping some of that essence.

I wasn't there at WEVL's birth, but I was lucky enough to be there, for at least a short time, during its toddlerdom. We can be thankful that mad toddler is all grown up now and respectable. But I think at least part of WEVL's enduring greatness is the soul is still the same.

Happy 40th Birthday, WEVL!








Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Sanctity of Property

The urbanist Steve Mouzon recently took note of Memphis' effort to save the Tennessee Brewery and in noting, wrote an excellent 2 part (part 1, part 2) how-to guide to preservation, "Ground Rules to Save a Building from Demolition".  There are so many excellent ideas here that I recommend you read them and, if you care about preservation and your built environment, commit them to memory, which should be easy for Memphians because he illustrates them with a campaign vision for the Brewery.

But I must take issue with how he begins his list.  His very first rule.  I don't have a problem with what I consider it's real point -- make nice and be nice with the owners of the threatened property.  But I do have a great beef with its actual title,

Property Rights.

The phrase "property rights" has jumped out of the trollpit of online news comment sections and into the mouths of people trying to court favor, or avoid disfavor, with right-wing property owners (although I suspect those owners' speaking them behind closed doors are the medium between the trolls and the advocates).  And it's bullshit.

Making urbanists and preservationists accept "property rights" as a ground rule for their work is as bogus as telling equality activists they must accept the "sanctity of marriage" and pro-choice activists the "holiness of life" before they can begin their work  The problem is not that we don't.  The problem is these ground rules require an oath of loyalty because the opposition says we're disloyal, without requiring the opposition to do the same. And the opposition is no more loyal to an absolute concept of "property rights" than those fighting for the "sanctity of marriage" or "life" are to theirs.

Right-wing property owners will fight a stinky chicken farm opening next to their new clearcut residential development, or a Son of Bottoms Up Strip Club opening across from their new family-oriented strip mall, no less passionately than urbanists and preservationists will against development actions that destroy the built city's quality and value.  None of these fights are confiscatory and all are legal.

We should neither apologize for nor waive our right to legally fight a property owners' anti-social designs with their property.

Because sometimes we have to fight.  We should fight.

Which is why I have a real problem with what comes right after the Property Rights title:
"Don't waste your time on a 1960s-era cause… you know, petitions, standing in front of the bulldozers, and stuff like that. Those tactics might have once worked (and in a very few places) but if you want to make stuff work today, you need to realize that you don't own the property… and someone else does.
(What?  We don't realize that someone else owns the property? And can we drop the "1960's" as a dog-whistle call for "hippie")

Fighting goes a long way in advocacy circles, and a short way in long-term success.  But that short way can save stuff in the meantime, giving preservation advocates cover to find owners and developers who see what we see.  As a primary strategy it's not going to save our city, and we'll exhaust followers with crisis after crisis, but it is a tactical tool that we must keep in the bag because sometimes the owners, no matter how nice and ready for business we are,  don't want to be our friend and don't give a shit.

And these tactics have worked today with huge success in Overton Square, the University District and the Nineteenth Century Club (not to mention the greatest fight of them all -- to keep Interstate 40 from mowing down Overton Park).  We can't depend on it -- we must still find owners who care -- but these tactics are still part of urban triage.

So we should make no apologies for our passion.  Let's keep it sharp,  use it judiciously, and follow Mr. Mouzon's wise advice.


Friday, October 04, 2013

Crosstown Arc

Itinerant writer's note:  while it's been a long time since the event happened, and since I began this blessed post, and a lot has happened on the street, I believe the observations and ideas are no more full of crap than they were on the day I began them.

Besides enjoying the great spirit and energy of last November's tactical urbanish MEMFix on Cleveland, it was really cool to get a sense of the street with lots people flowing around and through it, on foot, bicycle and car.












It gave a sense of what a vital Cleveland could be, perhaps for the first time ever, and what could keep that from happening.

On one hand, the main strip of shops on either side of Cleveland between Overton Park and Autumn have a single row of parking in front of them, separating them from Cleveland, with lots of curb cuts.



This is the way it's always been at that spot on Cleveland, but the disruption the parked cars and continuous curb cut caused to pedestrian flow and energy was marked at MEMFix.  A major event could be happening at one of those spaces and it's possible that street energy wouldn't change.  Passing walkers, cyclists and motorists might not even notice that something's happening.  Pushing a patio out to the street is a possible solution, as the now defunct Memphis Mary's did.


and the Cleveland Street Flea Market hinted at during MEMFix.


Also, most of the area is single story.  It provides no hovering counterbalance to the off-street parking frontage.







Finally, the large Sears Crosstown surface parking lot is a major discontinuity between the great building and the shops on either side of Cleveland and Autumn (including those on the other side of the pocket park).



The Cleveland/Watkins curve is carved into the parking lot, with the giant building hovering above it as you come from the south, giving it much better energy than your standard surface parking lot.  It also helps that its greatest uses for the past few years have been for public space rather than parking lot.  Still, the parking lot is so massive that I think it's possible that the Sears building could be completely occupied and have no effect on the surrounding buildings.

On a much better hand, MEMFix revealed to me and everyone there what a cool, strong anchor the district already has in the Cleveland Street Flea Market.



 and the visual street energy created, temporarily, by the eccentric triangular crosswalk.






And the pocket park made lively by the excellent bike wheel sculpture.


The literal intersection of these 3 pieces at the center of the Crosstown arc was the ultimate revelation of the day for me.  




This spot is the key to the revitalization of the rest of the area.

With a few changes this corner could activate Crosstown.
  • Make the triangular crosswalk permanent and and even add a light (which I believe is feasible since the only post office left in Midtown is on Autumn).
  • Break off a piece of the Sears parking lot at that corner and give it to someone willing to build a street fronting bar/restaurant.  Or build a semi-permanent cafe site opening to the corner site for food trucks to pull up to.
  • Give more definition to the pocket park via trees or other devices.



Wednesday, February 27, 2013

The Iron Mullet Becomes a Decorated Shed

The one on the left was created as sitcom backdrop and  recreated for laughs.  The one on the right was created as a city symbol and recreated for laughs -- almost!

I like laughs.  If there's a problem with the new signage of the Bass Pro Pyramid and DeathStyle Center (other than keeping the people of the Pinch and Harbor Town awake at night), it's that it's not funny enough.  

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

I Am a Sivad Geek

Sivad's Candelabra, in Skelevision! at Art for Jobs
Advance Memphis, 769 Vance Avenue
Thursday, September 20, 2012, 5-8 p.m.

I have my ancient pre-VHS memory of  Memphis' black-and-white-magical late-night can't-wait don't-miss hyperlocal horror host with the terrifying face and deep southern-accented voice,  and I have ready access to surviving video and audio recordings of  the menacing jokester with the impeccable visual showmanship telling the bad jokes and singing the weird songs, but I want more Sivad.

 So I've stenciled Sivad.


I've carved him into a discarded wooden cabinet door


and lit the carving with TV lanterns made from my old smoker.


I've silkscreened him


and illuminated his silkscreened eyes with LEDs.


I've drawn him by hand,


and rendered him in vector drawings.



Most recently, I've cast concrete busts, Sivad's Candelabra, complete with Sivad candles





and lit by Skelevision! lanterns.




And I did it with no more heart and skill than that possessed by an obsessive bored insomniac caveman, hunkered underground in the south of France.

My creating these icons are what The Gates of Memphis are about.  Fo me, it's not enough to have memories and fixed artifacts.  We have to build homages to our giants.  I'm just doing it at a Spinal Tap Stonehenge scale.

But I'm probably not going to making any more Sivads for awhile.  I've got my eyes set on Sputnik Monroe.

Until then, come to Arts for Jobs and buy some great art for a great cause.  Or buy Sivad's Candelabra in Skelevision! priced at either $30 or $50 -- I don't remember.

Good evening!


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Monday, April 16, 2012

Signs of Change

It was good to be wrong.



I didn't think Mayor Wharton would make the decision to put in dedicated bicycle lanes between Cooper and Cleveland.  Or at least all the way.  There was no major player pushing it, only a lot of citizens and community organizations.  And while the opposition was relatively small and individually muted, together it had made a big media splash, successfully positioned itself as "business" and counted Wharton supporters the Boggs family among its numbers.  I cynically figured there was no way that the Mayor wasn't going to look for a compromise, as he had on Cooper when he rejected protected bike lanes at the prodding of some Cooper-Young business owners.

Cynicism sucks and I'm glad to have mine sucker punched by the Mayor's decision.  Without the easy cover of the support of a bigwig, the Mayor didn't compromise -- he listened to his Bicycle and Pedestrian coordinator and the many citizens and businesses who had supported it, and re-striped Madison with dedicated bike lanes.  Perhaps it's too much to to call the decision by a Memphis leader to ignore a narrow and antiquated vision of business historic, so I'll just say the decision was great.

The decision was great 6 months ago when the striping began, but now it's been proven even greater now because of something that wasn't mentioned by anybody during the debate, at least directly.

The transformation that's resulted from cars parking on Madison in the new parking spaces.


The extra spaces were definitely part of the give and take of the process, but now that people are using them, not only bicyclists but people walking back and forth to their cars are energizing the street.  Plus Madison lined with cars makes it obvious to anyone randomly driving down the street that something is happening here.  Madison hasn't had that consistent visual cue until now.

The change most pronounced in Overton Square where the street parking has re-energized the district's street without Bob Loeb having to do anything.

I believe that the next Madison location that would benefit is the cluster of businesses and restaurants at Madison and Belvedere.  So the next time you have to drive to Zinnie's or the Lamplighter or Audiomania, park across the street and seed the energy.