I’m an avid fan of Robin Garr’s Louisville Restaurant Forum, where Louisville’s “foodies” meet on-line to discuss, debate and review the metro area’s abundant dining, drinking and entertainment venues.
Yesterday a thread took up the topic of Memphis, Tennessee, and recent changes at the city’s airport that are incorporating “local flavors” in eateries on the concourses.
The eloquently simple idea is that Memphis’s airport should boost the local identity of the city through indigenous food and drink offerings. This would seem to be a no-brainer, but most often isn’t, given the innate artlessness of airport authorities, the tremendous financial clout wielded by national restaurant and retail chains, and the pathological habit of concessions firms to be receptive to most known forms of bribery.
One reader then added this comment about Memphis:
“Memphis was also miles ahead of us on urban renewal. When I moved to Memphis in 1990, it's downtown was far more desolate than Louisville's. Beale Street had shriveled to a mere block and the Peabody and Rendezvous were the only real tourist attractions. Because of a visionary city planner on the Mayor's staff, Memphis realized that people had to live downtown in order to play downtown. Developers built "Mud Island", a community with several different levels of market-rate housing ranging from studio apartments to spacious homes overlooking the river. These people supported the new eateries shops and galleries that opened. The new entertainment options created a buzz about downtown that begat the development of more downtown housing, including the South Bluffs development where Cybill Shephard built a home and the loft district on South Main. By the time I left Memphis in 1996, the downtown had improved dramatically, and it has continued to grow.”
This is something to consider in the context of New Albany, especially when one of the most indelible images of 2004, at least for me, was the Scribner Place press conference and New Albany’s Mayor James “Jethro” Garner forlornly pointing at the second and third floors of buildings unoccupied for decades and insisting in a confused, bizarre monotone that people would live “there.”
Ironically, a limited amount of residential redevelopment does seem to be occurring, and it is being done by people who are flying quite consciously beneath the radar -- not because they don’t have permits or aren’t doing it in the correct manner, but because they’re absolutely convinced that New Albany’s historical inertia is ingrained in local positions of authority, and to speak above a whisper is to invite some sort of undefined but demonstrably Pavlovian retribution.
Here is yet another instance where mayoral leadership might make a difference. Instead, unable to provide answers for questions that apparently have eluded its limited comprehension, City Hall continues to do what it does best, engaging in endless turf wars over the spoils of political patronage and remaining mute when it comes to even the most mundane of platforms and plans.
Maybe I didn't get the memo, but exactly what is different about any of this?
It’s one year into the Garner term, and three to go. Will there be anything approximating vision during the next 36 long, grueling, months?
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