ON THE AVENUES: Pretty in pink slips, aren’t they? Those who mutilated Speck need to be cashiered.

Yes, it's true that I've been indulging in reruns, but hear me out.

For the past two weeks I've been using all my spare moments to go swimming in the rank, toxic, soul-crushing sewer otherwise known as Mayor Jeff Gahan's CFA-4 campaign finance reports.

Y'all know I'm a hardcore cynic -- and the pay-to-play is worse than even I thought.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 5: In 2019, Gahan will pass the half million dollar mark in campaign fundraising since 2011.

There's another reason for dipping into the archive.

Many readers weren't with us back when a column like today's was first published (January 8, 2015). At the time, consultant Jeff Speck's draft report about the two-way future of the street grid had only just appeared.

It took another two years for Gahan to commission the ever servile HWC Engineering to butcher Speck's overall perspective, stuff the remnants into sausage casings, spread the largess among the usual suspects, and declare victory.

In short, Gahan gleefully botched the street grid modernization as trucking special interests applauded and the mayor's sticky sycophants sagely nodded -- among them the East Spring Street Neighborhood Association, the brain trust of which concluded with all due terror that "modernization" was far too dangerous a concept to risk in New Albany.

ESNA was catastrophically wrong, and its timidity was both short-sighted and unforgivable. Now Greg Phipps wants four more years as councilman because he's not finished yet -- doing the mayor's daily bidding, that is. We need a principled, independent choice in the third district, don't we?

As for Gahan's trashing of Speck, you can't say I didn't predict it. Read on, and don't forget to vote these under-achievers out of office as soon as you have the chance.

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ON THE AVENUES: Pretty in pink slips, aren’t they?

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

On Tuesday, the very morning when City Hall at long last hazarded a first halting, wheezing, asthmatic step toward taking proper possession of Jeff Speck’s seminal street study, it was disturbingly sunny outside.

Now, I’m so old I can remember when Speck was Jeff Gahan’s Big Idea, prompting his very own commissioned mayoral study, at least right up until that fateful moment when the Tiger Trucking semi rig’s headlights froze Hizzoner dead in his tracks, at river’s edge, like a bedraggled, matted raccoon without a paddle, stuck in the middle of an arterial one-way Highway to Birdseye.

Where was I?

Oh, yes: It was sunny outside.

I muttered a choice epithet and spat as I walked downtown, past the doomed urban corner where a quarter million is about to be squandered to permanently anchor a temporary seasonal farmers market on one of the city’s hottest future infill parcels.

Damn. It really needed to be cloudy outside on this, our auspicious Speck Study Day.

After all, if Mayor Gahan (or more likely, the hardest working hologram in Indiana municipal governance) were to surface from Das Subterranean Command Bunker on Speck Study Day, only to see the sun actually shining, we’d be condemned to eight more years of foot-dragging, feeble excuses and DemoDisneyDixecrat appeasement, with little hope of street grid reformatting taking place in our lifetimes.

However, and we can only hope fortuitously, agoraphobia is the cruelest of mistresses. Mayor Gahan sent the city engineer, Larry Summers, to the Bored of Works in his stead, and poor Larry was far too nervous performing his assigned task of explaining how something and nothing can occur simultaneously to notice the prevailing atmospheric conditions.

Tinkerbell Dickey was there, too, but the Democratic major domo was preoccupied with feverishly emitting ear-lobe-tugging, nose-scratching procedural signals to the BOW chairman Nash, who gazed in bewilderment at the Power Point slides:

“Wow, Larry, you mean a road diet isn’t a Disney theme park ride?

"Why, this is the space age!

"Next thing you know, they’ll have color TVs playing at the Waffle House.”

---

Unsurprisingly, those of us most thrilled by the comprehensive efficiency and vigorous optimism of Jeff Speck’s Downtown Street Network Proposal are just as dour and pessimistic about the chances of it ever being carried out hereabouts in any substantive fashion.

That’s because in Come to City, we’ve never really come to, and what’s Groundhog Day, anyway? In New Albany, it’s just another word for tomorrow, and the day after that, and …

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In 1989, several previous fallen dominoes (Solidarity’s election victory in Poland and the partial opening of the Austro-Hungarian border, to name just two) culminated with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The USSR stood aside, and the Warsaw Pact was no more.

The subsequent experiences of these East Bloc nations varied, but to some extent in all of them, surely more so in Romania and Bulgaria, the period of post-Communism possessed a decided aura of déjà vu, because there, in the seats of power, occupying elected as well as appointed offices, sat the very same functionaries as before.

Rather like a species of rapidly evolving insect (remember, Franz Kafka was Czech), they either chose the proper moment to switch sides just prior to the outbreak of revolution, or merely shifted into a dormant stage of Down-Low to wait out the post-crash euphoria, reasoning that in the cold light of day, their bureaucratic skills would be deemed essential, and their previous careers worthy of selective forgetfulness.

In this context of adaptability, formerly Communist officials in newly democratic Eastern Europe drew upon an irrefutable pedigree, because after all, denazification in Germany following World War II proved to be schnauzer that simply wouldn’t hunt. Apart from a low percentage of high-profile examples, numerous adherents of the “Heil Hitler” persuasion made a seamless transition from discredited losers to irreplaceable stalwarts of the new/old system now harnessed to a different master, whether West or East.

Why mention Europe’s 20th-century totalitarian hangovers?

It’s because Speck’s street study is more revolutionary than all the (Groucho) Marxists and (John) Lennonists combined, meaning the chances of its implementation in the Land of C and D Students is embarrassingly slight.

But what if a miracle occurs?

What if Speck Happens?

Maybe Tricky Dickey was right all along, and all it takes is faith, and a little bit of pixie dust, and BOOM – Speck in our time!

The good guys win, the city’s future brightens … prosperous times are around the corner, with Tippecanoe and Walkability Too … get out those bikes, people, and skates, and … hold on.

Just wait. It couldn’t be, could it?

Those guys with the clipboards, managing the Five Year Speck Conversion Plan, working for the New Boss … OMG, say it ain’t so.

Not him.

Anyone but him.

---

That’s right. You guessed it. Even in the very rosiest of street scenarios, which most of us reckon might – just might – yield a Speck Study Quotient conversion rate of 15%, quite likely we’ll be asked to accept a state of affairs wherein the same street-disfigurement criminals wreaking havoc all along are magically transformed into courageous reformers.

We’ll be asked to believe that zebras can shed their stripes, as they set out at the usual bloated pay scale to dismantle the very same dysfunctional one-way, auto-centric edifice they spent the previous three decades perfecting, the sheer idiocy of which comprised the fundamental cause for the revolution in the first place.

Specifically, if John Rosenbarger has anything to do with the implementation of the Speck plan, which clearly calls for ridding the landscape of previous masterworks undertaken at Rosenbarger’s dull instigation, like the rock-strewn bump-outs on State Street, then we’ll have final, irrefutable proof of New Albany as default Groundhog Day, every day, forever.

Wonderful. Rosenbarger and his compatriots, some departed, and others still secured within the Third Floor woodwork like termite larva, built a street grid that Speck’s study relentlessly, mercilessly eviscerates – block by block, and lane width by asphalt expanse. Now, he’ll fix it.

Not only is it bullshit, but it’s also unconscionable, absurd and intolerable. In New Albany, these four words are considered synonyms for “bound to happen” – again, and again, and again.

Good grief, people.

Just during the brief period of the Speck study’s gestation in 2014, Rosenbarger merrily shepherded our Main Street equivalent of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s destructive pre-1989 boulevards and palaces chaos in Bucharest, placing a colossal raspberry of damp flatulence on the street grid he has had such a prominent hand in pillaging over 30 long, wasted, impotent years.

Imagining him at the triumphant Speck photo op, equipped with kiddie hardhat and requisite rubber shovel, those glow-in-the-dark reddened eyes leering, makes me reach for my garlic cloves and nice, sharp, wooden stakes. Ceaușescu wasn’t the only vampire on his Romanian bloc, you know.

Yet, in the end, there is very good news … and also very bad news.

The good news is that Rosenbarger probably will have no part whatever in implementing the Speck study in New Albany.

The bad news?

There’ll probably be no implementation of street modernity in New Albany.

Once upon a time, Speck was to have been Gahan’s Big Idea, but now the odds makers are unanimous, and persuasive: All we get is this lousy Potemkin Village – Hooterville and Caesartown, and again tomorrow, and the day after that, and …

Wouldn’t it be nice, just for once, to escape the recurring cycle of stupid?

---

Recent columns:

February 22: ON THE AVENUES SPECIAL: Take your cult of personality and shove it, Dear Leader.

February 19: ON THE AVENUES: I'd stop drinking, but I'm no quitter (the 2019 Gravity Head remix).

February 12: ON THE AVENUES: If it's about learning and knowledge, then by definition it's a Gahan Free Zone. You're welcome.

February 5: ON THE AVENUES: Our mayor hates non-elected boards -- except when they're his own, which is why "hypocrisy" is spelled G-A-H-A-N.

January 29: ON THE AVENUES: How has the 3rd district councilman fared since this question from 2015: "Et tu, Greg Phipps?"

Meat Loaf Is the Answer, Part 3: A brief postscript to yesterday's Taco, Broccoli and Lutefisk Walk reference.

Meat Loaf Is the Answer, Part 1: Local food culture presupposes local culture. Popeyes, anyone?

Meat Loaf Is the Answer, Part 2: Let's come together over meat loaf.

The straight dope on the Taco Walk.

DNA's Durian Fruit Taco Walk started me thinking about meatloaf (meat loaf).

Develop New Albany's Broccoli Walk is August 12. What? Oops, sorry -- it's a Taco Walk.

I'm not an ogre, and I'm not hiking my leg and Dugginsizing all over a good idea from a well-intentioned individual. Rather, I regard it as a teaching moment, whether or not I have any students in attendance.

A Taco Walk or similar activities should be the domain of a functioning restaurant association, which currently (and unfortunately) we possess only as a conceptual outline. Some day, I hope this comes together.

Eateries constantly are approached with such ideas as a Taco Walk, many of them good and others not so much.

Invariably, these events are one-offs, constructed to maximize the future of the event itself and the share taken by the sponsor. Just as inevitably, the events are "special," not reinforcing of the day-to-day, as with the notion of a pizzeria making tacos only one day a year, only for the Taco Walk, which isn't necessarily a productive use of time or effort because it doesn't represent what it does on a daily basis.

In the case of one-off events like the Taco Walk, owners and managers are hesitant to refuse participation for fear that it will offend the city, which is perceived to be the force behind the idea, seeing as the city sponsors DNA, and DNA sponsors the event itself. That's why it can seem like a shakedown, even when it isn't.

Far better that these events come from within a restaurant association as a consortium of those who know best what's best for their businesses. Right now, this couldn't originate where it should, because the framework barely exists. As I said, maybe some day this will change. Note also that the same idea applies to independent local businesses in general, apart from food and drink.

Furthermore, speaking personally, it comes back to how one wishes to direct his or her money.

I'd say the vast majority of expenditures Diana and I make on food and drink goes to eateries and watering holes in downtown NA, precisely the ones participating in the Taco Walk.

Concurrent to this, there is DNA, now positioning itself as yet another captive arm of City Hall's diversionary propaganda and events-planning efforts, while neglecting certain key aspects of its mission as a Main Street organization, presumably because these are matters that Deaf Gahan likes to keep in his own in-box for maximum political self-aggrandizement.

Finally, there is the fact that yes, I served my terms inside the DNA organization (just shy of three years, if memory serves), and have subsequently immersed myself in the wider issues that pertain to the success of the city's food and drink community -- streets, sidewalks, subsidies, policies and the like. That's something DNA itself might try doing -- as a change of pace.

Restaurants and bars cannot exist in a vacuum. Various governmental decisions with ramifications on the conduct of commerce every single day matter tremendously -- and these are the same decisions DNA traditionally has avoided any involvement in reaching, except when they directly impact DNA itself (see market, farmers); only then does DNA leap into the fray.

Put all this together, and it should become clear that while I'm perfectly willing to spend my money by handing it directly to locally-owned businesses, I'm unwilling to do it when DNA acts as the intermediary.

Instead, I'll hand it directly to Chef Israel next Saturday night.

On the other hand, when (if) DNA undertakes useful activities that address the wider issues, I'm willing to support them. As it stands, DNA is serving as a toady for a mayor-for-life's crass daily re-election campaign, and I have no interest in contributing to this.

But I have an open mind, and await persuasion. There are numerous others, but here are three relevant questions for DNA:

1. How much is municipal government contributing to DNA's operation each budget cycle? I believe the sum used to be around $5,000 per year. Now that DNA has a part-time staff person, we can surmise that the sum is greater. Is it?

2. Since it remains the case that any time an organization like DNA is funded by the city, from a mere thin dime up to thousands of dollars, it is the right of any citizen to know where his or her tax monies are going, how much of the proceeds of the Taco Walk remain with DNA after eateries are reimbursed, and what will DNA be doing with the proceeds?

3. Ranging a bit from meat loaf (why?), is DNA playing an active role in the city's implied (though unrevealed "Make parking Great Again" plan for downtown? I've heard city officials make hints at merchant meetings, and am wondering if this is something occurring with the active participation of DNA, seeing as this would actually be a component of the organization's Main Street mission.

I won't be holding my breath waiting for answers, but make no mistake: DNA should be providing them.

Meat Loaf Is the Answer, Part 2: Let's come together over meat loaf.

Meat Loaf Is the Answer, Part 1: Local food culture presupposes local culture. Popeyes, anyone?

Meat Loaf Is the Answer, Part 3: A brief postscript to yesterday's Taco, Broccoli and Lutefisk Walk reference.

DNA's Lutefisk Taco Walk started me thinking about meatloaf (or meat loaf), and a far bigger civic game, surpassing Mexican-derived street food in August.

Develop New Albany's Broccoli Walk is August 12. What? Oops, sorry -- it's a Taco Walk.

The most recent mention of meat loaf in the NAC archives comes in 2013:

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Wonderful and delightful harvesting ... in 2013.

Here's the reprint, lightly edited for topicality.

Alas, we've waited to long for implementation, because Paxico, Kansas has beaten us to the meat loaf festival*. However, since Paxico numbers a mere 211 residents, I suspect we might yet infiltrate their shtick, just so long as we don't claim world championship status for the winners. 

Let's come together over meat loaf.

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We’ve considered another pressing question many times previously: Do we need a second major civic festival in New Albany?

Whatever its future disposition, Harvest Homecoming has the autumn outdoor imagery slot locked up tight, and in late April, two weeks of Kentucky Derby revelry usually consumes Southern Indiana residents and then spits them back out in mid-May, after the horse pimps have moved on to fresh drugging elsewhere.

A few years back, there was a springtime Da Vinci fest in downtown New Albany, which in retrospect may have been just slightly before its time. Da Vinci’s twist was a bicycle racing component; if it ever were to be resurrected, as with the recent New Albany Crit, I’d like to see beercycling events take place, too. 

Of course, a dozen or more weekends annually are booked with local and regional church picnics, concerts and specialized fetes. Finding an open date for our second major civic festival might be difficult, indeed.

(While none of the preceding can compete in scale and impact with the true heavyweight world fests – Oktoberfest, Mardi Gras, Running with the Bulls, or that lesser-known fete in Spain where they stage massive civic tomato fights – the violence inherent in each of these, real or imagined, certainly qualifies them as worth copying for city council fundraising opportunities.)

With the chair’s permission, permit me to repeat my insistent civic festival proposal: As held on Election Day in November, it calls for the exaltation of meat loaf.

Not upper-case Meat Loaf, formerly Marvin Aday, who always wanted to sleep on it, but lower-case meat loaf: The myth, the legend and the great extender, tastily stretching limited household meats and means. Meat loaves of varying composition are rock solid staples in cultural, culinary repertoires the world over.

Great meat loaves? There’s a certain ring to that, and a growling of stomachs.

Does head cheese qualify as meat loaf?

I think so. Pig parts congealed in aspic and formed into a quivering block definitely merit a side competition for the more adventurous, because after all, aren’t we past the whole catsup glaze notion? Instead, our competition will encourage creativity. You can barbecue meat loaf, make it Cuban, or substitute Honey Creme doughnuts for filler.

Why Election Day for this festive “New Albany Loves Meat Loaf” gig? It’s an apt metaphor for a municipality (and county, and state) with budgets long since pared of lean and fat, where we’re down to cooking the bones for a bit of flavoring marrow.

Indiana’s former governor, current university head and future saint Mitch Daniels already had the Hoosier 99% dining on scant meat loaf when he left office, and his successor Mike Pence (and now Eric Holcomb) is steady at the helm when it comes to ensuring the better cuts of cow stay at the “right” tables. 

The rest of us might as well learn a few meat loaf recipes sooner rather than later -- if not for own sustenance, then maybe for paying the municipal workers.

---

*

Meat Loaf Is the Answer, Part 1: Local food culture presupposes local culture. Popeyes, anyone?

Meat Loaf Is the Answer, Part 2: Let's come together over meat loaf.

Meat Loaf Is the Answer, Part 3: A brief postscript to yesterday's Taco, Broccoli and Lutefisk Walk reference.

The Broccoli Taco Walk started me thinking about meat loaf (meatloaf).

Develop New Albany's Broccoli Walk is August 12. What? Oops, sorry -- it's a Taco Walk.

Way back on 28 June 2014 we pondered the dimensions of local food culture in New Albany. It's worth another look.

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Might we invent a local food culture in New Albany?

Cincinnati has goetta and it's own distinctive chili.

Down river in Evansville, calves' brain sandwiches are a specialty, albeit one probably borrowed from St. Louis.

Does Louisville's hot brown fit the bill, or is the entire state of Kentucky represented by cured hams and bourbon? After all, they represent all the relevant food groups.

Then there's New Albany, and no, Rally's is not eligible as a yardstick.

I've consistently advocated meatloaf as the culinary concept most in keeping with local culture, or its absence, suggesting that we promote a themed meat loaf festival as a springtime alternative to Harvest Homecoming. Now that there is a Boomtown fest on Memorial Day weekend, perhaps the time has come: A Houndmouth ale in every hand, and a meatloaf ciabatta in every disposable wrapper. The band itself can judge the cooking competition. There can be meatless loaves, too.

It begs a question: At one time, would river cats and carp have been staple in a place like this? Noting that Hungarians render a fine, peppery soup from Lake Balaton carp, a bottom-feeding Scribner Bouillabaise springs to mind. Serve with a spoon and strainer, as those fish are bony.

Local food culture presupposes local culture, and in this sense, New Albany's legacy of dependable underachievement jibes almost perfectly with glib American stereotypes of Frenchmen rising in the morning to be first to surrender. Maybe the NA baguette needs to come without meat or cheese, and stale. If it cannot be eaten, it can be used to smack new ideas in the face.

How to invent a local food culture, by Simon Preston (The Guardian)

In many British towns, local dishes have never evolved or have been forgotten. Is it possible to invent a meaningful food culture for a place that doesn't have one?

In most areas of Britain, local dishes have never evolved or have been forgotten. But might it be possible simply to invent a food culture for a place that doesn't have one? After all, a connection to the food we eat and to the place we live is a vital part of helping us to lead happy, healthy lives.

ON THE AVENUES: You know, the two-way streets column I wrote -- 7 years ago, in 2009.

ON THE AVENUES: You know, the two-way streets column I wrote -- 7 years ago, in 2009.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

These periodic time capsules are worth the risk of repetition.

That's because they have a tendency to vibrantly illustrate a basic New Albany truth: As those in positions of authority dig their claws into the upholstery as you attempt to compel them to gaze past the county line, they like to dismiss the topic of the day as something newly brought to their attention, raised only now by wild-eyed, book-reading radicals with hidden agendas.

They invariably play to the peanut gallery as pitiable victims of fresh thinking and new ideas, when the thoughts expressed actually extend well into the past, even allowing for local standards of comprehensive indifference to modernity.

And so it was April, 2009, and my column in the newspaper, which means that these words were not confined to a blog that no one ever reads until it needs rebutting, in which case someone else reads it aloud to them so they they needn't concede using their own eyes. Nowadays, Steve Price is back to playing music, which he does quite capably, and Dan Coffey -- after four years assisting the Gahan administration in spending more discretionary "quality of someone else's life" money than the Overton, Garner and England regimes combined -- has declared his neutrality, at least until the next paymaster comes calling.

I'm not entirely sure where the bloody shirt has gone, although the odds are it isn't in the landfill.

The two words I'd most like to take back are struck through. Other than that, I'm delighted with being so prescient.

Thanks for asking.

Now, go and read a book.

Any book.

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BAYLOR: Two-way, better way ... April 30, 2009.

What is the desired outcome, and how do we get there?

If the desired outcome is boosting New Albany’s future prospects as an urban entity, a key element is improving the city’s quality of life in residential districts adjacent to downtown, and linking their inhabitants to niche-oriented commercial redevelopment in the historic business district.

A restoration of the city’s two-way traffic grid is rightfully viewed by a diverse cross-section of the community as an achievable centerpiece of future downtown redevelopment strategies, with added benefits for residential and business interests alike.

If the desired outcome is doing as little as possible to avoid offending a steadily shrinking minority of city residents who view the future as a threat to be “nickel and dimed” into leaving us alone, the chosen political alternative is lethargic decay management, a strategy preferred by those of our local council ward heelers adept at “boiling the bitter Coffey.”

Who are they, and what is that? Let’s begin with a digression.

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Out there – in the wider world, beyond the Knobs, and even past the state line – there is broad agreement as to the merits of slower, calmer automotive traffic patterns.

According to the bigger picture, speeding and certain other manifestations of dangerous driving are viewed as street design issues, not law enforcement issues. To design a traffic grid that encourages speeding and reckless driving is to achieve exactly that. Aggressive law enforcement should be a given, and yet approaching the problem from a design perspective offers more lasting and substantive relief, as well as a long list of added attractions for urban areas.

By requiring greater driver attentiveness, two-way streets and related traffic calming measures lower travel speeds, and lower speeds reduce the number of accidents as well as their severity, further lessening repair costs and the number and extent of injuries. Lower speeds also are green, reducing noise and automotive emissions.

Planners of a previous generation responded to the advent of suburban sprawl and the corresponding desertion of the historic city core with one-way, arterial street refittings, manipulating the transport grid as a means of motoring people in and out as quickly as possible, and jarringly dismissing the patterns of urban life prefacing the city’s original layout.

Now, in 2009, as conditions in the real world outside New Albany constantly change, it’s plainly mistaken to persist with an antiquated one-way traffic pattern that defies all efforts to revitalize New Albany into a human-friendly, future-oriented city, creating a more civilized, less threatening streetscape for pedestrians, cyclists, residents and visitors, improving livability in the city’s neighborhoods, and helping to attract fresh New Albanians by offering them a better quality of life.

The rational future of downtown lies in its transformation into an overtly-stated, explicitly-billed antithesis of the plastic, big-box exurb, and what is more perfectly representative of the soulless exurb than its cruelly auto-centric traffic requirements?

Conversely, how better to jump-start the process than allow the city center to function as the city center was originally designed to function?

----

Let’s return now to New Albany’s stunted political culture.

The phrase "waving the bloody shirt" came into common usage following the American Civil War. It describes a familiar trait of political demagoguery, wherein a politician points to the bloodshed suffered by “our side,” as heinously inflicted by the enemy (“them people”). The tactic is a conscious effort to deflect criticism and avoid honest consideration of the topic.

In the lexicon of the New Albany Syndrome, the bloody shirt might be paraphrased as “boiling the bitter Coffey,” wherein a local politician attacks the source (“them people”) of ideas, innovations and hope in a conscious effort to deflect criticism, avoid honest consideration of the topic at hand, and protect “our side” from a difficult, demanding future.

Accordingly, to “boil the bitter Coffey” is to be trapped in a state of perpetual political obstructionism, inexorably bound to the nonsensical principle that “them people” – i.e., those residents who are eager, educated, capable and willing to assist in the process of change – are arrogantly and callously demanding unaffordable and effete luxuries, something that the saintly and penurious “little people” must oppose at all costs, supposedly on financial grounds, but actually on ones vaguely reminiscent of the GOP’s culture wars – except that our Coffey boilers are always Democrats.

We’re about to see a high volume of Coffey being mercilessly boiled, right down to the darkest dregs, because these standard bearers of the city’s embittered and increasingly irrelevant wannabeens seem fully prepared to go to their mattresses in an offensive against the current administration’s efforts to rebuild and re-energize New Albany.

In addition to proposals for comprehensive paving and two-way street conversions, a full range of uniformly exciting and long overdue public and private investments currently are on the table, including the second phase of Scribner Place, ongoing riverfront enhancements, rehabs for existing housing, and positive ideas for West End redevelopment, all aimed at improving the quality of life for residents and businesses within the city’s historic core, and providing a platform for future growth.

The two council districts with the most to gain from progress are the 1st and 3rd, congenitally under-represented on the city council by Dan Coffey and Steve Price, surely the city’s most predictable proponents of deflated defeatism, penny-wise, pound-foolish fiscal deconstructionism, and outright malice toward a modern world that neither seems to comprehend.

Decay and death, or progress and life?

Can we afford not choosing the latter?

---

April 21: ON THE AVENUES: The Green Mouse tells all.

April 14: ON THE AVENUES: Forever NA, the wrong way ... from 2012, through 2014, to 2016 and beyond, forever more.

April 7: ON THE AVENUES: The Six Session Beers of Session Beer Day.

March 31: ON THE AVENUES: Abortion? Wichita, or maybe Targu Mures.

ON THE AVENUES: Pretty in pink slips, aren’t they?

ON THE AVENUES: Pretty in pink slips, aren’t they?

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

(Here is the link to a .pdf of the Speck draft report)

On Tuesday, the very morning when City Hall at long last hazarded a first halting, wheezing, asthmatic step toward taking proper possession of Jeff Speck’s seminal street study, it was disturbingly sunny outside.

Now, I’m so old I can remember when Speck was Jeff Gahan’s Big Idea, prompting his very own commissioned mayoral study, at least right up until that fateful moment when the Tiger Trucking semi rig’s headlights froze Hizzoner dead in his tracks, at river’s edge, like a bedraggled, matted raccoon without a paddle, stuck in the middle of an arterial one-way Highway to Birdseye.

Where was I?

Oh, yes: It was sunny outside.

I muttered a choice epithet and spat as I walked downtown, past the doomed urban corner where a quarter million is about to be squandered to permanently anchor a temporary seasonal farmers market on one of the city’s hottest future infill parcels.

Damn. It really needed to be cloudy outside on this, our auspicious Speck Study Day.

After all, if Mayor Gahan (or more likely, the hardest working hologram in Indiana municipal governance) were to surface from Das Subterranean Command Bunker on Speck Study Day, only to see the sun actually shining, we’d be condemned to eight more years of foot-dragging, feeble excuses and Dixecrat appeasement, with little hope of street grid reformatting taking place in our lifetimes.

However, and we can only hope fortuitously, agoraphobia is the cruelest of mistresses. Mayor Gahan sent the city engineer, Larry Summers, to the Bored of Works in his stead, and poor Larry was far too nervous performing his assigned task of explaining how something and nothing can occur simultaneously to notice the prevailing atmospheric conditions.

Tinkerbell was there, too, but the Democratic major domo was preoccupied with feverishly emitting ear-lobe-tugging, nose-scratching procedural signals to the BOW chairman Nash, who gazed in bewilderment at the Power Point slides: “Wow, Larry, you mean a road diet isn’t a Disney theme park ride? Why, this is the space age. Next thing you know, they’ll have color TVs playing at the Waffle House.”

---

Unsurprisingly, those of us most thrilled by the comprehensive efficiency and vigorous optimism of Jeff Speck’s Downtown Street Network Proposal are just as dour and pessimistic about the chances of it ever being carried out hereabouts in any substantive fashion.

That’s because in Come to City, we’ve never really come to, and what’s Groundhog Day, anyway? In New Albany, it’s just another word for tomorrow, and the day after that, and …

---

In 1989, several previous fallen dominoes (Solidarity’s election victory in Poland and the partial opening of the Austro-Hungarian border, to name just two) culminated with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The USSR stood aside, and the Warsaw Pact was no more.

The subsequent experiences of these East Bloc nations varied, but to some extent in all of them, surely more so in Romania and Bulgaria, the period of post-Communism possessed a decided aura of déjà vu, because there, in the seats of power, occupying elected as well as appointed offices, sat the very same functionaries as before.

Rather like a species of rapidly evolving insect (remember, Franz Kafka was Czech), they either chose the proper moment to switch sides just prior to the outbreak of revolution, or merely shifted into a dormant stage of Down-Low to wait out the post-crash euphoria, reasoning that in the cold light of day, their bureaucratic skills would be deemed essential, and their previous careers worthy of selective forgetfulness.

In this context of adaptability, formerly Communist officials in newly democratic Eastern Europe drew upon an irrefutable pedigree, because after all, denazification in Germany following World War II proved to be schnauzer that simply wouldn’t hunt. Apart from a low percentage of high-profile examples, numerous adherents of the “Heil Hitler” persuasion made a seamless transition from discredited losers to irreplaceable stalwarts of the new/old system now harnessed to a different master, whether West or East.

Why mention Europe’s 20th-century totalitarian hangovers?

It’s because Speck’s street study is more revolutionary than all the (Groucho) Marxists and (John) Lennonists combined, meaning the chances of its implementation in the Land of C and D Students is embarrassingly slight.

But what if a miracle occurs?

What if Speck Happens?

Maybe Tricky Dickey was right all along, and all it takes is faith, and a little bit of pixie dust, and BOOM – Speck in our time!

The good guys win, the city’s future brightens … prosperous times are around the corner, with Tippecanoe and Walkability Too … get out those bikes, people, and skates, and … hold on.

Just wait. It couldn’t be, could it?

Those guys with the clipboards, managing the Five Year Speck Conversion Plan, working for the New Boss … OMG, say it ain’t so.

Not him.

Anyone but him.

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That’s right. You guessed it. Even in the very rosiest of street scenarios, which most of us reckon might – just might – yield a Speck Study Quotient conversion rate of 15%, quite likely we’ll be asked to accept a state of affairs wherein the same street-disfigurement criminals wreaking havoc all along are magically transformed into courageous reformers.

We’ll be asked to believe that zebras can shed their stripes, as they set out at the usual bloated pay scale to dismantle the very same dysfunctional one-way, auto-centric edifice they spent the previous three decades perfecting, the sheer idiocy of which comprised the fundamental cause for the revolution in the first place.

Specifically, if John Rosenbarger has anything to do with the implementation of the Speck plan, which clearly calls for ridding the landscape of previous masterworks undertaken at Rosenbarger’s dull instigation, like the rock-strewn bump-outs on State Street, then we’ll have final, irrefutable proof of New Albany as default Groundhog Day, every day, forever.

Wonderful. Rosenbarger and his compatriots, some departed, and others still secured within the Third Floor woodwork like termite larva, built a street grid that Speck’s study relentlessly, mercilessly eviscerates – block by block, and lane width by asphalt expanse. Now, he’ll fix it.

Not only is it bullshit, but it’s also unconscionable, absurd and intolerable. In New Albany, these four words are considered synonyms for “bound to happen” – again, and again, and again.

Good grief, people.

Just during the brief period of the Speck study’s gestation in 2014, Rosenbarger merrily shepherded our Main Street equivalent of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s destructive pre-1989 boulevards and palaces chaos in Bucharest, placing a colossal raspberry of damp flatulence on the street grid he has had such a prominent hand in pillaging over 30 long, wasted, impotent years.

Imagining him at the triumphant Speck photo op, equipped with kiddie hardhat and requisite rubber shovel, those glow-in-the-dark reddened eyes leering, makes me reach for my garlic cloves and nice, sharp, wooden stakes. Ceaușescu wasn’t the only vampire on his Romanian bloc, you know.

Yet, in the end, there is very good news … and also very bad news.

The good news is that Rosenbarger probably will have no part whatever in implementing the Speck study in New Albany.

The bad news?

There’ll probably be no implementation of street modernity in New Albany.

Once upon a time, Speck was to have been Gahan’s Big Idea, but now the odds makers are unanimous, and persuasive: All we get is this lousy Potemkin Village – Hooterville and Caesartown, and again tomorrow, and the day after that, and …

Wouldn’t it be nice, just for once, to escape the recurring cycle of stupid?

Might we invent a local food culture in New Albany?

Cincinnati has goetta and it's own distinctive chili.

Down river in Evansville, calves' brain sandwiches are a specialty, albeit one probably borrowed from St. Louis.

Does Louisville's hot brown fit the bill, or is the entire state of Kentucky represented by cured hams and bourbon? After all, they represent all the relevant food groups.

Then there's New Albany, and no, Rally's is not eligible.

I've consistently advocated meatloaf as the culinary concept most in keeping with local culture, or its absence, suggesting that we promote a themed meat loaf festival as a springtime alternative to Harvest Homecoming. Now that there is a Boomtown fest on Memorial Day weekend, perhaps the time has come: A Houndmouth ale in every hand, and a meatloaf ciabatta in every disposable wrapper. The band itself can judge the cooking competition. There can be meatless loaves, too.

It begs a question: At one time, would river cats and carp have been staple in a place like this? Noting that Hungarians render a fine, peppery soup from Lake Balaton carp, a bottom-feeding Scribner Bouillabaise springs to mind. Serve with a spoon and strainer; those fish are bony.

Local food culture presupposes local culture, and in this sense, New Albany's legacy of dependable underachievement jibes almost perfectly with glib American stereotypes of Frenchmen rising in the morning to be first to surrender. Maybe the NA baguette needs to come without meat or cheese, and stale. If it cannot be eaten, it can be used to smack new ideas in the face.

How to invent a local food culture, by Simon Preston (The Guardian)

In many British towns, local dishes have never evolved or have been forgotten. Is it possible to invent a meaningful food culture for a place that doesn't have one?

In most areas of Britain, local dishes have never evolved or have been forgotten. But might it be possible simply to invent a food culture for a place that doesn't have one? After all, a connection to the food we eat and to the place we live is a vital part of helping us to lead happy, healthy lives.

ON THE AVENUES: From the countryside to “Livin’ for the City.”

ON THE AVENUES: From the countryside to “Livin’ for the City.”

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

For the past three months, a transition has been underway.

My mother moved from Georgetown to an apartment at the Silvercrest community, setting into motion familiar cadences in creative downsizing, at times requiring both brain cells and back muscles seldom flexed: Organizing, cataloguing, sorting and packing … applying, verifying, signing and calculating … selling, buying, donating depositing and withdrawing.

The fact that my wife and a group of amazing friends have done so much to help out during this process has made it much easier.

I do have my ghosts, and I respect their shadowy presence in my life. Closing the book on the house where I was raised naturally couldn’t come without periodic mental triage, itself requiring consultations with some of these very same ghosts, and in the main, they’ve been gentle and constructive.

It is true that in terms of physical residence, I’ve never left Floyd County. At the same time, as daily existence pertains to a set of interests and beliefs, and an overall worldview, I often feel like an illegal alien, or a stranger in a strange land. Perhaps I was a country boy in the distant past, but I’ve changed as much as any born-again this-or-that, and now I’m a practicing urbanist of some stripe. There has not been a moment these past weeks when I said to myself -- you know, self, why not live out here again?

The following column appeared in the pre-merger Tribune in March, 2009. I’ve made a few small edits for comprehensibility.

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BEER MONEY: Livin’ for the City.

By ROGER BAYLOR, Local Columnist

From the beginning of his life to within weeks of its end, excepting three years in the pacific during WWII, my father lived in rural Floyd County.

For much of that time the landscape genuinely there embodied the attractiveness of the American countryside prior to the invasiveness of postwar sprawl, and perhaps that’s why he seldom had anything positive to say about “city life,” which to him was a phenomenon endured by unfortunate people who were crowded more closely together than could possibly be healthy, with far too much traffic and far too little room to breathe.

When I was a boy, my family vacationed almost exclusively in the great outdoors of the Western United States. It was my father’s preference, and of course proved a valuable education for me. I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything, but as I grew older, my personal and academic interests inexorably began pointing eastward, back toward the Old World. As noted previously, it wasn’t my fault that the stork was toiling pre-GPS.

The precise moment of my divergence from the anti-urban household party line cannot be pinpointed, although by the conclusion of my first European backpacking expedition in 1985, the deal was probably sealed.

Europe’s cities were revelatory. Suddenly the bountiful possibilities of the urban ethos were revealed: Art, music and culture; parks, history and architecture; restaurants, clubs and pubs; and vast, comprehensive and affordable public transportation networks tying them together.

Yes, my dad had been right: There were more people than I’d ever seen together in one place. But it didn’t escape my notice that many of them in places like Paris were women my age, and that fact alone was more interesting than a mere animal kingdom in Wyoming or Montana.

Multiple summers were spent touring, learning, and experiencing, and each time I elected to return to Indiana. Somewhere along the way came the grudging realization that with an established business, family ties and the unlikelihood of feasible international relocation, New Albany was going to be a permanent home. Diana and I got a great deal on an old house downtown, took a closer look around the neighborhood, and had the same astounded reaction.

So much raw potential … and just as much all-embracing incomprehension.

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Amazingly, there are New Albanian residents who’ll vehemently disagree if you assert that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. If they could say “no” for a living, they would. Unfortunately, theirs are the voices that the majority of local politicians heed, hence a large measure of the eternal problem.

Unraveling the confused argumentation deployed by these semi-pro obstructionists is nearly as fun as wandering through a classic hedge maze in search of the exit, except that when it comes to efforts to reason with the city’s Luddites, there aren’t enough progressive pints of refreshing ale on the planet to ease your transition back to the coherent side of life.

Consider the city’s efforts to broker the construction of the downtown YMCA, a project envisioned by former mayor Regina Overton as the first phase of the Scribner Place revitalization effort, one funded primarily by private donations, including a substantial tithe from the Caesar’s/Horseshoe Foundation. Only a miniscule annual contribution from economic development monies was required to bring this win/win deal happily to fruition.

Even the Geico caveman could grasp it, and yet it took all four years of James Garner’s tenure as Overton’s successor and the first year of Doug England’s term to finally open the doors. Never has a governmental entity been compelled to fight so long and hard to spend millions of someone else’s cash, and the reason why touches on the hallmarks of the New Albany Syndrome: Envy, jealousy, and a seldom-used word normally used in an Irish context, begrudgery.

The very same people who objected to the city spending its economic development money for economic development to help build the YMCA, predicting no one would go there, now are grousing about the parking problems caused by too many people visiting the YMCA. This means that we can add another characteristic to the New Albany Syndrome checklist: Aversion to irony, as in a tragicomic appearance at the YMCA’s opening by two mercifully retired councilmen who spent their last four years in office vigorously opposing its construction.

That’s either extreme chutzpah … or utter cluelessness.

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Then as now, the YMCA and Scribner Place proposals make sense because they’re components of purposeful downtown revitalization, and purposeful downtown revitalization makes sense because utilizing the existing urban area means a more effective leveraging of resources we already have at hand. Low-risk expenditures in infrastructure like the YMCA and Scribner Place developments help broaden the tax base, encourage private investment and bring needed jobs to the city. They prime the pump for further growth, but more importantly, the growth achieved does not come at the expense of dwindling green fields.

Moreover, such public/private investments acknowledge that a city is a city – not a suburb, not an exurb, and not a collection of cabins in the forest. It concentrates available resources, work and amenities, and makes it possible to share burdens. There was a period when we forgot much of this, and now a doctrine has emerged that reminds us of the way it is. It’s called New Urbanism.

If I’m not too busy opening a business downtown, I may write more about New Urbanism in the weeks to come. Until then, you can do what the naysayers won’t.

Just look it up.

"Panoramic Views Of Columbus, Indiana's Modernist Landmarks."

Granted, we have no Cummins. What we have had is a wave of 1960s-era demolitions, leaving us with outmoded corporate relics (bank where the courthouse was), too many (and still expanding) holes in the urban streetscape, never enough infill (and plans to anchor corners we shouldn't), often overcompensating historic preservationists ... then, to top it off, we send Maalox to Columbus to bring our way of non-thinking to them, even as Doug England wanders through town brandishing a business card touting his consultancy in entrepreneurial matters he did virtually nothing to assist as mayor.

Hello Central: Give me John Galt. We need to stop the wheels of this atrocity and board a different bus.

Panoramic Views Of Columbus, Indiana's Modernist Landmarks, by Anthony Paletta (Metropolis)

... If the idea of physically investing in the well-being of a small town seems quaint, so often is its representative architecture. Consider Hershey, PA, which boasts a fine art deco windowless office building but otherwise derives its inspirations from the age of the soda fountain. Or Corning, New York; it contains a Gunnar Birkerts glass museum, and yet looks like it hasn’t taken much advantage of the possibilities of its signature product. Which makes one example, Columbus, Indiana—a town that doesn’t merely nod to Prairie Modernism but is defined by it—all the more exceptional.

As new attitudes have fed the Indianapolis area's apartment boom, old attitudes doom New Albany's.

Here in New Albany, we spend much time over beer, coffee and various illicit pharmaceuticals discussing the perennial disconnect between theory and practice.

For instance, just about everyone taking a position on the future of downtown acknowledges that more people need to live there. Granted, our Slumlord Empowerment Districts (i.e., historic neighborhoods) lie only a short distance from downtown, but after a decade spent trying to make the point that ideas like walkability and complete streets apply to these neighborhoods just as much as free federal stabilization monies when it comes to effectively connecting them with downtown, the powers that be still look at messengers like us as though we were extras populating the cantina scene in Star Wars.

The only downtown housing solution ever advanced during the past decade of muddle was the catastrophic Mainland Properties proposal to use a $15 million parking garage as collateral to find the money its backers didn't possess, perhaps leading eventually to habitation at DC-level prices. Meanwhile, empty buildings still sit, unused and rotting, and there hasn't been a new building erected downtown since the Redmen's Club (later Steinert's) ... which remains vacant.

Perhaps, in the end, our perennial disconnect reflects our enduring contempt for education. If one persists in thinking that an empty-nester is someone who didn't get lucky last night at the Road House, and a millennial is a flower that returns to bloom each spring, then it's hard to picture this city ever turning the corner on downtown housing.

After all, valuable corners are meant to be sacrificed for a farmers market, not for thinking outside self-imposed boxes. And so we stumble, dully, into the future.

New attitudes have fed Indianapolis area's apartment boom, by Chris Sikich (Indy Star)

 ... Changing attitudes and lifestyles have boosted the apartment industry even as the new home market has emerged from the recession, said Drew Klacik, senior policy analyst at the Indiana University Public Policy Institute.

• Millennials, he said, are interested in living in an urban environment without the long-term binds of mortgages. Millennials are a key demographic, expected to grow from 36 percent of the workforce today to 50 percent by the end of the decade, according to Denver-based Progressive Urban Management Associates.

• Empty-nesters, he said, are ready to downsize and give up the maintenance headaches associated with home ownership. The first wave of baby boomers reached 65 in 2011, and the last will turn 65 in 2029.

"Millennials and empty-nesters want walkable new urban neighborhoods," Klacik said. "The stuff Carmel and Westfield are doing is a really big deal, and that really is the trend."

Oh, New Albany ... please stop breaking my liver.

If I were to link directly to Valerie Alexander's article, you'd miss the Bookseller's introduction, which helps to establish proper context.

When New Albany is namedropped elsewhere in non-flyover America, even amid otherwise positive stories, the reference invariably tends to focus on the way we really are and remain, rather than the way we'd like to see ourselves -- allowing for "we" as perhaps a couple hundred persons among 37.000.

It's a stunning disconnect, made all the more annoying because it's true. This culture needs changing. We smile and build half-million dollar dog parks connected by nothing, to nothing.

Rinse, repeat.

“Oh, Indiana, Please Stop Breaking My Heart!”

Every once in a while, we discover something written from afar but aimed directly at New Albany. Remember the Chicago Tribune story from 2008 where a downtown businessman declared (implicitly representing us) that he could never vote for a black man for president?

Nine years of sublimation at NAC, and the beatings go on.

The ninth anniversary of NA Confidential passed unnoticed on October 22, primarily because I was too busy with other components of my merry fractured world to pay close enough attention.

Happy belated birthday to us.

I like to say that this blog began as a direct result of massive personal depression in the wake of W's re-election, except you'll notice a birth date preceding Elector Day in 2004. In fact, the epiphany didn't strike overnight. It probably began in earnest a year earlier, when we closed the deal on the purchase of our house at 1117 East Spring Street on Halloween, 2003.

Talk about foreshadowing.

Several previously disparate threads began to come together in 2003 and 2004. In retrospect, a significant factor was my new life. A marriage had ended, and a new relationship started. Because of that, we bought a home located in Midtown. Before and after the move, all those walks and bike rides through the deserted wastes of a criminally neglected downtown raised dozens of questions leading to lines of inquiry veering somewhat from my previous obsessions, most of which were variants of beer and travel. I began to see that NABC's business was transitioning toward a fuller embrace of brewing, which began to make sense as the ultimate, local, creative act.

As the presidential election year of 2004 advanced toward its likely conclusion -- the re-enthronement of arguably the worst American chief executive ever -- an absurdity began dawning on me. We live our lives in a specific place, but spend so much of our time debating issues far beyond it. In 2004, at 44, there was next to no chance of my influencing the disastrous Bush reign, and to even devote psychic energy to such issues merely left none to apply to matters nearest to me, when these were the sort of local conditions best addressed through direct action, and capable of being influenced. The odds were 1 in 300 million, or 1 in 37,000. Which would you choose?

Therefore, why not write about it these convergences? After all, everyone's entitled to my opinion, and naturally this is the precise juncture that a deeply personal proclivity came into play.

Quite early in my life, it was obvious that being able to arrange words on a page was essential to my being. I don't know why. It just is. Through most of my adult life, I have awakened to a jumble of thoughts centering on today's topics, thoughts on how this jumble is to be untangled and organized, and what must be written, as soon as possible, in order to expel the current crop of thoughts and make room for others. I suppose it is a compulsion of sorts. Music always plays in my head, and sentences always are forming there. I'm convinced that when these idiosyncracies cease to occur, or when math and numbers finally start to make sense to me, death will be imminent.

What better way to facilitate these needs than electronic media? It requires no start-up money. It's possible to write locally, and disseminate globally. It builds character, and makes me a better gadfly.

And so it went, from then until now. Coincidentally, this will be the 7,000th post at NAC, including unpublished drafts. We'll hit 7,000 actual published posts in early December. Thanks to Jeff, Randy and Lloyd for contributing over the past nine years, and to all the moles and agitators and malcontents who help our ideas to gestate. Thanks to my wife for tolerating my writing and cage-rattling compulsions. Thanks to you for reading.

Lastly, thanks to the late, great Howard Zinn for demonstrating to me the fundamental veracity of a people's history, nd the critical need for it, because while this blog is imperfect, the intent all along has been to provide New Albany's flip side. It required a learning curve, but I'm damned proud of the results, and I think we've helped provide a record while offering more ideas per square pixel than local political power structures and non-local media combined.

I think NAC is ridiculously under-rated, but it doesn't matter all that much. It's their loss. That's life.

Somewhere, it's beer-thirty.

Václav Havel, civil society and the New Albany Syndrome.

It wasn’t until I began planning European travel extravaganzas during the Ronald Reagan era that the name Václav Havel meant very much to me. Once it did, the contrasts in chosen theatricalities between the privileged, incumbent Hollywood actor and the imprisoned, dissident Czech playwright seemed to handily encapsulate the decade. They still do.

For more than a year prior to my spending five weeks in Czechoslovakia in 1989, I had a job writing abstracts of articles in periodicals, and enjoyed the good fortune of being deemed my department’s unofficial “expert” in deciphering foreign publications written in English. There was much to read in British magazines about Eastern Europe in general, and Czechoslovakia in particular. Among other topics, I learned much about Havel’s role in Charter 77. Overall, I was far better informed while visiting in ’89 than I’d been in ’87, which made quiet, substantive conversation such a joy.

In the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution, there was enough time to read Havel’s plays, essays and letters. For obvious reasons, my personal favorite piece of Havel’s work always will be the two-person play called “Audience.” It’s about an artistic, city-dwelling enemy of the totalitarian state (in essence, the author himself, based on his real-life experience) abruptly sent as punishment to the hinterlands for a term as manual laborer in a brewery. He must endure the ramblings of his boss, who cannot refrain from sampling the fermented wares, sinking into comic inebriation while haplessly pretending to interrogate the urban exile.

I’ve seen frequent parallels between the “battered city” syndrome (GC's apt usage) in New Albany, which we’ve also referred to quite often as the New Albany Syndrome, and Havel’s wide-ranging thoughts on the nature of a civil society. It reminds me of the post-communist adage that goes something like this: “It’s easier to make fish soup out of the aquarium than the other way around.” I wrote about it in a newspaper column in 2009.

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Pogo and the New Albany Syndrome

“We have met the enemy … and he is us.”

According to Pogo’s Axiom, most societal ills are firmly, fatefully localized, as in New Albany’s enduring disregard for shared purpose and social cohesion.

Hereabouts, there’s always something or someone else to blame, from immigrants and property taxes to the outside world and insider corruption, and mirrors are perpetually short of supply.

Consequently, if you’re looking for absolution, you’ve come to the wrong column. We’ve all acquiesced in perpetuating the New Albany Syndrome, permitting the city to devolve and deteriorate, and the best hope of reversing this accumulated weight of bad habits and poor decision-making is unity via a grand coalition that concedes the task’s immensity, suspends partisan wrangling, formulates clear strategies, and gets down to work.

Moreover, we need to find a kennel for Pavlov’s dog, which is keeping us all awake at night. Maybe we can ship the mutt off to Central Europe.

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Communism in Czechoslovakia began with a questionable election in 1948, and ended in 1989 with “Velvet Revolution.” Shortly thereafter, the dissident writer and playwright Vaclav Havel was chosen president.

It was a stunning development. Less than a year before the unraveling, Havel had been imprisoned by the seemingly impregnable regime. A humanist and intellectual, he had been denied the opportunity to work in his field, theater arts, and during the 1970’s was subjected to internal exile by being sent into the countryside to work in a brewery.

The inexperienced government faced a hitherto unprecedented task. The process of socializing a country was well documented, but what about the job of reconverting it? How do you set about reversing four decades of stagnation brought about by an outgunned, undercapitalized and outmoded state-owned economy?

The intrinsic absurdities of the Soviet-style system were evident to all, and yet ordinary people were accustomed to them. True, the system had to change quickly lest Czechoslovakia fall even further behind, but how to manage change without exacerbating human misery and risking societal chaos?

President Havel actually offered few concrete ideas as to how the country’s economy might be reinvented. However, others did, and a program of privatization was designed to quantify the value of Czechoslovakia’s state-held assets through vouchers (shares) that could be bought, sold and swapped by citizens.

The jury remains out. Posterity likely will judge the reform effort as middling in the overall context of the Warsaw Pact, and what’s more, Havel’s country split into two entities in 1993. Today the Czech Republic and Slovakia both belong to the European Union, and the ex-president is long since retired.

So, why focus on Vaclav Havel’s role in Czechoslovakia’s post-communist history when he played only a minor part in the country’s economic restructuring?

Because this isn’t about the economy, comrade.

Throughout his unforeseen political career, Havel focused his interpretive powers on matters of conscience and consciousness, which he perceived as vital at a fundamentally human level. He persistently reminded his countrymen that any reform program would have little chance of succeeding without an examination of the society’s daily psychological assumptions.

Havel theorized that the chief legacy of Communism was a trauma at the grassroots core of Czechoslovak society, something that had despoiled the very nature of daily interaction between friends, lovers, neighbors and co-workers. Persistent indoctrination in the ideology of class warfare had turned all human relationships inside out, and the cynicism of everyday reality as it operated far apart from the panaceas of official propaganda subverted all aspects of trust, caring and hope.

Havel offered a consistent, firm, but gentle remonstrance: Before post-communist revitalization could have a chance of success, a “civil society” would have to be redefined and rebuilt virtually from the ground up, and without exclusive recourse to the unfettered mercantile self-interest preferred by capitalism’s victorious adherents.

Admittedly, two decades further along, it remains unclear what effect Havel’s thoughtfully humanistic leadership had on the course of affairs in his homeland. His position was largely ceremonial, and he had neither substantive political power nor accumulated wealth to back up his words.

But, sometimes, it really isn’t whether you win or lose in the traditional all-or-nothing sense. Rather, it’s how you characterize the game, and to me, an imbibing humanist, habitual contrarian and profoundly spiritual (albeit displaced) European, Havel’s analysis applies foursquare to New Albany in the year 2009.

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Truly, it isn’t about the money.

In good times or bad, the New Albany Syndrome is displayed in mistrust, inertia, secrecy and contempt on the part of those who fear the unknown future more than the dilapidated past, and who regard any sign of communication and cooperation with others as a sign of weakness that somehow provides succor to the cultural or political enemy of the moment.

From the subsequent vacuum oozes the politics of fear-mongering. Once during a heated debate, 1^st district councilman Dan Coffey inadvertently revealed the obstructionist’s target, spluttering at “them people,” although in reality, “them people” want a livable city just as much as “his” people.

Havel provides the answer: We must remove ourselves from the cycle of blame and vituperation, and get on with the process of building a civil society – a civil city – with a sustainable foundation that prefaces future progress.

Who among us wishes to abandon his or her laboriously crafted straw man first, and get on with the task of reconstituting New Albany’s lost civility?

REWIND: Sign o’ the rabid times (2009).

From the Tribune guest column archives on July 30, 2009, an examination of the pathology of "no" as compared with "yes," not just when erecting signs, but all of the time.

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BEER MONEY: Sign o’ the rabid times. By ROGER BAYLOR Local Columnist

This is the year my family reunion came to town.

Annual hosting privileges rotate between the cousins, who are the sons and daughters of my mother and her seven brothers and sisters, five of whom now have passed on. With my oldest cousin nearing seventy, and only a handful younger than me, it appears that a passing of the torch is imminent. Until then, we soldier on.

Roughly 40 people turned out for Saturday’s picnic-style finale at our house on East Spring in New Albany. Visitors came from as far away as Boston, El Paso and South Florida. A half dozen massive pizzas were trucked in, group photos were taken on the porch, and then we held the annual family meeting, catching up on events of the past year and previewing the reunion to come in 2010.

When the formal program ended, a few attendees indicated interest in checking out the Bank Street Brewhouse, which is only nine short blocks west of the house. It was between afternoon rain storms, and with skies sunny, we decided to go by foot. I asked them to meet me on the sidewalk, and we set off down Spring. After about four blocks, it occurred to me to look back and see who else had decided to come, and to my shock I saw that the small group had grown to more than twenty. Only the teetotalers stayed behind. My hunch is they weren’t very happy about it, but then again, teetotalers never are.

Feeling variously like the Pied Piper of beer and the helpful fellow on the Verizon Wireless commercials, I duly escorted this huge group of family members of all ages to the corner of Spring and Bank, made the northern turn, and presently we were examining the shiny new brewing equipment and indulging in scientific sampling. The pitchers were lined up on the counter, sweaty and beckoning, and everyone had a beer in hand. I have to admit that it made me proud.

Only a handful of those attending the reunion live in Floyd County, and throughout the brewhouse visit there were many questions about life and times in New Albany: What’s that building, and why’s the roof gone? Where’s the Greenway? Is your city council as loopy as ours? Why doesn’t someone make them clean that mess up?

And, perhaps my favorite: Isn’t there a rule against those tacky signs?

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They’re not exactly yellow ribbons tied ‘round the old oak tree, those white yard signs scattered around town with the big red “NO” in screaming caps. I see them, and I shrug. To me, they’re the plaintive wail of the inarticulate and congenitally disaffected, those unable to describe what they’re “for” in the sense of a positive contribution to the community, only to squawk about what they’re “against” as a negation of unity.

What they’re really against is the whole of modernity, although they express it in terms of money. I find that unspeakably sad.

Since the overwhelming percentage of temporary signage posted hereabouts falls into categories of plainly illegal or trespassing, with handwritten day-care touts duct-taped to city-owned traffic signal stanchions, absentee slum lord solicitations stapled to wooden utility poles and political signs never removed after last year’s fall election, I tend to regard them as little more than obtrusive garbage.

Not only do I believe they should be removed; I’m perfectly willing to remove them myself, and will continue to do so whenever the mood strikes me. Nationwide, this blizzard of ugliness is known as “street spam,” and those who volunteer to remove it are “street spam sharks.”

But In the case of the raggedy, pestilential, malice-laden “NO” placards, most of them seem to be located quite properly in the yards of obstructionists. These are safe havens, perfectly legal, and the signs should be permitted to stand where they are as an indicator of bile within.

Several of us in the progressive bloc have concluded that matching “YES” placards should be created, although we’re mindful that describing what you’re “for” is sometimes more difficult than just screaming “NO” and holding your breath until you’re properly purple.

Among the “YES” suggestions that were made last week at the NA Confidential blog were these, in no particular order:

Rule of Law
Education
Fairness
Affordable health care
Sustainability
Code enforcement
Preservation
Green buildings
Friendly streets
Neighborhood schools
Craft beer
Bicycles
Gay Bars
Neighborhoods
Craftsmanship
Human-centered design
Communitas
Democracy here, now
Downtown
Native hardwoods
Participation
Redistricting
Two way streets
Locally owned businesses

“YES” signs currently are being printed and will mimic the design of the “NO” ones, except that green is used instead of red. Some will have items we’re “for” already printed in the spaces, while others will be left blank to encourage public participation. If you’d like to have one, and support the notion of positive participation in the community, let me know.

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Two hours after the group left to walk to the brewhouse, we ambled back home, and the reunion began winding down just before the rainfall at 8:00 p.m. I smoked a cigar to celebrate a successful conclusion to a familial obligation that I'll not be revisiting until some time around 2017, when I'll be ... a bit older than I am now. Who'll be coming then, and who will not?

There's no way to know, and that's why we play the game, same as with life in downtown New Albany.

REWIND: Stand united, fall divided (2009).

Way back on February 12, 2009, I used one of my earliest Tribune guest columns to discuss one of many elemental dysfunctions afflicting New Albany: The steadfast and puzzling refusal to unify and organize as a means of achieving shared goals.

It's been two years, and unfortunately, this congenital failure to grasp the merits of rowing together is once again rearing its self-harming head in the form of economic development entities bizarrely reluctant to support what's best for the whole city, in the form of an independent small business alliance to facilitate localization, as opposed to what rewards individuals within their own bureaucratic fiefdoms.

I'm running for council at large, and while it's true that there may be little traction for an individual office holder who attempts to tackle the miasma, it remains that one of my campaign slogans is, "Zero tolerance for non-cooperation among non-profit economic development entities." Read into it what you will ... and I hope some of you do. Whether elected or defeated, I will continue to use the closest bully pulpit to promote the virtues of cooperation and decry the foolishness of small-pond thinking. Thank you for your patronage.

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BEER MONEY: Stand united, fall divided.

By ROGER BAYLOR Local Columnist

A neighborhood forum was held last night. According to the planned agenda, topics were to include:

· Current experiences and problems in the city
· Ideas for improving quality of life
· City and neighborhood safety
· Code enforcement
· Proactive neighborhood involvement
· Future vision for the city and neighborhoods
· Street concerns

Over the past five years, probably a half-dozen neighborhood forums have been held, and the agenda list of hot button issues has been examined in exhaustive detail.

At various junctures during this time, individuals arrayed in small groupings throughout the city have diligently pursued their own solutions to selected flashpoints, whether by campaigning, petitioning government bodies, or enlisting legal assistance.

While there is general agreement among neighborhood activists as to problems and solutions, few tangible gains have resulted in spite of persistent efforts. The ongoing credit crunch, an economic turndown, and state government’s eagerness to starve municipalities of funding all have contributed to the stalemate.

Other impediments have been partially addressed with the ballot box, as in the genetic propensity of New Albany’s ruling elite to favor passivity and lowest common denominators rather than aggressiveness and the principled raising of community standards.

However, these are little more than glib excuses. My words today are written prior to the most recent neighborhood forum, but my fondest wish for a positive step forward remains a renewed commitment to grassroots unity, and a recognition that defeating the New Albany Syndrome requires cooperation, solidarity and inter-dependence as necessary preconditions for neighborhood progress, and not as bogey men to be feared by residents and manipulated by our congenital ward heelers.

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Recently I had the pleasure of chatting with Mark Webb, an Indianapolis attorney who serves the Brewers of Indiana Guild as legal advisor and part-time legislative liaison.

I refrain from using the word “lobbyist” in describing Mark’s function, although I shouldn’t. There is nothing intrinsically unsavory about businesses banding together to advocate for their shared interests by hiring someone adept in relevant legalities and procedures. Such a person helps us stay informed so we can navigate the murky regulatory and statutory swamplands.

The key point is this: How many small Indiana breweries standing alone can afford to have representation in such a way?

The obvious answer: Maybe one, perhaps two, but to pool the resources of 25 or more Indiana breweries is to facilitate the retention of a point man like Mark.

With him, the Guild has a knowledgeable professional who voices our collective concerns to the legislature and state bureaucracy – and we all share his expenses. Our viewpoint no longer is the lone voice of a single brewery, but the massed chorus of an economic entity. That, too, is why the legislators and bureaucrats have an interest in listening to what Mark has to say to them.

It isn’t one. It’s many.

And this is why politicians pay closer attention when any well-organized lobby group like Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana (ROCK) turns out its foot soldiers at a public meeting. Collective action implies weight of numbers, and weight of numbers catches the attention of those whose continuing employment depends on votes.

There’s a catch of sorts: Once the Indiana brewers have made a democratic decision pertaining to a policy or position, it becomes my responsibility as an individual member to maintain solidarity with the collective will of the whole.

For instance, Mark informed me that the Guild will not take a public stance on smoking legislation currently being debated in Indianapolis. Personally, I’d like to see us do so, but a decision has been made based on membership input, and I fully support it. We’ll our save ammo for other, more important, targets.

In order to enjoy the bigger picture benefits of collective action, we all may be obliged to surrender a smidgen of autonomy and subordinate a few bits of personal need in order to succeed at larger objectives.

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So, what does any of this have to do with the city’s neighborhoods?

My analogy should be clear, and surely nothing I‘ve written today should surprise anyone who understands that at an elemental level, human social existence is political in nature, and politics is about power and how power will be distributed. That’s why there are political parties, labor unions, the NRA and the AARP, all of which act in the knowledge that a greater share of influence comes from disciplined organization, which represents the weight of numbers, forming a stronger collective voice to get the point across to those not inclined to listen otherwise.

Many folks have spent years seeking to revitalize New Albany’s neighborhoods, searching for workable solutions to the problems like those discussed at neighborhood forums. There have been answers, and herculean efforts toward rallying property owners, cleaning streets and alleys, making residential blocks safer, demanding the city enforce its own codes, and transforming New Albany into a place where residents are proud to live, not numbly resigned.

The dooming problem is that simple unity across neighborhood boundary lines both real and imagined has been unattainable, and with sporadic exceptions, the toil has been rendered piecemeal.

Worse yet, there has been a tendency toward parochial self-aggrandizement on the part of egotistical and underachieving local politicians, who thrive on dire warnings against what supposedly can’t be done, rather than doing something.

Isn’t their inveterate, manipulative obstructionism the very best evidence that without disciplined unity, we can’t hope to reclaim New Albany’s neighborhoods?