BOOKS OF MY LIFE: Confederates in the Attic, and what it says about past versus future.

I’ve been a Civil War buff since childhood, but even so, the genre of battlefield reenactments always has puzzled me.

In his entertaining book, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (published in 1998), the late Tony Horwitz considers the Civil War’s numerous legacies, including the meticulous and obsessional efforts at authenticity on the part of those engaged in bringing 19th-century military campaigns back to life.

Horwitz describes one of the participants:

"One hardcore took this method acting to a bizarre extreme. His name was Robert Lee Hodge and the soldiers pointed him out as he ambled toward us. Hodge looked as though he'd stepped from a Civil War tintype: tall, rail thin, with a long pointed beard and a butternut uniform so frayed and filthy that it clung to his lank frame like rages to a scarecrow."

When I was much younger, I had the good fortune to visit more than a few of the Civil War battlefields -- Shiloh, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, among others -- and these occasions always seemed appropriate for reflection about cataclysmic events in times long since passed. You’d think the vivid colors and immediacy of a battlefield reenactment would complete the scene, except that it never scratched the itch with me.

The very thought of reenactments being staged to observe every detail of conflict sans the indescribable pain and sure death borne of extreme human violence seems a sophomoric intrusion of sorts, something conflicting quite jarringly with any notions of sacrificial hallowed ground – assuming even these thoughts have any genuine merit in the first place.

Men and their machines come and go, but ideas live on, and perhaps it is because the reenactment genre misses this fundamental point about the power of ideas that I fail to grasp it. It’s the future that matters, as approached with accumulated experience gleaned from the past’s examples. The future is why any of us bother getting out of bed in the morning. The past is gone, and the present is a figment of conceptual imagination, one entirely ephemeral.

Concurrently, yes, the precise details of how a 150-year-old cotton tunic was sewed together have their place, as do pageantry and spectacle, but re-animated hardtack and nighttime spooning (soldiers huddling for warmth) pale in comparison to the sad fact that in the year 2020, roughly half the American populace -- generally the paler-hued ones -- seems to have willfully forgotten what the Civil War was all about, hence the word “unfinished” in the title of Horwitz’s book, itself 22 years old.

In a thoughtful 2013 essay, Horwitz suggesteds "the 150th anniversary of the Civil War is too narrow a lens through which to view the conflict."

150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz (The Atlantic)

... It's hard to argue with the Gettysburg Address. But in recent years, historians have rubbed much of the luster from the Civil War and questioned its sanctification. Should we consecrate a war that killed and maimed over a million Americans? Or should we question, as many have in recent conflicts, whether this was really a war of necessity that justified its appalling costs?

Convincing these people that certain foundational issues pertaining to human rights were resolved long before the advent of the internal combustion engine probably ranks as more important than reenacting battles, assuming there is a future without a further round of secession.

Acting out uniformed history? Fine.

Knowing what history is trying to tell us? Priceless.

---

The preceding was written on October 31, 2013, and I touched it up a tad to reappear six and a half years later. Confederates in the Attic is a fine book, and I recommend it heartily. It has been a while since I read it, but I'm confident the subject matter remains relevant. 

In 2013, my aim was to relate the book to a situation in our own city, this being the New Albany Bicentennial celebration of 2012-2013. Current city council president Bob Caesar was in charge of the Bicentennial. Six and a half years later, the public has not seen the financial records documenting these events. In response to public access requests, the city denied possessing them. Caesar once suggested they were in his possession, although nothing came of this. 

Here's the second half of my 2013 Confederates in the Attic digression. Ironically, the attic probably is where those records reside to this very day. 

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Such is the critical error committed repeatedly during the past year by the cadre of well-intentioned, history-loving New Albanians who were brought together to contribute planning for this year’s Bicentennial celebration – an event that shouldn’t be occurring until 2017, anyway, since that’s when the city was incorporated … sorry, I digress.

The customary guiding lights have hoarded the process and tried to imbue the celebration with symbolism of their choosing, and yet the enduring difficulty with symbolism is the variability of the symbols themselves. They mutate incessantly, depending on one’s perspective and general vantage point.

Do you remember the centerpiece of the grand American bicentennial in 1976, when the old, tall, “masts from the past” sailing ships came into the harbor at New York?

It was a wonderful and epochal party, redolent with symbolism – flags, patriotism and Americana. The newspaper accounts agreed, but the late Randy Shilts, author of And the Band Played On, saw something else. To Shilts, the occasion of July 4, 1976, might well have been the point when Patient Zero kicked off the worldwide AIDS epidemic (this supposition has been disproved, by the way).

Wooden ships were on the water, and the future was pounding on the door. It is quite possible that owing to Ronald Reagan’s backward-looking obsession, we took far too long reacting to the scary reaper out on the stoop.

And so it is that from the very start, New Albany’s bicentennial program template was locked into a pattern so utterly predictable that Year Zero itself has been a massive yawner of an anti-climax.

Opposing ideas have not only been dismissed; they’ve been actively resisted, and it’s both sad and infuriating to contemplate the extent of an opportunity wasted. Apart from the solitary tangible gain of an over-priced, generically designed public area, variously known as Somnolent Estates, Rent Boy Park and Caesar’s Folly (the “official” designation is Bicentennial Park), we’ve been given a carpetbagger writer’s coffee table book to remember our rare old times and what seems like 4,762 occasions to watch as the selected don period costumes, dance the minuet, and recite the enumerated hagiography of the historic preservation code -- cookie-cutter events priced primarily to recoup the book’s lamentable costs.

It’s all safe, white-bread and oh-so-conservative, and fully appropriate for the buck-a-day extras at yet another Lewis & Clark expedition commemorative film, but it remains that the problem with making our bicentennial entirely about the city’s past, and not in any discernible way at all about our future, is that the situation begs a rather embarrassing question.

Why were our urban forefathers adept at city building for the times to come, but their modern-day ancestors are able to muster little more in terms of achievement than decay management?

You're thinking: Haven’t we come a long way during the past few years?

(We have. But what about the three decades before that?)

Downtown is revitalizing, isn’t it?

(If eating and drinking’s your thing, yes it is. If retail gains, residential enhancement, community engagement and two-way, calmed and completed streets interest you, then welcome to our default condition of perpetually self-flagellating stasis)

But Roger, don’t I look marvy dressed up as a Scribner?

(You needn’t ask me. I’ll be sober in the morning, but we’ll collectively experience this bicentennial hangover for the rest of our lives. You might direct your inquiry to that child slouching over there, assuming he’ll relinquish his iPhone)

And so, the safe and genteel rewriting wrought by the Coup d’Geriatrique winds its way toward the inevitable reenactment of New Year’s Eve, 1893, when a slew of white folks gathered somewhere amid Benedictine sandwiches and non-alcoholic cider, and chatted amiably about keeping the lower classes firmly in their place.

In the vacant lot where daughters once were paired and insider trading schemes consummated, the future is now. An empty liquor bottle meets pavement, drivers ignore pedestrians, and Farmers Market expansion plans are recycled by the same-way-every-single-time design suspects as Big Gulp cups flutter to the pavement.

Somewhere in the city, a dog barks.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Pokemonification? The beer market is plenty big enough for legacy brewers to benefit from segmentation.

I wrote these words three years ago.

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Food and drink lend themselves to constant reinvention, and yet it cannot be denied that there are eternal “classics” amid the bedlam. Clichés become such precisely because they contain an element of truth, and certain aspects of the human experience stand the test of time, whether an umbrella, mouse trap or De Koninck.

If I were to start over, conveniently ignoring pesky realities like rent, logistics and aching knees for the mere sake of conjecture, my plan of operation would be just this sort of time-tested, sustainable, “Classic Beer” programming, the fermentable equivalent of Stairway to Heaven, twice daily.

At my former business, we eventually incorporated our own brewery, guest taps, and hundreds of bottles into a bloated beer program that eventually had to be aggressively pruned to avoid capsizing itself.

I’ve no such grandiose ambitions in my dotage, and I don’t care to run a brewery, ever again.

Rather, my contrarian instincts tell me that the beer climate is ripe for a modest, thoughtful return to basics, emblemized by a relatively small list of classics on draft, and in bottles and cans, to be accompanied by some good, old-fashioned beer education, which seems to have been tossed aside in the era of mile-wide, inch-deep “craft” fandom.

Interpreting songs written by others may be the best singing I ever did, or might yet do.

---

The following essay got some measure of play on social media, perhaps owing to the clever title use of Pokemon, a phenomenon that means almost as little to me as mowing the lawn or visiting Disney World.

Kendall Jones is a well-established beer writer and appears to be an old guy, which I appreciate. This said, I'm finding his argument urging legacy brewers to embrace the logic of the kaleidoscope a tad fallacious, in the sense that Jones seems to accept his conclusion as a foundational premise -- short attention spans are the only conceivable beer market -- then argues his way back to supporting the premise as conclusion.

But is this really true? I think the premise bears examination.

The flagships may be down, but they're hardly out. Numerous beer lovers in America as yet snag a six-pack of Sierra Nevada or Anchor Steam from a supermarket shelf while doing the weekday shopping. Legacy brewers are making beer for a mindset and a generation that has decided it doesn't need bells, whistles and season tickets to the tilt-a-whirl in order to find enjoyment. 

We're eight months into Pints&union, and while there are numerous tweaks still to be addressed, my basic beer program strategy of emphasizing classics and saving the Purple IPAs for periodic seasoning seems to be working.

And for this I am grateful.

THE LEGACY BREWERY BLUES AND THE POKEMONIFICATION OF CRAFT BEER, by Kendall Jones (Washington Beer Blog)

The independent craft breweries that deserve so much credit for starting and fueling the craft beer revolution of the past 30-plus years are facing a challenge these days. I call it the legacy brewery blues. If I had to draw a line, I’d say that any brewery nearing the 20-year milestone, or older, qualifies as a legacy brewery. Some would draw that line to include 10-year-old breweries, but that seems a bit unreasonable to me.

Some legacy breweries, like Deschutes Brewery, for example, are refusing to go down without a fight. They aren’t alone. Most legacy breweries are working hard to remain relevant as the craft beer industry that they created and nurtured charges headlong into the future. The breweries that are not at least trying to keep up will inevitably fall behind the ever-growing herd and face extinction ...

ON THE AVENUES 3-PK, PART THREE: Survey says … Irv’s street grid agitprop won’t be putting Diogenes out of work any time soon.

ON THE AVENUES 3-PK, PART THREE: Survey says … Irv’s street grid agitprop won’t be putting Diogenes out of work any time soon.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

In the finale of a 3-pk, we come back to the present, only to find that like always in New Albany, the past won't let the future be. 

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The Green Mouse has uncovered a bonus copy of Irv Stumler's "Survey of Business in New Albany," as wrapped in a whoopee cushion made in China, and gifted to the Board of Public Works and Safety amid a room of eyes rolling in unrestrained mirth.

It isn’t a real survey, because Irv has made no apparent effort to present a fair case for the opposing side, and then to tally the ballots, come what may.

Rather, he’s circulating a petition, not a survey, and he intends to be given the “correct” answers, even if he is obliged to remind unfortunate listeners that one-way streets discourage atheism, dissuade onanism, and are better than milk and beefsteak for growing young drivers.

Naturally, Irv has a perfect right to post his selected theses (even his trademark feces) on any church door he chooses, at least once he’s browbeaten the attending minister for a few thumbtacks and plastic bags.

Concurrently, I feel the need to expose Irv’s ginormous honking whoppers, and today it is my grudging task to dissect this muddled, tragic and frankly hilarious mess, though with an important caveat.

Apart from a sole necessary exception, I’ll not be naming names. I harbor no interest in outing, or assembling boycott lists. To do so would merely perpetuate the divisiveness Irv seeks so mightily to conjure, and he can keep this dubious distinction for himself.

I hope he chokes on it.

When it comes to framing the many issues involved with our city’s potential to build a “complete” and calmed two-way street network downtown, Irv has shown neither an interest in, nor an aptitude for, any semblance of intellectual honesty.

His self-appointed task is evangelistic, to find fissures and to exploit them mercilessly – to foster division for the maintenance of the status quo, not so much of street direction itself as the prevailing local economic power structure.

A rebuttal is merited on both counts, and in formulating it, my only exception to the rule of discretion is Mark Seabrook, for reasons that should be obvious. As a funereal politician, High Commissioner Seabrook likes to have it both ways, and accordingly, I enjoy giving it back to him, good and hard, on a tarnished silver platter.

Someone’s got to do it, at least until the electorate has the good sense to turn him out.

---

What we have before us are several sheets of paper stapled together, with an introductory prelude written by a preschooler.

Exactly who has chosen to buy into Irv’s drivel?

Not very many, at least once the petition has been edited into vague comprehensibility, and as such, we can begin our sad survey of Irv’s bogus “survey” by consolidating repetitious entries, as when several signatures appear on behalf of a single business.

These duplications account for roughly 15% of the total signatures on the document. Out they go.

Next to be removed are the names of those companies who’ve already publicly voted against street grid reform by joining the 800-lb reigning Tsar Padgett in threatening to sue the city (see “lawyers at their feeding troughs,” below).

Irv would like us to believe that each time he goes pandering, a fresh new wave of like-minded drones materializes. Alas, this isn't the case. His latest petition is littered with the usual suspects, and we already have been made painfully aware of their opposition to street grid modernity.

So, chuck 'em.

Moreover, a typical business’s employees (as opposed to its owners) are in most cases unauthorized to represent their employer’s interests. Their signatures can be set aside; I've already fact-checked two instances of this occurring without management’s knowledge, and I'd guess there are at least a half-dozen more.

Nice try, but no dice.

C’mon, Irv. You should at least stick around long enough to speak with the person in charge.

---

What about “survey” signatories who don't actually live in New Albany?

Seeing as the pompous perpetual power-brokering windbag (and high commissioner) Seabrook has informed the newspaper that street direction opinions from people who "don't live here" cannot be trusted, we must take the conniving time-server at his word, and immediately dismiss the dozen-plus business owners who are opposed to two-way streets, but as yet reside outside city limits.

(Personally, I’d be inclined to accept the signatures of these out-of-town business owners, since they’re investing something concrete in New Albany, but who am I to dispute High Commissioner Seabrook’s stellar reasoning?)

Which makes this a good juncture for a digression.

---

Consider these mad-as-hell downtown business owners living elsewhere, generally in sedate rural settings, safely segregated from urban neighborhoods obviously intended by God herself to use as industrial corridors, and yet they are grievously offended that "a very vocal group" of homeowners (read: homo-owner-sexuals) who actually DO live downtown, “on the east side of the city,” keep insisting on measures to improve the quality of life in their neighborhood.

The unmitigated gall.

If all the city slickers agreed to be herded into a housing project by the crane works, just think how high profit margins might go!

Aren’t urban dwellers supposed to be inconvenienced by industrial activities that wouldn’t be permitted anywhere near the business owners’ homes?

Concurrently, I'm absolutely comfortable in guessing that 85% or more of Irv’s "survey" signatories are white males well past the age of 50, and as such, readers are invited to do their own social justice deprivation mathematics.

Be forewarned, for it’s a grim sum, indeed.

Various “survey” blatherings about safety and common sense are pure unadulterated hokum, appended as afterthoughts, doing little to obscure the basic fact that Irv's tireless solicitation of respectable people is directed primarily toward the preservation of local white male power elites, of which he is a part, as underwritten by self-appointed pillars of suitability, of whom he is one, and who aren’t saying that streets must be kept as currently configured to ease the passage of trucks and heavy machinery alone.

No, it’s much more than this.

What they're really saying is that people not operating vehicles powered by internal combustion engines have absolutely no right to the road, and by definition, respectable people do, because they have cars, trucks and motorcycles.

In fact, Irv’s purported “survey” is a document detailing social judgments borne of class warfare, not engineering conclusions.

Tiger's owner Joe Zeller ominously tooted this particular dog whistle at last week's public meeting, noting that whenever them dainty Spandex bicyclists get too close to one of his fully erect 18-wheelers – well, hell, we all know who always wins such confrontations, just sayin’, WINK WINK NUDGE NUDGE, and it’s certainly not any of Zeller’s responsibility to cede a square inch of tarmac ON A PUBLIC ROAD to make such conflicts less likely.

Rather, as Irv told BOW in high dudgeon, any piddling pedestrian scared of high-speed street traffic best get his spindly yellow ass up on the sidewalk, where his kind belongs.

To repeat: Irv’s absurd “survey” is about who belongs, who does not belong … and who decides, and in High Commissioner Seabrook, Irv has an eager applicant for the task of tattoo artist.

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A handful of attorneys also signed the petition, probably from the mistaken notion it was a paycheck. I believe each one of them has either suckled at the teat of Seabrook's tender GOP in the past, or continues to do so now.

Are their expressions of concern for trucking public safety genuine, or are they applying a little more Astroglide for the process of saying what must be said, so as to facilitate the continued wetting of beaks, considering that the most persistent opponent of street sensibility other than Irv is a Floyd County Commissioner and Republican Party stalwart named Mark Seabrook? After all, they're lawyers, serving on councils and committees.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must go take a shower.

---

Finally, I don't begrudge the stated "opposition" to two-way streets on the part of a duo of specific signatories whom I know personally.

Except that I've been around them long enough to know their beef with the city has nothing to do with streets. Their non-directional complaints with City Hall probably are legitimate, but their signatures on Irv's petition are plainly irrelevant.

---

When the smoke has cleared and the mirrors have all shattered, Irv’s jihadist screed adds up to far less than the sum of its ballyhooed parts. What does it tell us?

Just this.

In the past few years, dozens of new businesses have been established in downtown New Albany. Of these newer businesses, less than a half-dozen of them deigned to sign Irv's most recent poison pen petition.

This may be because Irv simply didn’t bother approaching the ones he knew would ignore him, or he conveniently forgot to record their true feelings after a series of swinging doors graced the fabric around his posterior. From beginning to end, Irv’s petition has been a contrived exercise in propaganda, one that never was intended to be scientific, and he feels no compunction whatever about spinning yarns.

Significantly, these many new businesses – the ones NOT rallying around Irv’s white flag of capitulation – symbolize the future of downtown New Albany as an inclusive, diverse and representative modern economic and residential entity.

Appropriately, this new breed of downtown business owner hasn’t once advocated for the exclusion of crane operators, veneer companies, wholesalers, funeral homes and trans-shippers, but merely sought civic equality, and as it stands, HWC’s street grid plan represents a compromise for all downtown stakeholders.

Why isn’t this compromise sufficient, Irv?

Mr. High Commissioner?

Almost unanimously, New Albany’s new generation of downtown business owners has rejected Irv’s desperate entreaties to keep New Albany configured for the rapidly diminishing past, as opposed to a constantly evolving future.

Ironically, then, Irv has done the city a great and purely unintended favor. In his blind zeal to discredit the future, he has revealed the obstructionist obstinacy of his own coddled ilk in refusing to compromise for the betterment of all.

For this, I think both Irv and Mark deserves plaques, to be permanently embedded by a crosswalk beneath our feet in the pavement of a two-way street.

I'll take great pleasure in walking there.

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September 29: ON THE AVENUES 3-PK, PART TWO: Inkem binkem notamus rex, protect us all from the city (still) with the hex (2014).

September 29: ON THE AVENUES 3-PK, PART ONE: Chocolate covered frozen banana republic, or "understanding" Harvest Homecoming, our peculiar institution (2014).

September 22: ON THE AVENUES: On two-way streets, a modest proposal for the consideration of my disoriented one-way counterpart.

September 15: ON THE AVENUES Now for my next amazing conversion trick (KABOOM!!!) – look at those pretty windows on Schmitt Furniture.

Mayoral hopeful David White offers exciting plan to keep the Reisz Furniture building dilapidated in 2026.

Perhaps it is to be used as a landing pad for George Jetson's spacemobile.

(photo at White's carefully manicured web site)

The sidewalk of New Albany's future is for 18-wheelers.

New Albany's plan is to use sidewalks as passive/aggressive energy generators.

I'm joking.

I think.

The Sidewalk of the Future Is Not So Concrete, by Nate Berg (City Lab)

... Some cities have started to rethink the traditional sidewalk as a result. Local governments and technology companies all over the world are considering new ways of building pedestrian pathways that go beyond the common mix of cement and aggregate we know as concrete. These materials have broadened not only how cities construct sidewalks but also the very notion of what a sidewalk can be. They can now enhance walkability, generate renewable energy, and improve public safety, even as they withstand all those tree roots that have been breaking concrete slabs for decades.

ON THE AVENUES: Where future is a dirty word.

ON THE AVENUES: Where future is a dirty word.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

I’ve been a Civil War buff since childhood, but even so, the genre of battlefield reenactments always has puzzled me.

In his entertaining book, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, the author Tony Horwitz considers the Civil War’s numerous legacies, including the meticulous and obsessional efforts at authenticity on the part of those engaged in bringing 19th-century military campaigns back to life.

Horwitz describes one of the participants:

"One hardcore took this method acting to a bizarre extreme. His name was Robert Lee Hodge and the soldiers pointed him out as he ambled toward us. Hodge looked as though he'd stepped from a Civil War tintype: tall, rail thin, with a long pointed beard and a butternut uniform so frayed and filthy that it clung to his lank frame like rages to a scarecrow."

When I was much younger, I had the good fortune to visit more than a few of the Civil War battlefields – Shiloh, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, among others – and these occasions always seemed appropriate for reflection as to the violent events of times long since passed. You’d think that the vivid color of a battlefield reenactment would complete the scene, except that it never scratched the itch with me.

The very thought of reenactments staged to observe every detail of conflict sans the indescribable pain and death borne of extreme human violence seems a sophomoric intrusion of sorts, something conflicting quite jarringly with any notions of sacrificial hallowed ground – assuming even these thoughts have any genuine merit.

Men and their machines come and go, but ideas live on, and perhaps it is because this fundamental point about the power of ideas is being missed that I fail to grasp the reenactment genre. It’s the future that matters, as approached with accumulated experience gleaned from the past’s examples. The future is why any of us bother getting out of bed in the morning. The past is gone, and the present is a figment of conceptual imagination, one entirely ephemeral.

Currently, the precise details of how a 150-year-old cotton tunic was sewed together have their place, as do pageantry and spectacle, but re-animated hardtack and nighttime spooning (look it up) pale in comparison to the sad fact that in the year 2013, roughly half the American populace, generally the paler-hued ones, seems to have forgotten what the Civil War was all about – hence the word “unfinished” in the title of Horwitz’s book.

Convincing these people that certain foundational issues were resolved long before the advent of the internal combustion engine probably ranks as more important for the sake of our future as a nation, assuming there is a future immune to secession, than reenacting battles.

Acting out uniformed history?

Fine.

Knowing what history is trying to tell us?

Priceless.

---

Such is the critical error committed repeatedly during the past year by the cadre of well-intentioned, history-loving New Albanians who were brought together to contribute planning for this year’s Bicentennial celebration – an event that shouldn’t be occurring until 2017, anyway, since that’s when the city was incorporated … sorry, I digress.

The customary guiding lights have hoarded the process and tried to imbue the celebration with symbolism of their choosing, and yet the enduring difficulty with symbolism is the variability of the symbols themselves. They mutate incessantly, depending on one’s perspective and general vantage point.

Do you remember the centerpiece of the grand American bicentennial in 1976, when the old, tall, “masts from the past” sailing ships came into the harbor at New York?

It was a wonderful and epochal party, redolent with symbolism – flags, patriotism and Americana. The newspaper accounts agreed, but the late Randy Shilts, author of And the Band Played On, saw something else. The occasion of July 4, 1976, may well have been the point when Patient Zero kicked off the worldwide AIDS epidemic.

Wooden ships were on the water, and the future was pounding on the door. It is quite possible that owing to Ronald Reagan’s backward-looking obsession, we took far too long reacting to the scary reaper out on the stoop.

And so it is that from the very start, New Albany’s bicentennial program template was locked into a pattern so utterly predictable that Year Zero itself has been a massive yawner of an anti-climax.

Opposing ideas have not only been dismissed; they’ve been actively resisted, and it’s both sad and infuriating to contemplate the extent of an opportunity wasted. Apart from the solitary tangible gain of an over-priced, generically designed public area, variously known as Somnolent Estates, Rent Boy Park and Caesar’s Folly (the “official” designation is Bicentennial Park), we’ve been given a carpetbagger writer’s coffee table book to remember our rare old times and what seems like 4,762 occasions to watch as the selected don period costumes, dance the minuet, and recite the enumerated hagiography of the historic preservation code -- cookie-cutter events priced primarily to recoup the book’s lamentable costs.

It’s all safe, white-bread and oh-so-conservative, and fully appropriate for the buck-a-day extras at yet another Lewis & Clark expedition commemorative film, but it remains that the problem with making our bicentennial entirely about the city’s past, and not in any discernible way at all about our future, is that the situation begs a rather embarrassing question.

Why were our urban forefathers adept at city building for the times to come, but their modern-day ancestors are able to muster little more in terms of achievement than decay management?

You're thinking: Haven’t we come a long way during the past few years?

(We have. But what about the three decades before that?)

Downtown is revitalizing, isn’t it?

(If eating and drinking’s your thing, yes it is. If retail gains, residential enhancement, community engagement and two-way, calmed and completed streets interest you, then welcome to our default condition of perpetually self-flagellating stasis)

But Roger, don’t I look marvy dressed up as a Scribner?

(You needn’t ask me. I’ll be sober in the morning, but we’ll collectively experience this bicentennial hangover for the rest of our lives. You might direct your inquiry to that child slouching over there, assuming he’ll relinquish his iPhone)

And so, the safe and genteel rewriting wrought by the Coup d’Geriatrique winds its way toward the inevitable reenactment of New Year’s Eve, 1893, when a slew of white folks gathered somewhere amid Benedictine sandwiches and non-alcoholic cider, and chatted amiably about keeping the lower classes firmly in their place.

In the vacant lot where daughters once were paired and insider trading schemes consummated, the future is now. An empty liquor bottle meets pavement, drivers ignore pedestrians, and Farmers Market expansion plans are recycled by the same-way-every-single-time design suspects as Big Gulp cups flutter to the pavement.

Somewhere in the city, a dog barks.

ON THE AVENUES: Walk on dead men.

ON THE AVENUES: Walk on dead men.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Yesterday was the 79th day of 2013, and it was my 70th day outside, walking for at least half an hour and often more. Most of these walks have been round trip jaunts from my house on Spring Street through downtown New Albany’s historic core.

This regimen has been intended to keep me active until it warms enough for biking, but it has been such a pleasant change of pace that a modified version of it is likely to continue throughout the year in conjunction with the two-wheeler. The overall plan is to be more regularly active, because exercise makes the good beer taste even better – almost like a reward, if you will.

Sadly I’m reminded that March walks in New Albany can be a difficult undertaking, not so much physically, but in terms of reduced human morale. This particular city, and probably many others like it, is best viewed when conditions are ideal. It is never more unattractive than in March, when the coldest weather already has passed and the growing season hasn’t yet arrived.

Until the greenery comes, one can clearly see every blemish and imperfection – the unkempt houses, the doggie droppings, and the voluminous garbage strewn seemingly everywhere.

There’s no mistaking: It’s depressing. We take it for granted that we’re a modern society – although I harbor no delusions pertaining to “enlightenment,” and what is meant by “modern” usually remains safely unexamined – and yet glancing around, one can’t help wondering whether New Albany’s chronic Battered City Syndrome (thanks, GC) is just too pervasive to be shaken.

And so I always think while walking: New Albany is 200 years old. Was it always this way?

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To know me is to understand my longstanding fascination with history.

When we stopped by the Carnegie Center last weekend to view the “Artists of Wonderland Way” exhibit, the paintings almost were secondary. I wanted to know more about the artists – their lives, times and stories. I wanted to know what this place was like when they were in their primes, and how they felt about it.

Back then, was there hope for a reasonable civic future, or did the low common denominator we tolerate (exalt?) in this present, benighted millennium suffice for them as absently as it does for us?

The answer’s probably obvious. Times change quickly, and people grudgingly.

One of my favorite modular phrases of late comes in handy, one restating Pogo’s most famous axiom: New Albany doesn’t have a (fill in the blank with annoyance) problem; it has a resident problem. Yes, the phrase is too cynically glib by half, but my guess is that even before World War I, frustrated New Albanians were muttering it amid the stasis.

Getting back to the art of the stroll (and the bike), walking affords ample time for reflection, and while the moments are filled with the usual ruminations on work and play, this botched bicentennial year has had me thinking about the uses of the past.

Most of us possess a personal narrative, a chronology of depleted years we’ve lived through, and of course our editorial attitude toward their recitation can be quite subjective. Some people actively erase their memories, often for very good reason. Why relive rotten times?

Others obsess over events and episodes, affixing artificially enhanced impact to their recollections. My own ghosts are many and varied, and words like “shoulda, woulda, coulda” bubble to the surface on occasion, but through it all, I try to stick to the task at hand and keep matters in my world moving forward.

Insofar as historical perspective assists this imperative, I indulge it. Some times it’s more useful, albeit it challenging, to make a clean break and innovate.

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As an individual consumed with history, I harbor no intrinsic objections to the notion of historical preservation. Generally speaking, I support it. At the same time, it strikes me that any unquestioned doctrine merits periodic surgical strikes of skepticism, and in the context of New Albany in the current age, there’s always room for ample doubt.

So it is that I keep asking myself and others: Why has the city’s bicentennial celebration thus far been so predictably, infuriatingly white-bread mundane, attitudinally speaking?

Maybe it’s because the past, while fascinating, also can be an 800-lb gorilla wearing a conceptual straitjacket. It can be re-interpreted, and these shadings actually change as time passes, because without learning from experience, what point is there? Still, overall, the historical record is fixed. It is what it was; for one to become immersed in it to the exclusion of future possibilities is like keep a foot clamped on the brake even after the light changes.

Somehow, for all my skepticism, and in spite of the March uglies, I remain convinced that the life and times of New Albany can be better and more expansive than this.

I believe New Albany can have nice things, new as well as old, though not just what the old persist in thinking is new, when it isn’t.

I believe that we actually can think our way through a wet beer label and grasp the modern world, in addition to respecting our history. Let’s have it all for a change.

I believe, contrary to the usual conditioned socio-economic responses and cultural proclivities, that older dogs can indeed learn newer tricks – and be a better animal for it.

New Albany’s not the only burg in the world where business “as usual,” blood feuds and certain fixed firmaments of the remote past tend to make progress toward the future more difficult. It’s just that I live and work here, and not in another burg somewhere else in the world. Hence, the chronology of my shtick.

New Albany doesn’t have to be the state of mind wherein focusing on remembering the past has the unintended consequence of constantly repeating the same mistakes. The present is its own future historical moment, isn’t it?

Can we please get started on it?

Jackie Green might as well be referring to New Albany.

In large measure, Jackie Green's conclusion about Louisville is this blog's perennial prescription for the city New Albany. After all, with very little greenfield land left to develop, a platform of urban reinvestment is the very strongest and most feasible card to play.

Transportation and land use define a city and its health. Louisville is sick, very sick. And our leadership refuses to address the illness. We need more urban reinvestment, less greenfield development. We need more public transit, fewer parking lots, highways and roads. We need more walkable communities, slower moving urban traffic.

So, how much sense does it make to humor those among us here in the city who offer the precise opposite as the appropriate option? You know who I'm talking about, don't you?

Guest blogger Jackie Green: Louisville is planning for the future ... as long as you drive a car, at Insider Louisville

 ... Given the percentage of our population who do not own cars, Dan Jones’ statement – “Louisville residents benefit from a rich menu of public park experiences — for young and old, regardless of income” – not only rings hollow, but also insults those too young to drive, those too old to drive, those too poor to drive, those too ill to drive, those not permitted to drive and those who choose not to drive.

Gonder with a different notion of the bicentennial and its park.

In his blog, at-large council person John Gonder considers New Albany's approaching bicentennial, ponders the deeper meaning, and offers a new twist on the idea of building a park for the purpose. In short, he again makes me happy I've voted for him.

To date, all we've heard amid the secrecy of the usual suspects is a by-the-numbers celebration of the past. As Gonder instinctively grasps, the bicentennial must be open, inclusive and addressing the future. It isn't too late to rescue the occasion from the icy clutches of self-assigned respectability, is it?

Seeds Are For Planting

New Albany's bicentennial is our chance to speak to those who follow us in time to this place, a place we will not go. So far I have heard little of what we will bring to the party ...

... I offer the following modest proposal: we should build a Bicentennial Park worthy of the momentous date we commemorate next year ...

... I believe the Bicentennial Park should help us show our children and our grandchildren why New Albany is here, and why it is special to us. It is difficult to convey civic sentiment through time. We do that by building for the future.

Gonder: "It's really always about the future."

County officials can't see the long-term for their own absence of creativity ...

North Annex: Either a strip mine or pawn shop mentality on the part of Floyd County's officialdom.

... While at-large city council member John Gonder eloquently reminds me of why I voted for him:

Just Wondering

The long view need not cause a burden for us in the here and now. A short term gain from a sale of property will not have a sizable impact on the City's finances for more than a couple quarters, while ongoing ownership will produce continual, though lower in the short run, dependable funds which will support City services year in and year out. More importantly, we can make decisions today which will benefit not just ourselves but those who follow us, so those who attend the Quadra (?) centennial celebration will have something valuable to pass on to their heirs.

Looking Back to Move Forward

One of the little discussed but much agreed upon issues put forth at the neighborhood forum last week was the idea that we need to identify where we’re going in order to get there.

My father was a carpenter by trade with little more than an eighth grade education. Yet he possessed an uncanny ability to look out over a vacant lot and see the finished home sitting there, complete with paint and landscaping, before driving the first nail. He had the vision in his head and then set forth to make it a reality.

Conversely we in New Albany do not have such a vision, at least not in any broad sense, to work toward. There are multitudes of individual concepts both public and private that float to the top on occasion but rarely do they get much farther than the door jamb of the room in which they are voiced.

So even though I realize that from many fronts I’m going to get the same old tired retorts of, “The city is broke!”, “We’re in a recession!”, “We can’t!” or “The sky is falling!”, I’m going to throw the question out once again in hopes of beginning an expansive, broad based, and far reaching conversation.

One that will hopefully look far beyond two-way streets, potholes, signage, and low manpower issues.

One that will explore such questions as what assets or attributes do we have (or need to develop) to entice individuals & businesses to call New Albany home?

What role do we play or want to play in the Metro area?

What’s missing from our downtown and core neighborhoods that would make living here more attractive and enjoyable?

I, for one, choose to look backwards in a sense to find those solutions. I, like many of you, grew up with the “Ward & Beaver ©” syndrome deeply embedded into my psyche. Likewise I, like most of you, arrived at the horrific conclusion that for the most part, it was bunk!

However, it was not all bad as I remember. In Scottsburg where I grew up the local 5¢ and 10¢ was also the fabric shop and the bookstore where we got our textbooks & supplies for the new school year. Oh! And it had the best 1¢ candy selection in two counties!

There was the grocery store complete with a fresh meat butcher shop, the drug store with a soda fountain, the hardware store so well stocked that if they didn’t have it you couldn’t possibly ever need it, and all this rounded out by the bank that not only knew your name when you walked in but was willing to talk to you!

All of this was in the downtown core by the way.

During that same time prior to Interstate highways coming thru, we used to come to and thru New Albany to shop and get to Louisville and points south. (See, the more some things change, the more they remain the same!)

Doing so for me was a treat because Woolworth’s had a bigger soda fountain than did Hancock's and Jerry’s had shrimp & oysters which were unheard of in Scottsburg. The store fronts had more elaborate signage and bigger plate glass windows as well!

Nostalgia? Of course, but the point being there was an atmosphere that embodied both small town comfort and safety, combined somewhat with big city bustle and availability. Those memories in large part are why I chose to live here for many years and to ultimately buy a home here.

Can we go back to that point in time? Of course not but I believe we can look at what worked about that era and rework some it to fit into the 21st century.

I think a soda fountain for the younger set could exist alongside a WIFI ready coffee shop for their elders. I can see a seamstress shop next to an art gallery. I have no problem envisioning apartment and lofts over ground floor retail establishments that cater to young single adults in conjunction with core neighborhood single family housing for all ages and income levels.

And speaking of neighborhoods, what’s to stop a small corner grocery stocked with staples along with community gardens for fresh veggies and small parks where neighbors can gather to visit while they watch their kids play?

The above may sound way too hokey for many but I’m convinced that for just as many it may be just what the doctor ordered. Yet another primary reason for me choosing the core of New Albany was that every need (read need as opposed to want) could be met within walking distance if all else went to hell in a hand basket. In our current economic environment that is a biggy.

So now that I’ve bared my soul along these lines, it’s your turn. What kind of atmosphere do you ultimately want you and your children to live in?

What kinds of retail, service business, and entertainment would entice you to invest in a community?

What do we have or can create that the rest of the Metro Louisville area doesn’t have, or wants and needs more of? How do we fit in that big picture?

In my view these are the questions that must be answered in order to form a vision. Once we can see the end result in our collective minds eye, then we can begin the process of getting there. Back to my Dad again!

And in the end, the results will not be exactly what we envisioned but it doesn’t really matter. The three things that matter are that we ask the questions,
form the vision, and AGREE COLLECTIVELY to work towards those goals.

So have at it! Let your imaginations run! Let’s begin this conversation in earnest!