ON THE AVENUES: The famous mishap in Madrid, November, 1989.

Earlier in 2019 you may recall my promise to regale readers with tales of my travels three decades ago, and to illustrate these stories with freshly digitized slide photos from the trip,

Life got in the way and as has been my lifelong preference, I chose instead the path of least resistance -- otherwise known as social media. The photos were posted at Facebook with truncated commentary, and now it's a good news/bad news proposition. On the one hand, I failed to make time to do the writing necessary to properly spin the yarn. On the other, there's actually an outline in place to do so.

Consequently, there must be a new plan. During the forthcoming cold weather season I'll begin writing, illustrating and posting chapters. Concurrently the next round of digitization will begin, these being the slides from my travels and teaching assignment in Kosice, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia) in 1991-92.

In the meantime, in an effort to fulfill at least a smidgen of my discarded promise, here's the story of my life-altering day in Madrid, early in November of 1989. 

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Thirty years ago at the beginning of November I arrived in warm and sunny Madrid after a grueling 40-something-hour textbook budget traveler’s Eurailpass journey by Atlantic Ocean ferry and French trains from cold and damp Ireland.

This is the sort of insane connection I wouldn’t even consider attempting nowadays, and if I did, just use my iPhone to book a $50 budget airline ticket and be done with the transfer in a single morning.

The better weather in Madrid was tonic for a building malaise. Only in retrospect could I see this patch as deep, pervasive exhaustion from more than five months spent on the road -- and with another month and a half scheduled to pass before returning home. Winter’s approach, as exacerbated by the claustrophobic Irish climate, might also have induced a measure of seasonal depression.

The object all along had been to stay in Europe as long as possible in 1989, dipping into January of 1990, and I had budgeted for this goal. However, traveling on a shoestring wasn’t always easy, or at least it wasn’t for me. I had a certain amount of money to spend, and no more; this meant discipline, diligence and adherence to a routine, with little margin for error.

Or, qualities for which I’ve never been universally known. It can be tiring.

But in fact I proved adept at budget travel, and for the most part this challenge of connecting the dots was fascinating. At the same time, having traveled in Europe for 12 months spread over three visits, I’d been lucky. There had been hundreds of inconsequential daily actions, almost all of which were smooth. Apart from losing my hat in Italy in 1985 and being accosted by a drunk Hungarian outside an eatery in Budapest in 1987, nothing much bad had happened to me.

In the fall of 1989, my luck started turning.

The misfortunes began in Vienna, where I somehow managed to lose my debit card, which didn't become apparent to me until Rome. A scofflaw already had used the card to purchase $1,500 of jewelry in Venice, but this was resolved satisfactorily, although it required a few phone calls on my dime from Rome and a fee or two.

Getting a new card without a fixed mailing address was a thornier issue, and as of my arrival in Madrid I hadn’t quite resolved it yet. This was not a burden because traveler's checks remained the norm at the time.

A few days later in Paris, while at the American Express office to change a few of those remaining traveler’s checks, my pocket was picked of cash while crammed into a crowded elevator. The loss wasn't severe, just another pinprick, a further inconvenience, and a few more meals down the drain.

Now finally I'd made it to Spain for the first time, and three or four pleasant days to roam before heading off to Portugal, where I hoped to stay for a far longer term owing to it being a very affordable country. Lisbon would be the place where I resolved the debit card issue.

In Madrid I took my meals in a budget cafeteria near Puerta del Sol, and it was there one evening that I chose a seat next to a talkative man approximately my age who said he was Greek. We struck up a conversation, and he made it a point to record his address on a scrap of paper in case I made it to Athens later as intended.

He invited me to meet him for a couple of beers the following day, as I’d have ample time to kill before boarding the overnight train to Portugal later in the evening. It would be the usual travel drill for me: check out from my dingy room, stow the pack in a train station locker, get a couchette reservation while at the station, then loiter in Madrid until it was time to leave.

My new Greek friend suggested we loiter together, buy some bottled beers from a shop and drink outdoors in the park. Obviously it would be cheaper this way than a bar, and after all the weather was drop dead lovely.

So I ran my errands and we met as scheduled around lunchtime, taking the subway to a large park, purchasing beers and sandwiches, and setting up a picnic. It was a sensible plan, even if today I don’t recall the exact location of the park, except there was a nearby subway stop, all the better for me to get quickly to the train station when the time came to depart.

Or, conversely, as a quick GETAWAY for someone who’d never found an easier mark than me for slipping him a mickey and robbing him of his train station locker key, cash and traveler’s checks. That address in Athens? Non-existent.

I remember almost nothing, awakening at dusk to the feeling I’d consumed twelve beers and a bottle of hootch, not just one lager, lurching first to the subway, then riding to the train station and stumbling into the locker area to find mine long since cleaned out. In reality my belongings were worthless to my assailant and surely ended up in a dumpster within minutes. Fortunately my passport, railpass and other documents were in my back pocket, untouched.

All I had left was my day pack, camera and the clothes I was wearing.

I found a policeman at the train station, and providentially he had lived in Los Angeles for ten years and spoke perfect English. He was kind and helpful, taking my report, sadly noting a recent wave of similar crimes, and referring me to the American embassy.

In 1989 our embassy in Madrid had a loan fund to assist people like me, and I was able to rent a room for the night and sleep off the drug, whatever it was. I didn't bother with seeing a doctor. The next day Am-Ex justified its good reputation by promptly refunding the stolen traveler’s checks, and after a trip to the massive El Cortes Ingles department store, I was duly restocked with another change of clothes, toiletries and a gym bag to carry them.

I’d already called home and given instructions to Mary Pat at Bliss Travel. She had my plane ticket changed. Instead of a month and a half, I now had two weeks left until returning home and 45 days of budgeted funds to use. Now I could relax and let loose as I departed Spain not for Portugal, but Denmark, my new return flight departure point and a place I could stay with my Danish friends.

I'd had some very bad luck in Madrid, but the most bizarre thing about the experience was the highly atypical, almost Zen-like way I felt coming out of it. This memory is very clear to me. I was not angry at all. If anything, I felt a measure of relief. I may have been drugged and robbed, but not injured or killed, and it seemed to me this was a sign to return home early and do something with my life. There'd be further travels, some other time.

This “something” proved to be Sportstime Pizza, where I started working in late November, just in time to watch Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution on CNN in December, and of course from Sportstime grew the subsequent quarter-century of co-ownership at Rich O’s Public House and later, the omnibus New Albanian Brewing Company. In short, post-robbery, the rest was (my) history.

Meanwhile, seated on a train from Madrid bound eventually for Paris and then Munich, my chosen route to Copenhagen, I understood that what had happened might change the trajectory of my life. Unbeknownst to me, a far more transformative event was about to occur in Berlin. I’d soon be in a comfy Munich beer hall, watching as the Berlin Wall started falling.

Europe changed a lot after this, and so did I.

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First Taco Walk, now 1 Night Stand. It's not derogatory to suggest that no idea is safe from being hijacked by Develop New Albany.

The reason why I don't write fiction is that real life is endlessly bizarre, so let's take a look at the next purloined event from the foot-shot specialists. It's called 1 Night Stand, and if this term sounds weirdly familiar to you, keep reading.

The 1 Night Stand originated in 2009 as an idea minted by Jala Miller, a civic-minded private citizen. She proceeded to organize a sequel, or maybe two, before the notion ran its course.

Now DNA is bringing back an event that wasn't ever their intellectual property to begin with, though as we've seen so depressingly with the Taco Walk (are various walks and crawls the only thing these people can think to do?), no one at DNA seems bothered much by the blatant pilferage, and elected officials merely shrug.

Details
We’re excited to be bringing back the 1 Night Stand! This is an event that was held in Downtown years ago and we’re looking forward to reviving it. This will be a Downtown New Albany Pub Crawl. Participants will pre-purchase a wristband with drink tickets along with a t-shirt and on the day of the event, will choose where to spend their drink tickets at participating locations. We anticipate this being a big draw to Downtown during the summer and a fun event showcasing our local bar/restaurants. Any questions please email developnainfo@gmail.com or message us on Facebook. Any derogatory comments will be deleted.

Boy oh boy, those last lines: "Any questions please email developnainfo@gmail.com or message us on Facebook. Any derogatory comments will be deleted."

Our vanguard of Gahanesque party planning expertise is getting a bit touchy, don't you think? And yet, I persist, safe in the knowledge that my question wasn't derogatory, and if I asked it via e-mail, it would be ignored like all the previous ones have been.

Did the founder give explicit permission for the name to be used, or was it another instance of intellectual property appropriation? DNA has a past, folks.

A week has passed, and guess what?

No answer.

The Green Mouse tells me another local event organizer was planning on staging precisely such a pub crawl reprise later this summer, and actually asked and received permission from Jala, the founder, only to be usurped by the mayor's preferred monopolists.

My advice to all and sundry: if you have a great idea for a community event, keep it a secret. The very walls have ears -- and grubby, grasping fingers.

Here's the story of the original 1 Night Stand from NA Confidential on August 5, 2009.

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"NA 1 Night Stand," a pub crawl, coming to downtown New Albany on August 29.

When first we heard from Jala Miller, she was moving into her new apartment in the building that houses Studio's Grille & Pub in downtown New Albany. Shortly thereafter, we were introduced, and I heard her idea for a downtown pub crawl, something that would being attention to the many new establishments coming to downtown New Albany.

Most important to me is her view of the demographics involved (her words):

To make this event a success – it is important that everyone “looks at the big picture”. The goal of this beer walk is to get the younger generation to want to visit New Albany “as a whole” – to make it a destination similar to that of Bardstown Road. In order for this to happen, the bars participating will need to be excited about it!

Jala has the plan together, and here are preliminary details. I concede that the date coinciding with Brew at the (Louisville) Zoo is inconvenient, but to be truthful, summer weekends tend to be booked from May through October in recent years. NABC will be participating in "NA 1 Night Stand" in a yet-to-be-determined fashion, hopefully with an outdoor party to serve as the trial run for similar events coming in September and October.

Event: The NA 1 Night Stand -- "Check 'em all before you fall"
What: Festival
Start Time: Saturday, August 29 at 3:00 p.m.
End Time: Sunday, August 30 at 12:00 a.m.
Where: Downtown New Albany

Description:

"The 'NA 1 Night Stand' is a one day welcome or reintroduction to downtown NA and all of the redevelopment that has been taking place. Join us on August 29th for a 'Beer Walk' different than anything NA has ever seen. Beer Olympics sign in begins at 3:00pm at Steinert's.

"Participating establishments will be featuring drink specials, food specials, and other attractions such as live music throughout the entire event day. Raffle prizes will be awarded throughout the day thanks to many local sponsors!"

THE BEER BEAT: "Belgian bars put the boot into tourists who steal beer glasses."

I'll keep this short.

Indeed, one of the central glories of Belgian cafe culture is the presence of appropriate glassware in just about any drinking establishment, from dive to grandiose, shaped and sized, with logos. To experience this phenomenon is to understand the notion of integrity in a drinking culture.

Many years ago at the Public House, seeking to emulate this loveliness, I'd pull every string to obtain these Belgian glasses for daily use. At times they were free of charge from the wholesaler, and at other times, we paid. My rule was to refrain from selling these glasses as souvenirs if they hadn't cost us anything. If we paid for them, maybe.

This didn't stop customers from pilfering glasses, as described below. The specialty glasses also were far more prone to being broken than imperial pints or shaker pints (apart from ubiquity, one reason the latter became so popular during the "craft" revolution is their thick impermeability to shattering).

At the Public House, we eventually learned two relevant truths.

First, non-specialty glasses aren't special enough to steal without logos. They'll be broken, but they won't walk out the door under a coat or in a purse.

Second, a range of generic Belgian-style (or Bavarian Hefe-Weizen) glasses can be purchased for daily use. They fill the bill for serving within general boundaries of appropriateness.

At out forthcoming pub Pints & Union, the bottle and can selection will include beers that should be served in specialty glasses. I'll try my best to find generic examples of these, and it will work out. After all, it's about the beer, first and foremost.

Meanwhile, get over to Belgium. Once there, enjoy the excellence of the country's many beer-friendly drinking venues -- and get your shoes back when you leave.

Belgian bars put the boot into tourists who steal beer glasses, by Daniel Boffey (The Guardian)

Pubs are finding novel ways to combat illicit glass collectors, with one demanding a shoe as a deposit.

While the beer is famously good in Belgium, for some tourists it would seem the drink itself is not enough. Bars and cafes in the country’s most picturesque cities complain that tens of thousands of their stylish glasses are being lost to souvenir hunters every year. But the purveyors of Belgium’s most famous cultural artefact are fighting back, in some unorthodox ways.

"Revitalized into oblivion": An astoundingly synonymous cautionary tale about Gah ... sorry, I mean Stephen Reed, former mayor of Harrisburg PA.

Last September, the Confidentials drove through Harrisburg, capital of Pennsylvania. We were road-tripping from Massachusetts to Maryland, and as we looked around, I harbored a vague notion that Harrisburg was somehow famous (or infamous) for malfeasance. The details eluded me at the time.

Only now does it come full circle with me. We'll begin this amazing story with a new post at CityLab.

The Mayor Who Broke Harrisburg, by Brentin Mock

Stephen Reed used to be known as Harrisburg’s “Mayor for Life.” His tenure as head of the Pennsylvania capital spanned almost 30 years, and in some quarters he still holds that title, even after he was voted out of office in 2009. Now he may be known as the “Mayor Who Avoided Life,” after dodging a sentence of thousands of years in prison for a 499-count indictment of theft, bribery, and corruption while he was mayor.

Today, Reed was sentenced to two years probation after pleading guilty to 20 counts of the least-serious crimes on his docket. Earlier this week, he admitted that part of his small collection of artifacts was bought with taxpayer money. The stolen items were part of an even larger collection of Civil War-era trinkets, documents, statues, and other memorabilia left over from Reed’s failed campaign to make Harrisburg a “city of museums.” Reed began siphoning taxpayer money into a secret account that he used to purchase heaps of 19th century American relics, all in an effort to transform the city into a “Westworld” of the East.

This was just one of Reed’s poorly (and criminally) conceived schemes that brought Harrisburg to the brink of bankruptcy—and almost landed the ex-mayor a 2,439-year jail sentence. How he got off with a two-year no-prison cakewalk instead is owed to a unique confluence of circumstances ...

The writer Mock makes several references to an article written last year by David Gambacorta at The Baffler, and as a resident of New Albania, I felt my neck hair doing calisthenics while reading it.

No, the billion-dollar economy of scale isn't the same. But the parallels are eerie, indeed. We pick up the narrative several paragraphs into Gambacorta's essay. I've marked certain passages in bold. Be sure to click through a read this in its entirety.

Called to Purchase: How mayor Stephen Reed shopped Harrisburg, PA, straight to hell, by David Gambacorta

 ... No one was really prepared to question Reed, or to peek behind the curtain of his kindly, eccentric persona. If they had, they would have found a petty autocrat hunkered down on a pile of redevelopment schemes, mistaking hoarding for a model for governance—a scenario only too possible in municipal America, the land that term limits forgot. The artifacts? Oh, they were just the spoils of a spending bender fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. When the spree was over, Reed would end up facing hundreds of criminal charges, and Harrisburg would be left in fiscal ruin.

The shared rise and fall of Reed and Harrisburg was decades in the making, a story of ambition and corruption that stands out even in Pennsylvania, a state that can’t go more than a few years without seeing one of its political giants succumb to arrogance, egotism, or the irresistible urge to take, take, take. As Reed prepares to finally go to trial on 114 charges, including theft, his case offers a stark reminder that the urban renewal and revitalization initiatives of the last century continue to dog our cities—and that too many of those initiatives turned out to be rip-offs, luring tourists to urban “playgrounds” at the expense of existing residents.

Sound familiar? Bright shiny objects, rather than daily nuts and bolts.

... According to state prosecutors, in the decades that followed (Reed's election in 1981), he set out to seize the puppet strings of anyone who had a say in the city’s financial decisions.

To the public, he appeared to use this power for good. Eateries and museums cropped up, along with hotels and a university. Reed was like a gleeful patriarch who continually surprised his children with vacations and shiny new toys—just never mind about how any of it would be paid for.

Imagine how many boards Reed packed. He was mayor for life, but elsewhere it was poverty for life.

Reed sometimes ran unopposed for reelection, earning the “mayor for life” tag from the media along the way. And why not? The ongoing projects seemed to prove that Harrisburg was a city on the rise. But with at least 33 percent of its residents now living in poverty, according to 2014 census data, and with state-owned tax-exempt land comprising a significant portion of the capital, where was the money coming from to cover the cost of these huge efforts?

“Nobody asked those questions,” sighs Patty Kim, a Pennsylvania state representative who worked with Reed when she served as a Harrisburg city councilwoman from 2005 to 2012. “He was able to play a shell game. He always had a new project to distract people.”

Note the connection between Reed's Special Projects Fund and the city's bond-compounded debt.

So money began to flow into the Special Projects Fund from every imaginable direction. Mealy said Reed began tacking on inexplicable “administrative fees” to the multitude of bond sales and debt that the Harrisburg Authority incurred at the mayor’s direction, and those fees were routed directly to the fund, according to the grand jury records.

Not unexpectedly, enforced loyalty maintains the cult of personality. Remember when Diane Benedetti and own John Gonder were messily deposed for failing to agree often enough?

“It was always, ‘You vote with me or you are the enemy,’” former Harrisburg City Council president Richard House told state investigators, according to the records. But Reed, apparently, had a lighter touch too. House said Reed offered him a community relations coordinator job in 2001 with the Harrisburg Senators—a position that previously didn’t exist—with the understanding that Reed was buying House’s votes, and the votes of other council members.

In the end, the accumulated debt could no longer be hidden.

... After a month of combing through handwritten records, (Eric Papanfuse) pieced together the big picture: Harrisburg was fucked. Everyone knew the incinerator was costing the city a fortune, but it seemed no one had done the math on the years and years of bond and debt deals that had built the city’s new attractions and also covered the cost of Reed’s artifact obsession. The total sum was north of a billion dollars—for a city with a population that couldn’t fill up a professional football stadium.

Such was Reed's hold that it took several years for Papenfuse to interest anyone in investigating, but once the state attorney general intervened, the house of cards collapsed. Reed was defeated for re-election.

(Linda) Thompson, at least, broke the “mayor for life” cycle, lasting only one term. She took heat for spending $35,000 to renovate the mayor’s office, after complaining about the inescapable cigarette odor that Reed left behind—and was replaced by Papenfuse, who was tasked with rescuing a city that had been revitalized almost into oblivion.

Looking for epitaphs?

Maybe Reed’s growing pile of dead-end revitalizing fantasies, tied more to his idiosyncratic understanding of leisure than to the interests of his city, was firmly in line with late twentieth-century urban-planning trends, which held that no city was too small to bet the farm on tourism-first redevelopment projects, the benefits of which would somehow trickle down.

Lots and lots of similarities, don't you think?

Hmm. Does Harrisburg have a luxury doggie park?