Louisville Magazine

MAR 2013

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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PARK DUVALLE Any Louisvillian who has lived here for more than a few years knows, almost instinctively, the boundary line between west Louisville and the rest of Louisville: Ninth Street. Most white Louisvillians know it because they���ve heard some variation of the warning, ���Don���t go west of Ninth Street.��� They might have heard it when they moved to town and were looking for a place to live, or from parents or friends concerned about their safety. Or they might have absorbed it osmotically from watching local TV news, where the lead story is too often ���another shooting in the West End . . .��� Although the notion that west Louisville is a dangerous and even foreign place is embedded in the mental map that many of us ��� even the most bleeding-heartedly liberal and racially tolerant, if we will admit it ��� carry around in our heads, it is rarely talked about in public. Or rather, one aspect ��� the regular drumbeat of news about the latest murder that occurred there ��� is constantly broadcast, but its underlying causes are seldom analyzed in any depth. In the package of stories that follows, we hope to give our readers, who mostly live east of downtown, a broader and deeper understanding of the West End and the challenges the area faces. And, more importantly, we hope to encourage a discussion of what we as a city might do to improve the social and economic lives of our neighbors who live in west Louisville. There are any number of reasons why this issue should be at the very top of the local political agenda. Besides the fact that bringing all parts of the city into the economic mainstream is simply the right thing to do, we must also recognize that as long as one area of our city lags so far behind the rest we cannot truly lay claim to being even a really good city, much less great or ���world-class��� or a place where possibility knows no limits. ��� Dan Crutcher 3.13 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 2 5

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