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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By Josh Moss West of NINTH Photos by Mickie Winters Where do you need to go to truly understand the ways of west Louisville? You go to west Louisville. And stay for a while. T he West End country clubs announce themselves with a barber pole���s swirl of red, white and blue or an electric glow from a liquor store window or, in one instance, mustard-colored arches. Tat McDonald���s, which some describe as the only ���cofee shop��� in west Louisville, is at the corner of 28th and Broadway, far west of Ninth Street, that invisible but impenetrable barricade that segregates our city in one fat brushstroke. Inside McDonald���s, this cofee shop with a Black History Month decal of Martin Luther King Jr. in a front window, Cornelius Petty porting on this piece I���d talked to nearly 125 people, spending the majority of a month���s worth of working days west of Ninth. I wanted to know what it���s actually like to live in west Louisville. On a recent Friday inside another country club, the New T and B Classic Cuts Barbershop on Muhammad Ali Boulevard between 18th and 19th streets, customers occupy all 13 waiting chairs opposite the three barbers, whose toolboxes include little more than straight razors, cans of Barbasol and a jumble of clippers plugged into power strips. A Chuck Berry look-alike who goes by Wooten ���I grew up in the deep West End, and we had everything we needed. Not much here now. Something within people has to say, ���It doesn���t have to be this way.������ ��� barber Gary Turner and two friends sit around a high-top table. ���Tese places,��� says Petty, a 60-year-old Vietnam vet from west Louisville, ���these are our country clubs.��� Before I began working on this story, I could count on two hands the number of times I had been to the West End, each trip for a magazine idea. I had seen the TV stories about murder and knew some of the statistics ��� a median household income of about $22,000 in west Louisville compared with roughly $60,000 in a similar-sized segment of the East End, an unemployment rate about three times greater in the west versus the east ��� but by the time I���d fnished re38 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.13 is doing a dance called the ���Stanky Legg��� to the ���80s funk song ���Fantastic Voyage.��� Te place has been around since ���61. ���Ali used to drop in,��� says Joseph Smith, who is 58 and has been a barber here for 31 years. Gary Turner, another barber, sits next to me. ���I grew up in the deep West End, and we had everything we needed. Not much here now,��� the 50-year-old says. ���Now, we take our money to the East End or down Dixie Highway or across the bridge to Indiana. Everything we spend ��� besides the liquor store or the corner store ��� happens outside our neighborhood.��� He grows quiet. ���Something within people has to say, ���It doesn���t have to be this way.��� But people are real comfortable with the familiar, even if the familiar is unhealthy. And some of this shit is unhealthy.��� Eric Hansberry, 45, runs the place. He���s been cutting hair since he was 18. His own head is a collection of graying sprouts. Until 2007, Hansberry worked with Donald Boyd at Big Don���s, which was on the border of Chickasaw and Parkland. ���Someone came into the barbershop with a mask on and fred several rounds from an AK-47,��� Hansberry says. Boyd was murdered in his own country club while giving a trim. I ask Hansberry what he���d do to improve the West End. ���Needs lots of help,��� he says. I ask for specifcs. ���Where do you start, man?��� he asks. ���Where?��� M y frst stop is the Academy at Shawnee to meet Keith Look. Te 40-year-old���s thicket of graying hair, tamed into a ponytail, is that of a Phish roadie, not a public high school principal. White hairs also have invaded his goatee and substantial sideburns. ���Some of our students, as teenagers, are the sole breadwinners in their families,��� Look says. Teri Kissel, the attendance clerk, says, ���Tere are kids who don���t know anything exists beyond this area. Tey don���t realize how big Louisville is. Louisville is this. Tis is it.��� Te poverty rate among the school���s roughly 500 kids ��� those who qualify to receive reduced-price or free lunch ��� is 90 percent, and 90 percent of the student body lives in Shawnee or Portland. (West Louisville���s other neighborhoods: Algonquin, California, Chickasaw, Park DuValle, Parkland,

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