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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���Te perfect portrait of what you never want to be,��� Callie says. I ask them to describe the West End. ���People think of it as the roll-up-your-carwindows-and-lock-your-doors part of town,��� Callie says. Is that accurate? ���Tere���s crime happening here, but it���s not like people think,��� Elijah says. ���Tere aren���t shootings every day. It���s not like Pakistan.��� Tey do mention two former Shawnee students who were murdered over Christmas break. Places they go for fun: a gas station near school, the Dixie Dozen movie theater in Pleasure Ridge Park, the Green Tree Mall in Southern Indiana, the Unique Trift Store in Portland, which Callie heard is closing. Laya: ���If they put a movie theater down here they���d make so much money.��� Tierra: ���No movie theater is in west Louisville because of all the stereotypes. I don���t believe people would get robbed if they put in a movie theater.��� Laya: ���I feel like they should bring the downtown down here.��� Tierra: ���Didn���t they just open up a new Sky Zone? With big trampolines? Why couldn���t they open that down here?��� Laya: ���It���s bandwagon. If one business won���t come, then the others say, ���Well, I���m not going out there either.������ Laya says she���d like to see less litter. Elijah says, ���Te people down here know each other well enough that we could form ��� ���I am,��� Callie says. ���I can admit that. I���ve always kind of thought of west Louisville as a place that just drags you back no matter how bad you try to get away from it.��� Callie would like to move to ���Bardstown Road or Canada.��� A ttica Scott exhales, breath clouds rising and dissipating in the frigid air. It���s the last morning in January, and Councilwoman Scott, bundled in a bright-orange scarf and bulky winter coat, is delivering food to the elderly in west Louisville. She���s in the passenger seat of legislative assistant Donna Sanders��� Lincoln Town Car, with a busted side-view mirror and an ejected jazz cassette in the dash. Te program is called Meals on Wheels, and today���s lunch includes chicken Parmesan, sliced strawberries and 1-percent milk. Scott is 41, has been a councilwoman not quite a year and a half. As she mentions the community garden planned for her district, and a May event to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the city���s 1968 race riots at 28th and Greenwood, we roll past another boarded-up house. ���So much of west Louisville is in need of some TLC,��� she says. According to census data, nearly 7,000 vacant properties ��� more than double the number in a comparable section of the East End in terms of population ��� dot west Louisville���s landscape. In this part of town, plywood yelled the N-word at us,��� Scott says. ���So I came back to what I consider home.��� She grew up in the West End, mainly with relatives as the daughter of a man who was ���in and out of jail��� as a ���small-time thief ��� and a mother who moved to Los Angeles and died when Scott was 16. After college, graduate school and starting a family, all in Tennessee, Scott returned to Louisville and worked for the social service agency Jobs With Justice. After making eight deliveries, Sanders drops Scott at the Shawnee Arts and Cultural Center, which is where we picked up the food. Scott gets into her car, pulls onto the highway. She mentions that some of her constituents have asked her to run for mayor. Would she consider it? ���No.��� Why? ���I don���t know if Louisville���s ready for a person of color as mayor,��� Scott says. ���I see very few people of color in leadership positions in our political parties. I don���t see any people of color whatsoever in the state administration. Picture in your mind a black person from west Louisville as mayor. Just try. I wonder if people could do it.��� (Jennie Jean Davidson, of NC3, tells me a black mayor would cause a ���stroke-out all over the ���Ville.���) Does Mayor Fischer care about the West End? ���I believe the mayor cares. But it���s not where he calls home. It���s what I live in every day,��� Scott says. ���If you don���t live here, you go home at night and are far removed from west Louisville. So I don���t know if it���s something According to census data, nearly 7,000 vacant properties ��� more than double the number in a comparable section of the East End in terms of population ��� dot west Louisville���s landscape. In this part of town, plywood rectangles seem as common as windowpanes. what do you call that when you picket?��� ���Protest,��� Laya says. ���Yeah,��� Elijah says, ���we could form a protest group to make the West End better.��� ���People,��� Laya says, ���they don���t look to the future like that.��� ���Just have to put their minds to it,��� Elijah says. Laya wants to be a radiologist, Callie a graphic novelist. Tierra and Elijah plan to go to nursing school. I ask if they���ll stay in the West End. Elijah says he wants a spread in Indiana, enough land so he can ride fourwheelers. Tierra and Laya will remain in west Louisville because that���s where their families are. ���I feel like where you live don���t determine your success,��� Laya says. ���I can live here and still be a billionaire. But some people are afraid of getting stuck here.��� 40 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.13 rectangles seem as common as windowpanes. Colored in on a bird���s-eye-view map, these empty homes look like rotting teeth in a giant smile. ���Tese houses represent so much to me,��� Scott says. ���Tey just want to be what they once were.��� On one, the spraypainted plywood reads ���No Cooper��� instead of ���No Copper.��� ���You wonder what���s going on in there. Is there a dead body? Prostitution? Drugs?��� Scott says. ���I believe in demolition. Bring a bullhorn, make it a party. Te people at Landmarks, none of them live in west Louisville but they make all the decisions. We butt heads.��� Parkland is in Scott���s district, and she lives in that neighborhood with her two children ��� a 12-year-old daughter and a 17-year-old son. She was in Okolona before that. ���I was walking with my daughter and these guys you go to bed thinking about. I do. And I wake up thinking about it. ���My constituents feel like the mayor shows up, which is great. He���ll come to somebody���s church or a cleanup. But in the time I���ve been here, we can���t really say we���ve seen anything tangible.��� Later today, Scott will have a meeting with Fischer, and she���ll ask him to go on another ���Reality Ride��� through some of her district. When I ask Scott to characterize her relationship with Fischer, she says, ���It���s getting better. It was a little tenuous at frst. I take full ��� well, not full ��� but I take some responsibility because I really did come in with that community-organizer, change-thesystem mentality. Tat Southern-hospitality thing is not me. It���s direct: ���Why do we have this house on 39th and Hale that���s falling in

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