Louisville Magazine

APR 2014

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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3 6 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 4.14 39 TIP C harles Houston started parking cars in his back yard on South Sixth Street when he was eight. He could earn as much as $100 back then, charging drivers maybe $2 to $5 a car. Sixty years later, he's still parking cars in the same back yard — although the price is a tad higher. Up and down the block, and on all the surrounding streets, his neighbors are in business for the day. Edward E. Edwards is selling burritos and fajitas, chicken and shrimp. Houston's nephew Ken is parking cars a few doors down. Over on Rodman Street, Jerry Payne and his nephew Nate have the grill going for barbecue while a DJ who calls herself Ice Lady spins some funk in the nonstop rain. "Tey always come home for Derby," Houston says. "In this neighborhood, it's just like Christmas. Everybody comes home; I don't care where you are." Houston has missed it only two years in more than 60. He was in Vietnam. Te neighborhoods around Churchill Downs celebrate Derby like nowhere else. It's part family barbecue and part patriotic capitalism, with a little bit of Mardi Gras thrown in — right down to women fashing the crowds, although the last time a woman did that in front of Brenda Carrico's house on Central Avenue, her daughter, Jackie Pryce, chased the show-of down to give her a piece of her mind. Didn't she know there were children in these houses? Brenda Playforth grew up on the south side of Churchill Downs, on Brentwood Avenue. She and her girlfriends had a parking business too, although they ran it a little diferently. "We'd say, 'Take a right turn down this alley and they'll be waiting for you.' Ten we took their money and ran," Playforth says. As big as Derby is in the neighborhood, plenty of people from these streets wouldn't dream of going inside Churchill Downs on the big day. Playforth did once, when she was 13. She and a friend scaled a little motor home to hop the fence and sneak into the infeld. "Tere were people sprawled everywhere on the ground drunk, grabbing at my feet," she says. "I felt like people were coming out of the grave." Te sidewalks around the track echo with amplifed music and bitter brimstone. Tere are the plastic-pail-beating Chicago Bucket Boys, some electric guitar licks by Jared Koshiol of Northern Kentucky and several iterations of "When the Saints Go Marching In" by Johnny Cool of Chicago. Ten there are the preachers. "Wicked, wicked, wicked people!" Marvin Holmes hollers not far from the track's main en- trance. Nearby, a street performer stands shouting nose-to-nose and toe-to-toe with another amplifed preacher fulminating against homosexuality. Chris Woodcock of Valley Station is selling fip-fops for $5 — a 500 percent markup. His grandma parked cars in the neighborhood until she died a few years ago. But Woodcock isn't able to get his hands on last Derby Day's No. 1 seller. "We went from every Family Dollar store from Valley Station to here and everyone was sold out of ponchos," says Nina Walter, who's working with Woodcock. Woodcock manages to buy a poncho for himself from another vender. It's one of the better ones, he says. Costs him $6. A POCKET RAIN PONCHO SOUNDS LIKE A GOOD IDEA. A Blast — and a Little Bread By Jenni Laidman Photos by Mickie Winters 26-43.indd 36 3/19/14 5:19 PM

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