The city of Cincinnati has designated Woodburn Avenue in my East Walnut Hills neighborhood an “entertainment district.”
The legions of (mostly) white folks who’ve been stalking and developing the stately real estate and prime storefront properties may now apply for liquor licenses.
This means sleep deprivation, parking headaches and serious aggravation for those of us living here long enough to recall when this was mostly a residential neighborhood and the only intrusive noises were the de rigueur sounds of Metro buses beginning their 5 a.m. routes and occasional one-sided cell phone conversations fading up the street.
I haven’t mustered any of the excitement shared by either the independent neighborhood business owners or the touristy white revelers who’ve come to over imbibe at Myrtle’s Punch House directly across the street from my place.
Despite that everyone’s been telling me the bar will cater to “a different clientele,” everyone is an asshole when they’re drunk regardless of zip code, car, income, race or education.
Our densely residential neighborhood is now home to this presumably upscale bar, and we’ve already welcomed a gallery, a bike shop, two clothing shops, two bric-a-brac shops, several hair salons and a bistro where we were once solely an unassuming urban enclave of older black homeowners and slightly younger black renters.
This is a tale of class, of flag-planters, of “urban renewal.”
It is more tellingly a tale of white comfort.
And we’re experts at white comfort in this city.
Of course, when I moved to this corner in summer 2002 I didn’t sign up to live across the street from a bar attracting honking car horns past midnight, gaggles of drunk, young white professionals yelling and guffawing on the corner at 3 a.m. long past the bar’s closing or a party bus of drunk white bridesmaids dancing to a window-rattling “Niggas in Paris” on repeat at 1 a.m. at the end of my driveway — all things that have actually happened in the brief time the bar’s been open.
When I moved here from a brief stay in a studio apartment on a rowdy, dirty corner in Mount Auburn after previously living in Walnut Hills for a dozen years I was enchanted by the slow turnover of the street from a once-violent, dark and ominous area to one dotted with flower pots, clean streets and sidewalks, and extremely friendly neighbors who’d survived the crime and sex traffic.
I loved waking up in summer to the sounds of my landlords sweeping up the McDonald’s and Wendy’s trash and watering the flowers.
They were (and are) stakeholders who live in the neighborhood and who rented their storefront spaces on the cheap to folks with retail dreams just to give the street life.
Those early businesses were merely placeholders.
Admittedly, I was relieved developers put in the money and time to overhaul the long-vacant building across from me. It was a single-room occupancy, filled with black men in transition from jail or social programs. After they’d moved out it sat there, attracting thieves looking for copper pipes and whatever else thieves steal from vacant buildings.
I am not averse to change, commerce, development or fun; however, rarely does the public hear from the folks whose lives, lifestyles, cultures or sleep patterns become the collateral damage of neighborhood “rehabilitation.”
Ask the black folks who’ve been “allowed” to stay in Over-the-Rhine in the shadows of Gateway Quarter and I’m certain they’ll tell you there’s little in what’s left of the neighborhood they can afford to eat, drink or wear. Further, they probably have little or no social contact with all the tourists and noisy revelers who come to have all that fun.
The same is happening throughout the entirety of Walnut Hills. It’s as though we poor and working-class blacks alone aren’t good enough to have goods and services — for years there’ve been quiet threats to close CVS and Kroger at Peeble’s Corner. Those threats have vanished now that more white-owned commerce is coming to the neighborhood, because the people those businesses attract need prescriptions and groceries.
Progress and white people are here.
I am a joiner, to a degree.
During Myrtle’s soft opening I stopped in to see the joint and to catch up with renowned mixologist Molly Wellman who runs it. She took great care to comfort me, telling me again that Myrtle’s appeals to “a different clientele” and that I should call her personally anytime things got out of hand.
Turns out managers and owners can’t control who frequents their establishments. Money is king.
To keep from being a complete flygirl in the buttermilk, my partner and I invited a mixed-race, pansexual group of friends to Myrtle’s one weekend night to experience it instead of observe it.
It was loud. (It’s a bar.) The live music downstairs was bad to the point of high annoyance. (It’s a bar.) I do not drink anymore but the word is the drinks were delicious and strong. (Hey, it’s a bar.)
My favorite and my least favorite part of the entire evening besides being gawked at by white women and side-eyed by the black men in search of white women was when I mistakenly made eye contact with a pudgy, sweaty white man who looked eerily like a guy I once worked with.
It wasn’t until he got up right next to me when I realized he wasn’t who I thought he was.
“Hey!” he yells at me, drunk-punching me in my right shoulder. “Can I call all these white people drunk assholes before I leave? Can I?” he asks me, of all people.
“Sure, be my guest,” I say above the music. “Have at it.” He pauses in the doorway between the main bar and the lounge.
“All you white people are assholes!”
He flips double middle fingers. Some people look around; one person claps or yells back a drunken indecipherable response. The pudgy drunk and his small group exit.
Yet another case of 21st century strangefruit: a drunk white man acting out, cursing his own kind by calling them precisely what he is.
I’d love to amass all the obstreperous black drug dealers I know, converge on Hyde Park Square, blast Gucci Mane after midnight, spark blunts and then leave in a blaze of profane glory.
But this is Cincinnati. I’ll have to dream of that and of times before white people required so much entertainment.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Dec 31, 2014 – Jan 6, 2015.