Month: March 2005

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

postscript

Repeating Falsehoods?

To the Editor:

Regarding the debate over medical malpractice insurance rates and the effect of malpractice suits and judgments (Letters, March 3rd issue), it is apparent that the medical-insurance complex has learned a lesson from its principal apologist, President Bush: If you repeat a falsehood often enough, eventually people will start believing it.

In a February article, The New York Times came to the following substantiated conclusions: 1) legal costs are not at the root of recent increases in medical malpractice premiums; 2) payments for malpractice claims have fallen sharply; 3) spikes in insurance premiums are directly related to insurers’ practices, including underpricing coverage in the 1990s to get greater market share and poor performance on their investments; 4) between 1993 and 2003, the total paid out by insurance companies for claims against doctors and other medical professionals rose, on average, 3.1 percent annually (roughly the rate of inflation), whereas in 2003 alone, the cost of coverage rose between 10 and 49 percent; 5) the average payment for malpractice fell in 2004, as did the number of payments made for medical malpractice; 6) there is little or no correlation between the cost of coverage and the institution of damage caps.

According to the watchdog group Public Citizen, all of the other bases touted by Bush and his “reformers” for limiting malpractice cases (e.g., defensive medicine, junk lawsuits, exodus of doctors, etc.) have been thoroughly debunked, many by the federal government itself.

The same people who are trying to deceive the public about the true causes of the malpractice “crisis” are using that deception to hide the facts about medical mistakes, which have escalated alarmingly. The government estimates that upwards of 100,000 people die from medical mistakes annually. The Harvard Medical School has estimated that less than 50 percent of malpractice is ever discovered; hospitals rarely, if ever, suspend or revoke the privileges of incompetent doctors; and the rate of physicians impaired by drug abuse is alarmingly high.

It’s a lot easier for the medical and insurance industries to contribute to the reelections of legislators willing to do their bidding than it is to solve the problem of malpractice or regulate the pricing practices of insurance companies, but the public should not be fooled.

Malpractice “reform” will only shield those industries at the expense of the improvement of medical care and the lives of the innocent victims of malpractice.

Martin H. Aussenberg

Memphis

Thanks A Lot

To the Editor:

I would like to thank Barry Chase for his letter (March 3rd issue) regarding my recent trip into the occupied territories and post my public apology for misusing my time while there.

His suggestion that we should have carried our message of peace to Hamas and the Al Aqsa Brigades was both stirring and insightful. We were invited to “bomber belt” workshops by militant Islamic factions but could not muster up the “courage” to attend. And I once passed a Vegas-style sign that read “Suicide Bomber Hideout,” but, alas, in my cowardice I continued to drive. Another time, a few men offered us “guide to where the terrorists live” maps, but I cowardly opted to buy two cups of Arabic coffee from a street vendor instead.

I now see how foolish my original goal of meeting with ordinary Israeli and Palestinian Jews, Muslims, and Christians who are committed to finding a nonviolent peaceful solution to the conflict was. You have taken me from a journey of pipe dreams to pipe bombs. Wish me better luck than the Bush administration in actually finding them.

Joey Noffsinger

Memphis

Flim-flam Man

To the Editor:

The president comes to Memphis to ask for the people’s support in his quest to make America the greatest debtor nation in history. This time, the flim-flam man wants to save Social Security by using false costs to fool Congress and the American people.

Let’s look at some facts: Since Bush became president, the national debt has soared; the tax cuts that were supposed to lower the debt are a sham; American jobs that used to pay into Social Security are now in China and other low-wage countries; and the pension benefit guarantee has a $23.3 billion deficit.

The president is now pitting the young against seniors with his several trillion-dollar scheme to start private investment accounts. Guess who gets to pay off this added debt? The young workers he claims to be looking out for. Bush, like Nero, is fiddling while America becomes a debtor nation the likes of which the world has never seen.

Jack Bishop

Cordova

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Wonderland

Even before you enter the WINCHESTER Farmer’s Market, you get an idea of what’s inside. Next to the big green letters spelling out “farmer’s market” are small signs. “Mercado Internacional,” reads one.

“The other signs are in Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean,” says Ben Park, one of the market’s owners. “For everybody else, we’re just the Winchester Farmer’s Market.”

Winchester Farmer’s Market opened three months ago in the site of a former Seessel’s at the corner of Kirby and Winchester. Owners Park and John Kang took the concept from super-sized international markets such as Buford Highway Farmer’s Market in Atlanta and the K&S World Market in Nashville.

“John and I were small-business owners — he in Nashville, I in Atlanta,” Park says. “We thought it was time to start something big together, so we came back to Memphis, where we went to college together 20-something years ago, to open this store.”

The resulting market is big and colorful, a culinary wonderland. There is no rabbit wearing white gloves and fretting so about being late, but there is rabbit meat for sale. And the aisles aren’t labeled 1, 2, 3, 4 for crackers, coffee, cereals, canned fruit. Instead, they’re organized by country, so you might find Mexican soda and refried beans in one aisle, live fish tanks filled with lobster, crab, and tilapia in the next, and then just a few seconds later be in front of cans of Spam in the American aisle.

In the background, it’s mostly Mexican music, though it’s Jimi Hendrix in the meat department. The common language among the customers of myriad nationalities is some sort of English.

“During the weekend, most of our customers are from the Hispanic community,” Park says. “But during the week we usually have a good mix of nationalities and locals who come to buy groceries.”

Currently, the store is stocked with approximately 30,000 products. Not all of them are exotic, but most are different from the merchandise mix at a more typical American store. Beef tongues are lying next to a cow’s head in one of the freezers. Small beef intestines are next to beef tripe, liver, and “Chorizo Mexicano.” In the produce section, beside the apples, potatoes, bananas, cabbage, and okra, you’ll see green Thai eggplant, which looks like a small green tomato, and fuzzy squash, banana leaves, Taiwanese bok choy, gai choy, a choy, yu choy, and baby bok choy, among other hard-to-find foreign produce and herbs.

The store carries more than 20 varieties and 50 brands of rice. “People from different countries prefer slightly different types of rice,” Park says. “Africans, for example, prefer broken rice. We didn’t really know that, but customers told us and now we carry it.”

Park sees the store as a work-in-progress that will evolve with help from its customers. For instance, Park knows that products from countries such as India, Africa, and the Middle East are underrepresented.

There is room to grow too. The market has enough space for independent vendors and retailers. A jewelry store and a custom-order auto-accessories shop have just opened in the front of the store. Yung Kim owns and operates Glory Video, a small Korean video rental that also carries lingerie, Korean cosmetics, and magazines. A coffee and smoothie bar is set up opposite the deli, which offers “Quick Fixin’ Ideas” with what appears to be seaweed and sprouts salads (no English signs here) as well as fried rice to-go. A sushi bar, a Mexican deli, a check-cashing place, and a Latin American clothing store are in the works.

Park says Winchester Farmer’s Market is filling a void.

“A lot of our customers come from out of town,” he says. “Those from Arkansas usually drive all the way to Dallas to find what they need. Now that this market has opened, they might find it here.” n

The store is located at 6616 Winchester. Store hours are 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday-Thursday and 8:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Sunday.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Bad Medicine

On the night I saw The Jacket, I had a fitful sleep filled with strange dreams, all variations on the film. So filled was my head with loose images (some from the movie, some from my ill sleep) of psych-ward terrors, time travel, and Adrien Brody’s huge, expressive face that I could scarcely sort them out; fact from fiction from science fiction.

The Jacket is a mind trip with moments and imagery and language that continue to haunt and disturb. After a night of tossing and turning and waking and thinking that I too was confined to a straitjacket, I can’t help but afford John Maybury’s chiller at least a few good words.

Brody is Jack Starks, a veteran of the first Gulf War, who, in 1991, briefly experienced death on the battlefield when shot in the head by a scared child he was trying to help. A year later (1992, remember), Jack is a drifter, walking long, lonely, snowy highways and hitching for rides with nowhere in particular to go. One fateful day, he helps a drunken mother and cutie-pie daughter with their stalled truck, only to be shooed away by the intoxicated shrew. But before he leaves, he gives the young girl, Jackie, his dog tags. Soon after, his next hitch goes awry when the driver shoots and kills a police officer and sets the scene to look like a wounded Jack did it. Jack maintains his innocence, but psychiatrists testify that his war trauma must have pushed him to the act. So, to the asylum we go. It’s not pretty. There are TVs, but they all seem to be showing strange, hallucinogenic programs and patients shuffle about meaninglessly. Worst yet, it’s run by Dr. Becker, played by Kris Kristofferson in his not-nice mode. Becker has an unconventional treatment that involves intense antipsychotic drugs and confinement while straitjacketed in a morgue drawer. This is all kept on the down low, since these methods, we are told, were banned in the 1970s.

A curious phenomenon occurs while Jack is in the drawer. He finds himself able to travel 15 years into the future to 2007. Is this a hallucination? A dream? Or is he really traveling? It doesn’t matter because he’s able to score with the little girl who took his dog tags and who grew up into a pert but grungy Keira Knightley (who went medieval on us as Guinevere in last year’s King Arthur). With her help in 2007 and that of a kindly, sensible shrink back in 1992, Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Jack is able to piece together enough information to learn that, in 1992, he’s about to die. The only questions now: how and why, and how to stop it.

In my dream, there was a bunch of extra doctors running around, each with different motives for imprisoning and deluding Jack. And I guess, now that I am awake, I realize that this is a valid concern on my part. Why? Why do Dr. Becker and his associates think this cruel and unusual treatment is useful, especially on a rational, well-spoken patient like Jack? We are asked to believe that they really are doing this in the patient’s best interests, but they scowl and laugh like movie villains and abuse Jack almost gleefully. I guess that in a world of Abu Ghraib, motiveless, well-intended atrocities committed by supposedly “good guys” shouldn’t surprise me, but in a film without a strong narrative, I wanted some explanations.

The Jacket is an effective, if bland, thriller; well-acted on the whole (though Knightley works awfully hard at wounded and dark, in a role that Jason Leigh might have played 15 years ago) and well-paced as it unravels its sordid mystery. Hollywood doesn’t quite yet know what to do with elegantly attractive Oscar-winner Adrien Brody, what with his leading-man smile but gaunt frame and gi-normous nose. The Jacket reaffirms him as ideal for roles as tortured, bedraggled survivors. It will take a good romantic comedy to further test his mettle.

I just wish that, with the time-jumping and psychological hoo-ha, The Jacket were more clever. No M. Night Shyamalan twists and turns. Nothing Hitchcockian here. You would think that a movie about dementia and traveling through time would offer at least one shocking revelation. But no. Like Jack, we too wander this movie’s highway looking for a ride.

Categories
Opinion

Dark Night

Walk into the Full Moon Club above Zinnie’s East restaurant on a Wednesday night, and you’ll find yourself in a world of darkness where the smoke from clove cigarettes fills the air and guys and girls dressed in leather, spikes, and chains dance to the sounds of Bauhaus and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult.

It’s Industrial Goth Night, and as soon as you reach the top of the stairs, you’re greeted by a friendly doorman wearing a fishnet shirt and a dog collar. A crowd of black-clothed patrons are hovering near the bar, and a couple of spiky-haired guys in heavy eyeliner and trenchcoats are shooting pool.

Around the corner on the dance floor, a woman with Elvira-style hair is being pulled by her chained collar by a slim guy in a tight-fitting black sportscoat. Next to them, an older man, who bears a striking resemblance to Riff-Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, dances with a younger man whose slick black hair is shaped into two hornlike spikes. Up in the curtained DJ booth, Dev “Sameal” Deval is spinning Depeche Mode.

It’s Memphis Industrial Goth Project’s first night at the Full Moon Club after the crowd outgrew the Liquid Lounge on Highland. The only goth/industrial-themed night in the city, an average Wednesday night at Liquid Lounge drew about 150. It began in December, and before long the club became so crowded that many patrons were left with nowhere to sit.

The popularity of the Wednesday nights showed that Memphis has a decent-sized goth scene that up until recently had no place to call home.

“I came to Memphis about six months ago [from Detroit], and I noticed there wasn’t any type of industrial goth night or club anywhere in the city, so I put some feelers out to see who might be interested,” says Sameal, founder of the entertainment collective called MIG Project.

Sameal recruited a team of four others to form the MIG Project: DJs Brad “Totenkopf” Allison, Jonas “The Plastic Citizen” Stoltz, and a guy who simply goes by St. Faust. Faust, doubling as a photographer, walks around shooting patrons and then posts the pictures on the group’s Web site, MIGProject.com. The doorman, the nice guy in the dog collar, is Levi.

Totenkopf, a longtime fixture in the Memphis goth scene, put on a few goth parties at Red Square, a defunct downtown dance club, back in 1997 and then again at the Spot in 2002, but he says the MIG Project is the largest revival of goth in Memphis that he’s seen.

The group is striving to create a safe place for the goth crowd to gather — a place to be entertained without having to worry about being gawked at. That’s why they’ve enacted a dress code requiring an excess of black clothing. Bondage, fetish, Renaissance, punk, and metal attire are also acceptable.

“When somebody comes in dressed in mainstream attire, they’re immediately gawking,” says Sameal. “This is a very nonviolent, nonconfrontational crowd, and they have no desire to be harassed for wearing makeup and leather pants.”

So, what is goth?

“There’s a huge misunderstanding in the mainstream community,” says Sameal. “They tend to think the black clothing and the dark music is all about death and morbidity.

“But like the hippie movement, the goth movement is actually about life and freedom. Yet the goth still wants a constant reminder that life isn’t always pretty and perfect. Even in the most sorrowful, horrible things in life, beauty can still be found.” n

Industrial Goth Night at the Full Moon Club (1718 Madison) runs from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. every Wednesday. For more information, go to the Web site MIGProject.com.

Categories
News The Fly-By

F-stop

Chicken livers, anyway. So said Annette Bursey about the snails she ate last week at Hollywood Elementary school. Bursey and other school administrators ate snails and dog food while students cheered from cafeteria tables.

About 250 kids spent four weeks selling $1 candy bars for the school’s annual fund-raiser. The goal was to raise $12,000 for an outdoor marquee, a new PA system, and library books. When students exceeded the goal by $1,000, teachers had to deliver their end of the bargain: a reality-show-inspired scenario in which Bursey and Principal Carla Franklin promised to eat snails, and building engineer Charles Childress said he would eat a can of Alpo.

A professional chef served up the eclectic menu on fine china with linen napkins.

Whatever happened to celebrating fund-raiser achievements with pizza parties? “We thought the Fear Factor challenge would be a great incentive for the kids. We didn’t expect them to sell this many,” said Bursey. Oh, but they did. Mmmm-mmm! n — Janel Davis

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Editorial

Having just succeeded in passing legislation imposing restrictions on class-action lawsuits, the Republican-controlled Congress is fast about seeing to the rest of President Bush’s real agenda — one that would impose severe constraints on the rights of Americans to seek legal redress.

We refer to the president’s “real” agenda, because in the judgment of many, Bush won reelection last November based on the voters’ sense that he saw things their way on a whole host of moral and social issues — none of which, as it turns out, were prominently featured in the president’s State of the Union address, and none of which ended up on the congressional calendar for immediate action.

It is difficult to disagree with those who see Bush as having played bait-and-switch with the so-called Red States. What is obvious, in any case, is that the issues that are on the calendar at the president’s behest have never commanded much public support, in the heartland or anywhere else. Besides several misnamed “tort reform” measures, these include: “tax reform” of the sort we have already seen several times over, creating new loopholes for the wealthy; Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security; and, on the docket as of this week, his intent to strike away those provisions in the bankruptcy laws that protect ordinary Americans.

The bankruptcy measure would even take away those provisions of existing law which give a modicum of protection to citizens whose debt has become uncontrollable because of medical emergency or loss of job. Democrats in Congress also proposed an exception for those on active duty in the military, but the Republicans would have none of it. But the bill does reinforce and expand those loopholes which shelter corporate bankruptcies. It’s “compassionate conservatism” at its finest.

It has been observed more than once in recent months that the aim of the Bush administration and its allies in Congress is to reap the New Deal. They’re on the way, not only to that but to the creation of something else to take its place: a Raw Deal.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

EDITORIAL

Since Mayor Herenton made his rueful budget shortfall announcement on February 18th that led to cutting jobs and city services, numerous people have come out of the woodwork with recommendations for closing the $6.4 million budget deficit. There’s been talk of rescinding pay increases to city employees, of ending tuition-reimbursement programs, and even of canceling a proposed efficiency study. While these suggestions are admirable, they are all too little, too late.

Long before the city found itself in such dire financial straits, there should have been in place some form of spending accountability. Since there wasn’t, the city was obliged to have provided better — both more considerate and more efficient — management of the layoff process. And surely it was possible to avoid the competitive muddles by which both mayor and council first proposed, then acted to take away employee pay raises. These were issues that Mayor Herenton dismissed as “nickel and diming” in discussions of the budget emergency, but the last we looked, nickels and dimes added up to dollars.

City financial officers have repeatedly blamed the failing economy and depleted revenue streams for the city’s budget woes. Maybe so, but such analysis overlooks the key budgeting tenet: You can’t spend more than you make. Unfortunately, those elected officials in charge of determining spending priorities seem never to have learned this rule.

As of this week, the city of Memphis was overdrawn by 2,100 lives. That’s the number of municipal employees affected with loss of livelihood, most of them involved in pursuits previously considered vital to the community’s well-being.

That’s what we call out of balance.

Categories
Opinion

Cost/Benefit Analysis

Like every other branch of government, the U.S. Department of Justice is facing tight budgets and cost-cutting measures. Combined with other factors, that suggests that a retrial of former Shelby County medical examiner Dr. O.C. Smith is unlikely.

Special prosecutor Bud Cummins, the U.S. attorney in Little Rock, isn’t tipping his hand, but he said a decision will probably be made within two weeks. A mistrial was declared last week following a three-week trial that was the culmination of a three-year investigation of the alleged attack on Smith at the morgue on June 1, 2002. In an unusually candid interview Tuesday, Cummins said the costs and benefits of a retrial are “on the table.”

“We’re facing the tightest budget restraints in memory of anyone in the Department of Justice,” he said. “We have a lot of discretion whether to indict someone. Cost is not pivotal in that decision, but you can’t pretend it’s free.”

Federal prosecutors in Memphis have had a full plate lately. They spent three years on the Lynn Lang and Logan Young football-booster case, which ended in February. And federal grand juries are looking at both Mayor Willie Herenton and state senator John Ford.

In Smith’s case, the cost has been considerable, because for several months Smith was under 24-hour protection, while a task force of 17 agencies ran down more than 100 leads looking for an attacker. When the focus shifted to Smith himself, investigators bent over backward to be thorough.

Jim Cavanaugh, lead investigator for the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, said he was the “biggest obstacle” to thinking of Smith as a suspect rather than a victim. He insisted that investigators continue to chase outside leads even after inconsistencies in Smith’s story became apparent. It was only after several months that he agreed the evidence should be presented to a grand jury for possible indictment of Smith.

“We took it that way because the facts forced us that way,” Cavanaugh said.

It took several more months during 2003 to find a prosecutor. Terry Harris, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, recused his staff because of ties to Smith. The United States attorney for North Mississippi took the case, then gave it back, before Cummins and assistant prosecutor Pat Harris agreed to try it. “That probably took nine months to a year in all,” said Cummins.

Cummins said he will check with defense attorneys Gerald Easter and Jim Garts then make a decision on a retrial “sooner rather than later.” U.S. district judge Bernice Donald set April 19th as the next report date, but Cummins said a decision could come next week.

“We hate to not retry one,” he said, adding that Harris is the main trial lawyer in the office and “it’s his case.”

But Cummins said he and Harris must also take into account the 9-3 vote in favor of acquittal and comments jurors made to the attorneys immediately after the trial. Cummins said there were moments during the debriefing “when I would liked to have jumped up and said, ‘Are you kidding?’ But if you shut up and listen, it’s good stuff.” Jurors said they didn’t like some expert witnesses and had little interest in factitious disorder, the diagnosis of Smith suggested by expert witness Dr. Park Dietz.

The biggest surprise to Cummins was that at least three of the nine jurors who voted not-guilty believed that Smith was attacked. Prosecutors thought their major problem would be overcoming the burden of proof and reasonable doubt. “We didn’t connect with them very well on our theory; there’s no beating around the bush,” he said. “If I conclude we are likely to hang another jury, then there is not much point.”

Asked if Smith had a home-court advantage, Cummins said there was “clearly a division of loyalties we had to deal with” in the law-enforcement community. But, like Easter, he complimented Donald on doing a professional job under difficult personal circumstances. The judge’s judicial colleague, James Swearengen, and her court clerk, Yolanda Savage, both died while the trial was under way.

Cavanaugh, who said he was strongly in favor of a retrial in a post-trial press conference last week, seemed to be softening his stance a bit this week. The ATF agent has worked on the Washington, D.C., sniper case, the Eric Rudolph case, and the bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

“If there is a bomber loose, it’s so devastating on a community,” he said. “I thought it was the right thing to take the Smith case to the bar of justice.” He added, however, “If it’s not at the end, it’s close to the end.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

No Money, Mo’ Problems

Things are tight in M-town, and I’m not talking about our music.

After years of hearing about mounting county debt, the city sampled the county’s tune last month and gave more than 2,000 workers their walking papers.

And with budget season looming, it’s probably only going to get leaner and meaner.

Mayor Willie Herenton met with the Memphis City School board last week to explain why he recommended cutting their annual funding from the city.

“I believe that funding education is the county’s responsibility,” said Herenton. “I want them to assume that responsibility.”

By not providing funding to the city system, Herenton hopes to shift the tax burden for all education over to the county and thus curb tax inequity between city and county residents.

“What I’m really saying to you guys is this: You’re in trouble with the $86 million, and you’re in trouble without it,” Herenton told the board. “You cannot meet the growing educational needs if the revenue situation does not change.”

Of course, there’s no guarantee that the cash-strapped county would, or even could, step up. Under the current funding formula, the county would have to put up $115 million to make up for Herenton’s decision to bow out. Which is sort of the point. As Herenton himself said last Thursday: “The political climate in Memphis and Shelby County is not conducive to raising taxes.”

Since we’re talking about equity and fairness, why should it be? We already have the highest property taxes in the state. Roughly 20 percent of the population lives below the poverty level. The city is laying off all part-time and temporary workers, but less than a year ago, several appointed city employees received double-digit raises.

In an effort to save jobs, City Council members suggested rescinding the raises last week, but Herenton had not acted on the raises when he presented an updated budget plan to the council Tuesday.

At a press conference to announce the layoffs last month, Memphis CAO Keith McGee said questions about the raises assumed they were not based on merit.

Personnel files show that administrative assistant Tonia Jackson was getting paid $41,000 and considered “an extremely well-organized individual” when she was given additional duties and a hefty raise.

But is being “extremely well-organized” worth an extra $20,000 a year when your employer is in the midst of a fiscal crisis? It’s one thing to offer a high salary to attract the best candidates for a top-level position; it’s quite another to give someone a 50 percent raise to schedule meetings.

Narquenta Sims’ file said she had taken the city’s multicultural office to “an outstanding level.” Maybe so, but a $15,000 raise is a pretty big pat on the back for someone who had been making $54,000 a year.

Maybe it’s time we looked at the city’s overall pay schedule. Two administrative assistants in the mayor’s office were being paid in the low $30,000 range until the “position of administrative assistant [was] upgraded with an across-the-board salary of $41,000” in city government.

Just for comparison, Salary.com says administrative assistants with less than three years of experience make a median base salary of $29,799 nationally. Slightly higher-level administrators — with two to five years experience — make a median base of $33,597. And administrative assistants or senior-level secretaries with at least five years experience get $37,888.

I’m going to assume that all the city’s administrative assistants have more than five years experience. Otherwise, I’d be a little huffy. Every time you turn around, it seems like something — or someone — else is in danger of getting the ax (see story page 17).

If we’re going to stop funding some city services, perhaps even city schools, fine, but we also need to take a hard look at what, exactly, we are funding. n

Categories
News The Fly-By

A Quickie with

The Magevney and Mallory-Neely houses in Victorian Village have taken their second budget-related blow in five months.

Last October, the homes, which were once open almost daily for touring, were reduced to operating by appointment only. On March 1st, the historic homes, operated by the Pink Palace Family of Museums, were closed to the public in an attempt to adjust to city budget reductions.

If the city’s budget improves, the historic homes may re-open on an appointment-only schedule on July 1st, the start of a new fiscal year. Other Victorian Village facilities, including the Woodruff-Fontaine House, will remain open, since they’re not funded by the city budget.

The Magevney House, built in 1836, was originally occupied by Irish immigrants. The Mallory-Neely House, circa 1852, was renovated in 1890 and is best known for its large collection of authentic household furnishings purchased with the family’s cotton wealth.

Kate Dixon served as manager of historic properties for both houses since the summer of 1989, but on February 21st, she was notified that she’d be laid off effective March 23rd.

Flyer: How much did it cost the city to keep Victorian Village open?

Dixon: Our city of Memphis operating budget for the Mallory-Neely and Magevney houses at the start of this fiscal year was about $123,000. Maintenance and collections management cost about $60,000, or half of the total. Even though the houses will be closed to the public, the city will need to continue to invest this amount for their physical maintenance. The other half was used for staff, which enabled us to do public tours.

In addition to city funding, another $60,000 was generated and spent for programming through Memphis Museums, Inc., a not-for-profit organization which partners with the city for the operation of the Pink Palace Family of Museums.

What is Memphis losing?

The history of the residents of these houses highlights our community’s immigrant population base and the importance of cotton to the development of our region’s economy.

They complement heritage tourism in Memphis. They offer educational and entertaining cultural programming to the public. Adult groups have enjoyed teas and luncheons, along with house tours.

The houses are important to the future development of the Victorian Village Historic District. The Center City Commission has identified Victorian Village as a prime neighborhood for development within the Biomedical Zone

Do you foresee Victorian Village being able to re-open?

Absolutely! Our city has already lost many of its 19th-century historic structures. The Mallory-Neely and Magevney houses (along with Woodruff-Fontaine) are Memphis’ best opportunity to preserve 19th-century residential structures. n