Month: November 2005

Categories
News

Playing Bridge

So says Tim Sorenson, senior project manager with Wilbur Smith Associates, the firm studying a possible new bridge across the Mississippi River.

“There are only two bridges [for vehicles] crossing the river, and they’re both in close proximity to each other,” Sorenson says. “What if you’re not in the city, but you want to cross the river?”

Wilbur Smith is studying a 15-mile corridor, from Route 304

in Mississippi to the north Shelby County line, to decide where an additional bridge for rail and vehicular traffic could, and should, be placed. At two public Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) meetings last week, the firm presented 13 possible routes.

The additional bridge would bring much-needed extra capacity to the region’s transportation system, as well as alleviate fears about the effects of an earthquake. Currently, there are two rail bridges and two bridges for vehicles. Only one of the four existing bridges has been retrofitted to new earthquake standards.

Almost 2 million railroad cars travel over the river at Memphis each year.

“We have to be concerned with bridge failure and system closures, especially with the proximity of the two,” says Sorenson. “If something were to happen to these bridges, there would be a significant disruption to, first, the local economy and then the national economy, given how much rail flows through this region.”

Sorenson indicated that without another rail bridge, long-term growth could be stifled. The same could be said for an additional vehicular bridge. Trucking traffic is expected to double within the next 10 years.

“What’s happening now is we have an overlap,” says Sorenson. “We have regional truck traffic that has to all go through downtown Memphis. That’s competing with local traffic and local people using the bridges on a regular basis. It’s not the most efficient way to do it.”

TDOT will hold additional public meetings at the beginning of the year to present which of the 13 routes were deemed most viable.

Categories
Music Music Features

Roots on and off the Road

Do you know where your favorite local roots artist is? This month, most of them are on the road. While The North Mississippi Allstars are working the East Coast, Lucero has been criss-crossing the continent, with a Memphis stop slated for Friday, November 25th, at The Complex.

In early November, Nancy Apple and fellow Ringo Records act Rob McNurlin collaborated on a 12-song CD called River, Road or Rail. Now, they’re in the midst of a three-week tour, which has taken them to Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California, as well as the legendary Threadgills club in Austin, Texas. In between, the duo has played house-party dates, opening slots for Dale Watson, and performed live on San Antonio’s radio station KSYM FM-90.1.

Midtown singer-songwriter Drew Holcomb has been hitting colleges from coast to coast as part of W2 Entertainment‘s Acoustic Music Series tour. He estimates that he’s sold 1,500 copies of his debut CD, Washed in Blue, to enthusiastic college kids.

“Sixty percent of my shows are on-campus gigs, anything from a noon show in a cafeteria to a nighttime concert in an auditorium,” says Holcomb, who’s been working with W2 since mid-2004. “It can be hit-or-miss, but it is getting me on the road, getting me crowds in random places around the country.”

In addition to campus gigs, Holcomb has been opening club shows for acts such as Susan Tedeschi and Los Lobos. Holcomb will return to Memphis to play the Hi-Tone Café on Thursday, December 22nd.

Last January, Collierville duo Jed and Kelley quit their day jobs, sold their cars, and piled into an RV to play eight months of gigs out west. They returned to the Memphis area in mid-October.

“If anything’s gonna happen, you have to make it happen,” says Kelley. “We just couldn’t sit around Memphis playing the same bars all the time. We wanted to get out there and see what other cities had to offer.”

Kelley booked 90 shows from February to October; Jed gassed up the RV; they loaded their instruments and their dog, Josey; and they hit the road.

They parked their RV for weeks at a time, basing operations out of states like New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. “One night, we’d be playing at an Elks lodge; the next, we’d be in a coffee shop or a rock club,” says Kelley. “The whole plan was to do it for nine months. It was hard work, and we ate a lot of ramen noodles. The gigs were wonderful and the scenery was beautiful, but the best part was making new musical friends.”

Kelley says she and Jed benefited from their Memphis connection. “Saying we’re from here automatically got us a level of respect. People took us a little more seriously.”

Back home, the duo will play Stop 345 Saturday, December 3rd.

Meanwhile, The Hometown Nobodies have no gigs on the calendar. This Memphis duo, the brainchild of Justin Burks and Aaron Brame, prefer to create music and launch songs via their Web site, HometownNobodies.com, instead of taking their act on the road.

“We were sick to death of touring and getting meager responses,” says Brame, who’s collaborated with Burks since 1995 in such groups as The F-Holes, The Living Room, and, most recently, Halfacre Gunroom.

“The traditional aspects of being in a band were getting us nowhere,” Burks says. “Shows were fleeting moments — even if it felt great, it was still unsatisfying. We don’t want shows. We don’t want a record deal. We just want to make music.”

Over the last eight months, the Hometown Nobodies have penned and recorded more than 30 tracks, which they post online every Monday.

“The deadlines are the secret,” Brame says. “We take them very seriously. People are asking us, ‘Are you sure you’re not gonna play out?’ But learning that we don’t have to elicit a response with a live show is a lot more rewarding. People who find us online are listening with more sincerity.”

While the Hometown Nobodies will have a track on the next Makeshift Records compilation, due out in February, the band currently has no plans to release an album. Instead, they’ll continue to write and release songs online — at least until they release the 52-week mark, which was their original goal.

“We shaved away everything that wasn’t fun about playing music,” Burks says.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

THE RANT

Talk about a trip! I was watching the news the other morning and screaming with laughter about my favorite person, Mr. George Bush. Poor thing, his ratings have dipped so low and he’s now so unpopular, even among his own herd, that he finally just gave up and ran off to — drum roll, please — Mongolia! The only sitting U.S. president ever to visit the country. I guess he figured since a majority of the population is nomadic and lives in tents, there wouldn’t be quite as many protesters screaming at him in the streets and causing riots like in every other place he visits. This was after stopping in Alaska to once again appear in that G.I Joe military costume he likes to don when talking about his war in Iraq — a war I could swear I heard him refer to as “cirrus bidness.” While addressing the good folks in Alaska, he referred to them as “Arctic Warriors,” no less, and told them to “please be seated unless you don’t have a seat.” He can turn a phrase! I’m just glad he didn’t tell them to pick their seats or offer to push in their stools. Of course, he droned on and on and on about why this war is good and how “we have killed or captured nearly all of those directly responsible for the September 11th attacks.” I guess he kind of forgot about that one minor guy, Osama bin Laden. He went on say, “We have killed or captured several of bin Laden’s most senior deputies, including the man who planned the U.S.” The man who planned the U.S? That is fabulous. And this comes from the White House Press Office transcript of his speech. I had no idea we’d killed George Washington. Of course, Bush used the speech to remind everyone about how Saddam Hussein gassed his own people back in the 1980s. He just forgot to mention one little detail, about his father and Ronald Reagan sending Donald Rumsfeld to sell Saddam the gas he used to commit that heinous act. Oops! Too bad that photo of Rummy and Saddam shaking hands got sent around the Internet. But Mongolia. That’s a pretty remote place to visit just to find someone who’ll talk to you. No offense to anyone from Mongolia, but really. When Bush first announced the trip, my main hope was that he wouldn’t say something like, “Weeeell, you Mongoloids don’t look nearly as bad I figerred!” Or, “You people call this barbecue?” What he did say to them, however, was just as embarrassing. He told Mongolia’s Eagle television, “I will say on your TV screens, there should be no corruption in government, that one of the foundations of any government is the ability for the people to trust the government itself.” This, on the heels of the news that all of those oil company executives lied to Congress when they said they had not participated in Dick Cheney’s secret energy task force. And on the heels of the speech Cheney gave chastising the patriotism of anyone who doubted the administration’s integrity. The look on his face was like someone getting a colonoscopy without anesthesia — or advance warning. Cheney is such a charming fella! He is my second-favorite person now. I would love to wake up to that cheerful face and contagious grin every morning. I hope he doesn’t give up his day job to play the sunshine character on those Jimmy Dean sausage commercials. Here’s an idea for interrogating suspected terrorists to get better results than what we’re getting now by threatening them with dogs and lions and sleep deprivation and hanging them by their wrists. Just put them in a room with the Dick and superglue their foreheads together and see how long they last without spilling the beans. I’d say you’d have Osama’s head on a platter in a matter of hours. The Iraqi insurgents would run like scared little children, and we could finally get the hell out of there and return to some kind of normal existence. It’s one way the Dick might finally be able to do us some good.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

End “Lawsuit Lottery”

Our existing medical liability system in Tennessee sorely needs effective reform. A “lawsuit-lottery” mentality is leading to problems in access to care, with some physicians considering dropping high-risk services. Effective reform would include a fixed cap on what are called non-economic damages and a graduated scale on payments to malpractice lawyers.

We have very good data on what liability insurance costs our doctors here, because more than 10,200 of our state’s 13,400 active practicing physicians are insured through one company, called State Volunteer Mutual Insurance Company (SVMIC). Data shows the cost of liability insurance in Tennessee has gone up 87 percent between 1999 and 2005. This far outstrips the overall rate of inflation.

What is fueling this rise? By Tennessee law, up to one-third of the award goes to the plaintiff’s attorney. Television in the Memphis area is rife with ads from various firms. One firm asks people to contact them for “any injury, major or minor.” Another states “the sky’s the limit.” The result has been both a proliferation of lawsuits and a sharp rise in the money paid out by SVMIC through both settlements and jury awards.

In 1991, there were 877 new suits filed against policyholders of SVMIC, but in 2004 there were 1,534. That’s a 75 percent increase in claims filed.

Is it just the “bad doctors” who are being sued? Actually, 70 percent of all Tennessee physicians insured by SVMIC in practice over 10 years have been sued, including 92 percent of practitioners of obstetrics/gynecologists and orthopedists and 100 percent of cardiac surgeons.

Who is paying for the defects in our liability system? Unfortunately, it’s our citizens. Ten percent of our state’s hospitals have dropped obstetrical services in the last five years. Older doctors contemplate early retirement, and our new graduates move to other states.

My colleague Jesse Woodall, a Bartlett-based obstetrician/gynecologist, comments, “I gave up obstetrics because I was not making enough to pay my malpractice insurance. I had to quit. My partners and I are not seeing any high-risk obstetrics patients any more, people with any sort of complication, such as high blood pressure during their pregnancy, and these are all things that we’re well trained to do. The suits that are filed and the jackpot juries are a factor. You can do everything perfectly right and still lose the lawsuit.”

Now is the time for the Tennessee General Assembly to take up effective reform legislation in medical liability when it convenes in January. What provisions need to be in that legislation?

Awards in professional liability cases fall into economic damages and non-economic damages. Economic damages are those which can be measured — such as lost wages, hospitalization, and custodial care costs, whereas non-economic damages include such categories as pain and suffering, loss of companionship, and diminishment or loss of the pleasure of life.

California took the lead in putting a “cap” on non-economic damages in the 1970s through legislation called MICRA (the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act). MICRA allows patients to sue if they need to, and it allows unlimited economic damages, but it puts a firm fixed limit of $250,000 on non-economic damages.

Some 26 other states — including Georgia and Colorado — have also established caps, and these states are not seeing a steep rise in liability premiums.

Effective reform legislation for Tennessee’s medical liability system has been introduced in both the state House and Senate. It would allow unlimited economic damages but would cap non-economic damages at $250,000 and set up a graduated scale of payments to a plaintiff’s attorneys.

Now is the time for us to contact our state legislators to ensure that liability reform gets the proper attention in the upcoming session.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Thanksgiving Vino

Thanksgiving at my house is a futile exercise in restraint. Which calorie-laden delight should we gorge on first? We load up on the traditional bread stuffing spiked with country sausage, roast turkey, and tart, homemade cranberry sauce, but we also have the less traditional spicy pork barbecue, which is made by Dad. Yes, we’re a gluttonous bunch, and then we add wine on top of all that. I imagine the excess and I feel fat just thinking about it. But excited too — I love Thanksgiving.

The holiday is the pinnacle of gluttony, a food bacchanal, an excuse to eat 20 pounds of bird. And a fabulous excuse to open bottle after bottle of wine.

First, there’s the walking-around wine while cooking. You don’t want to saddle one person with all the stove and oven work, and since most people in my family know how to cook, we share the duties. This calls for something light and not high in alcohol, like a Sauvignon Blanc, which unfortunately won’t go with the meal itself since the turkey’s flavor gets overwhelmed by the wine. Or you could opt for a festive sparkling wine from California. Hell, wine spurs creativity, so your buzzed brother might feel emboldened and sneak some fresh herbs into the gravy.

Another benefit of the walking-around wine: It promotes hunger and adds a party aspect to dinner, especially if you eat the big meal at noon. It’s a holiday, you know — 10 a.m. drinking is allowed, even encouraged, in some countries.

With the main meal, to match up with the turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, and the rest, my best recommendations are: 1) Drink what you like, no matter what food is in front of you. 2) If you don’t like red wine, drink white with everything. The holiday is about feeling good, right? Besides, a buttery but not too oaky Chardonnay from California is wonderful with Thanksgiving. 3) If you hate white wine, stick with lighter red wines, like French or domestic Pinot Noir, California Syrah, or Australian Shiraz. The heavier wines like Cabernet Sauvignon tend to overwhelm the food, but that could be an advantage in some households. Your call.

So basically, Thanksgiving is an excuse to break open three or four different bottles of the juice, adding pleasure to an already decadent holiday. And after the decadence, you’ll find my fat ass on the couch, numbly watching football.

Recommended Wines

St. Francis Red 2002 (Sonoma County) — A huge, fruity hit with everyone who tried this red blend of five grapes. Lots of flavor personality, but not too much that it wears out its welcome. The delicious, spicy black cherry will complement the meal and even make friends with it. $11

Byron 2003 Pinot Noir (Santa Maria Valley) — A classic California Pinot Noir with crisp acidity that matches well with food; has an earthy cherry flavor, like a fruit party on your tongue, and a velvety texture that makes you crave more. $25

Arrowood 2002 Grand Archer Chardonnay (Sonoma County) — Smooth, silky, and sophisticated with buttery vanilla, ripe pear, tangerine, and lemon. Creamy, rich, and thoroughly enjoyable. $16

Hardy’s 2005 Shiraz Grenache Rosé (Southeastern Australia) — This slightly sweet rosé smacks of juicy strawberry and the fruit goes perfectly with the Thanksgiving meal. Drink alone or with someone. $9

Palandri 2004 Boundary Road Sauvignon Blanc (Southeastern Australia) — A little sweeter than most Sauvignon Blancs I’ve had recently, but it floats on the tongue with a lemon-lime tartness as well. Crisp and clean, perfect as a walking-around wine. $8

corkscrew@creativeloafing.com

Categories
Editorial Opinion

The Stealth Issue

Nothing has underscored the problems of conducting public business so vividly as the ongoing fiasco of the Shelby County Commission’s attempts to deal with the medical malpractice issue.

As we noted two weeks ago, the commission had just passed almost without debate a resolution urging the state legislature to approve significant caps on “non-economic” malpractice judgments. The resolution, which was spoken for by a trio of ad-hoc physicians’ advocates, was opposed at the time by only two commissioners, both trial lawyers. One of these, Walter Bailey, pointed out this week when the issue resurfaced that neither he nor his colleagues nor the public at large had had ample advance notice of the resolution or sufficient information on which to conclude its merits.

Yes, the resolution had passed through one of the commission’s committees, but more or less perfunctorily, and several of the lawyers who showed up at Monday’s commission meeting to protest its passage had known nothing about its existence beforehand.

That is bad enough, but what is far worse is that the commission — with Bailey and fellow lawyer Julian Bolton the only dissenters — had gone on to pass the resolution, more or less on the say-so of its advocates and without fully weighing its pros and cons. To their credit, the members of the commission acknowledged as much Monday and set about finding the best way of correcting their error.

After considering various alternatives, including rescinding the resolution outright, the commission apparently (we use the adverb advisedly, given that the next move still remains unclear) decided to convene a public hearing on the malpractice-reform issue, after which it may or may not alter its original “judgment.”

What makes the whole affair appear even more bizarre is that, as Commissioner Bruce Thompson observed, the commission had no business taking sides on the issue in the first place. “This highlights the danger of diving into areas that we really don’t have influence or control over,” said Thompson, noting the state legislature’s exclusive jurisdiction over medical-malpractice issues. The commission should “look for a graceful way to hand this off,” said the commissioner, who added that even a forum on the matter should be the business of the legislature.

Commissioner John Willingham may have best put his finger on the point when he suggested that the malpractice resolution was only the latest in a series of public matters that have gone before the commission through what he calls “stealth” — without adequate prior notice or consideration. To his credit, the commissioner has made something of a self-professed nuisance of himself these past few years a propos several such matters — most of them having to do with costly public construction projects. Only now, well after the fact, are his warnings being heeded.

In endorsing the commission’s move to rethink its ill-advised recommendations on malpractice reform, Chairman Tom Moss noted that the state legislature “hasn’t paid much attention to us in the past.” That may change, now that everybody — notably the commission itself — is finally paying attention.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From The Editor: Back to Books

So, what are you reading these days? If you asked me, I’d answer: newspaper articles, magazine essays, book excerpts, film reviews, political analyses, and much more. And then, to be honest, I’d have to clarify by adding I read all of the above while hunched over a computer screen, often late into the night.

Meanwhile, the new (and very tempting) Oxford American magazine, themed around Southern art, lies unread on my bedside table; a stack of books I meant to read gathers dust bunnies on the floor. I stagger to bed late, my eyes glazed and weary, my wrist sore from clicking and scrolling. Lord, what have I become?

I grew up loving books, real books. My mother would sometimes have to make me go outside to play in the summer, so much did I prefer the company of The Mudhen and the Walrus or The Kid Who Batted 1.000. And I still love books — the smell of fresh pages, the promise of fresh intelligence or high adventure. I still like sitting under a lamp in a big chair, no keyboard, no clicks, just the soothing sound of a turning page every now and then. So I’ve made the effort lately to reunite with my old flame. I’ve begun reading words on, gasp, paper.

I began with the Bob Dylan autobiography, Chronicles, and found myself transported to Greenwich Village, circa 1961 — a good place to be for an ambitious young musician and a wonderful place to read about for a guy who wanted to be Bob Dylan during his salad days. I learned that one of my favorite albums, New Morning, was made to confound the critics, and some of the songs were originally written for an Archibald MacLeish play. Who knew?

Books, what a concept.

Bruce VanWyngarden, Editor

brucev@MemphisFlyer.com

Categories
Music Music Features

They Don’t Care

Kanye West is the most popular, most high-profile pop musician in the country right now, but you wouldn’t have known it from the crowd when his “Touch the Sky” tour stopped at the Mid-South Coliseum Saturday. While the floor-level seats were mostly full, the upper bowl was mostly empty.

I couldn’t help but flash back to the last time I’d been to a hip-hop concert at the Coliseum — 15 years ago, for Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet” tour. That night in 1990, the Coliseum was packed, fans gangsta-walking around the upper-rim of the arena. And I couldn’t stop wondering why the difference in crowd size was so dramatic.

Memphis may be a notoriously unreliable concert market, but I can’t imagine things were better 15 years ago. The economy is in rough shape, but there can’t be less discretionary income floating around the city than there was in 1990, can there? And it certainly isn’t that West is a lightweight by comparison. Public Enemy then and Kanye West now were/are both major-label rap acts with politicized content that provokes their genre comrades and their respective audiences. The difference is that the less strident West, a protégé of Jay-Z, has it both ways in hip-hop’s ever-raging culture wars in a way Public Enemy couldn’t have imagined. And that — with an album, Late Registration, and a single, “Gold Digger,” that have both spent time recently atop the pop charts — West is a bigger commercial/cultural force.

So why was his audience a third (if that) of what Public Enemy drew to the same venue a decade-and-half ago? The most plausible explanation is that there’s been that much of a sea-change in Southern rap fans. In 1990, hip-hop’s Southern style had yet to fully assert itself. Hip-hop fans everywhere were primarily fans of the music’s East and West Coast titans. Now with the “Dirty South” aesthetic — a distinctive sound and more limited lyrical concerns — ascendant, Southern rap seems to have profoundly altered Southern rap audiences.

West’s scattered live show Saturday night didn’t have quite the musical juice that I remembered from that P.E. show, despite a more promising set-up. With two background singers, a first-rate DJ, a keyboard player, a drummer, and, most intriguingly, a full string section (two cellos, four violins, and a harp — the violinists bobbing in unison like an old-fashioned soul horn section), West seemed to have all he needed for a live approximation of Late Registration‘s opulent musicality, but he was never able to convey the musical depth of that record.

But even if West’s live show underachieved, there was still more than enough happening on the Coliseum stage to convey how much local rap fans were missing.

Public Enemy’s overpowering It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back still gets my vote for best hip-hop album ever, but standing near the back of the lower-level Saturday, I decided that West is the more momentous artist. Though he can be every bit as self-aggrandizing as Public Enemy, he’s less full of shit. West is smarter and his music presents a fuller range of life experience than Public Enemy. Unlike Public Enemy, his admonishments are usually self-implicating and, at his very best, of a cultural complexity that P.E. mouthpiece Chuck D. couldn’t fathom.

Saturday night, West proved as race-conscious as Public Enemy but in a more playful, subtle way. As had opening act Fantasia, West dedicated a song to those who’d been affected by Katrina, hinting at the extent to which the New Orleans disaster has become black America’s 9/11. His intro to “Slow Jamz” acknowledged a soul lineage that runs from Al Green to D’Angelo and R. Kelly. One skit about music he — and his audience — grew up on baited the audience with Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” before pulling the rug out from under them with the equally identifiable new-wave hit “Take On Me.” And West teased his white fans too. In prompting fans into a singalong of the chorus to “Gold Digger,” West added, “White people, this is your only chance to say ‘nigger.’ Take advantage of it!” When West performed the single on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago, the final verse — the one that redeems the song’s potential misogyny while risking making his white fans uncomfortable — was cut off. Here it was back, and when West got to the twist ending in the final line, he fell silent to let the audience shout it out: “You stay right girl/And when he gets on, he’ll leave your ass for a white girl!”

These moments were typical of an artist as defiant as Public Enemy but far more sly about it. After opening the show with “Touch the Sky” and its triumphant horn fanfare, West segued into one of his greatest songs, the 2004 non-single “We Don’t Care,” which defines sly defiance and which has only deepened in the wake of Katrina. He flubbed it a little bit, missing the first verse and doing the second twice, but he made up for it in prompting a crowd singalong on the chorus: “We wasn’t supposed to make it past 25/Joke’s on you, we still alive/Throw your hands up in the sky/And say, we don’t care what people say.”

From there, West’s show had stops and starts, but as one song followed another, the richness of his music became towering. West has amassed an incredible body of work over the past couple of years, but in Memphis he didn’t find the audience it deserves. Maybe he should open Crunkfest next time. And I wouldn’t put that past him either.

Categories
Opinion

Sears Sale?

news feature By John Branston

The Midtown monster is back.

At least as far as the planning office and public hearing stage. And that’s as much of a life-sign as the massive Sears Crosstown building, opened in 1927, has shown in years.

Sears Crosstown is Midtown’s biggest building and biggest eyesore — 1.36 million square feet of empty space enclosed in dirty yellowish brick, broken windows, rusting fire escapes, and general neglect. It sits just south of the intersection of North Watkins and North Parkway, with a 200-foot tower tall enough to block out the afternoon sun for a piece of the neighboring Evergreen Historic District.

Too big and expensive to tear down and too old to attract serious interest as a retail store, Sears Crosstown is an 80-year-old orphan. Now that might — underline might — change.

The building is supposed to be sold in December, and a public hearing is scheduled for December 8th at City Hall on a redevelopment plan that includes retail, commercial, office, and residential space. An application was filed with the Memphis and Shelby County Office of Planning and Development (OPD) on October 26th. OPD will make a recommendation on December 2nd. The identity of the purported buyer, like the identity of the current owner, is vague.

Sears closed the last vestiges of its retail, catalog shopping, and warehouse operations in 1990. In 2000, Sears sold the property to Memtech LLC for $1.25 million. Beyond its incorporation in Delaware and its name, which evoked images of Memphis and technology, Memtech was an unknown quantity.

Memphis architect Guy Payne, who is working with the prospective new owners, said Memtech’s living and breathing face was “a lady out of New York.” Payne said the would-be new owners, who go by the name DBS LLC 2, include a local and an out-of-towner who are laying low until the sale closes.

“They’re not going to tear it down,” Payne said. “They will keep everything.”

As a first step, Payne said the new owners plan to repair the broken windows, remove the rusty fire escapes, and seal the building off from the vagrants and thieves who have ransacked it over the years. Sears sits on 19 acres and includes a tower that is the tallest building between downtown and Clark Tower in East Memphis; an 11-story warehouse with a two-story addition; and a parking garage. The top of the tower includes an executive office (reputed to be quite plush by old-timers who have seen it) and a red, 75,000-gallon water tank that supplied a sprinkler system.

No one would propose building such a massive building today next to a neighborhood where new houses must conform to historic guidelines, but Sears Crosstown — especially the tower section — has its fans among preservationists. It was recently named one of the 10 most endangered historic buildings in Tennessee by the Tennessee Preservation Trust.

Bill Bullock, president of the Evergreen Historic District Association, notified his board last week that an application for redevelopment of the property has been filed.

“I spoke with Guy [Payne], and while specific details like which big-box anchors are being considered were not available to us, I was generally pleased with the outcome of our conversation,” he said. He recommends that the Evergreen association support the redevelopment.

The prototype for possible renovation of Sears Crosstown is a similar Sears building in Boston near Fenway Park, which was renovated to include a movie theater, retail, and housing. The Memphis application includes before-and-after photographs of the atrium of Boston’s Landmark Center.

Midtown is not exactly Boston, and North Watkins is a far cry from Fenway Park. Talk is cheap when it comes to Sears Crosstown or a long-rumored Target in Midtown. Without knowing any more about the prospective new owners and their financing and track record, the Land Use Control Board and Midtown neighbors are acting on faith and hope.

The Land Use Control Board makes recommendations to the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission, which have the final say. OPD planner Mary Baker said it is not unusual for the staff to have to act on incomplete information about prospective developers.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the editor

Congrats

The “Generation Gap” offering by John Branston in his City Beat column (November 17th issue) was superb. We should all be able to, when appropriate, set aside the things that separate us to celebrate the things that unite us. Congrats to John for pointing out such a situation and doing so in such a wonderful fashion. Our young people have much they can learn from older generations, but those of us in older sets have much to learn from them.  

Sam GoffMemphis

Malpractice Reform

Bravo for an excellent “malpractice reform” opinion by attorney Mark Ledbetter (Viewpoint, November 10th issue). Malpractice reform is a misnomer for loss of accountability and disclosure.

My husband died in a Memphis hospital as the result of hospital-acquired infections in combination with incompetent treatment. The physician responsible for his death now has been named in (at least) three active lawsuits and needs to be prevented from practicing. She continues to practice in a critical-care area of a major hospital.

Laws such as those at issue allow insurance companies to impose protective orders on disclosure while paying meager policy limits which permit physicians and/or hospitals to continue business as usual. Not only will malpractice escalate, bad physicians will continue to practice — with higher premiums to cover their incompetence. Hospitals will enjoy the same protection from disclosure and accountability for their practices.

Do people realize that a jury may never hear their side of the story if caps are put in place? Results will be the same as those enacted for HMOs, which cannot be sued. When people give up their right to be heard, it means that bad doctors will continue to be free to practice bad medicine.

Julia B. Young

Memphis

Editor’s note: For an opposing view, see Viewpoint, page 17.

A Dark Hour

The winter of 1776 marked a dark hour on the American continent. The American Revolution had almost certainly failed and with that failure would come the death by hanging of its perpetrators, including George Washington and John Adams. Worse still came the news that in New York and New Jersey the British and Hessian armies were applying the standard European war doctrine of “shock and awe,” called in those days “quarter.” That meant the murder by rifle butt and bayonet of most wounded and many unwounded captured American soldiers and the brutal treatment and starvation of those POWs not murdered. (A larger percentage of American POWs died in British hands than did those in WW II Japanese camps.) The news from the countryside was even worse, as Hessian troops ran amok, burning, looting, and raping women and girls.

If ever there was a time for retaliation, it was then. Surely the Congress and General Washington would order stern measures to be taken. Surely captured British and Hessian troops would receive the same treatment. Washington would surely order “enhanced interrogation techniques” to be employed against captured prisoners to obtain vital intelligence necessary for the winning of the war.

Well, no. As Pulitzer Prize author D.H. Fisher writes in Washington’s Crossing: “In 1776, American leaders believed it was not enough to win the war. They had to win it in a way that was consistent with the values of their society and the principles of the cause.” Washington ordered POWs to be treated appropriately and provided with adequate food and shelter. Congress, at the instigation of John Adams, adopted a “policy of humanity.”

Those Americans, men of their time, believed that their personal honor, morality, decency, and Christian ethics were more important than mere survival.

But that was then. Now is now, I guess.

Clary Lunsford

Memphis

Conviction

Thank you for reminding us in your editorial (November 17th issue) about the Rev. Adrian Rogers. “The man had conviction,” you wrote, and he did, indeed.

Let us all remember that life is an adventure — a gift from God — to which we must commit ourselves and to which we must carry through, one way or another. We must have conviction, loving and serving an ideal. We must right wrongs and be, if necessary, considered crazy by the rest of humanity for trying with every fiber of our being.

Arthur H. Prince

Memphis