Brandon Dill – Memphis Flyer

Greg Cravens

About Toby Sells’ cover story, “Engaging the Big Muddy” …

Toby Sells and Brandon Dill captured the mystery, the magic, and the majesty of the big river, not to mention the good-time fun. And Joe Royer is the Mississippi’s greatest Memphis protagonist!

The only thing not covered were details about safety, e.g., when to go and when not to go — and the myriad considerations paddlers need to make when approaching such a powerful force of nature. Fortunately, there is an excellent guide available on the internet: The River Gator’s Paddler’s Guide.

Anyone considering safe paddling in the Memphis area (and beyond), please visit the River Gator. Some of the Memphis routes described in the River Gator were pioneered by Joe Royer and his wife Carol Lee. Many Memphians were consulted as experts for the River Gator (including the editor of the Flyer!).

There are dozens of pages covering the many choices for paddlers in between Shelby Forest State Park and Memphis, including the main channel, and enticing alternate back-channel routes such as those behind Brandywine, Hickman, Loosahatchie, and Redman. There is a very detailed safety section describing the specific skills paddlers should know before attempting the challenges of the biggest river in North America.

John Ruskey

About Bianca Phillips’ post, “State Bill Would Allow Religious Clergy to Deny Same-Sex Marriage” …

I’m trying to remember anywhere in all of the arguments over this where gay people said they wanted to force ministers and other clergy members to marry them. Everything I’ve seen has been they wanted the government to allow them to marry and for the government to recognize it. That is all.

Charlie Eppes

I am pretty sure that religious clergy already have the freedom to refuse to marry two individuals regardless of the reason. The only purpose of this proposal is to score political points.

Barf

Today’s ruling clearly stated that no minister was going to be forced to marry a same-sex couple if they did not choose to do so. Again, this is a way of wasting Tennesseans’ taxpayer money on frivolous bills rather than working to decrease our uninsured or create jobs, neither of which the Republican majority has shown any interest in.

Lane Scoggins

This is just the first step toward man-turtle unions and the death of Christianity. I firmly believe that although Christianity survived the Roman empire, it is helpless in the face of gay marriage.

Jeff

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s Letter From the Editor, “Black is the New White” …

VanWyngarden conveniently failed or refused to admit the lost war on poverty has much to do with the policies of the Democratic Party. Poverty, strife, and divisiveness will continue to swell until politicos stop rewarding bad behavior.

By his own admission, President Johnson’s “Great Society” entitlement programs were created to cement constituents to the Democratic Party. This nefarious scheme damaged the African-American communities most. Instead of the government concentrating on how to get citizens out of ghettos, the entitlement programs too often kept them there.

Victimization has become the key to successful Democratic election results. President Obama’s policies and that of most democratic strongholds in American cities have resulted in the greatest degree of black poverty and black-on-black crime in recent history.

There are no easy answers, but a strong economy fueled by less taxation and a healthier business climate will go far toward creating opportunity for all.

William Pollack

Many whites exist in a poverty of compassion that is compounded by the illusions created by what Douglas Adams called the “Somebody Else’s Problem” effect (SEP). SEP is a psychological effect where people choose to dissociate themselves from an issue that may be in critical need of recognition. Such issues may be of large concern to the population as a whole but can easily be a choice of ignorance by an individual.

Scott Banbury

Years ago, photographers in the Sears portrait studio at Crosstown captured timeless images of happy families. But at a photo shoot inside the Crosstown building last month, shots were of peeling paint on columns in cavernous, leaky warehouse rooms or bathroom floors covered in shattered bits of smashed porcelain sinks.

Around 40 photographers and videographers captured these images in the long-vacant Sears Crosstown building at the end of May. Crosstown Arts video producer Justin Thompson organized the final photo shoot before construction begins on the 1.4-million-square-foot future “vertical urban village” that will be home to a combination of medical, educational, arts, and residential spaces.

“We’ve known for a long time that there would come a time when we couldn’t go in there, and the building would change forever,” Thompson said. “[Crosstown development project leader] Todd [Richardson] said we needed to go ahead and do this, because we are running out of time.”

Photographer Hope Dooner not only shot haunting images of the abandoned building, she also found some closure. Her boyfriend David, whose father managed Sears years ago, died recently, but Dooner said he grew up playing in the building while his dad worked.

“I felt a real presence of him in there. I could imagine him skateboarding through the warehouse,” Dooner said.

Richardson said the development team is waiting on a $15 million new market tax credit allocation from the federal government, which “could happen any day now.” That’s the final piece of funding for the $180 million project, and after that happens, there will be a 60- to 90-day financial closing before construction begins.

Once construction is complete, the Crosstown building will house the Church Health Center, Gestalt Community Schools, Memphis Teacher Residency, Crosstown Arts, and some offices for Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, Rhodes College, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and ALSAC. It will also contain apartments and some retail stores.

Even though construction is a couple months away, Richardson said the building is already changing inside.

“Right now, we’re removing some of the historic items that we want to keep and reuse. Some will be used for Crosstown Arts in their spaces, and some will be used in the building’s common areas and in the landscape,” Richardson said. “There are 80 ladders in the building, and we’ll cut those in half and install them in the apartments as towel racks. Some of the big tanks will be cut up and used as benches for the community garden.”

After the photo shoot event, Thompson asked all the photographers involved to share their pictures for the Crosstown Arts archives. Some may be used in a future art show, and others could wind up in a documentary that Thompson has been working on about the development of the Crosstown building.

“We knew from the beginning that this project would be a long shot, and if it did work, it needed to be documented — from the physical aspect of the building itself to the community-building process and the creative process,” said Richardson, who is also an art history professor at the University of Memphis. “Justin [Thompson] has been documenting our events since the first MemFEAST in our basement in 2010 with 50 people.”

Richardson said the Crosstown Development Team has been sensitive to keeping as much of the building intact as possible. Some areas inside will be demolished to house light wells, but the exterior will look largely the same.

“From the beginning, when we started working with our architects, my message was ‘Look, guys, the building is awesome as it is. We just can’t screw it up,'” Richardson said. “You’d think that renovating and cleaning and making new would automatically equate to improvement, but that’s not necessarily the case. People are very attracted to the building as it is, so we need to make it more attractive not by covering it up but by accentuating what is already there.”