Live in Salemtown and need to drive out somewhere on the morning of Saturday, Oct. 11? Well, Germantown is closing down our streets half that morning, so you better rearrange your life to suit their tipsy raccoon 5K run. HGI President Stacy Mosley just announced it to us this week, saying that the organizers of the "Germantown Street Festival" (NOT "Germantown Oktoberfest") wanted to highlight our "charm" as they see it with or without our consent.
We'll try to suspend all of our frivolous suspicious person calls in honor of that day. We would like to invite Tennessean reporter and G-town resident Janell Ross to join us on the sidelines as we cheer the runners on along the charming streets of Salemtown before we restart plaguing police in our inimitable race-based ways once again.
I think its great that they are including our neighborhood for the race. And I also think that politics should be set aside for this wonderful festival. Oktobefest/Germantown Street Festival is a very special event for North End, and I am very proud to be apart of it. So there are a lot of changes,...nothing can stay exactly the same forever. Did ever occur to you that all the changes could be for the good? Did ever occur to you that no one outside of north end will even notice or care that changes were made, as long as brawts and beer will still be served? Did it ever occur to you that not only will Salemtown survive the "small" inconvenience of closed streets for a few hours on a saturday, most of us don't really care? Its a festival, just enjoy it.
ReplyDeleteIf you really do live in Salemtown, ubiquitous anonymous commenter, then the whole point is that you were NOT a part of it. Despite Salemtown's best efforts to collaborate on things, G-town has decided that they will go their own way until they need us (and they generally require our participation in nothing). I've got no problem with the idea of them holding their race through our streets. What I do have a problem with is their presumption that they treat us with at-arms-length, need-to-know paternalism. We have older long-time residents (not Johnny-come-lately, empty-nest lifestylers) here who probably should have known about this sooner.
ReplyDeleteThat paternalism turned into seething belligerence this week in the form of e-mails sent by their officers to our association leadership about the post above. They verbally abused other SNNA members who have nothing to do with this blog. So, that did not help the impression that HGI has a certain loathing of Salemtown, which is also probably consistent with the relationship of the distant past, too, when S-town was Kalb Hallow, the factory working class section of the Germantown area, what is now Historic G-town was the professional and guild section of Nashville's "first suburb."
But if you really do live in S-town, and you don't mind being used as a G-town tool thinking that their leadership respects you, then more power to you. It's a self-evident no brainer that if they sell beer and food then people are going to come. There's nothing unique or special about that. And the fight over money that drove the two groups to have different festivals this year diminishes the sense of pride that I felt for the past four years in living here. Regardless of what you say, it won't be the same experience for me that it was (with the exception of those Mad Platter Reubens).