When we moved out of the seminary apartment and into a home on Brookland Parkway we found a Sherwood Park neighborhood newsletter on our steps. How friendly! Inside we found out about the neighborhood listserve, subscribed to it, and have continued to subscribe after moving across Laburnum Avenue last summer. It keeps us informed about lost pets, dubious door-to-door salesmen, and other Northside phenomena.
Over the weekend someone posted this to the listserve:
Neighbors,
Are you aware that the former Holiday Inn is about to become a night club open from 9 PM until 3 AM every Friday and Saturday night?
This morning __________ handed me an advertising postcard and free grand opening pass for the Zodiac Night Club at the former Holiday Inn. They are planning Hip Hop parties every weekend starting March 25.
We need to organize and stop this before we have all the problems moving from Shockoe Bottom to our community.
After a few other posts rallying to this call to action, I decided to put in my two cents worth:
I think that more facts are needed before there's any organized attempt to stop this new nightclub. Who are the managers? Has anyone contacted them? Do they have a plan for security and crowd control? Do they manage other nightclubs, and if so, what's the safety record at their other locations?
If these questions can be answered satisfactorily, then the neighborhood doesn't need to organize to stop this, but to welcome a new business to the community. A well-run business in that location would certainly be preferable to a building standing empty. And I imagine that well-run nightclubs do exist; they just don't make headlines.
In short, the neighborhood needs to act out of a sense of curiosity, not from a place of knee-jerk fear, stereotyping and NIMBYism.
Yours,
Marvin Lindsay
In reply I got one "Hear hear" and one request to confirm my current residence in Sherwood Park since the home we used to lived in on Brookland Parkway was demolished last summer. "We live in Bellevue, at 1216 Greycourt Avenue," I replied, and that's the last email I've received from the listserve. But my wife has received several messages from the listserve since then.
I think I have been banned!
I guess it's because we've moved so very, very far from Sherwood Park, and live so much farther from the old Holiday Inn at Boulevard and Hermitage than Sherwood Park residents do, that I really have no business commenting on local matters:
Now that outside agitators like me have been silenced, the group can get on with assembling pitch forks and marching on City Hall.
Meanwhile my wife, who due to sloppy purging on the administrator's part is able to function as my Sherwood Park listserve mole, informs me that still another person has posted on the dread scourge of hip hop invading our community in the dead of night. According to this person, the nightclub's already been open for a couple of weeks now.
Imagine that: black folks dancing and rapping and they slept right through it! That sleep apnea machine works wonders, doesn't it?
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