I love scouting for local flavor when I visit a new place, or revisiting a gem that I have discovered on a previous adventure.   We live in a nation where, were one to parachute into the vast majority of the national landscape, one would have no idea where they were when they stood after hitting the ground, tucking and rolling.  The standardized McDonald's, Taco Bells, Walmarts, other assorted fry-pits, and strip centers wrought by zoning laws and retailing strategies brought about by globalization have led to a bleak street scene that looks the same in Memphis or Albany, Atlanta or Minneapolis.

Whereas our nation used to be serviced exclusively at the retail and service level by our neighbors, we are now primarily serviced by national or multinational corporations.

The area of Huntsville immediately adjacent to Lincoln Mills is fortunate to be teeming with local flavor, also known individually as "Mom and Pop Shops."

When I went for a haircut at the Five Points Barber, there was a man dozing on the couch like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western who would interject into my conversation with the barberess from time to time.  I could finally resist no more, and whispered to the barberess, "Is that man drunk?"  Her reply: "No, he's the landlord."  I guarantee that you will not find yourself in such a stimulating scene at the Hair Cuttery franchise.

Hurl macho barbs if you must, however my favorite place to have a business lunch is Emma's Tea Room. The ladies who run this splendid establishment are smiling and spunky, and the food and tea are delicious and varied enough to come back every week without boredom ever becoming a concern.

I went into the Five Points Hallmark store, and was greeted with a "what can I help you find?"  I explained that it was my 20th wedding anniversary, gave her one small additional clue, and the proprietress instantly located and handed me the perfect card.  The penguins on the envelope ensured that my youngest daughter would enjoy the presentation as much as my wife.

Olde Towne Coffee stands as one of the few non-Starbuck's coffee shops of which I am aware that sports a graph of increasing sales over its 7-year history.  The locals are to congratulated for supporting this establishment on Pratt by using their lips to sip, not to pay lip service.

Donny and Marie are classic "Mom and Pop" owner/operators at the Po Boy Factory.  I don't know how they make a profit on their scrumptious seafood fare, given the quality and portions.  Their Hot Damn sauce should win some awards, if it has not already. 

Garden Cove,  run by another husband/wife team, is a superb organic food market.

Curtis and his Dallas Mill Deli sport a local following that threaten to overwhelm his establishment's seating capacity in the near future.

Thai Garden is yet another true Mom and Pop, with caring, competent wait staff serving outstanding fare.

What can one say about Star Market Grocery, save for "They get it?"

Even the Region's Bank and Hardee's feel local flavor due to the continuity of their employees providing consistently excellent service. 

There are other local flavor businesses that are in the works, particularly in and around Lincoln Mills.  These will be spotlighted in the near future as they add their spice to the existing substantial local flavor. 

 

As we should.  As we must. 

After years of building in the Atlanta high-rise office market by day, and redeveloping historic property by nights and weekends, a wave of horror swept over me in the Spring of 2005.  The thought that had been brewing for years, and one that I continually suppressed into submission as an optimistic, capitalistic American,  unleashed itself fully into my consciousness:  We as a nation were seriously over-built in every category of real estate, and were thus tremendously overextended financially. I immediately embarked on a mission to shed every piece of real estate that I owned, for I felt that the appreciation models we had been using were in serious error.

Divesting of real estate is rarely easy, and my efforts were made even more difficult by my decision to jar my family from their comfortable suburban life, moving them 3 times in 4 years in order for me to be close to, or actually live in, the projects I was selling out or winding down.  

My ultimate objective was to land in Huntsville or Chattanooga and build a lower overhead, more sustainable life in a city with significant quantities of people who were smart, possessed a sense of humor and a sense of community, and one scaled in size to the future.

Our cat, Pepper, accompanied us on our journey;  I had relented to adopting her after she was found in a box in the creek that wound through Legacy Park.  My hope was that this little mammal would capture and hold my then 12-year old daughter's attention and affection, staving off any interest in boys on her part until she was in her mid-twenties.  (This strategy was a resounding failure, as an aside.)

The home Pepper lived in as an adorable kitten was kitten-perfect, for it had a second-story deck with no steps to the backyard.  The backyard teemed with a rich variety of animals and wildlife, including deer, other cats, dogs, rabbits, squirrels, birds, lizards and an occasional coyote seeking the previously mentioned fare. In this safe setting, Pepper was allowed to experience the great outdoors without actually being in any danger, and this suited my wife Karen's maternal instincts quite well.

Pepper moved with us from this setting into a compact, cool loft community on the south side of Atlanta, and was given her first steady, ground-level access to the outside world. She quickly found a "cat cave" in the bushes, fought her first cat fights, learned to use my test gardens as litter boxes, and gave Karen incredible stress when she did not come in some nights.  

From Hampton Lofts, we moved to a truly stunning ravine setting on the old Roswell Mill site overlooking the 1853 mill dam.  Pepper preceded to decimate the ground squirrels in the area.  She developed a taste for hunting and blood, and she fought to stay outside, again to Karen's great dismay, for coyotes ranged Vickery Creek, and were responsible for many pet "disappearances."

When we moved to Huntsville, a curious thing happened.  We have a cozy master-on-the-main just off the kitchen, and Pepper has taken to what we have come to call the "Cat Condo," spending the vast majority of her time lounging comfortably both on, and under, the big bed.

The cat stands at the top of the predator list on planet earth in terms of adaptability. Though they have a reputation for being finicky eaters, they hunt over 1000 species for food.  As they have been living domesticated with humans for at least 9500 years, they have had a front row seat in witnessing our evolution as a civilization.

Just as Pepper adapted to new realities, as eventually did my family I might proudly add, American society must do the same.  Business as usual, embodied in the credit and consumption economy that we have practiced for at least the last 35 years, is not coming back, nor should it if we are thinking clearly, even if it were possible.  Many successful strategies developed over the past 9500 years can be re-implemented at the community level. Combined with some of the more elegant technologies that have evolved, the future could be an interesting, fulfilling place if we have the courage to adapt like the cat and create it.

I have heard the FarmVille chatter in recent months, however, I was absolutely floored when I spent a few moments with my daughter, Ashley, and had her educate me on this cultural phenomenon. 

Did you know that there is a farming revolution underway?  Every day, over 15 million Americans are intensely, personally managing farms?  This could be very exciting were it not for the fact that these farms are virtual farms, meaning they are virtually worthless beyond their sheer entertainment value.  They don't produce a single calorie of food, and one can farm wearing a suit and never break a sweat.

What if this virtual obsession were to become a real obsession?  What would it look like?  It would look like what the 7 acres of ground and rooftops that make up Lincoln Mills will look like over the next few years.  The relocalization of food in Huntsville will find Lincoln Mills at its epicenter.

When I asked some of my obsessed friends and relatives who play FarmVille if they would like to become urban farmers for real, they laughed and said, "No way.  That would be way too hard."

Yes, it is hard to grow food and tend to animals.  But it is fulfilling and, I believe, more critical to our future success as a country than most realize.  Ask most people where their food comes from, and they reply "Publix."

Speaking of fulfilling, I had a fulfilling speaking engagement before the Northeast Huntsville Civic Association tonight.  This town is chocked full of good people. 

For those bored enough to view the entire Question & Answer session, please click here.

Memphis - 1968 

Using the Bible and the Constitution, King argued and demonstrated that ordinary people can affect history by organizing themselves into a coherent force for change

As a nation, we have much for which to thank Dr. Martin Luther King.  It is not found often in the annals of history that such monumental change has been wrought without extensive violence.  Well done, good Doctor.

In 1968, my then Robert Redford-esque father moved our family to Memphis.  We had yet to exchange our Louisiana auto tag (singular, for this was an era when many families, even successful ones, made do with one car) for a Tennessee plate when Dr. King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis.

My family spent a considerable amount of time in downtown Memphis due to my father’s business being in the area, and what happened over the next few years was perplexing to me.  These beautiful, historic buildings became increasingly void of humans and their activity.  Having no previous point of reference, my parents were unable to explain to me that white flight was decanting a large portion of the downtown population to the suburbs, with their “safe” cul-del-sacs, strip centers and malls (which decimated downtown shopping), and generic office “parks.”

I have inherited my father’s strategy of taking the scenic route (how it pleased my mother!), and as we traversed the Southeast, the economically abandoned, derelict buildings we passed, and sometimes stopped and peered into, would haunt me.  I would sketch plans of reuse in my mind and in my school notebooks, and these sketches usually included an indoor basketball court and a hot tub.  The exposed brick, the massive wood columns and beams, the wood and concrete floors, the expansive rolled steel windows - these features made my spirits soar.

When we moved to Huntsville in 1975, this fine town still had millions of square feet of textile mills standing.  Severely misguided demolition (Merrimack) and massive fires (75% of Lincoln Mills and 100% of Dallas Mill) have reduced the square footage to less than 350,000 square feet (Lincoln Mills and Lowe Mill.) Lowe Mill (www.lowemill.net) is now thriving, and it is the Byrne family’s charge to breathe similar life into Lincoln Mills. 

So as an American, I owe a debt to Dr. King. 

As an individual, I owe him yet another debt, for the societal reverberations emanating from his life and death planted in my heart the intense desire to restore, and place back into useful service, these severely underutilized structures. 

And it appears to me that God has given me the desires of my heart at Lincoln Mills.

An interesting occurrence, one that has actually happened several times as an historic rehabilitator in the South, is when a local informs me, after glancing sideways in both directions, and then drawing close to whisper, “you know, this building was part of the Underground Railroad.” 

The Underground Railroad, for those unaware souls qualified to be both screened and accepted for “Are You Smarter Than a 5^th Grader,” is not the insane proposal to bore roads underneath downtown Atlanta to relieve that city’s crushing congestion, rather it was the network of safe-houses that abolitionists strung together to get escaped southern slaves to the North and relative safety.

The fact that many of these buildings were built decades after the Civil War and slavery immediately negates this possibility, however, many people like to hang on to their pet stories, and whether they are actually true or not becomes secondary- they like the truth being elusive in this instance.

Ray Jones has written a quaint history of his family’s purchase and development of what is now known as Jones Valley (The Farm in Jones Valley, readily available at Barnes and Nobles on Carl T. Jones Blvd in Huntsville)  As evidence of how he has lived two or three lives in one, he nary once mentions his, or his father's, substantial role with the HIC building, the Huntsville Hilton and other forays.  

The Jones family’s relationship with the City of Huntsville has been a broad, two-way street, with both parties benefiting through the years.  For instance, the important roads that we use to criss-cross Jones Valley sit on land that was donated to the City by the Jones family. 

And the Jones family has been quite generous with sharing their time and resources through the years.  As an example, though their family are all Huntsville High graduates, they allowed the team that designed and built a float for Grissom’s 1978 homecoming to utilize one of their farm buildings.   This float, extravagant by high school standards, featured an androgynous Senior in cap and gown with two outstretched hands, one clutching a diploma and the other sporting what appeared to be a “We’re #1!” finger.  The problem was that the "We're #1" hand had only three fingers due to design difficulty, time constraints, or some other valid reason.  My father swore that Burke and his team were giving the people in the stands the middle finger salute that does not mean "We're #1," and Burke fiercely maintained that the truth was far more benign. Through the years, neither side has budged on their convictions or perceptions. 

The truth will remain elusive regarding this cherished Sisco story.

Ashley Sisco feels the pain

One of the many Stapler-isms that have made me smile is the statement that you “have to be queer for it,” which means to desire something intensely.

My daughter Ashley has as parents two decent former quarter-milers, so it did not surprise us when she excelled on the track.  Biomechanically, she is a beautiful runner, simply gorgeous when she is stretched out in a race.  By her junior year in High School, she had risen to the level just under the true elite, winning the County title in the 800.

Something I noticed, however, and something that she readily admitted was that she seemed to never leave everything on the track; she always held back from running all-out. When I ran, I would often feel as if I was going to projectile vomit as I staggered like a newborn giraffe calf at the end of a race.  Ashley, on the other hand, recovered almost immediately.  Though she had good genes and incredible talent, she was not queer for it.   Her career ended by her choice after a year at Kennesaw State, and her mother and I smile bitter sweetly when we hear her play woulda-coulda-shoulda.

Although I, too, am guilty of playing woulda-coulda-shoulda from time to time, particularly when it comes to transferring out of a medical track into real estate development while in college, I am doing what I truly love.  Marrying historic rehabilitation with sustainability is where my heart is. I’m absolutely queer for it.

Over the twelve months of 2010, we believe that the changes underway at Lincoln Mills will be so profound that many in this fine city will become queer for it, perhaps even to their own surprise.

Coach Ronnie Stapler and Nathan Sisco - December, 2009I found out the hard way that the door to college athletics closes quickly if one does not pass through at the appointed time.  There’s a new crop of high school seniors close on your heels, and, though you do hear the occasional tale of some older athlete overcoming obstacles and making it back onto the court or field, statistically that’s very rare.  Second Chances in this scenario are few and far between, almost non-existent.  If Led Zeppelin and chemicals distract, then seduce, the opportunity is lost.

One of my Mother’s sayings is “Babies are God’s way of telling us that he wants the world to go on, for humans to keep doing what humans do.”  These babies grow into daughters and sons who can sometimes give us Second Chances. 

Though I could never have predicted the circuitous path through which it became a reality, my son, Nathan, is playing basketball at Randolph.  Coach Ronnie Stapler, my coach at Grissom High, is coaching Randolph’s varsity girls’ team, and Nathan is privileged to have almost daily Coach Stapler contact and influence.  Coach Stapler is a passionate master devoted to the game of basketball.  His influence on the game and the players in this region has been, and continues to be, immense.

Though I’m not neurotically trying to live vicariously through my son, I love watching him play.  I see the joy it brings him, and the endorphin high that shows itself in his elevated, playful mood after games and practice. It gives me a Second Chance to enjoy the superb entertainment that high school basketball affords.

Moving back to Huntsville, after living away for almost three decades, has proven to me the adage that “you can never go home again” – simply put, people and places change.  Second Chances, though, with special people have presented themselves, and from this an unexpected observation has surfaced – just as it is often easier to build a building from the ground-up, versus restoring an existing one, the same can be said for human relationships.  I contend, however, that the rewards are far greater if the complexity of restoring buildings or relationships is embraced and navigated, versus starting fresh.

For a building example, the galvanized pipe that looks so solid and reusable from the outside is ruined from the inside.  Instead of being able to reuse this pipe, the extra cost of demolition must be added to the budget.  At first glance the pipe is an asset, when in reality it is a liability.

As the renovations gather speed at Lincoln Mills, it is my distinct feeling that, if these buildings could talk, as they become cleaner and brighter, and as they refill their quiet, lonely, dark interiors with lively, complex humans doing all the things that humans do, these buildings would proclaim the power of Second Chances.  If they had voices, they would fill this valley, in which they have lived now for the length of an average human life, with song. If they had hands, they would applaud the humans who join in this adventure in spite of the complexity of the undertaking. If they had feet, they would surely dance.

• The early 1900s cotton fabric mill was converted to a Duck (canvas) mill. This would be like converting an automobile factory to one making trains. (That's an idea worth lifting, Detroit.)
• The Duck factory was later converted to office, laboratory and manufacturing space instrumental in placing men on the moon, and Huntsville on the high-tech map.
• The evolution of the site, and our society, now yields the 4th configuration - an inspiring, sustainable village combining the old and the new, low tech and high tech, rich and poor, work and play, food and drink, young and old, black and white, body and spirit, education and relaxation.

I lived in Memphis in the shadow of Graceland for 8 years.  Though we saw Priscilla, and Lisa Marie riding her horses and go-carts, and Vernon and many other family and friends, we never saw Elvis. 

During this intensely innocent age, I became fascinated with beavers.  The woods behind my home contained a creek that connected two lakes, and this environment was teeming with beavers and their unmistakable industry.  I marveled at one dam that was over 6 feet tall, and both lakes contained classic beaver lodges.

However, just as I never saw Elvis, I never saw a beaver.  Beavers are nocturnal, and truth be told, I did see a shadowy glimpse of several at night with my not-yet-diagnosed legally blind vision, including some gliding silently through the water;  silent, that is, until they smelled me with their little wet nose and slapped the water with their tail before diving to safety.  But never did I see a beaver in all its glory when the sun was up.

The day we drove to our new home in Huntsville in May of 1975, my luck changed dramatically.  As we entered the city, there, on the side of the road, I spotted a beaver in broad daylight.  My dad, surprisingly, careened wildly to a halt in the roadside gravel upon hearing my “beaver!” shriek.  Having read for years how slow and clumsy beavers were on land, I jumped out thinking that I might be able to capture this handsome specimen.   However, the speed with which he or she returned to the creek from which it had come was astonishing.

Back in the car, with the family in high spirits, my father announced that Elvis was in town for a concert.  Ten minutes after the beaver episode, we pulled into the swanky, sparklingly-new Huntsville Hilton.  Dad said that it was almost guaranteed that Elvis would be staying there, so we pulled into the back parking lot and came in by the dock.  There were some young ladies congregated there bouncing with joyful, nervous energy.  As I gathered in this interesting spectacle, Elvis in the flesh breezed by right in front of me, fully decked out in his classic late-period white jump suit, wearing sunglasses and a hazy, lazy smile.   I am still uncertain if the palpable energy that I felt was due to his charisma or the bouncing girls, but I certainly felt something special.

Before I had even laid my head down to sleep in my new city, I had been close enough to touch Elvis, and almost close enough to touch a beaver.  I interpreted these events as a sign, later proven correct, that life was going to be good in Huntsville, Alabama.

Fast forward to 2009

In our continued peeling of the onion at Lincoln Mills, we came across two rooms chocked full of Huntsville Industrial Associates’ business records.  HIA was the group of 35 business and government leaders who purchased the textile mills and converted them into the Huntsville Industrial Center.  In a text-book case of business acumen and prowess, HIA plowed their not-insignificant profits, derived from leasing the HIC Building to the likes of Brown Engineering, Chrysler, Boeing, and NASA, into other Huntsville properties - including conceiving and developing the Huntsville Hilton.   

So when Elvis laid his head down and drifted to sleep that May night in 1975,  the Lincoln Mills/HIC Building had played a significant role in his finally coming to Huntsville to perform, for Elvis would stay in no hotel but a Hilton.

Just as the redevelopment of Lincoln Mills features a wide range of residential, educational and commercial uses, it follows that the heart of the village, the Dye House Theatre, will feature diverse entertainment and inspiration. 

Concerts, movie screenings, plays, recitals, dances, parties, speeches and sermons will fill the weekly schedule. 

The Viridian Room, an extraordinary loft connected to the theatre, will provide entertainers with a cozy pre- and post- event refuge. 

This fly-thru shows the location of the Dye House Theatre and the surrounding property development. 

Unique and affordable, the Dye House Theatre opens April 1, 2010, and is accepting bookings now. 

Please contact us at:

dyehouse@lincoln-mills.com 

256-319-5638.