by Peter Schmidtke
“There are certain things you probably should buy new, but for other things, you should definitely come and take a look here, because either we have it, or we will have it.”
Riverwest residents Trent Hanson and Angela Botka stepped out for a bite of Mexican food and returned home the proud co-owners of a thrift shop.
For Riverwesters used to contentious public meetings with their elected officials, this meeting felt a bit kinder and gentler. On October 10, the Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgendered (“LGBT”) Community Center hosted its annual Public Officials reception in honor of National Coming Out Day.
by Sonya Jongsma Knauss / photo by Peter Di Antoni
Clinton Clay was born in Mississippi and raised in the streets. He has bounced around from town to town, but somehow, after all these years, he ended up in Riverwest. It feels like home. The 76-year-old Clay puffs on cigarettes as he talks from his “office” at a table in Onopa. “The most beautiful women in the world are here!” he says of Riverwest, looking out the big windows. It’s a topic he likes to come back to. “And they all are friendly!” he says.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” -Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
On October 10, about 150 people participated in a Town Hall meeting held in a church at 22nd and Center Streets. Many of them were residents in the area where a mob made up mostly of young teenagers recently beat a man to death. People at the gathering were addressing problems and possible solutions in their neighborhood.
Eudemon stopped in at the new place on Weil and Hadley, Nessun Dorma, to check it out. It is another Riverwest corner bar that has gone through changes over the years. Eudemon thought of earlier versions, recently the Stork Club, a gritty bar with lots of characters. The Gordon Park Pub, with a palette of music ranging from Voot Warning, the Violent Femmes, to the Ghostly Trio with their translucent red Christmas album of ghostly carols.
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