Recently, a friend of mine picked up an 8-month-old mamma dog and her 2 puppies from the area near Jefferson and Cox in Midtown. As the picture shows, they were in deplorable condition. She took them to Memphis Animal Clinic in CY where Dr. Tower, Dr. Seratt, and their terrific staff cared for them day and night. One of the puppies had parvo but is now doing well. Many vets would have put her down.
I thank Memphis Animal Clinic for the terrific care these animals received. They have all been adopted out to good homes. We also thank Jennifer Dobbs for help in the funding process.
I highly recommend Memphis Animal Clinic to all. Thank you, Dr. Tower and Dr. Seratt for the great care you gave.
Patricia Primrose

Cooper-Young recently lost a resident; I lost a neighbor and friend. Since the 1930s, Ella Mae Hasty has lived at the same address with her husband. She was independent and somewhat difficult to know. My mother remembered one day the door bell rang. Mrs. Hasty was standing on the porch with a cup and stated, “I need to borrow a cup of sugar.” Remember those days? After that she became a good friend and close neighbor.

As the years went by, she would recall Cooper-Young but not as we know it now. The Drum Shop was the Peabody movie theater. Street cars ran the middle of Cooper from Young to Madison. There were several grocery stores and a hardware store at the corner of Cooper and Young where she shopped. She knew every crack in the sidewalks and every bump in the streets. Her love for her husband and church and enjoyment of ceramics was her life. God gave her 99 years on this earth. I will miss her.

– Bob Isgren

Most remember our company, Barnett USA, as the ice machine company in the Cooper-Young district. Started in 1957 by my dad, Cliff, we were based at 2089 York Avenue, with additional locations in Nashville, TN; Jackson, MS; and Louisville, KY. We employed over 30 people. Unfortunately, because of the continual sewage and flooding we have experienced on our property and the City’s refusal to address or correct the problems, we can no longer use our facility. We were forced out, literally, from our Cooper-Young home base. We now operate from 1721 September Ave.

We have been begging the City for help since the early 80’s, but nothing has been done. On November 22, 2010 we met with Tetratech and City officials at Snowden School to discuss the problem. After the meeting I was expecting updates in some capacity, but that has not happened. As a Cooper-Young property owner, my concerns grow daily with the lack of communication. While residents and businesses have suffered varying levels of damage, our 15,000 + square foot office/warehouse is a total loss of $1.2M, and the City expects us to continue paying the enormous property taxes as if our business were still there. Adding insult to injury, I was sued by the City and fire services in environmental court because they wanted me to tear down the building and clean up the destruction they left me with.

This has been an ongoing issue for our family, and I think it’s time for us to consider and prepare contingency plans should the City continue with their do nothing approach. Today I met with members of the TN Recovery Project Program. They had no idea of the devastation we had suffered until they reviewed some of the pictures. They have provided me with some options for consideration, and I would be interested to know if any other affected businesses or families would like to be involved? I am sure most anyone affected by the flooding has run out of patience dealing with the City of Memphis and what the mayor calls “red tape that hurts” everyone. If you have interest, please send an email to Bruce@BarnettUSA.com.

Sincerely,
Bruce Barnett

By Randy Norwood
After reading the preface from Cooper-Young: A Community that Works [reprinted in the September LampLighter], I am definitely looking forward to reading this interesting book. Since Cooper-Young is an older neighborhood that remained relatively stable all through the years when Memphis pushed the city limits east, it should be enlightening to read how the neighborhood did not succumb to white flight, slumlords, failing businesses, deteriorating property values, and increasing crime rate as many areas in Memphis did, especially in the 1970s.
However, in the rather rosy introduction to the book, the authors seem to imply that most of the houses in Cooper-Young have been renovated and that hardly any houses have been abandoned. Of course, this is not the case. I live in the area, and I have noticed several dwellings that need extensive work, as well as some that are boarded up. These distressed houses are not common, but there are several scattered throughout the neighborhood.
Nevertheless, Cooper-Young is on an upswing. Strong neighborhood and business associations, coupled with middle and high income home owners, have transformed the area into a trendy, family-friendly neighborhood that people are genuinely connected to. In many ways Cooper-Young is an oasis in a harsh urban environment. However, there is plenty of work to be done to make sure the deterioration and neglect of some Cooper-Young houses does not continue.

By Dee Sanders
As Bob and I prepare to leave Cooper-Young, I am finally writing the letter I intended to write shortly after we arrived here two years ago and realized what an amazing place we had landed in. When a job transfer required us to move to Memphis and leave South Carolina for the first time ever, you can imagine how anxious we were. We had never stepped foot in Memphis! After hours of online research, we arrived in town on a Sunday afternoon. We had to find a home before we left on Tuesday. I had come across the CY neighborhood and CY Festival websites before we arrived to house hunt. We still felt like we needed to look around, and we did: Collierville, Bartlett, Germantown, and even Mud Island. We kept coming back to a little house on Young Avenue, and it chose us.
The first weekend we were in town we volunteered at the neighborhood water stop for the St. Jude Marathon. There we made the first of our very great friends. At every stop along this journey of two years in “the hood”, we have been continually welcomed, excited, and entertained. We have made lifelong friends, and as our dear Maggie Cardwell said to me, “Cooper-Young is like Hotel California. You can check in, but you can never check out!”
Oh how we hope this is true, because we will certainly be leaving a part of our hearts here. We want everyone to take a minute and truly appreciate where you are. We cannot imagine how we would have dealt with leaving our family and friends without the support of this neighborhood. We leave with heavy hearts and great thankfulness for the chance to have been Cooper-Youngians! Remember, you are blessed to be here. It is a special, special place!

I was distressed to see online in your June LampLighter issue that one of John Gaisford’s beautiful buildings [the Union Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church on the corner of Union and Cooper] may be demolished to make way for a chain drugstore.

John Gaisford was the brother of my grandmother, and he was a well-respected architect. He was born the son of a carpenter and builder in Warminster, Wiltshire, England on October 6, 1875. In 1896, he immigrated to Memphis where he married twice and died on August 31, 1917. He was buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, Memphis. He was a prolific architect and built many churches and public buildings during his short career.

I hope your conservation lobby can save this church for posterity. Best wishes.

Martin Pomeroy

This letter was written in response to an article titled “Drugstores take over historic corners and neighborhoods have had enough” by Robert Tom which was published in the June LampLighter.

BY TAMARA WALKER

On July 14th, 2008, the Cooper-Young Business Association initiated talks with Mary Baker of the Office of Planning and Development and Bill Schaffer of the Memphis City Engineering Office to discuss ways to slow down traffic on Cooper Street. After meeting with Mary and Bill, we asked the ETI Corporation, an Engineering Planning Company, in March of 2009 to design different possible configurations of Cooper Street that would help us make the street more pedestrian friendly and easier for patrons of our area to access, as well.

At first, we thought that we could reduce the four traffic lanes to two traffic lanes and install a median down the middle. The median would act as a landing spot for the patrons between the traffic lanes. Diagonal parking along Cooper Street was another consideration during this first phase. We thought that if we could increase street parking and make it more accessible than we would effectively eliminate some of the residential parking that occurs during the weekends and on weeknights. The diagonal parking would also help slow down traffic because vehicles would be backing into the street.

The Memphis City Engineering Office determined that diagonal parking was not possible, however, due to all the curb cuts along Cooper Street. In addition, the Engineering office wanted to install parking meters, which we thought would drive business to areas of town where parking is more convenient and free (i.e. East Memphis). At this time, we had ETI Corporation design several mock-ups to include existing parallel parking, a median, two traffic lanes, bike lanes and a turn lane down the whole of Cooper Street from Central to Young. This design would slow down traffic, keep a place in the middle where a pedestrian could land, add bike lanes to connect Midtown, and still maintain the current required parallel parking spaces that exist and are needed by business owners.

We were then faced with the physical limitations of Cooper Street starting at the Young intersection. At the intersection, Cooper Street’s width narrows to 40 feet wide as it goes south toward Southern. This made a real challenge opposed to the 60 foot width that runs from the Trestle Art to Young. At this point, it only made sense that the bike lanes would go from dedicated lanes to ride-share lanes at the Young intersection. These ride-share lanes are common all over the Memphis area and certainly the 2 blocks from Young to Southern shouldn’t be a problem. The last design had two traffic lanes, bike lanes (3/4 dedicated, 1/4 shared), a middle turn lane and parallel parking. It was submitted to Engineering in December of 2009, and it is a win-win for all.

I wanted to provide a background on the modification of Cooper Street that has been on our table for the last several years. The Cooper-Young business district with its thriving retail shops, service locations, antique stores and restaurants is in a delicate position when it comes to losing even one parking space, let alone two whole blocks of parking. In this economy, we must do everything to protect the limited parking that we have otherwise we lose our patrons. If we lose our patrons, we lose our shops.

This opportunity to improve Cooper Street will be a positive for our neighborhood. I hope that the all or nothing attitude of some doesn’t put a negative spin on the whole process. It will be a benefit for our residents, our business owners and our patrons regardless of their mode of transportation.

Tamara Walker is the Executive Director for the Cooper-Young Business Association.

By Emily Bishop

The LampLighter has grown under the leadership of many editors since the premiere issue back in 1989. Some editors have served for several years and some only a few issues. Leslie Jaynes has stepped down as editor after more than a year of service. Leslie worked to broaden the scope of articles printed in the LampLighter and brought a new energy to the task of production. We wish her well.

The search for a new editor was a brief one. Barb Elder interviewed for the job previously but realized because of her other commitments that she would not have the time necessary to do the job. The timing is right now that she is taking some time off from teaching school. Barb, along with her husband, Jason, and daughter, Violet, have lived in CY for almost four years. She is excited about the opportunity to work with the LampLighter staff and the many volunteers that work to publish the paper. This will be Barb’s first editorial endeavor but Cooper-Young has provided many firsts for her already. “This is where we bought our first home. It is where Violet took her first steps. It is where many of our close friends live. We are thankful to be in CY and we love being a part of this community,” said Barb.

The July issue will be the first issue for Barb and she will be meeting lots of new people. Each editor brings their own ideas to the paper and she is enthusiastic about the possibilities that lie ahead. Barb added, “I look forward to getting to know all of you who contribute to this paper on a regular basis. I also invite all of you writers, artists, poets, and photographers out there who have yet to share your thoughts and talents with the rest of us to please get involved. This paper serves to keep our neighborhood connected and informed and is a platform for many of our voices to be heard. What a beautiful thing to be a part of!”

LampLighter benefits from summer internship.

The CYCA has a new intern from the University of Memphis English Department. Kara Chamberlain will be working about 15 hours a week throughout the summer on several projects during her internship. In between the monthly issues of the LampLighter she will work on the CY History project, the CY Festival Friday 4-Miler, the CYCA website, and the LampLighter online.

Kara is also a new resident to CY having just moved to Manila Avenue. She plans to graduate in December and then apply to the Uof M law school.

Last month, I was fortunate enough to attend a Neighborhood Watch retreat sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security. While I can’t say I learned a great deal of new information—as I have long been an avid supporter of NW—the experience did renew my resolve to advocate this critical aspect of community. Criminals, like cockroaches, are most active when they think we’re not looking, and a well-coordinated Neighborhood Watch is, by far, the best way to keep the criminal element at bay. Get to know your neighbors, share contact information, and, by all means, if you want to play a more active role in CYNW, I encourage you to contact our Safety Coordinator, Kyle Gowen, at khgowen@hotmail.com.

Aaron James

Cooper-Young has one major thing in common with our newly chartered neighbors, the Rozelle-Annesdale Historic District to the west, and that is, of course, the revitalization of Mclean. Since we have two independent communities after one goal, this should start happening sooner rather than later. The thoughts are to put a bike path, widen, power wash, add a crosswalk (for children crossing to Peabody), add a mural to the railroad bridge, and add a small island rest area for the teardrop (shaped grassy area where Southern, Mclean, and Lamar all converge), rendering a more united neighborhood. A beautiful Mclean would really strengthen our communities as a whole.

According to Stoy Bailey (our community activist spearheading the Mclean project), the money as well as the design for the teardrop is already in place. The exact time of the project starting has not yet been determined. Details include placing a nice retaining wall on the south side (Southern side), a place for bike riders to rest, and hopefully a garbage can!

I intend to get a group of us together and power wash the concrete decorative hand rail that sits on both sides of Mclean just south of the railroad bridge. Also, it would be nice to wash the bridge itself, especially where it is to have a mural. I have not asked or talked with the Railroad people about doing this yet.

So far, Stoy Bailey and I have measured Mclean, and Stoy has tentative engineering plans that were drawn up and are available for viewing (by appointment only) at his office. We canvassed the neighbors on either side of Mclean to get documentation that can be presented for further approval of the project. As you may or may not know, getting things done like this takes time and effort. I, for one, didn’t know that there is a committee for “walkability” and the like, on top of the other Government people, which need to go along with this. Fun. Right?

The crosswalk for the Peabody Elementary students is important. The route will take them down Oliver, Nelson, or Evelyn where they will not have all of the traffic that sits on Young while school is convening. Having them walk down a dedicated route that is safe is a plan that is agreed on by all. Again, we need all of the “Government” factions to support us.

Glenn Althoff