It's all coming back to me

Sprinkle a little bit more of gentrification on it

I’ve taken a lot of time since my visit to grasp my experience and I still don’t have the whole story on Louisville, Kentucky. I had been trying to figure it out for days prior to the summit I was attending and even after my departure was grappling with where I was.

The first day I arrived I stayed in a VRBO under the hosting name of Front door listing of Vue. It was only there for a night because the hotel I booked for the remainder of my stay for the summit was booked up. But this one night was what I needed to understand my experience.

The all too familiar disheveled look and feel of the exterior made me remember the old adage that you should believe nothing on the internet.

The broken elevator and the dirty carpet let me know that I was witnessing the beginnings of gentrification or at the very least the edges of what happens when it’s happening to any city.

There was someone capitalizing on the shifts happening and more thanks likely it was the real estate agencies that posted on VRBO.

Of course the listing looked better than it actually was

All of this looked familiar because I had already lived through this in the Bay Area. The difference was I think Louisville is prepared for what was to come better than any other cities.

Filthy hallways aside, this trip was also a reminder that you learn a lot more about a city by the people who service the city that you do anything else.

I talked to a couple people who worked in the area. Meeting a Lyft driver who returned home once his season playing with The Globetrotters was probably the most informative to the race relations.

He explained he didn't make a lot of money with the team and returned home so that he could be close to his daughter. It was hard to get past the standard messaging that I had gotten previously about sticking to the downtown area but he agreed there were still undertones of racism that existed.

But he pushed back that he learned in his travels that racism was pretty standard for any city in this country. Maybe he was right.

I hadn't seen much of anything to indicate that some brand of racism existed here and definitely didn't experience anything blatantly racist, so the expectation that being in the South made me assume that I was in for something more.

There was more than just the tale tell signs of gentrification in progress. It was the sanitizing of the city that hadn't learned yet that the culture of the city was going to keep it alive when the tourists went home.

Meeting up with a friend and former editor, I ventured to a completely different neighborhood. The walkable block was colorful and filled with bustling shops full of nic knacks, fancy one scoop ice creams and a patio with aspiring artists rehearsing for their event that night. It hadn't occurred to me until that moment that I heard no local music played anywhere.

Commercial pop rap and East Coast rap music was ubiquitous and this was the first time in any region I had travelled that I didn’t feel some connection to the local artists.

Stumbling into a near empty strip club was the highlight of the trip. After I switched hotels, I went for a walk at night. In the day time the black matte building looked abandoned. The planters filled with cigarette butts and weeds marked the entrance I had walked by several times.

The two security guards let me know that it was still early but I was welcome to enter as I peaked in the door with some hesitance. I paid my $10 and ordered a double of whatever well bourbon they were serving.

Sure enough, one man sat staring at his phone as a very young skinny dancer clicked her heels and twitched a butt cheek, more as practice for a better audience than for the disinterested man on the couch.

I stayed for the end of my drink and more pole practices before heading outside. I talked to the bouncers for longer than I watched the show.

They explained that every night a minivan with a woman from the local church made the rounds to save the souls and drop off free dinners to the unhoused who weren't shoved off to an outskirt, shielding tourists from the horrors of what every city across the nation was experiencing.

She didn’t have a hard job. There really wasn’t much more than the strippers inside. But praise God for her efforts anyway.