Dear Media: Please Stop. You Aren't Helping. Love, Highland Park

Here is the original entry I submitted to Chattarati.com before it was re-written prior to posting. No, I'm not bitter.

Over the last five and a half years that I have lived in Highland Park (and Chattanooga), I have had my share of debates, discussions, and outright arguments with people regarding the place I have chosen to call home.

John and I were well aware of the history of the neighborhood when we decided to live here; indeed, it’s sort of what drew us to it – the opportunity to live in a fabulous old home while working to make a difference was very appealing to us. The fact that it was light-years away from our dreary tract house-filled subdivision in the northern Atlanta suburbs made it even better.

Settling into my job, I began realizing what kind of perception Highland Park had locally. If the wide-eyed looks of horror didn’t clue me in, the strange and sometimes pointed comments would have hit me over the head. Things such as:

“Are you scared?”

“Do you have a gun? You NEED one. And bars on your windows. And dogs."

“Bless your heart. You’re not from here and you don’t know no better.”

“You’re an idiot. SOMEONE saw you coming. Get out of there.”

"Highland Park has the highest [insert violent crime here]. You're screwed."

And so on. I didn’t understand it – were they referring to my neighborhood? The one with the awesome houses and the active association and the fabulous people? The same one?

I soon found out that the answer to that question was quite often no.

One day the local news was on (John watches it; I’d rather watch Imitation of Life AND It's My Party on a continuous loop because they're less depressing), and my ears perked up when I heard something about a shooting in the “Highland Park Neighborhood”. The street mentioned was one I’d never heard of; when I looked it up, it was at least five miles away. Further observations led me (and nearly all of our neighbors) to the conclusion that the local news media often refer to any area between E.23rd Street and Wilcox Blvd. as Highland Park, or anything within the 37404 ZIP code, and that 99% of any crime references to our neighborhood did not happen here.

This still happens today, but not as much; somebody normally jumps on the phone to whichever media outlet to ask that they please refrain from referring to an area as Highland Park if it’s not within the actual boundaries. They’ve complied for the most part, but still mess it up enough to make our teeth itch.

Now granted, we’re one city, and what affects our neighbors affects all of us and all that. However, from a PR perspective, such inaccuracies are a nightmare. These perceptions make some people hesitant to live or invest in Highland Park. I can’t imagine how many potential residents – ones who would enjoy living here and contribute to the neighborhood – have been scared away. Not only that, I have heard countless stories of real estate agents flatly refusing to show homes in HP to their clients, even when they request it specifically. So, when someone slags my 'hood, I feel that it's my duty to defend it, much like Scarlett O'Hara defended Tara from the Yankees and carpetbaggers. Except that I don’t jerk the curtains off the windows to construct needlessly voluminous hoop dresses and live in a mid-19th Century version of a metro Atlanta McMansion (come to think of it, the O'Hara Plantation, if it actually existed, would probably be covered by a declining 1960s subdivision or seedy strip mall at this point).

The overwhelming majority of the negative comments have come from Chattanooga natives; indeed, it isn’t a coincidence that most of Highland Park’s newest residents are not from here. We weren’t here back in the bad old days of the 1990s when we did have the highest crime rate in the city, or when prostitutes skulked about openly on our corners (yeah, there's Main Street, but they've been nearly entirely driven from the neighborhood proper, and Main Street has become rather inhospitable for them as of late). It is somewhat understandable that people who were here then may have a difficult time understanding that things change.

But things do change. Cities change. I wouldn’t have lived in Chattanooga 15-20 years ago (my first impression of the city when I visited back in 1992 was Frazier Avenue, which at that time was an unseemly hellhole), much less Highland Park, but around that time, a small group of residents decided they were over it and they weren’t going to take it anymore. At the time, they were simply holding their own, accepting that they were only delaying the inevitable, that when they died or moved away, their neighborhood would slide back into chaos. But that didn’t happen – the homes, neglected yet proud, well-built yet crumbling, full of much of Chattanooga’s history – the lure was too powerful for many of us to ignore. And here we are, and we absolutely owe that to those first pioneers like Judith Schorr, the late Ginny Tatum, the late Mary Norwood, Marlene Brown, Charles and Uneva Shaw, and countless others. They worked to ensure that Highland Park would be a viable community for themselves as well as for those who would follow them. When people insult and disparage our neighborhood, it’s a slap in the faces of these people, and for the rest of us as well. It diminishes all of the hard work we have all put into it. It demeans my friends and neighbors who have chosen to call this place home – like the half-dozen or more who came to see after John when he wasn’t feeling well, or the ones who invite each other for drinks on their porches, or those of us who greet new residents and help them get acclimated. To me, it’s more than simply being ignorant or contrary – it’s hurtful.

Granted, urban living isn’t for everyone, and those of us who grew up in suburbs probably took a little time getting used to it, but this is my home, good and bad. I can’t say enough about the people I’ve had the privilege to get to know here. Many of us worry about not making a difference during our lives, but we have. People in one hundred years may not know our names, but they’ll know that we were here, and what we did, because our legacy will live on. I think this quote (of a quote) from Dr. Martin Luther King is fitting in our case:

“…we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”