Downtown Détente

rebuilding jacksons best neighborhood

“It’s been six weeks since we had our last walk-in customer downtown.”

That’s how my dad justified his plan to the family to move OSCO to the Industrial Drive location in West Jackson. He and I had already discussed it with his father, my grandfather, in our morning session.

While my grandfather clipped the ends off envelopes, my father answered pointed questions about the move. The Office Supply Company had been downtown since before the war, the big one with Germany and Japan. Mrs Jeffreys listened pensively as this quiet, respectful battle between father and son played out, counting checks and sorting invoices, orders, bids, and correspondence.

By “The Family” I mean the bigger family. We were Campbells, but the Flowers sisters systematically married Jackson Giants. Robert Wingate didn’t always attend “Family Christmas Dinner,” but he did this time. Being my dad’s mentor since he was in Jr. High School, I suspect it was a show of solidarity.

At the family dinner was Tom Hederman, who ran the Jackson Papers. A generation older than my father, Uncle Tom had different feelings on every subject, except books. Tom and Daddy were both members of the Capitol Street Gang, but Tom was a generation younger than the group’s charter members. Daddy was the third generation (the last) of the Capitol Street Gang, and he announced his move away from Capitol Street.

One concern was how Uncle Tom would have his writers report this in the Clarion Ledger. Daddy was decidedly pro-Jackson and pro-Downtown, but he liked making money, and that retail space wasn’t. In the end, it didn’t appear in the paper. Daddy had waited long enough that one more store closing up wasn’t news anymore. That itself was a bit painful to him. He was prepared for a confrontation that never came.

Very young, I sided with my grandfather. I loved the downtown store. When momma bought me clothes and shoes at the downtown McRaes, we would walk through the Office Supply Company, a block up Capitol, and I’d be treated like a little prince—a little prince who stuttered and was terrified of people, holding hands with his momma.

I told the protegee the story about a time when her mom caught me holding hands with one of her friends. She took it to mean that I really liked this girl, and I should ask her out as soon as possible. Embarassed, I had to explain that I was just drunk, and when I’m drunk, I like to hold hands with somebody. Anybody. I’d hold hands with Bill Cheney if he sat still long enough. Among the KA sweethearts and Roses, this was known as “babysitting Boyd.”

I explained to Little Bird that it’s like in the Babar Books, when Babar got nervous and afraid, he’d hold trunks with the other elephants. Elephants actually do that. One day, I conspired to impress her mom by taking her and her niece to the Zoo, where I sat on the board at twenty-four. It was a set-up; I planned the entire trip so that it ended with me showing her mom and her little niece that I knew an elephant and the elephant knew me. There was a spot where the larger elephant could just reach your hand if you reached out for her trunk. She loved me. We were friends, actual friends, not like a dog you throw a bone to. The tip of her African trunk fondled my Mississippi white fingers—that part’s actually kind of gross. Elephants have a constant drip of snot coming out of their trunk, but I always carry a handkerchief. Since we had a five-year-old with us, I had four. She squealed with delight when it became clear this giant was making eye contact with us.

I knew I’d lose, but I wanted to take my grandfather’s side and try to talk Daddy out of this move. The problem is that I had bullshit for ammo, and approaching Jim Campbell when you have bullshit for ammo is stupid. What I had, as he pointed out, was sentiment, and for the most part, sentiment is not good business.

Many years later, as downtown was entirely empty, Stuart Irby bought many of the older buildings and created a sort of fantasy land for his wife as her mind began slipping away. That such a thing would befall such a brilliant and energetic woman hurt me, almost as much as it hurt him. Fortunately, unlike a lot of people who have dementia and Alzheimer’s, she didn’t have much of the terror and confusion that sometimes accompanied the disease. She would just dance in her private studio and remember things that hadn’t existed for fifty years, but not my name, and eventually not his.

One of the buildings he bought was the (long-empty) Office Supply Company. When Daddy was a child, half a block from the Old Capitol, the Office Supply Company occupied the most premium of all the premium retail spots in the bustling retail environment on East Capitol Street. When Mr. Irby bought it, it’d been empty for fifteen years.

He’d take me to lunch under the pretence of talking to me about ideas he had for the OSCO building, but really, he was checking on me. Several Capitol Street Gang guys would occasionally check on me after Daddy died to make sure I was doing OK. I wasn’t.

He had several ideas for the spot. A movie theater for only uplifting movies was one. I pointed out that there were seven parking spaces, and inside the building was a row of support pillars in the middle. Not a prime location for a movie theater. He had an idea for a restaurant. 400 East Capitol was the nicest restaurant I knew of, but it didn’t survive. You’d really have to have a good concept to make a restaurant work at 517 East Capitol. Eventually, he donated it to the Mississippi State University Architectural School. Since it’s the Architectural school, which I love, I won’t say anything ugly about the bulldogs—this time.

You’ll hear that guns, democrats, blacks, Hispanics, drugs, and Obama are why downtown died. That’s all entirely stupid. What killed downtown was suburban retail. Once the Meadowbrook McRaes opened, we never returned to McRaes downtown. It didn’t take long for Richard McRae to realize the writing was on the wall.

Five Points had always been a prime location in Jackson. There was a tamale shack there that my daddy loved. Daddy loved Mississippi food. Some of it was shit I wouldn’t want in the room with me, like chitterlings and head cheese, but he’d grin like a ten-year-old eating that stuff.

Jackson did a crazy thing. Even though that was prime real estate, they built our first mall there. It’s the Jackson Medical Mall now, but at the time, we thought we were more modern than Paris.

The loss of retail downtown didn’t kill it all at once. Following the death of retail came the age of bankers and lawyers. Computers have replaced it all now, but for a while, every office was what you see on “Mad Men,” a sea of twenty and thirty-something hot chicks with IBM Selectric typewriters, with male bankers in suits entirely too warm for Mississippi, weaving in and out of them like benevolent overlords. If you’ve seen “Mad Men,” you know they weren’t that benevolent.

Détente was a word you heard a lot when I was a kid. It described the state of affairs between the United States and the Soviet Union, where they knew they could destroy each other with a button, so they chose not to. This was the era of Apollo–Soyuz. My dad was obsessed with space and obsessed with the communists. We watched the news of this intently on CBS.

Some guys combined smaller banks to create Deposit Guarantee because people thought First National (now Trustmark) wasn’t liberal enough in their lending practices. By “liberal” I mean “generous,” not “purple hair.”

My friend Chip used to argue that DGB had the largest asset pool of any bank in the Southeast that wasn’t in Florida. He was right, too. At banks, loans are assets, and DBG had more and larger loans than anybody. They were pretty well managed, though. I don’t remember there ever being any crisis. Brum Day or Bob Hearin would have blanched at the thought of having that many loans out, but the concept of having one white-shoes and one black-shoes big bank seemed to be working for Jackson and Mississippi.

By Détente, I mean two secret passages that led from DGB to Trustmark, and back again. They had joint Christmas Parties. Many people, but most especially my father, would attend both. We would go by Bob Hearin’s office on the way to the secret passage. He’d be smoking a cigar and say, “Forgive my laziness,” when he didn’t stand, continuing whatever he was working on. Some guys don’t take off for Christmas, I guess.

Dero Puckett borrowed money to open “The Everyday Gourmet.” One year, she attended the bank’s Christmas party with her husband. When they gave her shit for being the only female, she reminded them that she was the only one who had paid off her bank loan, and she paid it off early. Touché. Good for her.

During the banker and lawyer age downtown, some massive new structures rose. Charles Sewell with DGB was a financial genius. He put the packages together for the new growth. One was the new DGB Plaza, which was the tallest structure in Mississippi, at the time, and featured Mississippi’s first pedestrian crosswalk to the latest High Rise Hotel across Amite Street.

The Jackson Street car had been torn down decades before. I’m not even sure why. It was popular and economical. Cities like New Orleans, which kept theirs, have always been glad they did.

Since downtown was now filled with bankers and lawyers wearing suits picked out by Billy Neville and tight-skirted secretaries who considered themselves liberated and modern, traffic downtown at eight and five became a problem. Always the idea man, Leland Speed (the son, not the mayor or the grandson) and Dale Danks brought in a consulting firm to design a system in which downtown streets were converted to one-way, so Capitol Street was four lanes, all leading out of Downtown.

This became the era of slowly dying downtown nightlife. The old movie theaters started showing “Shaft” and “Blacula Goes to Africa.” There were two restaurants left on Capitol: Mayflower and Elite. The food was good enough to keep them alive. I write about the Mayflower a lot. It was a magical place. If I really liked somebody, or if I wanted to make them feel better about whatever they didn’t feel so great about, I’d take them to Mayflower. It was at the Mayflower where I almost held Angel’s hand, but decided that was dumb and entirely too risky.

A group of guys became the new Masters of downtown. The Capitol Street Gang never announced they were closing shop. People just slowly stopped talking about it. After Daddy shuttered the Office Supply Company, Rowan Taylor started talking about moving Mississippi Valley Title, two blocks over. Most of the time, those two moved in unison like the dancers in “Swan Lake.”

The last true believer was Leland Speed (the son, not the mayor, and not the grandson). The last time I saw him alive, we were both traveling on Congress Street, behind him was the statue of Andrew Jackson, his mother sculpted for City Hall. He was old and very sad-looking. I was older and had let my body become broken in almost every place. We didn’t speak.

Downtown Jackson Partners started during the Lawyers and Bankers phase of Downtown. They had beautification plans, including these ginormous concrete planters. Daddy and Leland had known each other since they were in diapers. He was so impressed by the planters that he ordered three for our Industrial Drive location. A crane showed up to put them in place!

Some ugliness befell Downtown Jackson Partners. I don’t want to talk about it. If you know, you know. It never should have happened. People began to lose faith in the organization, in downtown Jackson, and in the city.

This is the part of the story where things are gonna get much better, or get much worse. Running for Mayor, I had some respect for the Senior Lumumba, even though he was a communist and a radical. In my mind, Jackson had gotten so poor that they would have to try this at least. Why and how Jackson got so poor, well, that’s another story.

Even though I was a Republican at the time, I kept up with Jackson’s Civil Rights Leaders. One of them, Charles Evers, was also a Republican. His brother gave his life for the cause. While I have some faith in Democratic Socialism, for me, communism is just “Animal Farm.” All animals are created equal, but some are created more equal.

When the father died, and the son took over, I began having serious second thoughts. Everybody in Jackson loved his wife, but he openly cheated on her. I’m not a virgin. I’ve seen this before. It pissed me off every single time. He bought a house a block from Eastover. For a communist, I found that suspect.

Obviously, I can’t blame everything on him. Jackson had been heading south for a while. I began hearing that he was corrupting younger guys I liked. Rumors are rumors, and most are bullshit, but this caught my eye. I’d seen it before. I joked about how it was a bad idea to open a cigar bar with a secret room where the FBI can look out their window and see what you’re doing, and damn if that’s not exactly what happened.

I’m not gonna mention all the names involved in finding us a new mayor. Let’s just say, it was the usual suspects, PLUS some rising talent. Knowing that if I spoke out, my reputation as a former conservative would sink whatever hopes any candidate for Jackson Mayor might have, I kept my opinions to myself. There are advantages to being from an old, white, Mississippi family, and there are disadvantages.

The good guys won. I’d been a fan of John Horhn for decades. Once the votes were in, I figured it was safe to show my support. Other things were happening. A couple of years before, one of my theater kids bought Hal and Mal’s. That was going remarkably well. After wanting to retire for twenty years, Jerry finally had a buyer for the Mayflower. Rumors about who bought it hit me before the announcement. I kept my mouth shut again, but I was so very excited.

I got a phone call. “Did you hear about Downtown Jackson Partners?”

“Oh, god, what now?”

“They hired Liz Brister to run it.”

“Bil’s wife? That Liz Brister?”

“The same.”

The Millsaps mafia strikes again!

In my head, I’m thinking, “Janie is downtown. Nicole is downtown. Mary Sanders is downtown. Now Liz is downtown. Holy smokes, kids! It’s a hat-trick, plus one!”

Adding to that, the job Betsy Bradly had been doing at the art museum for a while, and we were clearly onto something. Seeing people I love and trust take essential positions in matters I care about makes my life better in ways you can’t imagine.

Trying to convince Daddy not to give up on Capitol Street, I lost. I was too young, and the cards weren’t in the right spot. Cards change, though. That’s the nature of cards. It’s different every deal. We lost DGB. That’s a whole other story for a whole other day. We lost some of the big firms, but kept others.

I feel better about downtown now than I did when I was twenty-five. I wouldn’t say this has made me feel young again, but it’s done something.

I’m not leaving out that Little Bird, my protégée, has her office behind Hal and Mals. She’s a downtown girl. So many kids, her age, with her education, are choosing to flee Mississippi. She’s staying. That she’s staying during a downtown revitalization makes me very happy.