Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 4, 1995 TAG: 9509050089
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER NOTE: Above
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
After 20 years of ups and downs and careful nudging, the Roanoke City Market is an unequivocal hit: It's been named one of America's "Great Pub-lic Places."
Crowds swarm the entertainment district on warm nights, often filling the Market's dozen restaurants and rambling the streets as rock music pours from the clubs.
But along with the human crush has come tension over the tangle-haired, punkish teens and 20-somethings congregating near the public benches.
Police have arrested several in recent weeks, charging them with blocking sidewalks, smoking under age and disturbing the peace.
They've been barred from sitting on farmers' tables during the Market's off hours. A prominent Roanoke Valley arts supporter has referred to the young people in a letter to the newspaper as a "public menace," and a few merchants on the increasingly cash-rich Market are hostile toward the kids.
They say they're loud, rude and vulgar, and they pen weird graffiti on tables and walls. Some Market employees wish the kids would go away.
Says a young pony-tailed bouncer wearing Aladdin pants at Awful Arthur's seafood restaurant, identifying himself only as "Tommy at the Door": "I'd just like to find the one person who started it all and punch their lights out."
The kids pose the most ticklish human relations dilemma since the city ran prostitutes off the Market in the 1970s. The X-rated bookstores are gone now. The smoke-filled, working-class Capitol Restaurant is about to move out, and with the Market becoming an enclave of French bread and cappuccino, Market molders are pondering how squeaky clean it needs to be.
The young people say the whole rap against them is unfair. They're lumped together just because they're young and dress unconventionally.
A few may be obnoxious or use drugs, they confess, but the majority are well-behaved kids - church-going, choir-singing honor students among them. All they want is a safe place to meet friends from across the Roanoke Valley.
The young Market-lovers express no interest in going to malls or getting drunk at home or driving up and down Williamson Road, as was the custom for generations of Roanoke teens. The Market's their venue of choice.
"I couldn't think of a more positive place to be," says James Ingrassia, 21, transparent beads gleaming from his tangle of dark dreads. "I mean, what would they want us to be doing?"
Take away the very young and the very old, the country people and the street people - weed out all but the moneyed and the super-straight - and where would that leave the Market?
"Somehow, you've got to reach a balance," says Roanoke economic development chief Phil Sparks. He defends the kids' right to be on the Market. They're Roanoke's civic leaders-to-be, he says. But the few bad actors need to tone it down, "take care of the Market, and preserve it for their future."
The kids outside Books, Strings and Things late on a recent Friday night look like one big tribe. Most know each other and greet one another with hugs, but it's hard to generalize about them. They're a mishmash of humanity.
Some are honor roll students; some are dropouts. Some are children and siblings of local public figures, like Kim Hodge, daughter of Roanoke County Administrator Elmer Hodge. Some are college students. One works at a Botetourt County day-care center. One works at the Orvis telemarketing center. One's an aspiring publisher who pays his bills making Whoppers at Burger King.
There are, as well:
Skateboarders.
Babies with their teen-age mothers and fathers.
"Ravers" addicted to the all-night dance-a-thons that are sometimes the scene of drug arrests.
"Straight-edgers" who don't drink, smoke or use drugs.
"Vegans" who don't eat meat or wear leather.
"Swankers" who follow a local band called Swank.
Anti-hunger activists who feed people in Elmwood Park Sunday afternoons through a national group called Food Not Bombs.
The kids want Roanoke to see that they're peaceable people, with ambitions like other young people. "We have goals," said Hodge, a pianist who'll finish her senior year of high school in a special program at Virginia Western Community College. "We're actually working for something."
"I guess I scare old ladies," said teen artist Katie Thomas, "but I'm really nice and I live with my grandparents sometimes. Does that help?"
The young crowd sees a double standard at work on the Market. Intoxicated older people weave from one bar to another. When they sit on the vendor tables, nobody bothers them. Harley-Davidson motorcycles roar in and off the Market. Yet, it's the young people who get arrested.
"Go talk to those people," Cobey Ferguson, 17, urged a reporter, pointing to a group emerging from a watering hole on a Friday night. "I'll bet you won't get a sober word out of any of them."
"There are drunks on the streets ... There are prostitutes two blocks from the Police Department, roaming the streets, and hoodlums and druggies vandalizing and dealing drugs," Leah Ann Rowell, 18, wrote in a letter to the newspaper. And yet, she said, police are arresting kids for sitting around the Market, "or for speaking their mind or questioning them."
The kids hang out there because it's the most central spot in the Roanoke Valley. It's free, safe and well-lighted. Despite recent run-ins with police, many are glad the cops are there.
"That's what's nice about Roanoke," said Katie Thomas. "You can come down here and be safe. You don't have to worry about being shot or mugged."
The main thing, say nearly all the Market youth, is there's nowhere else 15- to 21-year-olds want to go in Roanoke. There's no skateboard park and, except for occasional bands at the Iroquois Club, there's no entertainment geared to them.
So, kids from Bent Mountain, Vinton and Cloverdale - and as far away as Buena Vista and Natural Bridge - come to the Market to drink cafe latte and Italian sodas at Mill Mountain Coffee & Tea. They play with the 5-month-old daughter of young Market regulars. They read and sketch pictures. They people-watch. They laugh and dance on the sidewalks to music from the bars.
That's not all they do, their critics say. They accuse the kids of piercing each other's body parts in public, making obscene gestures outside restaurant windows, and intimidating older Market patrons.
"They're a nuisance, man," said Kerry Hurley, lead singer for the Roanoke rockabilly band the Thrillbillyz and a security guard at the Market Building.
"They just tear things up, basically," said his friend, Bill Woodson, 29, who runs the Full Moon Cafe in a Market corner popular with the young bench-sitters.
Woodson said he's complained to City Manager Bob Herbert about the kids. "Even somebody who lived in New York City called up and said they were scared to come down here," Woodson said. He says the kids are scaring customers away.
An older woman, a patron of Mill Mountain Theatre interviewed for this story, was adamant that there need to be strict controls on the young people. She had one run-in with them when she took friends to the theater. "One of these persons got right up in my female friend's face and said, 'Hi, Babe!' At which she almost passed away. She's 62 years old!"
No adult knows the Market or the kids better than Police Officer L.C. Ollie. He's patrolled the Market since the 1970s, and has arrested several young people recently for breach of peace, impeding police and trespassing on city property - namely, the Market vendor tables. He's caught them drawing graffiti, too, particularly the artistic personal signatures the kids call "tags."
He says they're good kids, mostly. It's just that they're hanging out in the middle of the biggest economic boom the Market's ever seen. With the new pedestrian walkway dumping Hotel Roanoke patrons directly onto the Market, the economic stakes are higher than ever.
Ollie has never seen kids body-piercing each other. "And I'll tell you, I've stood back and watched them."
Nor has he seen them using or selling drugs. "It's rare to see them even smoking a cigarette." He defends them against another charge as well - that they beg for money. But he has seen people ask the kids for money.
Ollie knows Market visitors may be intimidated by the sight of kids in green Mohawks or dog collars. "A lot of folks have never seen young folks like this, so they figure our downtown is not safe, and our downtown IS safe."
He wants to turn Elmwood Park over to the kids at night, maybe let them skateboard there. Young people say it's too dark and older street people sleep on park benches, so Ollie would turn up the lights, turn off the lawn sprinklers and install phones. He's waiting to hear from the city on all that.
On a recent Friday night, older adults streamed from Mill Mountain Theatre's production of "Forever Plaid." They brushed by the kids and on down Campbell Avenue to Mill Mountain Coffee & Tea. More than a dozen people in the coffeehouse were asked if the kids bothered them. All said no.
Mike and Donna Bell, who live in Southwest Roanoke County, were glad to see young people on the Market. "In a way," Mike Bell said, "it seems like there's life downtown again."
The presence of lots of young people doesn't trouble Ruby Weaver, office manager for a surgeon in Old Southwest Roanoke, either. "It doesn't deter me from coming down to the Market," she said. "I've never been bothered by them. Never."
Last month, Susan Shortridge wrote a letter to the editor of this newspaper complaining about "bands of young people sporting purple and green half-shaven hair and multiple body pierces who noisily roam the streets and loiter on the farmers' tables." Though she didn't write her letter in her official capacity, Shortridge is president of the Art Museum of Western Virginia at Center in the Square, down on the Market.
She called the young people a "public menace" and warned that if something isn't done to control them, Market business will suffer.
Christine Hastings works at Books, Strings & Things. The benches outside the bookstore are one of the most popular gathering spots for kids. She disagrees with Shortridge's depiction.
Sometimes, the teens hold the door as her co-workers put out the trash. "I think they add a lot," Hastings said, "as long as they don't bother anybody else."
She worries that the police and civic leaders want to drive the kids away. "I mean, why can't there be ALL kinds of people? They just want a homogeneous downtown. Think of Baltimore and other places - it's all kinds of people, all together."
Yes, and that's what the Market is, too, says Matt Kennell, executive director of Downtown Roanoke Inc. He likes its pluralism - age, race, lifestyle. "I think the diversity is a positive thing and adds a lot of character," he said. "We want the Market to be for everybody," teen-agers included. "We want them to grow up thinking about shopping and eating downtown."
Kennell suspects only a few kids are causing trouble. "I think it's like everything else. If there's one incident, people blow it out of proportion. But we don't want any one person keeping any other person from being down there."
Roanoke is no longer a 9-to-5 town, says Rob Callahan, owner of 309 First Street Fine Food and Drink on the Market.
Look for the Market to get busier at night. Callahan would like merchants to stay open later. He'd like more street sweepers, police and other city employees out there to make people feel safer.
Head of a Market merchants committee of Downtown Roanoke Inc., Callahan's looking for ways to make everyone feel more comfortable on the Market. He's careful not to criticize the Market's young people, and says he doesn't want to homogenize the Market.
But he is out to stop the graffiti, to collect curbside trash more often, and to discourage street people from hassling visitors.
Danny Molloy, 37, operates Fast Freddie's food cart outside the building until 3 a.m. on weekends. Sometimes, four kids pool their change to buy a single soda from him.
He's heard about graffiti and parking signs being damaged, but he thinks just a handful of people are doing it.
A young woman with short hair dyed an orangy pink was drinking coffee at Mill Mountain Coffee & Tea on a Saturday night. She'll be in City School this year, a program for academically talented high school students. She wouldn't give her name because she said newspaper reports this summer misquoted and inaccurately portrayed young people who dress as she does.
Her girlfriend's hair was short, black and spiky, with a veil of long lavender hair over her left eye. People steer clear of her on the sidewalk, said the friend, as if they're saying, "Oh, my God! Stay away from my children!"
The pink-haired girl has 17 body pierces; the lavender-haired had 13, and a young male friend said he had one. As a reporter looked for an earring or nose ring, the guy opened his mouth to reveal a stud in the middle of his tongue. "I didn't want you to have to look too hard," teased the young man, a physical therapy student.
Their acquaintance, Sarah Johnson, 21, is one of the Market young people who dresses more plainly - natural hair, no visible piercings. She's been on the Market all her life - since her Floyd County parents sold vegetables there and she was a baby in her mother's backpack.
An artist and waitress who attends Virginia Western, Johnson isn't a drinker, so she doesn't come to the Market for the bars. She comes to visit with friends. "There's a good flow of culture," she said. "It's really safe here. If anything happens, there's always a store open."
Two weeks ago, however, she saw a male friend, 21, thrown to the ground and arrested by police when he smart-mouthed one of them. She feels the city is putting pressure on the kids. "There is a lot of prejudice down here about the people who look different," she said.
Jerry Rush jokingly calls himself "the ancient one" of the Market.
He's been coming to the Market to meet his friends for four years, since his junior year at William Byrd High School. Twenty now and with a job as a pipe-cutter in Troutville, he's still a Market regular - in T-shirt and jeans for hanging out with friends one night, a coat and tie the next for dinner at Carlos Brazilian International Cuisine.
Rush had purple hair as a teen-ager in Wise County. Now, he's a self-appointed Market ambassador, trying to make peace between the police, the merchants and the kids.
He tries to talk younger kids out of acting outrageous or talking back to the cops. They're just doing their job. He hopes the city is not trying to drive the kids off the Market.
Without them and the street people, he said, all you'd have would be "frat boys and Hollie Dollies," as people call Hollins College students.
Rush puts in 40, sometimes 60 hours a week at Connex Pipe Systems. He lives in town and pays his taxes. "I feel like I have a right to hang out here."
Older adults shouldn't judge the kids by their hair or clothes alone, he said. "They're friendly, just different looking." After all, he said, "Those kids accept them for what THEY are."
by CNB