Stupidity Trumps Race Card

During my many years as a denizen of Atlanta, I logged quite a few hours hanging out in Kirkwood, which can best be described as the quaintest lil’ rough neighborhood you ever did see. It is a neighborhood that has hardly begun to sew the seeds of gentrification. That is why my friends live there: the rent is still cheap.

There was a bar in Kirkwood that went by the name of Kirkwood Public House, but that we had all affectionately dubbed K-Pub. It was a cool little neighborhood hang out and the short-lived weekly comedy show there was fun while it lasted. K-pub went out, and in its place came the Kirkwood Bar and Grill…a sport’s bar with 18 plasma screens where you are ignored by waitresses wearing referee uniforms. They opened a fucking TGI Friday’s in a neighborhood…if TGI Fridays had no liquor license. Now it looks like the shitty business plan for a shitty business is not going to work out, and the owner has decided to try and besmirch an entire neighborhood as he makes his way out the door and back to the suburbs. 

Kirkwood is a black neighborhood. The owner of this terrible establishment is black. Yet somehow, he claims he is being racially harassed into leaving Kirkwood. The alleged harassment has come in the form of graffiti and a voicemail, both involving racial slurs. Did the harassers graffiti the bar that they don’t want in their neighborhood which is, of course, conveniently located IN THEIR NEIGHBORHOOD?…no. The harassers decided to drive 29 miles away to Grayson, GA to spray paint on the proprietors garage. Hmmm, seems a roundabout way to make a point. Well, what about the phone message? Can we hear that? I mean, it is really more trouble to delete a voicemail than to keep it…especially when it helps your case. No? We can’t hear that?

I guess we should just take the owner’s word for it. An owner, who originally was going to name the place “VIP Sports Bar and Lounge,” which caused a backlash from the neighborhood…and after the backlash, the owner blamed the reporter who did the write up. He claimed he never said that was the name…I guess the reporter just decided on a name for him. What’s odd about this little side story is that, in the comments of the online article, the owner said “we strive to treat everyone like a VIP”…which sounds an awful lot like an attempt to assuage the anger created by the name that he came up with. More about this incident here

I really feel for this guy. What a coincidence that all this strife would come at the exact same time that the law is catching up to this bar and its illegal practices. This guy is a real shit head, and it sucks that he is trying to make more problems for a neighborhood that has enough problems of its own…however, he does make a great slogan:

Brilliant! I love when my food is described in vague colloquialisms, and I really like my drinks to be just like I like them. Why don’t more companies take this angle?… “what we have is exactly what you like the most, whatever that may be”…or: “what’s your favorite thing? That’s what we got! And it is just the way you like that thing!”

-Andy