Bruce Walker, the main man at Flying Possum Leather, took a break to watch the first half of the Razorback football game against Kentucky on Saturday.
Walker represents the few longtime business owners who have managed to survive on Dickson Street by providing a quality product and by being his own best salesman as well as a skilled craftsman.
Somewhat similar small businesses in south Fayetteville are at particular risk as the planning process goes on for the Walker Park Neighborhood, which includes both sides of South School Avenue from Prairie Ave./Fourth and Fifth Street to a bit past Fifteenth Street.
Those diverse small businesses and nearby affordable housing make south Fayetteville as is a walkable, efficient neighborhood, where many residents seldom are forced to drive for basic services, shopping and, for the luckiest few, to their place of employment.
The old trees and old houses are the local model, despite obvious deterioration and neglect in some spots, of the best of sustainable communities that the new urbanists are pushing for various development sites.
And the restaurants offer the best food at reasonable prices available anywhere in Northwest Arkansas.
The push for gentrification should not be allowed to take the good things away.
Dickson Street and the Square have been priced out of the market for the majority of people working in the restaurants, etc., in that area. And the old houses are being taken down for more expensive multifamily buildings rapidly. Service workers are being forced to commute greater distances.
The city must protect what works for the workers or pay workers in the new buildings so much that the payroll will rise to match the food and other service prices and the RENT on those shiny, new architectural wonders being projected for the future.
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I miss Bill's Fixit Shop at 6th and School, and I have never found anyone or any place that can do what he did to keep things working and avoid the Bic syndrome of a disposable society. Bill did sustainability before sustainability was cool.
How quickly we forget what is lost.
My closest friend and hunting and fishing guide in south Fayetteville for a couple of decades was Cary Adams, whose funeral in the '90s filled a large church far beyond capacity with people who nearly all could have said he was their closest friend.
Adams Conoco on South School kept many a family vehicle rolling when others would have priced the work beyond reach.
What about Arvil Carr? You ran his photo with your column in the Northwest Arkansas Times in, I think, 1974, and credited him with being your favorite hunting and fishing guide on the Illinois River and Lake Francis and a bunch of ponds and prairies northwest of town. In fact, later when he was unable to hunt during his final fall alive, you said he asked you to take his deer rifle and get a buck or doe to feed his neighbors on Willow Avenue and you made a big deal out of having found a spot way up off U.S. or Arkansas 59 north of Gentry and Gravette and having been surrounded by does and fawns in a thicket of tall trees and underbrush and never having fired a shot because no antlers ever appeared. If I understood you, Arvil sent you to bring home some meat and you let him down because you were so pious about following Game and Fish regulations.
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