New Albany Farmers Market

There was an impressive crowd at the Farmers Market yesterday despite the intermittent downpours. If you are not a regular visitor to the New Albany Famers Market, you should be. I can’t think of a better way to spend a Saturday morning (or Wednesday evening). Buy local fresh produce. Listen to local musicians. Meander around downtown New Albany.

You can follow the Market on Facebook too and get up to the minute details on new vendors and special events.

Neighbors Helping Neighbors

That’s what Repair Affair is all about. Neighbors helping neighbors.

Members of the S. Ellen Jones Neighborhood Association are committed to reaching out and helping others. Taking on a Repair Affair home was a great project and we plan to make this type of effort a regular occurrence.

Why is Repair Affair so important? Qualifying low-income, elderly or disabled homeowners get home repair assistance. Residents are “hands on” in fulfilling a primary objective of maintaining and improving housing conditions of area homes. And it feels good helping those who need it.

Here’s a small slide show of progress at the SEJ Repair Affair home. We underestimated the work needed and will be back at the house on Saturday, July 18. Painters are needed. Contact me at fulmore_runner@msn.com if you want to volunteer time next weekend to finish out the project.



Thank you Stephen, Suzanne, Mary Anne, Dave and Nora for all your help this week.

Learn More, Further Reading:
Tribune article about Repair Affair
New Directions Housing Corporation website
Learn more about New Directions Housing Corporation

The wonderfully unstructured guerilla campaign to promote New Albany

I like things to be structured. It’s how I’m wired. I guess it’s some sort of herding instinct that I have inherited. Get the game plan together and execute it. Measure progress. Celebrate the progress. Finish the project. Start the next project. And so on…

I’ve even recently mused about progress in New Albany and lamented about the unstructured and uncoordinated approach. But I realized that despite that, progress had been made. A comment by Randy Smith (All4word) on that posting emphasized a critical point:

100 people 100 miles away from it can see the top of the mountain. And if they all head that way, from time to time their paths will cross. Some will make it to the top and others will not.That's not a "coordinated" strategy, but perhaps the guerilla campaign is more coordinated than you might think. Perhaps not everything has to be coordinated. In fact, what you call coordination has, in past years, seemed to be counterproductive in many ways, undemocratic, and more Astroturf than grass roots.

Thanks Randy. I get it. I really do. In fact, I’ve been part of the guerilla campaign without really knowing it. To further emphasize the point, here is part of some text from a Facebook message I received recently:

Hello, Ted - I've been reading your blog for a few months now. Your blog combined with Historic New Albany and NA Confidential managed to pull another Louisville Resident to the sunny side.

Just wanted to say hello and let you that your efforts to revitalize New Albany aren't going unnoticed. Matt.

No, I did not coordinate with other bloggers or the webmaster at Historic New Albany.com when I launched my blog in 2006. I simply wanted a place to promote a positive image of New Albany, its history and to share the trials and tribulations of my house restoration (32,189 page views later, I think that I can call the effort a reasonable success).

The guerilla campaign is working. If you’ve ever talked to a friend or co-worker about good stuff in New Albany, you’ve been part of it. If you’ve forwarded the link to Historic New Albany.com to someone house shopping, you’ve been part of it. If you’ve ever rigged voting on another website to promote New Albany as the best neighborhood in the region, you’ve been part of it.

Yes, I can see the top of the mountain. And many others can too. I get it. But damn it, I want to measure something!

Actually, I can measure and report something:
224,683 = number of site visits to Historic New Albany.com since November 2006
7,021 = average number of monthly site visits to Historic New Albany.com

Those are nice numbers. Let's keep the guerilla campaign going.

To view site data and a graph, click this link.