The Virginian-Pilot
On Thursday, a man used a pole to change letters on the Granby Theater marquee.
During times when the building had gone vacant, with downtown on the brink of revival, it had proclaimed a promise - WATCH NORFOLK GROW.
Grow it did, with a shopping mall, restaurants, and lots of people capable of spreading around some mean green. Money came to the theater itself through developer Bobby Wright five years ago.
What had been a historic, though dilapidated, movie house returned within three years of Wright's buying it. The beautifully restored Granby Theater established itself as a venue for concerts, private functions, charity events and parties.
Wednesday, someone was shot during a hip-hop gathering that lasted into the small hours of the morning. A man opened fire, critically wounding another patron. So ended the party.
"The fallout is tremendous," Wright said. The theater - a portion of Wright's many downtown investments - had been meeting its goals, catering to a varied crowd that included nonprofits and arts functions.
But you only had to see the marquee to know how wrong it went this week. The man with the pole worked with an audience of TV news crews. He slapped each letter with a suction-cup end of the pole, and raised the letters high.
"I'm putting '4 SALE OR 4 LEASE' on the other side, too," Josh McKinney said.
Down the block, Gabriella "Bobbie" Baranyai of Bobbie B's Deli watched him work.
"They got poor Josh doing the work - good job, Josh!"
Baranyai noted that the city had come in and found code violations at the Granby.
The inspectors went in Wednesday, though they also had found problems at the theater last year.
Baranyai summed up what violence means downtown.
"You've got residents," she said. "You've got a lot of businesses down here. They're trying to promote downtown.... And you've got a shooting."
I spoke to passers-by who remembered when the Granby showed movies in the days of department stores and five-and-dimes, before suburban shopping centers and highways took people away.
Wright talked about restoration when the Granby Theater was first coming together.
Now, over uncertainty over who has been actually managing the theater, Mayor Paul Fraim announced that a special exception - meaning permission for the Granby to serve alcohol or have bands or DJs - is over. "I think it would be very hard for Bobby to get another," Fraim said of the exception.
Wright said he's been making decisions at the Granby, though he had managers there, too. He may meet with the city but wouldn't comment about whether the Granby was being treated fairly.
The Granby Theater promised what Norfolk might be. Now the fate of a place with 90 years of history is up in the air. Wright wants to make sure the Granby returns - in his hands or not.
A man was shot. People may lose jobs. Events are booked. There's uncertainty. Bad business for downtown - all because some fool pulled a trigger in the middle of what should have been just another party in a rebounding downtown.
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Granby
Don S talks about violence and criminals and society's dregs.
Don S forgets this country was born in bloodshed. Rich men massacred Indians, enslaved Africans, killed each other in a Civil War.
The descendents of these rich men created the Pueblo Incident, Gulf of Tonkin incident, millions were killed.
Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam,Angola, Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, Panama, Grenada, Guatemala, Chile, Peru, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iraq, millions dead from those same descendents.
We could resurrect Rosewood, Tulsa, 8 Little Girls, and the list goes on. The point is no one can throw stones.
The psychology of the dregs deserves mention.Certain segments of America suffer from a type of PTSD from an insular social structure perpetuating self defeating self hatred. Couple that with a dominant society's ingrained biased based behavior and you have implosion with spill over across cultural lines.
So it's the wealthy that caused the gun battle in downtown Norfolk that closed the Granby Theater. Quoting the criminal Tupac Shakur (spent time in prison and finally murdered by some other criminal) giving us advice on how to handle Criminals. Don't you get it? Criminals have criminal behavior and when criminals get together they act like criminials. It's not just the affluent that are sick of it; it's all of society that's not Criminal...now the criminal have closed yet another venue where they congragrate and act like the criminals they are. I feel sorry for Bobby Wright but you just can't deal with criminals and the dregs of society and expect them to act like regular, ethical people;they don't know how.
So, you keep blaming it on the affluent and when you or someone you love take a bullet see if it comes from "the rich" or from one of these criminals and let's see how forgiving your are then. Pathetic!
Smoke and Mirrors
There may be more here than meets the eye, with the Fire Department being made the patsy.
Violence, imprisioning me, all that I see, absolute horror
We have a nation with a growing number of poorly educated people in a society where we have been trained that wealth is what matters most. We have a widening gap between the rich and poor, in a country where there is a high number of guns. Who is surprised that there is violence? To quote the late Tupac Shakur, "Instead of a war on drugs how about a war on poverty." Our violence issues will only continue to increase, although the more affluent can try to ignore it. This is a case where problems spilled over into the playground of the more afluent, and it's getting several days of news. Would this be a big deal if it was in a venue across the railroad tracks? Americans have a long history of settling dispute with guns, that is what they were made for. Making living things dead.