I’ve been shooting photos at Junk 2 Funk for a number of years, and I am always impressed by the sheer warmth and joy of the event. It’s inspiring to see to many creative teenagers working together and supporting each other.

This is just a sampling of the photos I took at the Saturday matinee show. If you want to see even more, there is a huge album on my Savannah Unplugged Facebook page. Many thanks to photographer teacher Kinte Taylor for reaching out to me every year.

There was a nice turnout, but it was really hot, which clearly kept some folks away and prompted others to head home early rather than linger for the live entertainment and festival atmosphere. The parade began and ended in the city-owned plaza on Waters near 37th, headed a block east from there, turned north, and eventually headed south on Waters for a number of blocks.

Waters Avenue has some wonderful potential, but some of the vacant commercial properties are unlikely to attract investors until the city’s long-delayed zoning overhaul is in place.

Anyway, the evening was great fun, and I took a bunch of photos:

I took some photos of the joyous affair.

Once again this year, I attended and photographed one of the three performances of the fast-paced, beautifully produced Junk 2 Funk Fashion Show, which is spearheaded by the visual arts department at the magnet high school. The fashions are made from ordinary “junk.” This year’s theme was “The Savannah Safari,” which obviously inspired some beautiful work.

I took a ton of photos, and I have included a few dozen of them in this post. Within the next couple of days, I’ll post all of these plus many more to the Savannah Unplugged Facebook page.

Savannah itself is an important player in Why I Walk, but the thrust of the text is more universal. The principles and examples could be applied in some way by people who live across America and around the world.

I should note that, before he became SDRA director, Kevin also wrote a wildly popular Savannah Unplugged post that later appeared as an op-ed in the Savannah Morning News: Savannah as a model for the nation: not 1733, but today.

In an SMN column today — Why Savannahians should care about walking — Klinkenberg puts Savannah’s walkability into a broader context. A snippet:

Walking is not a fringe benefit of being in Savannah. It is essential. In this city, you can experience other human beings by greeting them in reality, not just through a car window. Anyone can be here and enjoy a slower pace of life that includes sitting on picturesque streets and shaded public spaces. This place speaks to some very human desires that are timeless, and consistent across every culture.

The fact that Savannah was built around walking for 200 years is also why it is so attractive. When you experience a place by walking, the little details and the appearance of every building matters more. When you speed through a town at 60 mph, you rarely notice much beyond the signs.

I write this because it seems that sometimes we forget just how important walking is to the current and future health of our city.

Kevin doesn’t delve into specific examples, but it’s interesting that this piece has been published as the city of Savannah is about to conduct a misguided “experiment” that will make Bay Street less walkable. For the month of September, we’re going to remove over 100 on-street parking spaces on the south side of Bay Street — spaces that generate millions of dollars for nearby businesses annually — so that travel lanes can be widened in the hope that sideswipe auto collisions can be reduced. In the process, we’ll have speeding traffic just a few feet from the sidewalk on the south side of Bay Street from MLK to East Broad.

Click here for my recent City Talk column detailing all the negative fallout that we’ll see from that experiment.

Ironically, this experiment is in part the end result of Mayor Eddie DeLoach’s expression of concerns about traffic traveling too fast on Bay and the unpleasantness of being on the sidewalk near City Hall. With wider lanes and less on-street parking, we’ll have even faster traffic on Bay and even more unpleasant conditions for pedestrians, in addition to the massive damage done to nearby small businesses and property values.

Yes, we might reduce sideswipe accidents with wider lanes, but we’ll raise the odds of truly catastrophic crashes.

More recently, city officials announced that they might also add a truck ban to Bay Street in the evening until very early morning. That’s worth trying, I think, but I’d invite city officials and members of city council to stand beside Bay Street on a typical weeknight, when traffic really isn’t heavy at all. Some drivers are going far in excess of the speed limit, and a relatively small number of those vehicles are large trucks. With wider lanes, no trucks at all in the evening, and no on-street parking, some of those light vehicle drivers will go even faster.

One important point: a couple days ago, John Bennett of the Savannah Bicycle Campaign told the SMN that the September experiment could result in a “false positive” involving vehicle speeds. In other words, since the temporary medians will be marked with a sea of orange traffic barrels, we will see some drivers automatically slow down. If we had permanent medians there, those drivers would not slow down.

What a mess. Clearly, the city of Savannah needs more people on staff who can advocate clearly and effectively for pedestrians and for small businesses.

Beyond the immediate issue of Bay Street, Kevin’s piece about Savannah’s walking brand is worth keeping in mind for a variety of other reasons. For example, incredibly, there isn’t a signalized crosswalk on either the east or west side of Forsyth Park between Gaston Street and Park Avenue. That’s about 3/8ths of a mile. On MLK south of Gwinnett, we’ve got a median that prevents many pedestrians with limited mobility from crossing the street for blocks at a stretch. I could go on and on with examples.

Yes, Savannah’s older neighborhoods are dramatically more walkable than many places in America, and Savannah’s downtown area remains breathtakingly beautiful in many places, but those qualities exist because of good planning in the relatively distant past. We need to make sure that we make decisions right now that reinforce the visionary planning in Savannah’s history.

There will be lots of complaints about city council making this choice without any sort of public process, but, as I’ve noted in my City Talk columns in the Savannah Morning News, we had a very public search process that resulted in the hiring of Rochelle Small-Toney.

So who is Rob Hernandez?

Here are some key details from the Broward County, Florida website, with emphasis added:

Rob Hernandez is an ICMA-Credentialed Manager with more than twenty years of progressive and responsible local government management experience. He re-joined Broward County in July 2013 as Deputy County Administrator. Previously, he served as Deputy City Manager for the City of Coral Springs overseeing various city functions as well as the cityâ€s community redevelopment agency. Prior to Coral Springs, he served as Deputy County Manager for Fulton County, Ga., where he oversaw public safety agencies, unincorporated area services, the Office of the Child Attorney, offender reentry program, and coordinated with the Countyâ€s constitutional and judicial agencies.

Hernandez is also retired from the U.S. Army Reserves.

Broward County has a population of more than 1.9 million and is home to Fort Lauderdale. The county is about 43 percent non-Hispanic white, 26 percent non-Hispanic black, and 26 percent Hispanic. So, it’s a big, diverse metro area, which is dealing with issues of tourism, climate, economic development, traffic, and so forth.

I’m assuming that Hernandez identifies as Hispanic, which has some interesting political elements. If the mayor and members of city council had hired a black or a non-Hispanic white city manager, there would have been some of the usual racial resentment, but that tension is disrupted by the choice of a Hispanic.

Hernandez has been looking to move up the ladder for a while; he’s been a named finalist for manager positions in El Paso, Fort Myers, Delray Beach, and Pinecrest, Fla. He’s clearly a credible pick who has been extensively vetted in other searches before ours.

Hernandez is in his late 40s, I think, though I haven’t seen any confirmation of age.

I hope he gets a warm welcome.

My house has only a narrow front porch — a larger porch on the west side of the house was demolished long before I moved in — but there’s still plenty of room to sit out there. I don’t sit out there, however. Some of the neighborhood’s residents — mostly black, mostly older — still sit on their porches a lot, but porches are no longer the civic meeting points that they once were.

So hats off to Emergent Savannah and Art Rise Savannah for the Artists of Social Change exhibition on four front porches on 39th Street on Sunday evening.

From the Facebook event description:

An icon of the Deep South that can be found at all latitudes, the front porch is a place to slow down, spend time together, and to cool off during the dog days of summer. As varied spaces of relaxation, surveillance, leisure and democratic discourse, front porches hold a unique place between the private world of home and family and the public world of civic and street life. In Starland, four front porches will become creative platforms to examine themes that are as essential to our communities as porches are to our homes: empathy, survival, pleasure and emancipation. By honoring activist histories and bringing new voices to the table, we will span past and present to consider how social change takes root.

I’m going to quibble a little with the use of the term “Starland” here. I was one of the first journalists to write about Starland, and I use the term routinely to describe the area immediately around the old Starland Dairy (still unrenovated btw) at Bull and 40th streets, but I don’t think the term sensibly applies to blocks east of Abercorn. The Thomas Square Streetcar Historic District has been a National Register Historic District since 1997, and the short version of that — Thomas Square — works just fine for me.

Curators Lisa Junkin Lopez and Stephanie Raines brought the following performers to the Artists of Social Change:

• House of Gunt
• Abeni Cultural Arts Performing Dance Center
• Martin Bell, PostCrunk
• Patt Gunn, Master Storyteller and Geechee Girl Productions

I bought a new lens last week, so I was experimenting some with my camera settings. I was happy with a lot of the photos, and I’m going to present these in chronological order, even though it means that the shots aren’t sorted logically. I think this presentation gives a clearer sense of what it was like to wander 39th Street on Sunday. Congrats to all involved.

And this is what 35th Street looked like while I was walking home:

For what it’s worth, and at the risk of oversimplifying some complex issues, I think a lot of the tension over the Black Lives Matter movement results from some Americans either innocently or willfully misconstruing the name as “Only Black Lives Matter” when the intent is something much closer to “Black Lives Matter Too.”

Anyway, I took a bunch of photos before, during, and after the vigil, and some of the beginning of the march to City Hall.