Remembering Max and Rosie’s and Asheville in the early 2000s

Posted on — Jeff Fobes

Katie Herzog blogs about the Asheville that was, on WFAE – Charlotte’s NPR station’s website. Here are a few excerpts:

I lived in Asheville in the early 2000s…The were a lot of freaks back then, with train-hoppers and burnouts sleeping in Pritchard Park and the highest population of dreadlocked didgeridoo players east of Sydney. There were also tourists, especially in fall when hoards of leaf peepers arrived, but most of the year you were more likely to see panhandling gutter punks than Pomeranians in handbags. …We were all broke then, and survived mostly on bagels dumpster-dived from New York Bagel on Merrimon. Every payday, my best friend and I would walk up Lexington Avenue to Max & Rosie’s, a small, basement-level cafe with the best vegetarian food in town, or at least the best we could afford.

Read the whole post here.

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About Jeff Fobes
As a long-time proponent of media for social change, my early activities included coordinating the creation of a small community FM radio station to serve a poor section of St. Louis, Mo. In the 1980s I served as the editor of the "futurist" newsletter of the U.S. Association for the Club of Rome, a professional/academic group with a global focus and a mandate to act locally. During that time, I was impressed by a journalism experiment in Mississippi, in which a newspaper reporter spent a year in a small town covering how global activities impacted local events (e.g., literacy programs in Asia drove up the price of pulpwood; soybean demand in China impacted local soybean prices). Taking a cue from the Mississippi journalism experiment, I offered to help the local Green Party in western North Carolina start its own newspaper, which published under the name Green Line. Eventually the local party turned Green Line over to me, giving Asheville-area readers an independent, locally focused news source that was driven by global concerns. Over the years the monthly grew, until it morphed into the weekly Mountain Xpress in 1994. I've been its publisher since the beginning. Mountain Xpress' mission is to promote grassroots democracy (of any political persuasion) by serving the area's most active, thoughtful readers. Consider Xpress as an experiment to see if such a media operation can promote a healthy, democratic and wise community. In addition to print, today's rapidly evolving Web technosphere offers a grand opportunity to see how an interactive global information network impacts a local community when the network includes a locally focused media outlet whose aim is promote thoughtful citizen activism. Follow me @fobes
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