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Old 04-15-2010, 07:23 AM
 
61 posts, read 131,249 times
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Photos in Downtown Ensley Alabama

Ensley Alabama pictures by otto56 - Photobucket
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Old 04-16-2010, 04:18 PM
 
122 posts, read 585,032 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Gay View Post
Photos in Downtown Ensley Alabama

Ensley Alabama pictures by otto56 - Photobucket
You've got big freakin' huge cajones to go in there, hombre.

The last time I happened to be in Ensley was when I was heading west but suddenly needed to turn around on the interstate and head back to Birmingham. I knew better than to take this exit, but I thought, Hey, it's only for a minute or so. What could happen in a minute? So, I took it, and at the first light I came to, a thug driving a jacked-up Chevy with rims and fenders so shiny I was practically blinded by the sun's reflection off them pulled up next to me and stopped cold. There was no one in front of him in his lane. He rolled his window down and made a menacing gesture at me. I looked away and tried not to look directly at him, but I did catch his gold grill chattering at me out of the corner of my eye and some hand movements. When the light turned green, the female in the car in front of me wouldn't go, and instead craned her head out of the window toward the thug in the car next to me. They started laughing, then pointed at me, and honked their horns. Then the woman opened her car door, got out, and started walking towards me. I said "F this," threw it in reverse, went in reverse across a grassy median, drove forward across another median, drove down a wrong way, and violated a bunch of ordinances and deftly evaded collisions in my haste to get the hell out of Dodge. I ended up doing 100 mph down a side road and catching the interstate at the next on-ramp. I was hoping a cop would pull me over and give me sanctuary. That was a scary episode.

Last edited by Laocoön; 04-16-2010 at 04:39 PM..
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Old 04-17-2010, 07:54 PM
 
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I am in West Bham all the time and have never had that happen. Seems like something out of a paranoid brain...
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Old 04-22-2010, 02:54 AM
 
283 posts, read 372,736 times
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Nice pics. I've been meaning to do a little historical documentation via pictures myself, but I've never had the time to do it.
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Old 05-26-2010, 12:20 PM
 
497 posts, read 503,879 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Laocoön View Post
You've got big freakin' huge cajones to go in there, hombre.

The last time I happened to be in Ensley was when I was heading west but suddenly needed to turn around on the interstate and head back to Birmingham. I knew better than to take this exit, but I thought, Hey, it's only for a minute or so. What could happen in a minute? So, I took it, and at the first light I came to, a thug driving a jacked-up Chevy with rims and fenders so shiny I was practically blinded by the sun's reflection off them pulled up next to me and stopped cold. There was no one in front of him in his lane. He rolled his window down and made a menacing gesture at me. I looked away and tried not to look directly at him, but I did catch his gold grill chattering at me out of the corner of my eye and some hand movements. When the light turned green, the female in the car in front of me wouldn't go, and instead craned her head out of the window toward the thug in the car next to me. They started laughing, then pointed at me, and honked their horns. Then the woman opened her car door, got out, and started walking towards me. I said "F this," threw it in reverse, went in reverse across a grassy median, drove forward across another median, drove down a wrong way, and violated a bunch of ordinances and deftly evaded collisions in my haste to get the hell out of Dodge. I ended up doing 100 mph down a side road and catching the interstate at the next on-ramp. I was hoping a cop would pull me over and give me sanctuary. That was a scary episode.
Probably thought you were someone else, that just sounds weird!
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Old 05-27-2010, 03:53 PM
 
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Maybe they were laughing at how ridiculous he must have been acting. That kind of thing is just abnormal on all levels, even in lower socio-economic neighborhoods. I would laugh too if someone went that far out of their way to frightened of me, or of my neighborhood.
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Old 05-31-2010, 09:16 PM
 
247 posts, read 1,111,548 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pvjd View Post
I am in West Bham all the time and have never had that happen. Seems like something out of a paranoid brain...
My job sends me to the poorest parts of pratically every city in Alabama and some in Georgia and Mississippi. I've never had anything remotely similar happen.
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Old 06-05-2010, 02:33 PM
 
1,028 posts, read 3,070,600 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HipLib View Post
My job sends me to the poorest parts of pratically every city in Alabama and some in Georgia and Mississippi. I've never had anything remotely similar happen.
I know, right! I am a psychiatric social worker and all my work is in the field. I have patients in west Birmingham, Norwood, Ensley, north Birmingham, etc. Perhaps it might be because of how I carry myself, but I have never experienced intimmidation on any level. Some people might look mean, but that is usually a defensive strategy. They are usually pretty nice if you are respectful, and don't treat them like they are animals. I had the mother of one of my patients tell me that she is very hesitant toward white people in her neighborhood because they are usually there if they want drugs or a prostitute, which opened my eyes because when you look at it that way, it is the opportunisitic suburban white people who are actually bringing crime into her neighborhood, not the other way around.
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Old 06-11-2010, 03:12 PM
 
122 posts, read 585,032 times
Reputation: 128
You naïfs. Ever heard of a tag team carjacking? One car positions itself in front of you, the target, so that you can't proceed forward. The other car stops short of the red light and at your side so that you can't switch lanes to go around the first car. Then the driver of one of the cars exits his vehicle and carjacks and/or mugs you.

I believe that my heady and quick actions allowed me to escape a dangerous situation that day. The rest of you would have been left sitting on the side of the road car-less, possibly mugged or physically harmed to boot, to reevaluate your sanguine and naïve notions.


For the record:

Since my last post in this thread I have, by requirement of my job, had to venture into a quite notorious and blighted Birmingham neighborhood on the east side. I was in the neighborhood for most of a business day, in offices and in an eatery. In the course of that day I witnessed one man being arrested, saw that man tasered prior to his arrest, and heard of shots being fired. All of the blacks in the building ran toward the incident as it was happening; most of the whites ran away from the scene, by the way.

"Anything can happen anywhere," the locals (all of them black) said after the scene had been cleared and declared safe. Yeah right. How come I’ve never seen the above carjack maneuver in Mountain Brook or along my usual route south of town? And how come, in all my years living south of town, I’ve never seen tasers and such situations on my turf? Could it possibly be that all neighborhoods are not the same with regard to safety? *GASP*

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Old 06-11-2010, 03:24 PM
 
2,450 posts, read 5,575,157 times
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How do you type those umlauted "i"s? Is this all an attempt for your stories to be printed by the New Yorker?
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