Buzz

Peace of the action:We thought it must have been a joke.

A co-worker dropped on Buzz's desk a price list for being listed on a new Web site (www.lowergreenville.org) that aims to promote businesses, including bars, on Lower Greenville Avenue. The guy passing out the flier was Avi Adelman, the scourge of illegal parkers, code-flouting bar owners and incontinent drinkers on Greenville. Adelman is the man behind another Web site, www.barkingdogs.org, that routinely flays Lower Greenville bars and their pissing patronswho whiz on neighborhood streets.

OK, so say you're a bar owner, and the man who smacks you with one hand puts out the other to collect a fee for promoting your establishment. To Buzz, that sounded a bit like being offered "insurance" from a largish gentleman in a silk suit, because, you know, fires and things, "dey happen."

"Oh, please," Adelman told Buzz when we suggested that to him. "First, my name's not Guido."

Maybe not, but there seemed to be a bit of dissonance at work here, Buzz said. Adelman doesn't see it that way.

"We never said we want to close Lower Greenville down," he says. "We want to bring some control back in."

Life near Lower Greenville has been getting better lately, with new parking restrictions and more give-and-take bringing some peace among neighborhood groups and bar owners, Adelman says, and the goal of lowergreenville.org is to help good businesses stay in business. That's especially important now with the opening of American Airlines Center, which seems likely to draw more nightlife to downtown and the nearby West End, away from Greenville. "We need a Web site to bring people back here, responsible people for responsible businesses," he says.

That's right. Adelman wants to bring customers into Lower Greenville bars--and retail stores, too--at least those customers who can hold their water. We checked; it was still 100 degrees outside, so as far as we know hell has not frozen over, but has Avi sold out? Nope, he says.

The costs for being listed on the new Web directory, $1,760 per year to design and post a site, $1,260 to link a business' existing Web site, will cover expenses with a bit left over, he claims. And the cost to Adelman's rep as an anti-bar crusader?

"They're not evil," Adelman says of the Lower Greenville clubs. "I never said they were evil." Besides, he adds, he only regularly slams three or so bars, and they're not likely to do business with lowergreenville.org anyway.

Maybe they should, just in case, because dey wouldn't want to be da victims of any tragical events.