Tag: lafayette

The Pekin Café from the Green Book

The Negro Motorist’s Green Book was a guide compiled by Victor Green of New York City. This guide listed places in the United States that permitted or welcomed the patronage of African-Americans, which helped Black travelers and tourists avoid places where they would be driven out on account of their skin color.

Lafayette, Indiana’s Black community was not particularly large so there was only one place listed that African-Americans could be sure of service: the Pekin Café.

According to Stuti Varma of the Urban Matters Lab, the Pekin Café was located at 1624 Salem Street originally, then moved to its second location at 1704 Hartford Street. It started in 1924 as an ice cream parlor opened at the Salem Street location when Eugene Semmes opened it. Two years later, it began to offer chop suey as well as a meeting place: things Chinese were fashionable at the time, though the cultural appropriation was not always sensitive (to put it gently).

The business went through a succession of owners until it closed in 1954. Further information about the restaurant and its owners can be found at the link below, which is Stuti Varma’s history of the Café.

Pekin Cafe, 1624 Salem St and 1702 Hartford St

Welcome to the Lafayette Sentinel!

This is the third iteration of the old Tipped Canoe site, renamed to the Lafayette Sentinel.

With the new Administration, people must know what their legislators and leaders are up to at every level. For that matter, most of our lives are lived close to home and most of our interactions with government are with our township, city and county.

A national government may be excellent, but that of a city may be horrible, and Uncle Sam is not completely to blame for potholes in the street or scandals in the Police Department. For example, Donald Trump and Joseph Biden are not to blame for the bizarre behavior of the Wabash Township trustee who tried governing from Florida or whatever mess has taken place in Fairfield Township.

The opposite may be true. Lafayette’s Mayor Roswarski and West Lafayette’s Mayor John Dennis helped us get through the first four Trump years, shielding their cities from some of their problems.

Some problems take place on multiple scales. Greater Lafayette’s beloved weather forecaster, Chad Evans, is facing a layoff from Channel 18 because its owner, Allen Media Broadcasting, has decided to delegate forecasts for our area to The Weather Channel, also owned by Allen Media Broadcasting; it is feared that our local forecasts will be less reliable coming out of Atlanta rather than from the office on Yeager Road. This was made possible by the Communications Act of 1996 because entities far from Lafayette can now own Lafayette media.

So here goes! The Sentinel has its own domain (lafasent.com) (sort of) and, I hope, will someday join other outlets here in Lafayette in keeping you informed.