BY STEVE STEWART

A four-block stroll through downtown Clarksdale reveals the potential of a city that rarely gives itself enough credit.
The walk begins on the northern end of the historic district at the Cutrer Mansion, an 85-year-old Italian Renaissance villa that, even in its decaying state, stands as a testament to what Clarksdalians can achieve when they ignore some of the traditional barriers to progress.
An Oxford architect is putting the finishing touches on renovation plans that will make the grand old mansion the focal point of a new joint campus of Delta State University and Coahoma Community College. Many see the higher-education center as the catalyst for economic prosperity in a community where far too many residents lack the skills to get and keep a good-paying job.
Such lofty expectations might have drawn snickers two summers ago, when the Cutrer Mansion came perilously close to demolition. Deemed at the time by the Mississippi Heritage Trust as the state’s most endangered historic place, Cutrer was placed on the auction block by its owner, St. Elizabeth Catholic Church, which operated a school in two adjacent buildings.
There were no takers at auction, so parishioners, who had patiently sought a means of preserving the mansion but were eager to proceed with construction of a new school reluctantly advertised for demolition bids.
Cutrer’s demise seemed certain.
At the 11th hour, Clarksdale businessman Jon Levingston, inspired by his friend and local preservationist Bubba O’Keefe, organized a small coalition of area business leaders who coughed up $50,000 out of their own pockets as a non-refundable deposit on the property’s $750,000 purchase price. Levingston, a Cleveland native, simultaneously was selling Delta State officials on his vision of a higher-education center in Clarksdale.
Levingston’s committee and leaders of DSU’s private fund-raising foundation embarked on an ambitious campaign to raise the balance of the purchase price within a year. It took them just five months, and the Delta State-Coahoma Community College partnership was formalized in December 1999. The state Legislature followed a couple of months later with $1 million in bonds to renovate the mansion, a project that should begin this fall.
Walking south from Cutrer, one passes the renovated Coahoma County Courthouse, site of one of the more impressive fiscal recoveries in Mississippi history. A decade ago, Coahoma County’s finances were in shambles and county government teetered on the edge of insolvency.
The state Department of Audit told county supervisors to get their act together or risk state intervention. So supervisors, at the recommendation of audit officials, called in an expert on county government finances, former Hinds and Simpson County Administrator Hugh Jack Stubbs, to help restore order.
Stubbs, who planned to stay for just two years but remains in the county administrator’s post today, gets much of the credit for the current fiscal health of county government: reserve funds of more than $40 million, a sum accumulated even as county supervisors reduced property taxes 32 percent over the past seven years.
Stubbs himself is quick to deflect credit for the fiscal turnaround. He cites primarily the decision by supervisors in the mid-1990s to lease the county-owned Northwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center to a private operator, which turned the hospital from a drain on taxpayers to a major moneymaker. Health Management Associates, the Florida company that leases the hospital, pays the county $500,000 a year. The hospital also has benefitted from equipment and staff upgrades that wouldn’t have been possible under continued county operation.
The $6.8 million courthouse renovation was messy and prolonged, but nonetheless accomplished, Stubbs proudly notes, without a bond issue or tax increase.
One block down Delta Avenue from the courthouse, well-dressed diners file out of luxury automobiles, and an occasional limo or two, into Madidi, the new gourmet restaurant opened by Clarksdale attorney Bill Luckett and his friend Morgan Freeman, who, when not making movies, regularly makes the trek up to Clarksdale from his Tallahatchie County home.
Madidi has brought a touch of celebrity and class to a rebounding downtown district. On a pleasant summer evening, Madidi customers are apt to take an after-dinner stroll further south on Delta, where window-shopping opportunities abound in the 200 block.
The aforementioned O’Keefe and a handful of other merchants have persisted, despite economic trends that steer shoppers toward out-of-town malls and discount houses, in developing a quaint, tidy series of retail shops. Three of the shops are in buildings renovated by O’Keefe, a homebuilder by trade whose passion is historic preservation and downtown revitalization.
Capping our stroll, at the foot of Delta, is a stop at 0 Blues Alley, better known as Ground Zero, the latest handiwork of Luckett and Freeman. Answering a frequent tourist request for live music, the entrepreneurs took an abandoned warehouse and turned it into a nightclub with the look and feel of an authentic Delta juke joint, save for its modern restroom facilities.
A grand-opening party last month drew regional and national media attention and a few celebrities, including the Judd sisters, actress Ashley and singer Wynona.
Cynics and Clarksdale has more than its share can point to less flattering areas of town, including some primary entrance points, where a four-block stroll might reveal visible evidence of poverty, including dirty streets and dilapidated houses.
There’s no denying Clarksdale’s significant problems. Every Delta town has them.
But this is a column about potential. Progress has to start somewhere, and leaders like Levingston, Luckett, Freeman and O’Keefe give Clarksdale reason for optimism. DBJ

(Steve Stewart is the publisher of the Clarksdale Press Register.)