Back in April, I wrote a piece on the gentrification of the Bartlett Park neighborhood in St. Pete and the tensions simmering in the community. In one of my subsequent blog posts, I mentioned a blog written by a Gulfport Gabber reporter and Bartlett Park resident, Cathy Salustri. Her entry “I Had A Dream,†in which she admits that living in the majority African-American neighborhood has turned her into a racist, is now a front-page story in this week’s Gabber. The 15,000-circulation Pinellas County weekly has recently begun reporting on Midtown issues, and I have to wonder if this piece will come back to haunt the paper's main scribe. On her newest personal blog entry, Salustri says people have told her she has courage for writing such a potentially inflammatory piece.
I’ll let you make up your own mind. Read it here.
This article appears in May 9-15, 2007.