BY KAREN SAMPLES
The Cincinnati Enquirer
NEWPORT -- You plunk down 30 cents for a peanut-butter cookie at the local bakery, and then you realize what's missing from Monmouth Street. Oh sure, it's got plenty of characters: the jeweler who doubles as an Elvis impersonator, the grandma who sews sequined pants for strippers.
There's the C & D Record Bar, with its prodigious collection of old 45s, and the Melody Manor Grooming Salon, whose customers are extremely loyal. One Shih Tzu used to fly in from New Mexico for trims, and now the salon's owner is installing the country's largest system for suctioning dog hair.
So Monmouth Street has its charms.
What it doesn't have is a place to sit.
Here you are, peanut-butter cookie in hand, when you notice there's not a bench in sight -- not even a bus-stop shelter or a convenient brick wall.
Hyde Park Square, this isn't.
Then again, what can you expect from a street once plastered with some 13 strip bars? In the old days, every greasy spoon on Monmouth had a slot machine in the corner, and gambling was so open that people assumed it was legal.
Newport's main drag is a gritty and infinitely interesting institution. Now, thanks to development along the riverfront, it also may become one that people actually visit once in a while.
Near the northern end of the street, developers are working on an aquarium, a 3D IMAX theater, a parking garage and an entertainment district. If all goes as planned, there will also be a millennium bell tower and museum.
A few blocks to the east in Mansion Hill, people are snapping up rehabbed houses that have doubled and tripled in value.
Monmouth Street, too, is getting a makeover. Plans call for benches, antiquey street lamps and traffic lights that will hang from corner poles instead of ugly wires.
Utility lines will be relocated to back alleys, and a grand entranceway will say: This is one of those cute little historic districts. Come on in and spend your money.
For now, though, Monmouth is a hodgepodge of the new, the old and the empty. While some buildings have been spruced up with paint and flowers, others sit vacant, waiting for boom times.
The street has six country-style restaurants, eight pubs and several beauty salons -- the kind where middle-aged women sit under dryers, their heads covered with pink curlers.
What does best here are stores that specialize. Joy Galbraith moved her costuming business from Cincinnati to Monmouth, and she's going gangbusters -- outfitting people for musicals, masquerade balls, vampire role-play games and '70s parties.
Monmouth also has a gun-repair shop, a Mexican grocery and a bakery that makes wedding cakes, birthday cakes and cakes with naked body parts sticking out of them.
Time for a windfall?
At Jewel King Jewelers, owner Steve Chuke sells gems and perfects his Elvisimpersonation, appearing to be teetering between the sexy and bloated years. On the wall outside, fliers announce Mr. Chuke's next performance as the King.
Inside his eponymous variety shop, Richard Deaton's face lights up at the prospects.
For 18 years, he has stayed open seven days a week, kept his merchandise inexpensive and put up with a parade of men asking which strip bar was best.
Now most of those bars are gone, and Mr. Deaton is anticipating riches, or at least enough windfall to cover his mortgages. He's purchased seven homes in and around Mansion Hill, and when not at Richard's, he's checking on renovations.
Newport's time has come, Mr. Deaton says. If development keeps marching south, he'll gladly sell his store at 720 Monmouth.
"Nothing good lasts forever," he says. "People really have to understand, some things have to go for the betterment of Newport."
But Richard's Variety Store? Where else can shoppers walk through the front door -- with its sign that says "Jesus is Coming, R U Ready?" -- and find such a haphazard assortment of interesting doo-dads? Mr. Deaton gets much of his stock from going-out-of-business sales, which explains why he has 18 boxes of beaded curtains, 75 rectangular mirrors and 17 pairs of ceramic hands holding Bibles. Next to a display of porcelain dolls is a room full of X-rated gag gifts, and for the pale shopper, there's a tanning bed upstairs.
Not ready for Thai
This is the sort of mom-and-pop uniqueness that Eric Avner would like to preserve.
As Newport's Main Street coordinator, he's an engagingly open fellow, given to optimistic pronouncements tempered with realism. Monmouth is overloaded with greasy-spoon restaurants, for instance, so Mr. Avner was glad to see a Thai place open near Fourth Street. But it was too early for such a venture to succeed, and the restaurant closed in less than a year.
Mr. Avner acknowledges Monmouth's current status as a useful street for nearby residents. On Newport's west side, the landscape is still dominated by small, wood-frame houses, and some people's rents are subsidized.
At 822 Monmouth, a plasma center offers $10 bonuses to donors who bring in a buddy. And in recent years, five rent-to-own stores have popped up on the street. This week, one was offering a big-screen TV for 24 easy payments totaling $4,917, compared to a cash price of $2,999.
The city recently passed an ordinance banning any more pawn shops or rent-to-own places on Monmouth.
"They're death to a small street like this," says Kris Carter, whose grandparents own The Thing Shop. "It just says we're going downhill."
To be sure, her family's business has lasted 28 years. Named for its original emphasis on knickknacks, or "things," the shop soon found its true niche: Strippers. Even now, with the decline in that particular market, pictures of near-naked customers grace the walls, and the shop carries pasties and 7-inch heels.
Its owners, though, have learned to adapt. Employees sew made-to-order outfits for wrestlers, drag queens and pageant contestants. Display racks are full of sexy lingerie.
Co-owner Sandi Lang is now anticipating -- with some regret -- a yuppie invasion. But even then, she's confident The Thing Shop will survive, perhaps as an oddball destination for titillated tourists.
"You get a bunch of these people who go, "Hee, hee, hee,' and it's like, "Lord, haven't you ever seen underwear before?' " Ms. Lang says.
Hidden jewels
On a recent afternoon, a gray-haired man with reddened eyes is walking slowly down the sidewalk. He stops to bum a cigarette from a carpenter, and his T-shirt comes into focus. "Booze is the answer," it says. "What was the question?"
He's one sort of Monmouth Street regular. To their credit, some businesspeople know full well that he exists.
At the Melody Manor dog-grooming salon, owner Kitty Pritchard sometimes makes a note of elderly people she sees walking their dogs. Then she calls to announce they've won a drawing: free pet food and a grooming.
The generosity is Ms. Pritchard's little secret. There's never really been a drawing.
Her spirit is what Eric Avner loves about Monmouth Street. He talks of a balance between the expensive and the affordable, the unique and the functional, the real and the touristy.
"There's so many hidden jewels of businesses on this street," he says, the optimism bursting forth. "These stores you just can't find anywhere else, and if you start putting in Gaps and Pottery Barns . . . "
We'd lose an institution.
"You get a bunch of these people who go, "Hee, hee, hee," and it's like, "Lord, haven't you ever seen underwear before?" ' Sandi Lang
Karen Samples is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. Her column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. She can be reached at 578-5584 or email
her at ksamples@enquirer.com
SAMPLES ARCHIVE