Jackie Harris has her machete out again, if only figuratively this time. Years ago, Harris brandished one literally. Tired of having patrons parking in or blocking her driveway, she strode with cold ferocity and with great blade in hand into the cantina next to her Sunset Heights bungalow and asked them to kindly stop. That solved that problem, but still, the cantina's unsavory clientele, alleged Mexican Mafia-connected owner and the all-night thumping from the jukebox irked her. Once she found out the putative owner had never registered the deed, she engineered a takeover, and the cantina has since been reborn as mod Yale Street wine bar the Boom Boom Room.
And on a blazing white-hot July evening, at a table out in front, that's where Harris, the creator of the Fruitmobile (Houston's very first art car), talks all about the latest target of her fearsome ire. That would be Mitch Cohen, long the man behind the First Saturday Arts Markets on West 19th Street in the Heights and now, the Man Who Would Be King of White Linen Night, the relatively new and increasingly popular summer shindig in Houston's most quaint, Austin-like neighborhood. (As Lights in the Heights is to winter in Woodland Heights, so White Linen Night is to summer in Houston Heights.)
Harris has been a burr under Cohen's saddle pretty much since the morning after last year's event, which like this year's installment was held on the first Saturday in August. While Cohen has been a part of White Linen Night since the event's inception in 2006, he says that 2010 was his first at the helm. Last year Cohen teamed up with art gallery owner Lori Betz. She is president and founder of Houston Art and Culture, a mentoring and scholarship-awarding nonprofit. Betz believed that HAAC could serve as an umbrella for White Linen Night, enabling alcohol sales in some of the dry precincts of the Heights.
Last year Cohen became CEO of Houston Arts and Culture, which made him White Linen Night's chief cook and bottle-washer, all while simultaneously running what is likely the largest and most lucrative installment of his for-profit First Saturday Arts Market. Cohen says the event exploded in popularity last year, with somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 braving the blazing heat.
While many businesses in the Heights enjoyed red-letter nights, some, like the Boom Boom Room, did not. In fact, several felt downright screwed.
Harris says she paid Cohen $100 to participate and in return was promised shuttle service, parking-lot flags, printed promotional materials and inclusion on the event's map. She says she also laid in extra staff and spent an extra $3,500 stocking her bar with ice, coolers and glasses.
She had misgivings almost immediately. It seemed to her the event was too sprawling. It was no longer walkable. Where once the event was firmly ensconced on 19th Street, the city-within-a-city's quaint main drag, last year Cohen decided to cast a much wider net, one that took in the area's fringes, from White Oak Boulevard on the south, to Durham/Shepherd on the west, within earshot of the thrumming traffic of the North Loop at the top, and Studewood/North Main on the east.
When none of the promised maps, flags or flyers appeared, Harris's misgivings curdled into anger, if a mild one at first. It was when she finally tracked down a copy of the official event map that she started boiling over into something approaching rage. The Boom Boom Room, and several other participating businesses in her neck of the woods on the fringes of the Heights, were not even on the map. And then the final straw: She says she stood in front of her bar on the big night and watched as the shuttle buses came up Yale tantalizingly close to the Boom Boom Room, only to lumber back west a block or so down the street.
"And we didn't have nary a customer," she says. "Not a one until we got slammed as usual at ten o'clock. But that was after White Linen Night was over. In the past, we had gotten business from it."
In the days and weeks that followed, she heard similar tales from, among others, her neighbors at the pasta-and-cheese restaurant Jus' Mac, Texan-proud boutique Urban Western and, worst of all, from Pepper's Hamburgers and Tacos, a hole-in-the-wall taqueria on Durham whose owner Harris had personally encouraged to participate.
"We were all pissed. None of us had any business, and we'd all spent a bunch of money. Last year was so hard for businesses everywhere, so many of my friends went out of business, and there were these teeny little businesses that paid their hundred dollars and were left off the map."
Harris confronted Cohen, wanting to know why all the promised materials had not arrived and why so many businesses were left off. She demanded to see the financials for the event and says now that Cohen refused. She wanted to know if he had collected cash from food trucks and alcohol vendors, and if so, if he could account for it. Cohen has denied receiving any money from those sources, and no one that the Houston Press contacted said they had given him any. Even though Harris managed to get her $100 back from Cohen, she says she has reported him to the IRS and has publicly told Cohen that she has taken the case to the FBI.
