This project was bred out of fear and ignorance. As I grew up in Tallahassee, I grew to understand that I was too comfortably cocooned in my own little corner of the town. It's a strange feeling to call a place your home and yet to find so many roads foreign. And one of those roads led to Frenchtown. I was always told never to go to Frenchtown. My dad had successfully admonished me with stories of the time a prostitute propositioned him and when a man threw himself onto the hood of my father's car. But my habitual commute down Old Bainbridge Road while in college opened my eyes a bit and little things struck me. Things like sidewalks and men sitting on stoops and the pungent smokiness of barbequed meat. Things that made a community. What I’d once taken at face value I now appreciated for what it was and is: a neighborhood. And I wanted others to see it for the same.

So I set out to change my perceptions. I talked to people. I walked around. Noted changes and stagnancy. Wondered about its past and future. And through getting to know and understand Frenchtown through the people, I grew to love it just as I'd grown to love Tallahassee after I first moved here. And my hope is that, through my putting names to faces and anecdotes, you can learn to appreciate the place beyond the