Door-to-door trouble

The Elizabeth Crime Dawg writes:

There is a 30-ish white male going door to door as an alarm company salesman. He was aggressive with one of my neighbors. He has been seen in Elizabeth and Plaza Midwood, yesterday and today. He is driving a small silver car with Ohio plates. Today he was seen cruising the neighborhood, stopping in front of each house, making notes. He may be taking notes of who does and who doesn't have an alarm system.

DO NOT OPEN the door to him. Call the police if you spot him. Dark hair, dark blue shirt, white shorts. When I saw him again today he sped off in his car as though he was afraid I would see him. The police have gotten several reports and are trying to catch him. There is no alarm company with the name on his clipboard.

I just had another person come to my door from a different company. It is suspicious because they are coming during the day when most people are working. Don't be afraid to call the police, if these are legitimate businesses they should know that this is no way to sell products. On the other hand, if it is a theft ring, they need to know that neighbors are watching.

Elizabeth news

My recent post got a pair of excellent responses:

• The Observer's Dan Tierney, staff writer for Neighbors of The City, says: "Please feel free to tell your neighborhood association, neighbors or anyone to please contact me if they have any story ideas or suggestions." Don't be bashful, folks. Call or email Dan and let him know what's going on here. Or tell me and I'll post it and/or call Dan. His phone: 704-358-5696.


• A note that Merry Oaks's fine blog underoak has a bit of Elizabeth news: Free classical music in a beautiful space.
  

Ask and ye shall receive.

Where's Elizabeth?

I hope you've been enjoying the new Neighbors of The City section of The Observer. It's a welcome replacement for the old Mecklenburg Neighbors section, and it's one of the first sections I look for Sunday mornings. (If newspapers are going to survive, they'll do so only by offering readers something they can't get anywhere else, and that will include hyper-local content like you see in NOTC.)

However, one thing has struck me as I've been reading the new section: It's almost as if Elizabeth doesn't exist. In today's section, for example, I count about 35 column inches of news space over 14 pages, and not one news item from Elizabeth. To be fair, there is a mention of CPCC in the College Notes and an event at the Visulite in the calendar. But surely there's more going on in Elizabeth than that.

Labels refer to SouthPark, Uptown, East Charlotte, Myers Park, Cotswold, Eastover, Plaza Midwood, Eastland, Coventry Woods, Idlewild Farms -- but no Elizabeth. And, apart from two Presbyterian Hospital ads, a listing for St. John's Baptist Church in the Worship directory, and a mention of a Helen Adams Realty office in "Historic Elizabeth," there aren't even any ads from our neighborhood.

This is not a one-time deal. I no longer have last week's section, but if memory serves there were only two mentions of Elizabeth, one in the traffic news column on page 2 and one in the list of homes sold by ZIP code.

C'mon NOTC. I'm doing a terrible job covering Elizabeth lately. Why don't you step in and put me out of business? Show Elizabeth some love!