Toriano Porter
The Pride of Park Avenue
Combining cool, reflective narrative, free-flowing prose and authentic character dialogue, The Pride of Park Avenue is a collection of emotionally charged personal essays about life, loss and pain, character-driven flash fiction passages of love and betrayal, action-helmed coming of age short stories centered on the pursuit of the American Dream, painstaking, tragedy-filled poetry and insanely written gonzo blog entries that form one of the more daring works of the last quarter century.
From the depths of Park Avenue in South Saint Louis, Missouri emerges one of the quintessential literary voices of the 21st century. The Pride of Park Avenue is Toriano L. Porter’s first published book. He is a former All-Conference football player at both Eureka High School in Eureka, Missouri and Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg and a former minor league football All-American for the St. Louis Bulldogs. A news reporter with the Examiner newspaper in Independence, Missouri, his work has appeared in publications such as the St. Louis American, St. Louis Evening Whirl, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Riverfront Times, The Kansas City Pitch, inBox Magazine, Playback STL Magazine, Central News Magazine, ENVY Magazine in Kansas City, www.stlhiphop.com and the Houston Press.
Park Avenue Prolouge
My guess is nearly everyone in the city of St. Louis has as much pride in the their neighborhood as I have in mine. Although the Southside neighborhood in which I was reared - the 3400 block of Park Avenue in the city's Gate District - is a complicated place, it's a place I love and know best.
In my years of existence, I have experienced Park Ave in varying degrees. From the sandlot ball-playing days of the 1980's to the dope-slanging, gang-banging, thugged out highs of the '90's, to the weed-selling, ecstasy-popping phase of the new millennium, the eclectic charm of Park Ave has stood the test of time.
As a collective group of neighbors, we've loved, we've lost, we've prospered, we've struggled and we have always worked hard for what we deemed properly ours. We have made sure our place in the annals of historical neighborhoods in The City wouldn't and couldn't ever be denied.
Victorian-Style homes dotted the block in my early years. A mixture of single-family homes, two and four family flats and a few apartments lined both sides of Park Avenue from the 3300 block closer to Grand Boulevard down to the 3500 block near Compton Avenue. Several families owned their home including the Porters, different clans of Elliotts and McKinneys, the Turners, the Watsons, the Mitchells, the Kennedys, the Davis' and many others.
Please visit www.myspace.com/prideofparkavenue or www.torianoporter.com for more.
