Morningside's Best

Morningside is an old neighborhood, dating back to the 1920s if not before, but Wessyngton Road is much newer - connecting North Highland and Cumberland Road, it is straight and much wider than other Morningside streets that are not major thoroughfares. The official descriptions of the property on this street calls this the F.P. Smith Estate subdivision. I don't know who F.P. Smith was, but I am assuming that sometime after World War II the property was sold for development and you can't develop it without a street - so Wessyngton Road was built, and the houses started to appear. The lots are only 50 feet wide and the older houses on the street are (by current standards) small ranch houses nearly devoid of the architectural charm of the older Morningside neighborhoods. (We also have no sidewalks on our street, except along the apartments, at the corner of Wessyngton and Highland, and in front of two of the newly built houses across from the church. I assume that this is because the street was built in the Era of the Automobile.)

Our house was built in 1950. When I bought it in the late 1980s, it had a funny cupola sort of thing on the roof that accommodated an attic fan. The fan was nice, but (along with many of the other houses on street) it didn't look anything like the classic Morningside houses. That's the reason I could afford it at the time - I couldn't believe I could find a house in this neighborhood that I could afford, and of course it was because this wasn't one of those Morningside streets with the big old houses.

We put a second floor on our house in 1998 which not only meant we did not have to give away a couple of our three children, but also that the house looked more like it belonged in the neighborhood than it had previously. (Kudos to Ben Dooley, the architect, who did the magic in design, and Fernando Reyes, who at that time lived across the street, who was our builder.)

Iain and I were walking the dog the other evening and I picked up a flyer for a house on the street that is for sale. The flyer is advertising an "adorable home on one of Morningside's best streets." I was stunned by this. Not the "adorable home" part - it may well be extremely adorable - but the "one of Morningside's best streets" part. Presumably this was written by a real estate agent who actually knows something about Atlanta real estate, and I don't know who in their right mind would characterize Wessyngton Road as "one of Morningside's best streets" from the real estate point of view (unless of course they are thinking "buy a relatively affordable 1950s ranch house and knock it down and build a Large House that is Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses," but that is too depressing to contemplate.)

There are plenty of wonderful things about our location - proximity to both Highland Walk and Virginia-Highlands commercial areas, so we can walk to both Alon's and San Francisco Coffee, and we are in the district of Morningside Elementary School, a public school with high test scores, even though it is chronically infested with head lice - but plenty of other streets in Morningside can say the same thing, and might not be wide enough that the cars cutting through assume the speed limit must be 50 mph. (Our neighbor Tim tried to get a speed bump but no luck. Tom and Dan had proposed pot holes to slow the cars down. Really big ones. You get the picture.) Little ranch houses, no sidewalks, and a real estate agent says this is "one of Morningside's best streets"?

But of course, the real estate agent is right - it's just that what makes Wessyngton one of Morningside's best streets is not captured in any statistic that anyone can look up in a table somewhere. There is a tradition here - I am not sure what to call it, but for lack of a better term I will call in neighborliness - that one doesn't expect to find in a city. Years ago, people who don't live here any more hosted parties and invited me, and I got to know people I otherwise might not have met. The social committee baton has been passed, and now there are several of us who pick the dates and send the emails, but we didn't start it - it was here already. Morningside Presbyterian Church has been a wonderful neighbor and has let us hold block parties in their parking lot, but there are also baby showers and going away parties. If you met someone at a block party, you might stop and talk when you're out walking the dog, and then, if you see someone you don't know carrying a flatscreen TV out of their house, you might call 911. There's the informal network of flat tire repair, pest control, and plumbing help. The race car bed went from one side of the street to the other and back, from Max to Iain to Benjamin.

So that's the story. Even with the speeding cars barrelling down the hill toward Cumberland Road and no sidewalks, it is a great street.

But it's not the houses, it's the people in them.

Fireworks!

Sometime before July 4th, Caroline went with her friend Sally on an expedition to Alabama to buy fireworks. She came back and said that there had been a raffle while she was there and she had won $100 worth of fireworks. Tom said, what was second prize - $200 worth? She did survive the 4th without injury.

One day last week I was driving home from work and ended up behind a long line of cars on Lenox Road, stopped for a train. In front of me was a white Volvo station wagon (you know, the kind of car people drive who really care a lot about safety) with Dekalb County plates. There were three people in the car. Then I see the passenger in the front seat stick an arm out the window, and he was holding something bright, like it was on fire. It was a sparkler.

At the intersection of Johnson Road and East Rock Springs, I ended up alongside the car at a red light. There were three boys in it - they looked like high school kids. I thought about rolling down the window and ask if they had anything more incendiary that sparklers they were thinking about lighting in the car, but I didn't.

What I Thought I Knew

We have been talking about trees at our house - planting them, and talking other people into planting them. Tom had wanted to invite someone from Trees Atlanta or the Georgia Urban Forest Council to come to our last block party but we never got around to doing it. Last year I didn't go to the Trees Atlanta workshop on how to plan a neighborhood tree-planting event because it was during the Great Atlanta Gasoline Shortage, but maybe Tom or I can make it to the one at the end of the month.

I notice the trees mostly when I'm walking, and I thought I had noticed over the years most of what there was to notice about the trees on the street. The tall pines, the tulip poplars, the mulberry trees, the maples (Japanese and otherwise), and of course the oak trees - the tall, towering oaks that shade the yards and houses and asphalt of our street better than another other trees on the block. We've been gradually losing the oak trees - they are old, and city living is hard on trees, with heat and pavement and drought. We lost one in our yard, years ago, and the huge, wonderful oak tree in Angela's yard was removed a while ago. Someone once told me (in reference to another wonderful oak tree in the neighborhood) that you can't put a price on a tree like that, but it's very valuable.

I thought I knew the trees on our street - I walk by them with the dog or the kids, or on my way to the Farmers Market on Saturday morning. I walk by them all the time and I thought I knew Everything that was Important to Know. I had thought about putting together a guide to the trees of Wessyngton Road, or a website, or something - when you define the boundaries to just our street, you think you can know everything that matters. And I don't just walk by - I do look, and I thought I saw.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed for the first time a small oak tree a few feet from the curb (I say small - small compared to the full size ones. This tree is taller than I am.) I think it is a water oak. I told Tom that Angela had planted a tree, and for the next week or so fretted that the dry hot weather was bad for a newly planted tree.

I finally saw Angela and she said no, that it had been there for a long time, that she had just cleared out the rest of the bed so now the tree was there by itself.

We think we know the places and people that we see all the time, but maybe we don't know them as well as we think we do. It's easy to assume that we know things that in fact we don't.

It's been raining since yesterday evening. The rain will be good for the trees. But as far as the human part of the urban ecosystem is concerned, we can't rely on the weather - we have to attend to that ourselves.