The Colors of Advent

Yesterday was the third Sunday of Advent.  There were red candles on the windowsills  surrounded by greenery, and wreaths with red and gold ribbons streaming down hung high above them in the tall windows on either side of the sanctuary.  A Christmas tree at the front of the sanctuary was topped with an illuminated angel.  In spite of the rain the pews were nearly full, with families with their children home from college, the winter family vacations not yet started.

Advent is the season of preparing for Christmas.  I grew up in a church that saw Christmas as a secular holiday that had no place in church (we should celebrate Christ's birth every Sunday, not just in late December).  I love the rituals of the liturgical calendar.  It's not that they bring back childhood memories but they connect us to ebb and flow of seasons and harvests and lives ordered by movements of the sun and moon, rather than Outlook calendars.

But yesterday wasn't about joyous preparation.  It was about the unspeakable tragedy that occurred  on Friday.  I was at clinic when it happened, with charts appearing in my box faster than I could complete a patient visit.  That morning I'd left my Blackberry on the dining room table and I had a doctor's appointment of my own in the early afternoon.  So it wasn't until later when I got to the office that I heard the full horror of what had unfolded that morning in Newtown, Connecticut.

Yesterday their names were listed in a black rectangle on the front page of the New York Times.  Twenty first graders, killed in their classrooms, and 6 adults from the school -- the principal, the school psychologist, and 4 teachers -- and the mother of the shooter, who had been his first victim, before he took her guns and her car and headed off to the elementary school.  There was selfless heroism at the school -- the principal and psychologist were killed when they tried to intervene, teachers tried to shield their young students from the gunman -- but they couldn't protect the children from a young man armed with a Bushmaster AR-15.

It's not that all mass murders are committed with guns -- they aren't -- or that they only occur in the United States -- they don't -- but they occur here more often than anywhere else and they almost always involve guns.  The ease with which guns designed to kill lots of people quickly -- like the gun the shooter used at the Newtown elementary school -- are obtained in the United States is  part of the problem, but gun regulation alone won't prevent these tragedies. We also need to do better with providing care for our mentally ill, and providing a safe place to grow up for all our children, including the odd ones who have few friends who get bullied or just ignored. By Friday night, the story the New York Times posted on line included the obligatory quotes from acquaintances of the killer. A high school classmate said “I never saw him with anyone. I can’t even think of one person that was associated with him.”

A sermon on the third Sunday of Advent about taking a stand, about being a part of a community that demands safety for our children.  Surrounded by the symbols of the season, thinking about guns, and mental illness, and wondering if this is the episode that is bad enough that we will demand action, that we will realize that we can't just demand, that we have to take action ourselves.  Otherwise, nothing changes.

There are no other people who are going to step up to the plate on this one.  There's only us.

An Empty Wall

Living Walls, a local nonprofit organization, hosted a wonderful street art event in Atlanta in August.  Artists painted amazing murals on empty walls in different parts of the city.  One of those murals, by the Argentinian artist Hyuro, caused controversy from the start.  It featured multiple images of a woman who -- initially nude -- grew fur that turned into a garment, then she stepped out of it and the wolf walked away.  It was a wonderful piece of art on a bleak corner across the street from the grounds of the Federal penitentiary.  While some in the neighborhood loved it, others didn't.  The mural was vandalized a couple of times, and when the issue went to the neighborhood association, the Chosewood Park neighborhood voted to have it removed.  So volunteers from Living Walls came and painted it over and now it's gone.  I haven't been back since that Sunday afternoon in late August when Sarah and I went to see it.  It was wonderful, and I am glad I got to see it.  But now it's gone.

And now it's happened again.  This time it was a French artist named Pierre Roti, who started the work soon after the Living Walls event.  The mural is on a long wall on University Avenue in south Atlanta in the Pittsburgh neighborhood, just off the interstate.  The wall is adjacent to Carey Limosine and is more than 200 feet long.  Roti paints with spray paint, and weeks of work went into creating this piece.  But some in the neighborhood found the imagery (including snakes) disturbing, and others felt it was disrespectful, that the neighborhood was not engaged consulted before the work was created.  In November, a group including a retired state legislator took it upon themselves to paint over the work.  The murals' supporters showed up and worked to remove the paint before it dried, and a crew from the Georgia Department of Transportation -- the actual owner of the wall -- helped clean it up.

But then there were issues about who approved what and although Living Walls did do what the city told them to do, in terms of permitting for this site, the wall actually did belong to GDOT and they hadn't approved it.  So there was an announcement that the work would be painted as early as this week.

Caroline and I went to see it on Sunday afternoon.  By that time, it not only had been defaced by the neighborhood group in early November but someone had glued posters over it.  But it still could mostly be seen.  It's huge and hallucinatory and I can't even describe it.  My French is not good enough to read the inscription which seems to include the word "xenophobia."  (To get a better photo of the inscription I would have had to step out into the street, which is something that didn't seem worth the risk.)

 

But now it's gone.  Yesterday the GDOT painted over it and now it's back to being a long gray wall, waiting for the next vandal with a can of spray paint or a pile of posters.  Maybe the community can agree on a new piece of art to replace this one, and get the appropriate permits from GDOT to place it there.  But given the dispute over this one, it's hard to see any kind of community consensus emerging.  There were plenty of people in the Pittsburgh neighborhood who liked this one.  Whose decision is it?  There always will be people who don't like a particular work of art.  Do they get to veto a work that it is in a public place?

This year Living Walls tried to place murals in some neighborhoods that had been hard-hit by the recession.  They were trying to help revitalize communities by installations of murals.  Now there's talk about the need for more involvement of the community, which sounds good, but it's hard for me to see exactly how that's supposed to work.  Twice burned, if I were Living Walls I'd stay in the neighborhoods where I was welcome.  And the community leaders who have driven the decisions to remove the murals may not own the walls but they are now responsible for what follows.  What happens now?

We'll see.

Update from the Construction Zones

I was out of town last week and wasn't able to attend the meeting Tuesday morning at Morningside Elementary School on the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) construction. Given the absence of news on the neighborhood email lists subsequently about what was discussed there, I don't know how many people were able to attend. In the meantime, East Morningside is still torn up with and the right turn bypass lane to North Morningside is closed. It doesn't seem that there has been much progress made on construction there. Perhaps the absence of news and the absence of progress means there's been no decision made. If they are still trying to figure out how to get drivers to slow down, I can understand the lack of progress.

In the meantime, I came across this blog post from the Atlanta Public Schools from last month, listing the goals of the SRTS project in Morningside. I had to laugh when I saw the first one was "Reducing traffic congestion around the school by 10% every year."

Although the work at the East Morningside/Rock Springs/North Pelham intersection seems to have come to an indefinite halt, the work seems close to done at the North Morningside/North Highland intersection. There still is an orange barrel indicating the obliterated right turn late from North Morningside to North Highland southbound; some better markings, with reflective paint on the new concrete that now blocks the lane, would help. The crosswalks are now marked and aligned with the new islands in the intersection.





At Cumberland and North Morningside, where the whole things started, the big pile of sand has been replaced with a larger pile of dirt, suggesting that they are filling in the new space that they created there. The small traffic island that used to be there is long gone. Instead there's a much larger area that is connected to the block between Sherwood and North Morningside on the northwest corner of the intersection. That work seems to be going slowly, too, allowing ample time for speculation. What are they going to put there, after all the dirt goes in? We've often discussed this, when we walk by on our regular walks with the dog. I've suggested that it might be a good location for the new sixth grade annex but I don't know that that idea has gotten any traction yet.



Of course, if they did that, they probably wouldn't meet that goal for a 10% reduction in traffic.

Security Screening

Too much travel these last several weeks.  On Friday, I came back to Atlanta from Charleston, West Virginia, flying out of Yeager Airport.  Yeager Airport is named for Chuck Yeager, the test pilot who first broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 in 1947.  There's a bust of General Yeager in the lobby of the airport and a portrait of him on the wall above the area where passengers go through security screening.

It's a very small airport, and the only restaurant is on the outside of security.  There is a sign there that says something to that effect, and when I confirmed with one of the TSA agents that indeed there wasn't another restaurant in the gate area, I went and got something to eat before coming back to security.  There were more TSA agents than passengers there when I was there the first time, and it was the same when I came back after dinner.  There were two young men in line ahead of me.  One went through, and then the other one stepped up and handed his paperwork and identification to the TSA agent.  He was in his 20s, with short dark hair and a short beard, wearing a green T-shirt (some sort of youth group activity, I think -- there was lots of writing, but I didn't read it), warm up pants, and sneakers, with a cloth roll-aboard bag.

The agent flipped through the pages of his flight paperwork, which looked like a multiple-paged paper ticket of the kind I haven't seen for years, when you got a little booklet with a page for every leg of a trip with multiple flights.  For identification, he had provided a passport, which was dark blue and I assume was a U.S.  passport.  The TSA agent looked at that too, and then asked the the young man -- not in an unkind way -- "Where are you going, son?"  

I couldn't hear the response, and neither could the TSA agent, who asked him to repeat it.  The agent was polite but clearly something had gotten his attention.  He asked the young man to come with him and they both stepped around the corner.  I was left there alone for a bit -- not long, maybe a minute or so.  Then the agent came back and apologized for the delay.  I told him it was fine and didn't say what I was thinking, that if there was an issue with a passenger I wanted them to take as much time as they needed to sort it out, and anyway, I'm from Atlanta, and sometimes security screening takes half an hour or more at Hartsfield.  He looked at my boarding pass and ID and waved me on through.

I went on to the x-ray area to disassemble my carry on bag.  The TSA agent at the x-ray screen held up 3 fingers to signal something to another agent, I assumed about what had been seen in the bag of the young man ahead of me.  "Three," he mouthed to the other agent.  Three what?  Three box cutters?  Three guns?  Three containers of forbidden hair gel?  Three what?

I went through the scanner, the one that used to show an blurry unclothed image and now just shows "OK" or not, and had to show the agent on the other side my left ankle.  Did I have an ankle bracelet on?  I don't think so, I said, which was a ridiculous answer, as I knew I didn't.  They waved me on through and I started to reassemble my possessions.  In the meantime, the cloth suitcase was open and was being emptied.  The TSA agent had taken out a worn notebook and an empty Nalgene water bottle.  The young man stood there watching, expressionless.

I went on to find my gate, figuring that whatever was in the suitcase, they were going to find it.  I found the gate and settled in for the wait until time to board.  But later, looking across the waiting area I saw him again, the young man in the green T-shirt, just standing here with his suitcase, on the far side of the seating area.

I didn't see him on my flight, but if he did have an international destination, he might have been headed to Atlanta and then on to somewhere else.  I don't know what it was that caught the TSA's attention initially.  Was it his destination, or the flat, expressionless affect?  I've had my carry on bags emptied more often in small airports than large ones (I assume the TSA agents don't feel so pressed by the long lines, so they can take just a little more time), and while they are doing it,  I don't just stand there.  I'm talking, explaining, carrying on a conversation.  He wasn't, and that's what I noticed.  He could have mental health issues and is on meds that made him that way, Tom said, when I told him this story after I got home.  Yes, that could be it.  Or he could have been on his way to a terrorist training camp, or he could be going home for his father's funeral.  I don't know.

I got home Friday night.  I am glad to here.

Completing the Streets

First there were the new stop signs on Cumberland, turning the North Morningside-Cumberland intersection into a 4-way stop (although you have to look and see that there are 4 stop signs; there isn't any other signage indicating that it is a 4-way stop).  Then the orange barrels -- a serious quantity of orange barrels -- appeared near the triangular traffic island at the East Rock Springs/Morningside/North Pelham intersection -- and the lane that allowed eastbound cars to go directly from East Morningside to North Morningside was blocked off.  The result has been backed up eastbound traffic on East Morningside at least at the evening rush hour, as the volume of cars on the road exceeds what can make it through a 4-way stop.  This should not have been a surprise to the people who planned this, as the traffic volume at different times of day is a knowable quantity, and 4-way stops are generally recommended only for intersections with "approximately equal" traffic volumes on the intersecting roads (resulting in equivalent obstruction to traffic flow on both roads in both directions) at specified volumes.

There's also work being done at East Rock Springs and Johnson Road, and North Morningside and Highland; work is also planned on East Rock Springs near Morningside Elementary School, but I don't know if that has started yet.  All of this is thanks to Safe Routes to School, a Federally-funded program to make neighborhoods safer for kids to walk to school.  In 2008, Morningside parents wrote a grant to improve safety for children walking to Morningside Elementary School.  Since all the construction started, there's been complaints from drivers about almost everything, from the 4-way stop at North Morningside and Cumberland to the changes at Morningside and East Rock Springs.  At North Morningside and North Highland, the right turn lane for southbound traffic on North Morningside is now gone.  Due to inattentive drivers, this was a hazard for pedestrians -- drivers would only look to their left for cars before turning, and any pedestrian to their right was at risk -- but I understand that that intersection now backs up at peak times as well.

Once the construction started, there was a community meeting arranged by Alex Wan at Morningside Elementary, but that was during the daytime and I couldn't make it.  The Georgia Department of Transportation sent some people out last week at 6 p.m. one evening (presumably to check out how bad the backed-up traffic was on East Morningside).  According to the MLPA, there will be a right turn lane on East Rock Springs, and they are still considering whether or not the East Morningside to North Morningside lane that bypasses the 4-way stop can be re-opened. "This will not be considered if GDOT cannot find a way to slow that traffic as it moves onto N. Morningside." Well, good luck with that. That's the fundamental problem, that people in cars assume that this nice, wide road was built just for them and that the most important thing in the world is for them to be able to get from where they were to where they want to go as quickly as possible. Bicyclists, pedestrians, people walking their dogs, parents with baby strollers are mobile speed bumps that obstruct the flow of traffic and should just stay out of their way.

In September, the Georgia Department of Transportation adopted a Complete Streets policy. The idea behind Complete Streets is that streets need to be designed for all users, not just drivers; Georgia's Complete Streets policy includes accommodation for transit users, something not include in many other states' Complete Streets policies. This is a really good thing and I am delighted to see the GDOT doing something other than planning to build interstate highways through our intown neighborhoods, but even an excellent policy cannot do it all. All the traffic-calming in the world won't slow down Atlanta's sleep-deprived, long-commuting, large coffee-consuming drivers. The angry drivers on the neighborhood email lists say that if the problem is speeding, the police should enforce the speed limits. Well, good luck with that, too; the level of noncompliance with residential speed limits is so high that enforcement would take all the police in the city. So what could be done?  Activist David Engwicht recommends reclaiming streets from cars by moving the social life of the neighborhood closer to the street, putting "something intriguing" in your front yard, and waving at drivers (which might slow them down because they think mistakenly for just a moment that the pedestrian they are endangering might actually be someone they know).

There isn't a simple solution. Engineering changes can be part of the fix, but people have to change their behavior, too. It used to be socially acceptable to smoke, and it really isn't, anymore. It shouldn't be socially acceptable to drive too fast in residential neighborhoods. Maybe every block needs an activist with a radar gun who takes pictures of license plates of speeding cars and posts them on line (something I have thought about doing). But in the meantime, Georgia policy is that pedestrians and bicyclists and transit users have the same claim to Georgia streets and roads as drivers. If there are enough of us out there, maybe it will make a difference. And maybe while we're at it we should wave at the drivers as they speed past us.

Staying the Course

The Eastside Trail on the Beltline had its official opening on Monday.  I've been wanting to get out and walk it again, including the segment north of Virginia Avenue, but I just haven't had time.  But even though I've not explored it as much as I'd like, it's clear it's an amazing opportunity and can lead to private sector investment that can revitalize neighborhoods around our city.

What kind of development revitalizes neighborhoods?  It's not so difficult.  The kind that encourages walking and gets people out of their cars.  If there must be parking, put it behind the housing and retail, but build for density so there are enough people who can get there without driving that you are not relying on huge numbers of cars that demand so much space for parking that things are too far apart and too ugly.  It's diversity, so there's places for all kinds of people to live -- students and young people just out of school, families with kids, empty nesters, retired people.  And diversity too in what's there -- coffee shops and bakeries and farmers markets and neighborhood taverns and art galleries restaurants and local retailers.  All built to human scale, not for cars.  I'm not a city planner, but this is clear to me, and I am sure it's even clearer to the people who do this for a living.

I went to the MLPA Board meeting a couple of weeks ago and there was a report about a recent City Council vote on a requested change to the city's master development plan for the Lindbergh area.  Lindbergh is already home to too many big-box stores and parking lots, and a developer wanted to but a WalMart Superstore there.  There might be a way for a WalMart to work in a location like this (but this is awfully close to an existing Target store) but not with a huge footprint and a huge parking lot surrounding it.  It is currently zoned for high-density residential, and the City Council did not have enough votes to change it.

One of the new neighborhoods in Atlanta that has benefited from the right kind of redevelopment is Glenwood Park.  There's thoughtful design, community involvement, and "nearly ideal walkable density."  It had been an abandoned industrial site that had most recently been used as a concrete recycling facility.  Now there's houses and apartments and retail and public space and (as best I can tell) it's a great neighborhood and a terrific example of how to do redevelopment right.

Now just to the west of Glenwood Park, a developer has proposed to build a WalMart.  This is in the Grant Park neighborhood, and the proposed development -- with at 155,000 sq ft store and more than a thousand surface parking spaces.  The Neighborhood Planning Unit opposes the development, which is inconsistent with the Beltline Master Plan.  For NPU-W, Chairman Edward Gilgor wrote, "This kind of aggressive ignorance is indicative not of an enlightened view of new urbanism, but rather a rather common and pervasive view of old-style suburbanism."

We have wonderful neighborhoods in Atlanta, and with the right kind of development we can have even more of them.  But big-box stores, regardless of the retailer, are just not the right kind. More from Chairman Gilgor:

More fundamentally, the proposal fails in nearly every way to comply with the goals and ideals adopted by Council in committing to the construction of the Atlanta BeltLine and Council’s bold vision of connecting and revitalizing Atlanta. Instead, the proposal seeks to wedge a typically suburban big box store into historic neighborhoods and communities that have strived for true intersection of the live, work play ideal represented by new urbanism. NPU-W urges the Office of Planning to exercise its discretion and deny the application as it had been submitted. Should the applicant decide to submit an application that does meet with the BeltLine Overlay and the Subarea 4 Master Plan, then it will find the surrounding communities, as well as this NPU, to be active partners and supporters in its endeavor.

What kind of neighborhood do you want to live in?  There's an on line petition on the Glenwood Avenue rezoning.  The Beltline is a great opportunity, but let's stick with the plan and do it right.

The Power of Ten

The Project for Public Spaces uses the idea of "the power of ten" in working with communities to help them think about their community's strengths and how to build on them.   Great public spaces are great because there are multiple (say, ten) things you can do there -- you can sit on a bench and watch people, you can get something to eat, you can look at a great piece of public art, you can listen to music, and so on.  Great neighborhoods are great because they have multiple (again, let's say, ten) places within them that are great.  Great cities have multiple great neighborhoods within them.  And so on and so on.  (It's a little reminiscent in more than just title of the famous film Powers of Ten, by Charles and Ray Eames.)

I have been thinking about my neighborhood, and what are our ten great places.  (Since it's a great neighborhood, there must be, say, ten.)  So here's my list.  The order, if it conveys anything, is probably more about proximity rather than importance or priority.

1.  Morningside Presbyterian Church.  Morningside Presbyterian provides wonderful expanse of green lawn, a parking lot where neighborhood children learn to ride bikes and where we have our block parties, picnic tables for a National Night Out event, a wonderful and safe hill for sledding when it snows, and a trail through the green space between Wessyngton and North Morningside.  Several of the 5K races in the neighborhood end at Morningside Presybterian, with the finish line in the driveway from North Morningside and after-race activities in the parking lots. There's a pre-school that is attended by neighborhood children, and a festival fundraiser (now moved to fall) that's a fun event for the neighborhood.  There's an Easter egg hunt.  And there of course is the church itself, which draws its members from the neighborhood and beyond.  They support the larger community with a variety of good works.  Sometimes they host classical music concerts and our neighborhood association meets there.  If I had to identify a place that was the heart of our street, I would say Morningside Presbyterian.

2.  Sidney Marcus Park.  Sidney Marcus Park was created from land that was acquired for the I-485 expressway that the Georgia Department of Transportation planned on building through our neighborhood.  The park is named after Senator Sidney Marcus, who helped stop that from happening.  Now there's a playground and picnic tables and (for an urban park) a fair amount of space for frisbee-throwing and tag and hide and seek.  It's a frequent site for birthday parties (and not just for little kids -- Sarah planned a surprise 16th birthday party there for Caroline.)  The MLPA hosts concerts in the park that are pleasant but attendance is largely limited to parents of pre-school children, something that I'd like to see change.

3.  Haygood Memorial United Methodist Church.  Like Morningside Presbyterian, Haygood is deeply integrated into the neighborhood and touches the lives of many people who do not attend church there.  There's a pre-school and a daycare center and an after-school program there.   That's where we buy our pumpkins in October and our Christmas trees in December; where we park when we go to vote or visit our child's classroom at Morningside Elementary; where the kids play basketball or where their Scout troop meets.   It's also a great church and it also supports a wide variety of community outreach programs.

4.  Morningside Elementary School.  Morningside Elementary is one of the defining institutions of our neighborhood.  It's a good elementary school, but what's extraordinary are the fiercely committed parents who run the Halloween carnival (a fundraiser for the PTA), the book fair, the garden, Family Science Night, the chess club, and so forth.  Most parents of young children get pulled into the parent groups through their child's pre-school or daycare or through friendships made at playgrounds, but if you haven't yet, you will be once your child starts at Morningside.

5.  Alon's Bakery & Market.  Alon's is a place to walk on a weekend morning for coffee and pastry, or to pick up a sandwich for lunch.  You can met a friend there and sit outside.  It's not the food so much that makes it a great place, on my list, although the food is very good - it's that it is a place to go where you can have a cup of coffee with a friend or chat with people that you know while you are waiting in line to pay for your croissants.  There are tables outside and benches where you can sit.  Even though the outdoor view is mostly of a parking lot, it's still a social part of the community.  Maybe someday they will take out some of the parking places and plant some trees and put benches in the shade.

6.  The Morningside Farmers' Market.  Almost every Saturday morning there's a farmer's market in the small parking lot across from Alon's.  What's available varies by season, but it's a way to support local farmers, buy wonderful food, and chat with the neighbors while you wait in line to check out the tomatoes.  Sometimes there's music, and you can walk there from our street.

7.  San Francisco Coffee Company.  Coffee, a pleasant ambiance, local art on the walls, and wifi.  Need I say more?  It's a great place to meet a friend, study for an exam, or get that Boy Scout rechartering package submitted on line.  And you can walk there.

8.  North Highland Avenue & Virginia Avenue.  There is not quite enough at the commercial area near our street (where Alon's is, and Caramba used to be) to be a destination, but just south of us where North Highland intersects Virginia Avenue there is a critical mass of restaurants, bars, shops, and public space to make it a great place.  Almost any time of day or night there are people on the sidewalks.  Coffee at Aurora in the morning, lunch Yeah Burger, dinner at George's, music on the corner.   There's also the Virginia Highland Civic Association's Summerfest festival in early June and events year round in nearby John Howell Park (also created from land acquired for the Interstate That Wasn't Built).

This, as you may note, is only eight great places and not ten.  I thought about the Morningside Nature Preserve, and Herbert Taylor Park, and the new park off Zonolite, and the South Fork of Peachtree Creek, but they all seemed too far away and not really an integral part of the social fabric of the neighborhood.  I probably would have included Caramba Café if they hadn't moved to Decatur Street.  Of course, the Project for Public Spaces folks are clear that ten is an arbitrary number; there could be eight or eleven great places in a great neighborhood just as easily as ten.  But ten's a good number.  So what have I left off?

What a list of places -- physical places -- does not capture is the neighborhood connectivity that is not linked to places.  There are active and effective neighborhood associations in both Morningside-Lenox Park and Virginia-Highland.  There's an email list in Virginia Highland that provides real-time information on lost dogs, cats in trees, yard sales, suspicious persons, BOLOs ("be on the lookout" notices) from the Atlanta Police Department, and the occasional near-real-time report of serious crime.   The result of these active and effective social networks is what Harvard University processor Robert Sampson  has called "collective efficacy" - the degree to which people trust each other enough to work together and shared expectations for action.  Sampson believes that many of the differences between neighborhoods have differences in collective efficacy as a root cause.

Which gets us back to the list of great places.  Great places support communities to develop an engaged and effective neighborhood, and engaged and effective neighborhoods can and do develop and support the great places in their neighborhood.  Wherever you live, think about your neighborhood's great places, and be part of your neighborhood's community life -- it really does matter.  

But I have to get off the computer now.  Here in Morningside, today is the Third Annual Morningside Mile Race and Block Party, which was started by Rick Chey (owner of Doc Chey's) to benefit Fire Station No. 19.   Iain will be running; I'm just going to the party.

Stopped in Traffic

It was a week ago Friday. I had left the office around 5:30. It had been a tough week and we were planning to go out to dinner. The traffic was horrendous -- southbound cars on Johnson Road were backed up onto Briarcliff. I thought that there must have been an accident. I called Tom to tell him it was going to take me a while to get home, that I had never seen Johnson Road backed up like this. It was very slow going; cars turned left or right at side streets or turned around and headed north. I turned right on East Rock Springs when I had a chance, and then was home.

Google Maps traffic showed Highland in red all the way to Ponce de Leon. We took another route to Caramba, on Monroe, where there was traffic but not the bumper-to-bumper, not-really-moving kind of traffic that was on Highland; it was more the normal Friday evening kind of traffic.

I didn't see it until later, but there had been an email earlier:

APD on scene of shooting RT @emseaelle: @ajc why is the intersection of briarcliff and ponce closed off?

That was followed by another email, describing a white Mazda at the northeastern corner of Briarcliff and Ponce, with a blanket-covered body and bullet holes in the side of a car. Springdale Park Elementary had gone into lockdown mode, and children reported seeing a man running with a gun.

There was only a little more (or a little less) information than that in the AJC story that came out that evening. The victim, whose name had not yet been released, had been northbound on Moreland Avenue and stopped at the traffic light at Ponce. (North of Ponce, the street is Briarcliff; south of Ponce, the street is Moreland. I suspect this name change has something to do with Atlanta’s racial history, but I don’t know this for a fact.) While he was stopped at the light, multiple suspects in possibly two vehicles approached his car. There was gunfire; the victim’s car proceeded across Ponce before coming to a stop at the northeast corner of the intersection. The suspects were gone, and the man in the car was dead.

That was all the news that was available over the weekend. Was it a dispute among a group of people that ended badly, or was it random? The idea that a man could be murdered while sitting in a car at a red light not far from Springdale Park Elementary School at 4 o’clock in the afternoon was very disturbing. It could have been a mother on her way to pick up her kids, a man who left work early to make it to his son’s soccer game, a woman on an evening shift on her way to work, a man on the way to the grocery store. It could have been any of us, and we could have had our children with us in the car.

I went to the MLPA board meeting Monday night, and although I got there a few minutes late I did get there in time to hear the end of the security update – the police thought that the victim was targeted by the perpetrators and it wasn’t a random act. We were all glad to hear that, as we didn’t think that people that we knew were likely to shoot us at the corner of Moreland and Ponce de Leon.

On Tuesday, the police released the name of the man who had been killed. His name was Graham Stephen Sisk. He was from Atlanta, and he was 23 years old. On Thursday, the police released surveillance video. The incident that culminated in the shooting might have started “several miles down the road,” but the police wouldn't speculate as to motive. A witness, afraid to give her name, said that a black pickup truck stopped, and a man got out, and shot the man in the white car.

At the MLPA meeting, the speaker said that the homicide was being investigated by an experienced team of officers. There were a lot of people who saw this happen; I hope they could and did provide useful information to the police. It should not be possible to walk up to a car at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, stopped at a traffic light, and shoot someone, and get away with it.  Not in my neighborhood -- not in anyone's neighborhood.

A Street Alive

Yesterday was Atlanta Streets Alive, an open streets event that has been sponsored in Atlanta by the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition since 2010.  I had not heard of it until last spring, when Iain and I walked the route on North Highland from Virginia Avenue to Corley Street.  It was wonderful to be out in the city and see the street with new eyes, as a place one could walk instead of driving.  So when we heard there was going to be another Atlanta Streets Alive event this fall, we were looking forward to it, and we weren't disappointed. 

The Eastside Trail on the Beltline is very close to North Highland in Inman Park, and this time there was a loop incorporating the Beltline from Elizabeth Street to Virginia Avenue, for a total of about 5 miles.   The Beltline segment was okay (but not nearly as much fun as walking it at night in the lantern parade) -- I have been meaning to get there to see the artwork ever since Art on the Beltline started -- but the part that we enjoyed the most was the commercial section of North Highland through Virginia Highland and Poncey Highland.  The street was full of people, and bicyclists, and kids with hula hoops, and music.  It was like a party and everyone was welcome.

The team from Free Poems on Demand was there again and we commissioned a poem.

We played cornhole in Virginia Highland and bocce in Inman Park.  Other people were playing hockey and bicycle polo.

There were neighborhood-shaped jigsaw puzzle pieces, with magnets on the back, in the areas near Freedom Park, courtesy of the Freedom Park Conservancy; we collected the whole set.  

Last time I didn't take many pictures but this time I made sure to have new batteries and an empty memory card in my camera before I headed off.  But the pictures I took don't reflect the experience of the event.  The street looks empty, probably because I didn't take pictures when I was surrounded by people and bicycles.  It was wonderful to be out on a Sunday afternoon, enjoying the city.  This time we overheard lots of conversations about cars and bikes and walking; no one ever says driving on North Highland is enjoyable -- no one, ever -- but walking was wonderful.  We were waiting for the light to cross Ponce de Leon, late in the afternoon, and a man in an Atlanta Bicycle Coalition T-shirt commented to us that it just showed how terrible the traffic is, the contrast between the cars on Ponce and the "street full of life" behind us and ahead of us on Highland.

There was a participatory art project on the Beltline, in which we were invited to write something on a white satin ribbon and tie it on to poles as part of a display.  It wasn't clear to me what we were supposed to write -- a wish, a prayer, or what's important to us -- so I wrote a wish.  My photo didn't quite get the whole thing, but it got the most important part:

That's mine, just above the center of the photo.  It says "Cities for people not cars."   Open streets events are not just for fun, so we all have something to do on a Sunday afternoon.  The intention is to transform the way we see the city, and our streets, and transportation options in the city, and to make us all advocates for change.  

Count me in.

Cleaning Up the Creek

The South Fork of Peachtree Creek winds through Morningside before it heads north and joins Peachtree Creek, not far upstream from the Piedmont Road bridge.  The South Fork is a prominent feature in several neighborhood parks, including Herbert Taylor Park, the new park on Zonolite, and the Morningside Nature Preserve.  More land with public access and more trails mean more people getting upset about seeing the creek used as an urban dump site.  Yesterday morning there were two clean-ups done apparently simultaneously, one at the park near Zonolite and one at the Morningside Nature Preserve.  

Iain and I went to the clean-up in Morningside, which was arranged (as we learned after we got there) by Trudy's friend Wayne through the Sierra Club, with help from Park Pride and the Morningside Lenox Park Association.  The city sent two trucks from the Parks Department, and Park Pride had a staff person there with a sign-up sheet, gloves, shovels, wheel barrows, and a cooler full of ice water.  We entered the property from the service road under the power lines on Wildwood and walked up a short distance and then down a long steep hill to get to the creek, near the new bridge.  

There we picked up cans and plastic bottles and broken glass and pulled plastic bags out the stream.  Tires were dug out (I think the total was 18), although one near the bridge that was half-submerged and impaled on a large log defied removal with the tools we had available.  And there was all kinds of trash.  There was a cooler and a large trash can and a plastic bat (the baseball kind, not the flying animal kind) filled with sand that was so heavy we thought at first it was made of wood.  There were underwear, t-shirts, at least one sock, and one woman's boot with a heel not well-suited for walking on the beach (maybe that's how it came to be in the water).

When it rains, the water can be nasty, due (as I understand it, anyway) primarily to sewer overflows upstream in Dekalb County.  But yesterday it looked pretty good, and there were lots of small fish in sheltered areas of the stream.  We saw a frog and a salamander, both of which are pretty good indicators that the water can't be too bad.

At the same time, another crew was working in the area near Zonolite.  First there's access, then there's trails.  People like being able to walk through green space alongside a creek in the city.  Then there's stewardship and the expectation that someone upstream will do what they need to do to clean up the water.  Then there's advocacy.  That's the plan, anyway, and at least yesterday morning, it looked to me like it was working.

A Matter of Scale

On September 16, the mural at the intersection of McDonough & Sawtell was painted over. It had been created in mid-August by the Argentinian artist Hyuro for the street art event Living Walls 2012.  The plans that had been submitted to the city indicated that the mural would feature images of chairs.  But when the artist saw the wall, the dimensions were different than she had expected, so instead she painted a mural that featured multiple images of a nude woman.

Not unexpectedly, the controversy started right away.  There was a church across the street, and a mosque not far away.  While the leadership of the church made no public statements as far as I know, the leader of the mosque made clear that he found the images inappropriate and offensive.  Still, there was a good deal of thoughtful conversation among the residents of the neighborhood; there were people who liked the work and wanted it to stay, people who liked the work but thought it was in the wrong place, and people who didn't like it and wouldn't have liked it anywhere.

The Chosewood Park Neighborhood Association convened a meeting on September 10 to discuss the mural.  A motion to leave the mural as it was didn't pass, and one to have it removed did pass.   But before anything was done, on September 12, the mural was vandalized by someone with a can of spray paint who couldn't spell ("TAKE THIS SHIT TO BUCHHAD") and on September 16, Living Walls staff covered the figures in the mural with gray paint.  Now, it's gone.

I haven't been back there, since the Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks ago when Sarah and I went to see it.  It's a pretty bleak area, across the street from the Federal prison, on the periphery of the site of the old GM plant site; the church across the street is really all there is in the immediate area.  For a month, there was a wonderful piece of art there, but now it's gone.

Still, it's right that it was left to the community to decide.  An artist from another country changed her mind about what she was going to paint.  I assume that the organizers of the art festival don't want property owners to be concerned about participating in the event next year.  The majority of the neighborhood (or at least of the ones who were eligible to vote) wanted the work to be removed.  So it was.

I've been thinking about what I hope will happen next.  Hyuro's work is gone, and I don't think she's going to come back from Argentina to paint pictures of chairs on the wall.  But I hope that there is a neighborhood effort to replace that blank wall with something beautiful and amazing.  I am sure there are artists in the neighborhood, and someone could paint something that the community would value and support.

A misplaced mural is the kind of problem a neighborhood can address, and that's what the Chosewood Park Neighborhood Association did.  But it's hard for a neighborhood by itself to do anything about an abandoned industrial site.  The Lakewood GM plant has been closed for more than 20 years.  I know that many of the people who live in the area felt that the mural didn't belong in their neighborhood, but that swath of industrial desolation left by the closed auto plant doesn't belong in anyone's neighborhood.  That's a problem beyond the scale that a neighborhood can address on its own.   What's channel 2 doing to make people aware about that threat to the neighborhood?   Maybe -- until there's something else on that wall -- the neighborhood could use it as a giant whiteboard for brainstorming on what they want on that old GM site, Neighborland-style.  And then I think they should call channel 2.

"A Series of Unfortunate Circumstances"

A message from Lynsley one day last week - the new waffle sandwich place that replaced the burger place that replaced the empty space where Caramba used to be - was closed.  The brown paper is back up over the windows.  The notice that is posted on the door refers to "a series of unfortunate circumstances."

Of course I don't know what the specific "unfortunate circumstances" were but thanks to What Now Atlanta we do know about the trademark issues.  There probably was a way around that (pancakes could be substituted for the waffles, perhaps), but there was no way around this restaurant not being a good match for the neighborhood.

This space is in a small commercial area that already includes other restaurants.  There's Doc Chey's, which is a place to take the kids, but you won't linger over green tea after dinner.  There's Rosebud, where you can have your locally sourced chicken with the heirloom tomato salad, but I at least would not take my children there (although I am sure other families do).  There's the Family Dog, which is a popular bar that serves food, but don't even think about asking for the burger without the sauce.  (There was a review on Yelp complaining about the lack of a children's menu there.  Well, okay.)  There's Alon's, which is busy throughout the day with the morning coffee-and-croissants crowd, the lunchtime soup-and-sandwich crowd, and the after work get-something-so-I-don't-have-to-cook-tonight crowd.  The latter group could also get a casserole from Casseroles.

There also is not much parking.  Even with the small lot in front of Alon's, the small lot adjacent to Rosebud, the big lot in front of Doc Chey's, and the small lot behind the former waffle sandwich place, there is still overflow on busy nights to adjacent residential streets.  Which is fine -- I would rather have that than more parking lots -- but the reality is for all these places to be successful, a lot of people need to walk there, which mean they need to be appealing to people in the neighborhood, and worth walking to.

We used to walk to Caramba, when they were in that location.  Even though we might linger at our table, we almost always had margaritas, and I'm sure the owners made money on our visit.  We'd talk to the people at the next table, or visit with friends or neighbors who were sitting at the bar, or wander to the patio to say hello to someone we hadn't seen a while.  We liked the food, but it wasn't just the food.  It was a place where we participated in the social fabric of our neighborhood, and I'm sorry, you're not going to recreate that with waffle sandwiches.  

Yesterday morning, after a successful launch of a 2-liter soda bottle from a PVC pipe attached to a bicycle pump at Sunken Garden Park, Iain and I walked to Alon's to get some croissants.  The outdoor tables there overlook a parking lot and aren't obviously pleasant places to sit, but they were full.  It was late in the morning and things were winding down at the farmers' market across the street, but people were still walking through and lingering a moment to chat with an acquaintance.  Both of these places, Alon's and the farmers' market, are destinations worth going to on a Saturday morning.  We want to go to places where there are people.  And except for the part about launching the 2-liter soda bottle, it's not rocket science.

On the Beltline after Dark

Saturday night Iain and I joined the Lantern Parade on the Beltline's Eastside Trail.  Tom didn't think he could make the walk because of his ankle, and Sarah was getting together with a friend to watch Dr. Who, so it was just Iain and me.  After we all had dinner at Caramba, Tom dropped Iain and I off at Krog and Irwin.  We had thought we might have trouble finding where we were supposed to be, but it turned out it wasn't difficult at all -- we just joined the large group of people carrying (or in some cases, wearing) different forms of illumination.  There were the two giant illuminated figures that led us on the trail.  

There was a man with paper lantern, made to look like a chicken.

There were lanterns made from lampshades, fabric, and plastic milk jugs.  They were illuminated with flashlights, Christmas tree lights, and candles.   They were carried by young adults, by children, by older people like me, and attached to dogs on leashes.  There were people along most of the route, between Irwin Street and Virginia Avenue, watching from windows, standing alongside the trail, looking down from overpasses.  There was applause and cheering for the Seed & Feed Marching Band, along with the occasional performance along the side among the spectators.  Soon after we left Irwin Street, there was a person who periodically fired off what must have been a flamethrower, and farther on the route a performer high above us on a roof of a building was spinning what looked like an LED-illuminated baton.  There were people in new apartments and in some industrial chic repurposed buildings and on patios of resaurants and bars who came out to watch.  A woman in what I thought was a white evening gown -- possibly a wedding dress -- was doubled over in laughter on a side street.  Videos and photos taken in the darkness; maybe some of them came out better than mine did.

The parade ended at Monroe Drive.  I'm sure lots of parade participants went to the Park Tavern, but Iain and I walked home from there.

It was wonderfully, amazingly fun, walking in the dark with paper lanterns along the Beltline trail, nearly continually disoriented as to exactly where we were, but seeing the city in the dark in a whole new way and from a different vantage point.  Like Atlanta Streets Alive, the event got people to walk somewhere they might not have otherwise, and certainly at a time of day they wouldn't otherwise, and after you've done it once, you're much more likely to do it again (although not necessarily at night, unless it's another lantern parade).  

This weekend was also the opening weekend for Art on the Beltline (the lantern parade was the opening event) , and I hope to get out next weekend to see some of the art work.  Last weekend Caroline and I went out Sunday evening to find and see some of the murals from Living Walls.  I told her I felt like I was on a treasure hunt; I bet Art on the Beltline will be the same experience, not quite knowing where you are going or what to expect, and feeling some sense of accomplishment that you found the work, in addition to the enjoyment of seeing it.

Walking home from the parade, Iain was recapping his favorite moments from the evening.  This is the advantage of living in a city, I told him.  City lights, a friendly crowd of people we didn't know, carrying lanterns through the reclaimed ribbon of land that is the Beltline.  People in other parts of the metro area may want more freeways, but I'm glad I live in a city that is turning old railroad corridors into trails, making its places into places where people want to go.