Art, at McDonough & Sawtell

The Living Walls Conference, a street art event, was in Atlanta this month, from August 15 to 19.  This year the featured artists were women, and as part of the conference, new works of art were created in several Atlanta neighborhoods.  The conference's murals didn't go up in Morningside or Virginia Highland or Garden Hills; they are in the Old 4th Ward, and Reynoldstown and other neighborhoods that I don't even know where they are.  I only made it to one of the Conference's events, the lectures and discussion on August 18, and that was terrific, but I've been trying to make the rounds to see the murals.  None of the them are on the way to anywhere that I go, so it requires a special trip.

The weekend before last I went to see the mural on Irwin Street and the ones or or near Edgewood Avenue.  There are multiple murals on Edgewood -- some from previous Living Walls events, possibly -- and I'd never just walked around the neighborhood before.  There are some bars and restaurants that look like they'd be worth visiting, and a small art gallery, and some vacant commercial space that could become something interesting.  Living Walls had a block party on Edgewood on August 16.  I'm sure the bars and restaurants were full that night; I hope that some of the people who came there for the first time that night come back.  If the nearby apartments ever read reasonable occupancy rates, there will be enough population density in the area to support more businesses.  There are wonderful storefront spaces there, just waiting for more people.

But the big news out of Living Walls was the mural by the Argentinian artist Hyuro in southeast Atlanta.  On a bleak wall across the street from the grounds of the Federal penitentiary are multiple images of a woman, like frames from a movie.  In the first image, if the beginning is on the far left, she is facing forward.  She turns to her right, and then, with her back to the view, something appears, that may be hair, that gets denser and darker and by the time she completes the turn, it has become a jumpsuit.  She keeps turning, and she slips the jumpsuit off her shoulders and then -- her back once again to the viewer -- she steps out of it.  The garment lies at her feet and as she once again faces the viewer it is transformed into a wolf.  The wolf walks away, and the woman disappears.  It's a wonderful, evocative, magical work that engages the viewer and provokes thought and conversation, and -- at the time I am writing this -- it may no longer be there.

It does feature, prominently, multiple images of a nude woman, and because of that, there was some controversy.  It's not clear to me that it was real controversy -- much of the neighborhood seemed to be supportive -- but the kind that the media stirs up just to stir something up, until the property owner finally gets tired of the phone calls and says the paint the damn thing over.  

I was afraid this would happen, so last Sunday Sarah and I went there to see it.  It was amazing to see.

When we arrived, we were the only people there, but others came while we were there.  There were three women and a little girl, and then later another woman came.  Like me, the other adults were taking pictures.   It was like visiting a museum, there on the corner of McDonough and Sawtell, across from the prison.  I wished there had been someone to thank, or a cafe or coffee shop nearby where we could have stopped for a bite to eat or something to drink and told someone we were glad we had a chance to see the mural.  But there wasn't, so we walked back to the car and went home.

We had parked a block or two away on a residential street, and Sarah spotted this sign there:

But I think it's too late.

How We Got Our New Herbie Curbie

It was here when I bought the house, more than 20 years ago. Big enough to hold a couple 30 gallon bags full of trash, it was olive green and on wheels so it could be rolled down to the curb for trash pick up. It had a lid on it, and a metal bar that attached to the truck somehow and by which the bin was picked up and emptied when the City came by to pick up the trash. They are called Herbie Curbies (not to be confused with the trademarked Herby Curby®) and in Atlanta we've used them since the 1970s.  Sometime a few years ago the lid disappeared after a weekly pick-up and Kathy and Steve gave us the extra wheeled bin they had since they no longer had a tenant in their apartment.  So our old one without the lid went into the back yard.

At some point the City adopted an updated version of the bin that doesn't have the metal bar for a handle and is brighter green, in the same style as the new blue recycling bins.  Most of our neighbors have the new ones, but we still had the old-style one that Kathy and Steve had given us.  Or we had it until August 6, when it disappeared.  Tom called me at work and told me that the bin was gone, and he thought it had been taken with the trash collection.  He had talked to one of our neighbors, and there did appear to be some history of Herbie Curbies being taken by people on other streets who had not managed to get their own.  It seemed more likely that the guys who picked up the trash had just tossed it in the truck and driven off.  Tom called Alex Wan's office and the person he talked to there sent a request in to Public Works for a replacement.

The next day we had our National Night Out event, which was attended by someone from the Mayor's office, and from the office of the City Council President, along with a lots of police officers (including two from the APD's Mounted Patrol), and some firefighters from Station No. 19 along with the truck.  I mentioned the missing Herbie Curbie in my blog post about our NNO event, and in response to that, someone in the neighborhood emailed me with instructions on how to request a new one from the Department of Public Works.  So I sent a request to them by email on August 11.

In the meantime, we still had the problem of where to put the trash, so we hauled the old one that had lost the lid out of the back yard, even though by this time it also had a broken wheel. When we put it out the following Monday, it looked so pitiful I took a picture of it.

That day -- August 13 -- they did empty it and even put the dislocated wheel back in place.  It still didn't have a lid, but we could roll it around now that the wheel was back where it should be.  So it seemed like it would be okay until we got our new one.  It wasn't, though, because when the trash got picked up last Monday, that one disappeared, too.  Tom said something to Steve about it that evening, and Steve had an old one in the garage that he brought over for us to use temporarily.

That day, August 20, I had gotten an email from the Department of Public Works acknowledging receipt of our work request, and asking us to allow 7 to 10 days to receive a status update.  On Tuesday I called the phone number listed the email from Public Works and asked what we needed to do to actually get the trash container replaced, since it had now been a couple of weeks.  The person who answered the phone checked the records and acknowledged that they had a request for us dated August 6 (that would be the one from Alex Wan's office).  She apologized for the delay and said we should have a replacement by the end of the week.

As it turned out, we had one by the end of the day.  They came that afternoon with a new container.  It is beautiful, the green twin of our blue recycling bin.  It has our house number stenciled on the side.  And Tom said that when they delivered it, they took the one Steve had let us use.

Art and the City

Since last Wednesday, there has been a street art event, the Living Walls Conference, going on in Atlanta.  In spite of my best intentions, I didn't make it to any of the events until yesterday afternoon, when I went to the Plaza Theater for the second session of conference lectures on public art and urbanism in Atlanta.  The conferences I go to for work are the big-registration-fee, wear-a-name-badge-so-they-know-you-paid-it kind of conferences, where you get your program book and conference bag at the registration table.  This is a free-and-open-to-the-public-but-you-better-be-on-Facebook-because-otherwise-you-will-have-a-really-hard-time-finding-the-agenda conference.  This is not a complaint; I love "free and open to the public" and I am on Facebook and I did find the agenda.  And I am really glad I did, because once I saw the agenda for yesterday afternoon's session, I knew that I really did want to go.

One of the keynote talks was given by Ellen Dunham-Jones from Georgia Tech, who along with June Williamson is the author of Retrofitting Suburbia:  Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs.  This is about turning abandoned big box stores into libraries or churches, redeveloping dead malls, or -- in the most extreme cases -- tearing up the asphalt in the places that never should have been built and returning the land to wetlands or parks or to farming.  She pointed out that the suburban redevelopment that's now being done isn't really urban -- there are "urban streetscapes with suburban parking ratios" and some of the "instant urbanism" isn't very appealing from the pedestrian vantage point -- but it's still a big improvement over what was there before.  There was time for a couple of questions from the audience.  After the failure of T-SPLOST, what's the best option for the city?  She suggested that Fulton or Fulton and Dekalb Counties try for a 0.5% sales tax to support streetcar development.  Does redevelopment of the suburbs lead to diversion of investment and redevelopment resources from the city?  She acknowledged that it possibly could, but she couldn't come up with an example where it had, and could identify plenty of examples where it hadn't.

The second keynote speaker was Mike Lydon, from Street Plans, who is author of the tactical urbanism guides that have collated and disseminated many ideas from around the country (and few from outside the United States) on improving the urban environment through small-scale and often temporary changes.  Seeing what a neglected commercial block could be, with sidewalk cafes and art galleries and a farmers' market and bicycle lanes, can be the catalyst to lead to long-term changes being made.  Some of the tactical urbanism approaches could work in suburbs or small towns, but many of them are too small-scale to have any impact on the sea of asphalt that Ellen Dunham-Jones was describing.  After having stumbled across the tactical urbanism booklets after attending Atlanta Streets Alive a few months ago and some thinking since about what kind of small-scale changes we could make in our neighborhood, it was a real treat to hear him speak.  

As much as I enjoyed the keynotes, I think the most memorable moments for me came during the panel discussion that opened the afternoon.  Living Walls is about street art, giant murals painted on the sides of buildings or on underpasses, occupying that sometimes uncomfortable space between between vandalism and publicly commissioned public art, and (more provocatively, I thought) between decoration and advertising.  The panel included Courtney Hammond, Outreach & Education Supervisor for the Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs, and Lisa Tuttle, public art administrator for Fulton County, along with two Atlanta artists, Lauri Stallings and Karen Tauches.  Karen Tauches introduced herself by saying, "I grew up in the suburbs, and I never quite got over the experience."  She made the point that we tolerate advertising in the public space in a way that we don't tolerate public art.  We act like we have no control over the billboards and signs on our streets and in our neighborhoods, but public art (sanctioned or not) is held to completely different standards of acceptability by the public.

They discussed the role of public art in creating public spaces, and several times the example of Millennium Park in Chicago came up.  The picture is below is from our trip to Chicago last month.  We love Millennium Park, and part of the reason we love it is Anish Kapoor's wonderful reflective sculpture Cloud Gate, that draws you in and reflects you -- and the skyline -- back out.  It is irresistible.

Lisa Tuttle told a story about attending a conference for public art administrators in Milwaukee (no doubt a registration fee and name badge kind of conference) and as part of the conference they took a field trip to Millennium Park.  She said her group, in business clothes and with name tags on, was near the fountains in the park and a man approached her and asked what group this was that was visiting the park.  She said they were there as part of a meeting for public art administrators.   He replied, and gestured to indicate the park, "I just want to say thank you for this."

Of course we don't have a Millennium Park in Atlanta.  Someone made the point -- I don't remember who -- that in Atlanta we don't have a lot of great public spaces, and we have "fractured communities."  Can art help rebuild those communities?  The murals done for Living Walls aren't in my neighborhood; they are in poorer parts of town, places that I don't go.  Can the kind of art work that Living Walls created help strengthen those neighborhoods?  The final word of the session came from a woman in the audience, who said she is active in the planning activities in her neighborhood, but no one asked her if she wanted a mural with multiple 22 foot tall images of a nude woman painted on a building there.  The mural, she says, is marvelous, and has provoked meaningful discussions among neighborhood residents and within families and she is so glad it is there, and hopes that schoolchildren can come see it with their art teachers.  She believes it is a wonderful gift to the neighborhood. "I'm glad they didn't ask me," she said, "because I probably would have said 'no.'"

The maps showing the locations of the murals and the names of the artists who created them are now posted online.  I can't wait to go see them.

Wessyngton Road Night Out

It's been a while since we planned anything on Wessyngton Road in observance of National Night Out.  I think we did do it years ago, but we didn't actually have our event on the Tuesday night that the National Association of Town Watch designated for the national observance.  It always seemed awkward, having an event on a Tuesday night after school has already started, and August is hot in Atlanta, so it just never seemed like an optimal time to try to get anyone to participate in a neighborhood event.  (Texas, never quite part of the United States, actually observes National Night Out in October.)

This year National Night Out was August 7.  It seemed like it might be nice to do something, so we were trying to think of what might work -- something that would require minimal preparation, and wouldn't last very long, and might fit in between dinner and bedtime for the families with school-aged children.  We went with ice cream at the picnic tables at Morningside Presbyterian Church.  People brought ice cream and whipped cream and sprinkles and fruit and brownies, and showed up for just an hour, between 8 and 9 p.m.  The only set up required was putting table clothes on the tables, and Lynsley brought some trash bags.  We didn't really know how many people to expect -- some people came who we hadn't heard from, and some people who said they'd try to make it didn't -- but we ended up with more than 30 neighbors there, and plenty of ice cream.

National Night Out is all about building relationships not only within neighborhoods but between neighborhoods and local law enforcement.  I was expecting our event to be pretty small -- just some of the neighbors who live on one block on one street -- and if there was going to be an MLPA- or Virginia Highland-wide event, it wasn't realistic for us to expect anyone from the Atlanta Police Department to show up at ours.  But as best I could tell there were no other events planned nearby, so I went ahead and asked that an invitation be forwarded to Zone 2.  Then I forgot about it.

I did sign us up as an official National Night Out event, and subsequently got a couple of things in the mail from the National Association of Town Watch folks.  Then, about two weeks before the event, I got an email from someone in city government, wanting to know if I wanted someone from the City of Atlanta government to come to our event.  Sure, I replied, it would be great if someone -- anyone -- from the Atlanta Police Department could come.  Then I heard from someone in the Department of Public Works, and someone in the Office of the City Council President.  I wasn't sure if we were going to have a lot of people from the city come, or if they just hadn't made up their minds about who was coming to our little event in Morningside.

We ended up having lots of guests, and it was terrific.  Over the course of the evening we had Deputy Chief Propes from the Atlanta Police Department, along with Major Hobbs from Zone 2, someone from the Crime Prevention Unit in Zone 2, a couple of officers from Zone Six, and -- perhaps most amazing of all -- two officers on horseback from the APD's mounted patrol.  There was someone from the Mayor's office, and the person who had contacted me from the Office of the City Council President came by, too.  And the some of the firefighters from Station No. 19 came with the firetruck.  Some of the visitors were there for the entire event, others come from another NNO event and left early to make it to a third one, but we were surprised and delighted to have so many guests come to our event.

Thanks to everyone who came last Tuesday for helping us have a great National Night Out.  It was not hard to organize and I think everyone who came had a good time.  There was ice cream, and horses, and a fire truck.  What could be better than that, on a Tuesday night?

I can only only think of one thing.  If only someone from the Department of Solid Waste had come, and I could have asked them how we get that missing Herbie Curbie replaced.

Life in Atlanta, After T-SPLOST

Monday night we got back from a week-long vacation in Chicago.  We love Chicago, and this time we scheduled the trip so we could attend the Wicker Park Fest and a couple of concerts in Millennium Park.  We'd gotten tickets for a Second City performance in advance and planned to visit all the museums we've enjoyed on previous trips.  We did all of that, and filled in the gaps that were left in the schedule as the week went on.  There was a wonderful piano concert at the Chicago Cultural Center by Anatasya Terenkova and on our last night there we went to the Blue Man Group.  Tom and Iain went kayaking on the Chicago River and the girls and I went on a ghost tour (no ghosts seen, but lots of interesting stories from Chicago's history).  And we found the block of South Seeley that used to be Kroll Street, the street where Tom's great-grandparents lived in the 1890s.  Because the houses had been renumbered, we didn't know exactly which house it was until after we made the visit, but it was a pleasant street in Heart of Chicago, a neighborhood that is now largely Hispanic.

Over the week, we visited lots of neighborhoods.  We visited the shops on Milwaukee Avenue in Bucktown, had dinner in Boystown, and lunch in Pilsen.  We went to Second City in Old Town and visited the zoo in Lincoln Park.  We visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park and the Shedd Aquarium and Field Museum at the Museum Campus along Lake Shore Drive, at the southeast corner of Grant Park.  And except for some walking and a couple of specific other events (kayaking, a water taxi ride from Museum Campus back to Navy Pier, and the ghost tour), all our travel around the city was on Chicago Transit Authority buses and trains.  It wasn't perfect - the second day Tom and Iain decided to go back to the Museum of Science and Industry, there was a long wait for the bus - but it was plenty good enough to get us all over city for 7 full days on our week-long CTA passes.  Google Maps and the text messages we could send at bus stops provided more information, and many of the bus drivers were pretty proactive in asking us if we knew where we were going when we got on the bus (we were joking, after the second time that happened, that someone must have sent out a memo instructing them to do what they could to keep the tourists from getting lost).  Chicago is a fabulous place to visit because there is so much to see and do, in a relatively compact geographic area, and you can't have that without population density, and you can't have that without mass transit that works.

So Tuesday there was the T-SPLOST vote, and it lost in the 10 county metro region, by a lot.  Of course arguments could be made on either side of the issue but it just depresses me that we seem to be stuck in Atlanta with dysfunctional governance and systems, in a region that can't envision anything but freeways and cars and tried to put an interstate highway through my neighborhood in the 1960s and 70s.  Virginia Highland was developed as a suburb that was connected to the city by a streetcar line.  But we lost the streetcars around 1947, and except for the limited service that MARTA provides, we all are pretty much dependent on cars to get around.  But here's the deal -- if we design cities for cars, they are really unpleasant places for people; we end up with isolated buildings surrounded by a sea of asphalt, soul-killing places that aren't the kind of places I can see choosing to live in or to visit, and ever-wider highways that destroy neighborhoods and degrade the environment.

We were on a CTA bus and got into a conversation with a family from Dallas.  I mentioned the light-rail system in Dallas; they told us that it was about to expand further.  Dallas, another southern city that grew up in the Era of the Automobile, is investing in light-rail.  But Atlanta?  It's hard to see any solution given all those people who want to stay in their cars, and want more freeways built so they can do that.

I'm glad I don't have to get on an expressway to go to work or to the grocery store, that there are places I can walk to that I actually want to go to.  But as long as cars are more important than any other form of transportation, and as long as the city is designed for them and not for people, I don't see things getting any better.