Walking in the City

The weather was nice on Saturday afternoon, not as cold as it had been, and I thought it would be a good afternoon for a walk.  I asked Iain if he wanted to walk with me down to Elizabeth Street and then back on the Beltline.  No, he said, "there's not much to do on the Beltline."  So I proposed we look for some geocaches, and he was up for that.

Geocaching (for those of you who don't know) is one of those web-enabled activities where people hide containers -- in large parks and forests, often an ammo box, in urban areas, often a film canister (who has film canisters anymore?) or small magnetic container -- that includes a log book.  If you are the person who hide the container, you post the GPS coordinates on geocaching.com and then other people can look for it.  When you find it, you sign the log book and put it back.  If it's a larger container, there may be stuff in it -- things like the small toys that come with children's meals at fast food places -- and you can take an item if you leave one for the next person who finds the cache.  All you need to participate in geocaching is to sign up on the website (it's free) and a GPS.  The handheld ones that hikers use are optimized for this and you may be able to download the coordinates directly from your computer.

We found some caches on the website that were in walking distance from our house, downloaded the information, and headed off.  We ended up not being terribly successful geocachers that afternoon, only finding 2 of the 5 we looked for (urban caches are usually small, and can be pretty difficult to find) but we found lots of other things on a several hour walk around the neighborhood.  Not our neighborhood, precisely; we were in Virginia Highland and Poncey-Highland, but it was close enough I'll claim it.

We stopped at at San Francisco Coffee and got something hot to drink (I opted for hot chocolate, which is my new favorite thing).  The commercial area in Virginia Highland was full of people and is almost always a treat to walk through.  I just finished reading Jeff Speck's Walkable City:  How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time,  and he talks about the importance for pedestrians of human-scaled buildings with lots of variety in what pedestrians see from the sidewalk, with something new to see frequently, and buildings that don't look just alike and not the fake kind of "not just alike" in the new pseudo-urban developments like the one at Piedmont and Sidney Marcus.  In short, the commercial district at Virginia and Highland is nearly perfect, except for the taking-your-life-in-your-hands crossing the street part.  And there is lots to see, walking past the Virginia Highland shops.  This is the one picture I took there.

Who thought you could make a skirt out of chicken wire and marshmellows?  Just fabulous, although I wouldn't wear it.

Farther down Highland we got to Intown Hardware, where they used chicken wire to create another construction, this one involving actual live chickens. 

Then we got off Highland and walked down a side street (I don't remember which one) where this piece of artfully constructed yard art crossed my eye.

We'd never been to the Ponce de Leon part of Freedom Park and this sculpture, by self-taught artist Thornton Dial, was an unexpected pleasure to come upon.

This sign at the Rite-Aid on Ponce de Leon speaks for itself.  

We stopped at the Majestic Diner and had a very late lunch.  I hadn't been to the Majestic in decades and the clientele seemed more upscale than I remembered.  The burger was delicious and the fries were okay, and the service excellent, and no one was living in the ladies' room.  I would highly recommend it.

Next we were back in Freedom Park, this time the section near North Highland.  We didn't find the geocache we were looking for there, but we did find this interesting and slightly disturbing installation.  I am not sure what it is.  I hope it isn't a pet cemetery. 

Then it was back to Highland, we found a nice example of yarn bombing near North Avenue and this wonderful painting was on the side of a newspaper distribution box in the parking lot near the Plaza Theater.

Farther up the street there was this great homemade sticker on the back of a traffic sign.

Besides our stop at the Majestic we also went to Urban Outfitters, where Iain got some suspenders,  Young Blood Gallery (which is changing owners and having a big sale), and found the Indie-Pendent, which I have wondered about but never quite known where it was.  It was while we were walking down the alley where the Indie-Pendent is located that Iain told me he didn't want to live in Atlanta when grows up, that he wants to live in a real city with real public transportation. It might change by then, I told him.

Later I thought about Iain's initial response earlier in the afternoon, that there would be "not much to do" if we walked the Beltline.  On the walk we ended up taking there were things to see all along the way, and on the stretches where there weren't obviously, we found things to see because we were expecting it to be an adventure.  But a park?  Not so much.  (We didn't walk Freedom Park from Ponce to Highland.)  Jeff Speck wrote about that too, in Walkable City.  "Green spaces in cities are a lovely, salubrious, necessary thing.  But they are also dull, at least in comparison to shopfronts and street vendors. ... verdant landscapes do not entertain."  That's why the I-hope-it's-not-a-pet-cemetery installation was such an unexpected pleasure to find.

It was a great afternoon.  We didn't find most of the caches that we looked for, but it didn't really matter.