Update on the New Development at Piedmont and Cheshire Bridge

Years ago planning began to redevelop the retail strips between the thrift store and the taco place on Piedmont, across the street from the gorilla car wash and the BP station and The Pagoda and bar/tattoo parlor, between East Rock Springs and Cheshire Bridge.  The two small strip malls in the area were vacated.  That's when Artlite moved to much smaller and (it seemed to me) relatively horrible space facing a gargantuan parking lot at the new development at Piedmont and Sidney Marcus (since that time they've moved into somewhat less horrible space in the same development, but it is still a much smaller store than it used to be, and they're a stone's throw from Office Depot, which seems like it can't be a good thing).  So the tenants got mostly cleared out but the recession hit and nothing happened.  Then businesses moved back into the spaces for a while but now the construction fences are up and demolition begins soon.  Even the taco place is going to go, although that area is not yet fenced off.

Wednesday night representatives of Mill Creek Residential. the Dallas-based company that is developing the site, spoke at a community meeting sponsored by the Piedmont Heights neighborhood association at Rock Springs Presbyterian Church.  As an aside, when I first saw the name "Mill Creek" on the fence, I was highly skeptical.  I didn't think there had been a mill on the site, and I didn't even think there was a creek there.  So this struck me has a highly inaccurate and even misleading name for the property.  But it's the name of the company.  The plan apparently is to name the development Morningside Park.  It is, technically, in Morningside but it will not be very park-like (more about that later).  You might be excused from thinking it would be, though, from their website, which features this nice view of Piedmont Park.

The only thing in the area that looks remote like a park is the cemetery at Rock Springs Presbyterian, catty-cornered across both Piedmont and Rock Springs.  

But I digress.  The two representatives from Mill Creek came and answered questions about the development for about an hour.  I didn't quite catch their names but I think the one on the left (who did most of the talking) is Oz and the one on the right is Chris.  The Fellowship Hall was packed with neighbors from Morningside and Piedmont Heights as well as at least one owner of a nearby business.

The plan is to build two buildings 65 feet tall with 44,000 square feet of retail at street level and 300 residential units.  Behind will be a 7-story parking deck which will be partially underground providing controlled access parking for residents (1.6 parking spots per unit) and open parking for retail customers (5 spaces per thousand feet of retail).  Some of that is surface parking I think because the number of parking spaces they gave for the deck was only 520. They have signed Sprouts Farmers Market, an Arizona-based grocery chain with a recipe for Quinoa Pear Muffins on its website, to occupy 27,000 square feet on the first floor of one of the two buildings.

There will be a delivery entrance that can access the loading dock on the south end of the property, between the grocery store and the thrift store, and the main entrance will be between the two buildings, roughly across from Saigon Basil.  There will be a new traffic light here.  There were lots of questions and concerns about the impact of the development on traffic flow.  Oz said that a traffic study was underway.  Would delivery trucks be making left turns from the southbound lanes on Piedmont?  No, they wouldn't, they would only be turning in from the northbound lanes.  The plan also calls for parallel parking in front of the grocery store that would be inset into the property but still seems like a terrifying thing to do, given the speed and volume of traffic on Piedmont.  Why couldn't they have their main entrance across from Wimbledon?  It just didn't work, on the site plan, with the grocery store at the south end of the development.

There were questions about bike lanes (Oz wasn't sure) and the pedestrian experience.  What features would make the development accessible for pedestrians?  There would be 10 foot sidewalks and crosswalks; that seemed to pretty much be it.  Could they match the new streetscape on Cheshire Bridge?  Maybe they could, they didn't really know, they could check into that.  Did they know about the Piedmont Heights master plan and the proposal to turn the Piedmont/Cheshire Bridge intersection into a roundabout?  They didn't and although they didn't say so they pretty clearly had no intention to re-engineer this intersection.  

There were questions about water and trees.  Is there a creek in that valley?  No.  What about runoff?  There is water retention built into this, somehow, although where it is isn't so clear to me.  Did they know that their notice about trees (planned tree removals, I assume, but I'm not sure) was behind the construction fence and wasn't visible from the street?  Okay, thanks, noted.

The most uncomfortable moment of the evening was towards the end when a woman pointed out that lots of issues that weren't resolved had been raised and she wasn't confident that any of them were going to be addressed because she hadn't seen either Oz or Chris taking any notes.  Oz replied that he'd certainly made some mental notes.  

Iain and I were there and we took lots of notes.  If the guys from Mill Creek would like a copy, I'm sure we'll both be happy to share.

Listening in the Dark

I wrote last month about the barred owls in the neighborhood, about how I've learned that if, when I hear one, I look toward the sound and am patient I often can see the owl, if not in the tree then in flight.  I have heard owls in the trees behind the houses on my side of the street, in the trees behind the houses on the other side of the street, in the trees behind the houses across Cumberland, and in the trees along North Morningside.  I don't hear them all that often, though, and it always feels special when I do hear them.

Friday morning, early, I heard an owl in the trees in the ravine that runs behind our house.  The sound was coming from the trees behind Kathy and Steve's house, or maybe a little farther away, behind one of the houses between Kathy and Steve's house and Lynsley's.  I listened, and then I saw it take flight in the early morning darkness, over Kathy and Steve's house.

Later that day I heard from Lynsley that she had found a dead owl in her yard last week.  She thought it might have been a hawk that killed it; I've read since that the barred owl's most serious predator is the great horned owl, but lots of owls get hit by cars, too.  So I don't know what happened to this one.  But it was dead, and owls mate for life -- so somewhere nearby, there is an owl that has been left alone.

Last night I was getting ready to go to bed when I heard the owl again.  It was around the same place I'd heard it Friday morning, but it just calling, over and over again -- hoo-hoo-hoohooo, hoo-hoo-hoohooo.  I listened for a while; it went on for a long time.  It didn't move as far as I could tell.  Then I went back inside.

This morning early I heard it again, in the same place.  I heard it call several times, and then it flew, this time in the other direction, across our yard, and toward Cumberland.

I've never heard owls so close so frequently, as I have these last few days. It makes me wonder if it's calling for its missing partner.  Maybe that's too anthropomorphic.

Maybe it's not.

Playing for Fun

I started playing the flute when I was in medical school.  I lived in Brookline and the Flute Center of Boston (I think that was what it was called) was nearby.  My sister had played flute in elementary school or middle school and my parents had bought a nice flute for her, used, around 1960.  We still had it, and (as I remember telling people at the time), flute lessons were cheaper than therapy.  Later, when I was living in Nashville, I took lessons again, and then a few years ago I took lessons again for a while here in Atlanta.  I'm not very good, but it's fun, and many Saturday mornings I get together with my friend Susan and we play flute duets.  Neither one of us practice much -- most Saturday sessions start with the admission that neither one us has played since the last time we got together -- but it's still fun.  Our standard repertoire is duets by Loeillet and Telemann.  The Loeillet pieces are easier than the Telemann ones, and we play them better.  At Christmas we play Jonathan DeLoach's wonderful arrangements of French and English carols.  We're not very good, but it's still a lot of fun.

Sometimes when I have trips for work I take my flute with me, and play in my hotel room.  Not in the morning or late at night (people might be trying to sleep) but earlier in the evening, just before or after dinner, usually.  I've never gotten a knock on my door, asking me to stop, and occasionally I've had someone tell me they enjoyed hearing the music.  I've heard of amateur musicians meeting up with other musicians while travelling, to play music together, but I'm not good enough and don't really have the time, either, even in the evening when I'm on a work-related trip.

But I was delighted to see in the New York Times a week or so ago an article about a global event that took place earlier this month, the 2014 Worldwide Play-In Weekend.  It was sponsored by the ACMP--The Chamber Music Network, a non-profit that "facilitates informal music-making by people of all ages and nationalities, from beginners to professionals."  Members use the organization's directory to find partners for music-making, in their hometown or on the road, and this is the second year that the Network has promoted music-making by classical musicians of all skill levels on the first weekend in March.

The story in the Times ends with a great quote from an 11-year-old girl named Inez who plays the cello."'Mom always said that one of the reasons she thinks music is so great is because it's something you can do forever.  If you do ballet, and you don't end up being professional, when you're like older you can't just meet up with friends and do ballet.  But you can do that with music."

I used to be worried that classical music was going to die out, that only middle-aged and old people went to the symphony and when we got to be too infirm to go, there would be no audience left.  Whatever issues symphony orchestras have (and I know that many orchestras including the Atlanta Symphony have serious financial issues) I no longer think symphonies are going to go the way of the passenger pigeon.  I do see lots of young people in the audience at the ASO -- more than I remember seeing in the past -- and that's a good sign.  And of all the children taking music lessons, some of them will keep playing for pleasure into adulthood.  I think music is hard-wired into us, the enjoyment of listening to it, and performing it, and performing it with others.

So thanks to the ACMP for reminding us that music is a fundamentally social thing.  (There's a reason that the verb we use for operating a musical instrument is "to play.")  And that if we practiced a little more frequently, we probably could do that Telemann duet at a Play-In next year.

The Missing Airplane

Last night I had dinner with co-workers, and one of them -- her eye caught by CNN in the bar where we started the evening -- said she was obsessed with the evolving story of the missing Malaysian airliner.  I said I was too, that I had been following the story off and on through the workday through quick looks online or on CNN.  This morning I've checked again, and there is no news, just the ongoing back and forth of reports of new information (the engines were in communication with satellites after communication was lost), denials (there were no such communications), and then other reports (the engines were sending "pings," not necessarily data).  I just hope that the best technical experts are there and that the Malaysians are including them in the investigation.

It's a mystery.  There's the Iranians with the stolen passports (who are unlikely to have anything to do with the planes disappearance), and the angry denunciations from the Iran that the United States is at fault for stirring up anti-Iranian feelings.  There's China's impatience with Malaysia, and Malaysia's struggles to manage the unmanageable, and what I hope is a huge multinational effort to search the area where the plane might be.  The passengers and crew -- 239 in all -- were people travelling for work or leisure or immigrants hoping for a better life.  And they have just disappeared, along with the plane.

Getting on an airplane is an act of faith.  Faith that this huge heavy vehicle, loaded with highly flammable airplane fuel, is actually capable of getting off the ground, flying through the air, and landing where it's supposed to.  We assume that the airline and the air traffic control system know where the plane is and that it won't just disappear.  We assume that there are back up systems and redundancies that will allow the on board systems to work even when things go wrong.  And we assume that even if something bad happens that the plane won't just disappear and our families left to wonder.  The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is profoundly disturbing (aside from the loss of the 239 people on board) because it suggests that all of these assumptions are wrong.

And of course until the wreckage is found, there is the hope that the plane didn't crash, that it landed somewhere and those 239 people are alive.  That someone decided to turn off the transponders and take the plane off course to some unknown destination, for whatever reason.  This doesn't seem like it's very likely but there is nothing about this that is likely.

So I keep following the story.  Hoping for some sort of news, and not hoping, at the same time.  Because until there is evidence that the plane crashed, there is still the possibility that it didn't.

A Sunday Afternoon Walk

The weather was beautiful on Sunday afternoon in Atlanta, and I think almost everyone went out for a walk or a bike ride.  Iain and I planned on walking the Beltline's Eastside Trail, but he decided he wanted to go to Woody's for a cheesesteak first so instead of starting at Elizabeth Street we headed down Virginia Avenue.

We were walking along Virginia Avenue towards Monroe when we heard a car horn honking repeatedly.  It was neither the short staccato honks of a car alarm nor the long blasts of the impatient or angry.  The cadence was irregular and the honker was a small fluffy dog.

Approaching Monroe Avenue, there was a great view of the skyline and the (current) end of the paved part of the Eastside Trail.

We got a late lunch at Woody's Cheesesteaks.  I had never eaten there before (I don't know how that happened, but there you have it) but Iain had;  we had cheesesteaks and chips and then headed south on the Eastside Trail.

The first thing we encountered was two violinists under the bridge.

They were excellent.  I don't know what they were playing but I enjoyed it.

There were families with their kids, people with dogs, people on bikes, people on skateboards, runners, and plenty of people just walking.  The first time we walked the Eastside Trail was during the Lantern Parade in 2012.  I still remember how weirdly disorienting it was, walking through an area I'd never been before, in the dark, but seeing the tall buildings of the city in the distance and not really having any idea where we were.  

We made a pit stop at Paris on Ponce.  I knew they sold used furniture -- I'd seen it out on their porch, alongside the trail -- but who knew they had a private party facility that was so red?  And why has no one invited us to a party there?

We went by the Ponce City Market site ("Leasing for November 2014").  Last summer there had been food vendors in the shed on Sunday afternoons but there was no one there today. 

Someone has built beautiful erosion-control fences on a bluff adjacent to the trail.  They didn't photograph so well because they were mostly in the shade.  I don't think they were part of Art of the Beltline, but they could have been.

As we approached Elizabeth Street, we were thinking ice cream, but there were many people with popsicles heading north on the trail, suggesting that King of Pops was nearby.  And indeed it was.

And here's the last photo that I took that afternoon.  I am guessing this is a father and son.  On unicycles.

We walked back on Highland and noted some restaurants that we wanted to try and stopped in Half-Moon Outfitters just to look around.  Sweet Auburn Barbecue has opened at the old Pura Vida location and FLIP Burger is adding seating on the roof, which sounds like a fun place to be, at least when the weather is like it was last Sunday.  

All the way back I was remembering other times we've walked this route.  The first time was the first Atlanta Streets Alive event that we participated in, in May 2012.  I didn't know, until then, that it wasn't too far to walk from my house to Elizabeth Street.  The poets of Free Poems on Demand at Highland and North Avenue.  There was the afternoon we looked for geocaches and mostly didn't find them but found a lot of other things.  Those memories are all knitted together, like the Beltline bluff's erosion control fence, and were inseparable from the experience of walking.  There are things you just don't see if you are moving too fast.

Addendum: The Beltline has just posted something about the erosion control structures (created and installed by Trees Atlanta) on the bluff on the Eastside Trail, with much better photos than mine.

The Curious Incident of the Subdivision at Wessyngton and North Highland

Tom and I went to the the NPU-F meeting a couple of weeks ago, when the request for the subdivision of the two lots where the apartments are at Wessyngton and North Highland was up for discussion.  Various owners of this property -- and there have been several different ones over the last 10 years -- have wanted to put three houses on these two lots. There have been multiple applications for subdivision, going back I know to 2005 and probably farther back.  I knew there was some drama about all of this, but I didn't know how much.

Current zoning on Wessyngton Road is R-4, which requires 70 foot lots, among other things.  Most of the houses on the street were built before that requirement was in place, so in order to do any work on a nonconforming house (and few if any of the houses on the street are conforming to R-4 requirements) the owner of the house has to apply for and receive a variance, which is permission for a structure to not be in compliance with current zoning.  The variance process does consider how impacted neighbors feel about the proposal, and if you really hate it, you can show up at the meetings -- there are a whole series of meetings -- and speak in opposition.  I don't know what happens when neighbors show up in opposition, but this is another good reason to get to know your neighbors.  They are far less likely to be unhappy about your new second story or larger garage if the first time you talk to them is not to ask for a letter of support for your variance application.

The images that follow are from an earlier subdivision request, but they make the point.  Here's the current property lines with the footprint of the existing structures outlined:

And here is what's being requested:

The new lots will be similar in size to other lots on the street, which would be fine if the houses that were going to be built there were going to be the same size as the typical house on the street, but of course they won't be.  But to build a nonconforming house, there will have to be a variance, and I don't think that either the MLPA or NPU have been particularly happy about how all this has played out.  There had been an earlier subdivision request filed in late 2005.  In 2006 the City Council did not approve it, but somehow in spite of the request having not been approved, these two parcels subsequently showed up on the city's zoning map as R-4A, which would allow smaller lots.  Apparently someone just made a mistake.  During the time that the parcels were shown as R-4A, the property was purchased with the intention of subdividing it (as allowed with the R-4A designation) and building 3 houses.  That request was denied and -- not surprisingly -- it ended up in court.  It went all the way to the Georgia Supreme Court; the City of Atlanta lost the case.

By the time the legal issues were resolved the housing market had tanked, and so the apartment residents stayed put.  But since then the economy has gotten better and the tenants were evicted last year, and then new "For Sale" signs appeared.  New owners bought the property last fall.  They applied for a subdivision in January.  It was presented to NPU-F and the decision was to defer.  It will go before the city's Subdivision Review Committee in March and at that point -- regardless of the non-decision by the NPU -- I expect it will be approved, given the prior court decisions.

Notably, what the court ordered was that the subdivision should be allowed, not that the property had to be zoned R-4A.  So any structure that is not in compliance with R-4 requirements will require a variance.  We'll see what happens with that.

And one more thing.  At the NPU meeting, the owner's representative referred to the property as "rat-infested."  It that's true, it seems to me that a professional exterminator should eliminate the rats before the current buildings are demolished.  

Especially if they are going to come back in a couple of months requesting a variance.