Living Beyond Expectations on Sweet Auburn

Sometimes when I have to be out of town for work I end up missing something very cool that is happening in Atlanta, and that happened to me last week.  On June 19 the Atlanta Regional Commission hosted a daylong training on tactical urbanism followed by a day of workshops on June 20.  Mike Lydon and his team from the Street Plans Collaborative were there, along with Jason Roberts from The Better Block.  The City of Memphis has really embraced tactical urbanism as a way to make Memphis a better place to live, and Thomas Pacello of the City of Memphis Mayor's Innovation Team was there too.  And this coincided with the Atlanta chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism's third Thursday event, so there was a chance to talk to all of them over drinks at Noni's in the Old Fourth Ward.  And of course, while all of this was going on I was out of town.

The question the ARC was trying to address was a serious one -- what kind of neighborhoods will people need as they age?  This is especially an issue in a city like Atlanta, that is so dependent on cars and driving.  What do you do when you can't or don't want to drive anymore?

Although I missed the training and the workshops, I was back for the "better block" intervention on Auburn Avenue on June 21-22.  Rain intervened on Saturday afternoon and we went late in the day; by the time we got there there were not so many people around but it was still fun to see.  We came back the next day and again got there as things were winding down.

There were some pop-up shops there including Civil Bikes; I had talked to Nedra before, at the most recent Streets Alive event, so I was excited to see that they had a physical location.  She explained that the shop actually would be there all summer.  It turned out that the pop-up shops didn't have anything to do with the ARC event; they were part of a separate initiative related to the Atlanta Streetcar, which sort of explained why no one other than Nedra seemed to know about the other pop-up shops in the neighborhood, and why when we finally figured out where they were, they were not even necessarily open.

But no more complaining.  There was some cool stuff to see.  There were Walk [Your City] signs.

There was a pop-up plaza with a stage and performances.

The We Love Atlanta truck, the best mobile art gallery ever, was there earlier, but gone by the time we got there.

Living Walls had had tours earlier in the day of the wonderful murals in the neighborhood.  This one, from the artist JR, was installed last summer.

People for Bikes sponsored the bike lane, with a temporary barrier that wouldn't have stopped an errant car but did make the lane safer by providing a visual barrier.

Neighborland was there too, with red stickers instead of green.  There were all kinds of suggestions on how to make Auburn Avenue a great place to live for people of all ages -- everything from bike lanes to better transit to a supermarket to more things for kids to do to drug treatment.

There was a nice piece on line about the project.  Here's the subheader:  

Regional planners showcased a neighborhood with easy access to transportation, health services and entertainment. But it only lasted two days.

Tactical urbanism aims for "short term action, long term change."  Kudos to the ARC for catalyzing the short term action.  But what we need is the long term change.  I'm glad we're trying, but it's a hard lift in this city, with its legions of exhausted, angry drivers.  What matters is what happens now.

Without a Trace

The apartments at the corner of Wessyngton and Highland are long gone.  Here's the sequence.

This photo was taken last August, before the tenants were evicted.  There was a larger wood-frame structure on the corner, a long brick structure on the Wessyngton lot, and in between a small wood-frame building (attached to the larger one) that looked too small for someone to live in (but I'm pretty sure someone did).

By November, the buildings were empty and boarded up.

This photo - also from November - shows the sidewalk that extends from the corner down Wessyngton but does not extend all the way to the end of the second lot on Wessyngton.  Between the sidewalk and the street are the elm trees that were planted years ago by Trees Atlanta during a neighborhood tree-planting day.

By mid-May, when I took the pictures below, some of the erosion control fencing was in place and a large piece of equipment with a big shovel on the end was in place.  It was clear that demolition would begin soon.

On May 19, the demolition began.  That first day, the white frame structure was reduced to a large pile of rubble.

By the weekend, the corner lot was cleared off and leveled, and demolition of the brick building was well underway.  It looked like it had been bombed, without the fire.

Two weeks later, there was only a little rubble left from the brick building.  Mostly, there was a big hole.

By the following week, the rubble was pretty much gone, and all that was left of the brick building was the far wall, which was serving as a retaining wall for the property behind the lot.

The stairs remained at the corner lot, even though there no longer was anything at the top of them except for an empty lot.

A number of beautiful trees have been left.  With all the excavation around them, I don't know if they will survive, but it is encouraging that they aren't marked with fluorescent orange "X"'s and that there is no sign notifying neighbors that trees are about to be removed.

I was out of town the next week, but when I came back I was surprised to see a brand new sidewalk, extending the existing sidewalk along Wessyngton to the edge of the property.

Between kids being home and travel for work, I have not had time to attend any of the neighborhood meetings where I might have learned what is planned for the site.  We do know that the two lots have been or will be subdivided into three -- the Georgia Supreme Court has ruled that the City has to subdivide the property -- and that it will remain zoned for single-family homes.  But we don't know what will be built.

Myself, I'm not so worried about what the houses look like.  I'm more concerned about who will buy the houses and be our neighbors.  I'm hoping for the kind of neighbors who will pick up your mail or or newspaper if you are out of town for a few days and maybe even feed your cat and definitely call 911 if guys in an unmarked truck show up and start loading up your stuff.  

But of course that's still some ways away.  In the meantime, I'll take it as a good sign that there's a new sidewalk and pretty effective erosion control measures in place.  We'll see what happens.

Jazz in the Park

Last Sunday Tom and I went to the Atlanta Jazz Festival.  A jazz guitarist who was described by George Benson as "one of the greatest guitarists I've seen in my whole life" was playing, and that seemed like it would be would be worth going to.  So while Tom was at the monastery I dug a couple of folding chairs out of a closet and went to Kroger for portable food.

 

We were able to park on Virginia Avenue, not too far from Monroe, and walked from there.  At the park, there were lots of people who had clearly arrived early to stake out their favorite location and set up tents.  The International Stage, where we were going, was on the other side of the lake.  There the crowd was smaller.  There were not many people with tents but lots of people with folding chairs and blankets up close to the stage or farther back in the bits of shade that were available.  We put our chairs near a picnic table in the shade and settled in for the afternoon.

The first performer was a Moroccan musician, Ali Amr, who plays the qanun, a stringed instrument that resembles an autoharp.  It was a great performance but it did seem like it was better suited for a late night, dimly lit club than a bright Sunday afternoon.

Next was Diego Figueriedo, the Braziliam guitarist.  He was terrific.  Afterwards Tom joined the crowd at the WRFG tent and bought a CD.  He said that it took a long time because there was lots of conversation and photograph-taking that accompanied the transaction.

We'd checked the weather forecast before we left and it was "chance of rain after 4 p.m."  That didn't seem like a deal-breaker, but soon after 4 the clouds came in.  We moved away from our spot under the tree and closer to the stage, since we didn't need the shade any more, but then it rained.  Unlike many of the other attendees, we hadn't brought umbrellas.  We talked about leaving -- lots of people did -- but the final performer, Cyrille Aimée, is an acclaimed jazz vocalist and we thought hearing her was worth getting wet.  So we turned our chairs over to keep the seats a little drier and took refuge under some trees until the rain passed, which it did in a bit.

She was fabulous and I'm glad we stayed.  She has a wonderful voice and it was a terrific performance.

Not only was the music great, which it was, but it also was the kind of mellow, diverse group in the audience that is enjoyable to be with.  We shared the picnic table with lots of different people over the afternoon.  It was the closest thing I have experienced in Atlanta in my almost 25 years of living here to the concerts in Millennium Park that we have been to in Chicago.  Which raises the question -- if I enjoy this type of event so much, why haven't I ever been before?

In Chicago, we could get to the park on a bus.  We didn't have to drive and we didn't have to figure out where to park and we didn't have to walk very far once we got off the bus.  (I don't mind the walking, but Tom just can't do it any more.)  In Atlanta, MARTA is limited and you can't really get from point A to point B reliably by bus.  Everyone drives everywhere and that means parking is a mess.  I never went to the Atlanta Jazz Festival before because I could not envision getting there without a level of hassle that I wasn't willing to endure.  There are lots of things that I would enjoy doing that I don't do because I don't want to deal with driving and parking.  Maybe this is just me, but it does feel like this is a quality-of-life tax I pay for living in a city that is so car-dependent.  And of course, I *have* a car.

It ended up not being bad, the getting-there-hassle-part, although it was at the edge of what Tom could do in terms of walking.  Afterwards, we were talking about the possibility of getting to the park by bicycle.  I told him that the new high-tech traffic-stopping light finally got installed on Monroe, making it safer to cross from Cumberland into Piedmont Park.  He asked if there was anywhere at the park to park bicycles.  Yes, I told him, the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition was there, just inside the park, offering valet parking.