Two Houses

There are two houses for sale now on our street.  Well, technically, there are three, and one of the two I'm writing about actually has a North Highland address; the Wessyngton house with a "For Sale" sign that I'm not counting is the brick dupex, still awaiting demolition; there's been a dumpster on the driveway for months, but not anything obvious going on since they removed the trees behind the house last fall.

The really large house that was built where Angela's house used to be -- the one that has really good views of all our back yards -- is now pretty much finished and there was an open house a couple of weeks ago. I was out of town and couldn't go.

The "text for information" sign has disappeared and the house is now listed as "active contingent," which I think means they are close to a deal to sell it.

The other house that still has a "For Sale" sign in front of it is the one at Wessyngton & North Highland, across the street from where the apartments used to be.  The house has been renovated and I've been wondering which one would sell first, this one or the new construction.  But when I checked the realtor's website a couple of weeks ago, they didn't even have information about the house posted., so I figured, no way it would sell before the other one did.

This morning when I went by, walking the dog, someone had just pulled up into the driveway.  He told me he was there to inspect the house.  For the buyer or the seller, I asked.  For the buyer, he told me.

Saving Fire Station No. 19

Fire Station No. 19 is part of our neighborhood.  We often see the firefighters sitting outside when the weather is nice and they are not out fighting a fire. They take the fire truck to neighborhood events - they came to National Night Out on Wessyngton a couple of years ago.  We've taken cookies to the station on Christmas Eve a few times, and been to lots of neighborhood 5K runs that have started there.

A few years ago a campaign was started by the firefighters to raise money to removate the station.   An architechural firm put together an plan, and we all bought Fire Station No. 19 T-shirts to support the cause (plus, they were really cool, although Tom sometimes got mistaken for a firefighter when he wore his).  This is from the flyer from years ago:

Built in 1925, Station 19 has served and protected the Virginia Higland community for 85 years. Standing proud at the heart of the neighborhood, the building is the oldest fire station in Atlanta still functioning as a firehouse.  Old buildings, like this firehouse, need to be preserved in order to continue to function and serve.  After years of deferred maintenance, the firemen of Station 19 led by Sargent Ian Allum, are initiating the restoration and renovation of the historic structure.  Company 19 is committed to the health and welfare of the neighborhood, offering car seat installation & safety check, blood pressure monitoring, being a safety shelter for women, and hosting monthly story time for the children.  Restoring the firehouse will allow Station 19 to serve the community for years to come.

Fast forward to 2015.  The Morningside Mile is tomorrow,  It's a nice neighborhood event that benefits the fire station,

There's a one mile run ("Dude, it's only a mile") and what they call a block party, although it's not what I would call a block party; I think of a block party as neighbors in lawn chairs, and this is more crowds in a parking lot - but it's still a nice neighborhood event.

This year, the rhetoric about the fire station has been racheted up several notches.

This reflects what is on the firefighters' website, which states that the City plans to close the station in 2016.  The Virginia Highland Civic Association has a subsidiary organization, the Virginia Highland Conservation League, that is accepting donations to save the station.  Here's what the VHCA says about this on their website:

The City of Atlanta has plans to close the station in 2016. This decision has not been announced to the community at large, though, and key constituents in the neighborhood are very concerned about the possible loss of this historic resource that is central to our safety and community life. Interested citizens can help protect the station by donating funds to help renovate it.

The fire station’s building is in good structural condition but needs basic repairs. A neighborhood committee – consisting of architects, historians, preservationists, community leaders, and contractors – has made recommendations to renovate and update the building in partnership with the Atlanta Fire Department and the City of Atlanta.

Protecting out station will require community support. To date, nearly $80,000 has been raised. Another $220,000 is needed to keep No. 19 operating in a safe and efficient manner for another 50 years. Our goal is to raise those funds by December 2015.

I saw this a couple of weeks ago and shared it with some neighbors,  one of whom asked if it could possibly be true, that the City would actually close a station because it was in need of a $300,000 renovation, or did the plan to close it have to do with reducing operating costs.  Those were good questions and I didn't know - I just knew that for years they've been trying to raise money for renovations, and now there seems to be some urgency to the matter because "the City of Atlanta has plans to close the station in 2016."

Monday night was the Morningside-Lenox Park Association Annual Meeting and there were presentations from several of our elected officials.  Alex Wan, who represents us on the City Council, talked about the infrastructure proposal that had been approved by voters on March 17. There's extra effort being made to be good fiscal stewards of that investment.  The final list of projects is still being finalized, he said, but it does include the needed repairs at Fire Station No. 19.

This seemed to be very good news, and I emailed him later to confirm.  Here's the reply I got:

We have confirmation from Interim Fire Chief Joel Baker that Fire Station #19, post renovation, will be taken off the "Replacement" list and put onto the "Renovation" list. That's the fire department's way of saying that it won't be slated to be closed.

Regarding the funding, the infrastructure bond amount should more than cover the renovation cost for the building. There is a group of citizens that would still like to do supplemental fundraising to help purchase other incidentals for the firefighters that might not be covered as part of the construction budget (I'm thinking things like accessories, decor, electronics, etc.).

So...if you want to sign up for the Morningside Mile, by all means head on down to Highland Runners today and do it, but I think the fire station is probably going to be fine.  I already donated to the Virginia Highland Conservation League, and hopefully that can go toward "accessories, decor, electronics, etc."

It actually would have been nice to have known this *before* the special election -- it might have gotten some neighbors out to vote who didn't -- but now, it would be good if both the firefighters and the VHCA could update their websites.  The station's been saved by the 17,791 citizens of the City of Atlanta voted "yes" on Question 2 on March 17.

On Learning History

Last week I started a new course on EdX on Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, taught by Eric Foner, at Columbia University.  (It's actually the third part of a three part series on the Civil War, but I didn't take the first two parts.)  Last week he talked about how even today many people, if they know anything at all about Reconstruction, have a very negative view of it that was influenced by the work of historians in an earlier era who in turn were influenced by what had been contemporary anti-Reconstruction propaganda.  As an example of how Reconstruction was portrayed in the early 20th century, he showed excerpts from the 1915 film "Birth of a Nation."  However significant the movie may be in the history of American film, as history it is not correct and reflects the racism of the era in which it was made.

The week's assignment on using primary sources included an editorial written by James Weldon Johnson, the Executive Director of the NAACP, which was published in the New York Age in May 1921 following the re-release of the film.  Mr. Johnson wrote,

"Whatever other reasons there may be for the revival of “The Birth of a Nation” at this particular time I believe that one of the reasons is a determination to offset the shocking revelations that have just come out of Georgia.  The whole country has been stirred by the accounts of barbarous brutalities committed in connection with the Jasper County peonage cases; now comes this picture to instill the idea that no matter how brutally the Negro in the South is treated, there are justifications for the treatment."

I had no idea, on reading this, what had happened in Jasper County, Georgia, and I was curious.  Google turned up several good summaries, including one by Marshall McCart.  A man named John Williams was keeping 11 African-American men as involuntary indentured workers (the law calls it peonage).  One man escaped and made his way to Atlanta and talked to the Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner of the FBI).  Federal agents visited Williams' farm and talked to workers, who knew they had to lie.  But the visit was enough to prompt Williams to order his African-American overseer, Clyde Manning, to kill the men, a few at a time.  Several were killed and their bodies dumped in the Yellow River, and it was the discovery of those bodies in Newton County that led to an investigation that ultimately resulted in the convictions of both Williams and Manning for murder.  The investigation and subsequent trial was followed by the national press; this headline is from the New York Times.

This is a piece of Georgia history I certainly didn't know, just like most of us don't know much about the lynchings that occurred throughout the South, except for a few of the most famous ones.  A group called the Equal Justice Initiative has documented almost 4,000 "racial terror lynchings in 12 southern states during the period 1877 to 1950.  There is an effort now to place historical markers or memorials to mark some of these sites.

I've been thinking about this just as there have been stories in the news about pushback by some state legislators, including in Georgia, about the revised AP History curriculum, which is described as being insufficiently pro-American, and overly focused on the negative aspects of our country's history, including slavery. This makes me glad that I no longer have children in public schools, who could be impacted by directives from state politicians to leave out the bad parts of our history, but I do worry about the kids who wil be impacted.

As I write this, President Obama is about to speak in Selma, at the commemoration of the attack on peaceful civil rights marchers by state police,fifty years ago.  Iain is there, right now, with a group from school, and Tom was there last night.  He said that he heard lots of moving stories from people in Selma, about the police chief who spent the night in his car outside a house where Martin Luther King was staying, about the editor of the local paper who opened up his office to international press who had come to Selma.  There were a lot of good people there, he said, and those are stories that you never hear.

Our history is tumultuous and full of contradictions.  We can't understand the present unless we understand the past.  Leaving out the parts that make us uncomfortable is not patriotic; it's a lie, and we under estimate our young people.  I just heard the President say this, in Selma:

What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this; what greater form of patriotism is there; than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

Exactly.