Sun Spotting

Two weekends ago, Iain and I went to hear a presentation on solar astronomy at Manuel's Tavern.  It was part of the Atlanta Science Tavern series, a wonderful learning and networking group that Marc Merlin runs.  I don't know much of the background on either the Science Tavern or Marc -- I stumbled across it by chance -- but Tom and I have been to a few of the sessions at Manuel's and always enjoyed them.  This time, Tom was off with Sarah for a college visit, so it was just Iain and me.  I told him I wasn't completely sure I could get him into Manuel's (did he have to be 18?  I wasn't sure) but we didn't asked and no one said anything, and there were a couple of other kids there who looked even younger.

We got there early and it was a long time before the program started.  Iain had not been so sure about this anyway but then there was too much sitting, waiting for things to start.  But once it did, we both agreed that it was worth the wait.  The speaker was Stephen Ramsden, the founder of the Charlie Bates Solar Astronomy Project, a science outreach program that goes to schools and kids get to look at a close-up star through a real telescope, one where you can see all kinds of things you never knew were there.  And they do this during the school day, so the close-up star they look at is the sun.  With the right equipment, you not only don't go blind but you see sun spots, eruptions, and a teeming, boiling, burning surface.  With the right equipment you can take amazing pictures, and Mr. Ramsden has the right equipment and with it, middle school and high school students capture incredible images that Mr. Ramsden posts on line.  There were other images he showed us too, from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.  Pieces of the sun leaping up from its surface, dramatic limbs of fire and electromagnetic force that make a break for the emptiness of space beyond.  I never thought there was so much going on there.  It's easy to take it for granted, this nearby star that gives our planet life.

The next morning I left early, while it was still dark, for Athens to pick up Caroline.  It was foggy, and it wasn't until the sun was completely up that I saw it, an orange disc, flat in the white sky, its churning turmoil invisible to my eyes.  Later that morning, approaching home, I felt its warmth through the car window, and again felt wonder, for just a moment.  

Safer Routes to School

There was another community meeting in the neighborhood last week on the ongoing "Safe Routes to School" work going on in the neighborhood.  The work at the intersection of East Rock Springs, Pelham Road, and East Morningside seemed to have been largely stopped for months.  The design was being reconsidered, and changes might be made, we heard.  In the meantime, it seemed that nothing at all was happening.  I couldn't make it to the meeting on Tuesday morning, just like I have not made it to any of the other three meetings that have occurred, but at least the plans that are posted on line look like an improvement over the original design.  It looks like the lane that allows eastbound traffic from East Morningside to cut over to North Morningside without going through the 4-ways stop at the East Morningside/Pelham Road/East Rock Springs intersection will stay open for one-way traffic, which should help traffic flow substantially.

One of the reasons I have not been so excited about the Safe Routes to School work in the neighborhood (in spite of my strong interest in pedestrian safety) is that it had seemed to me to ignore an easy fix to one of the most obvious hazards, the absence of a crosswalk at Wessyngton and Cumberland.  If it wasn't obvious before, it was clearly marked in yellow paint just before school started, "CROSSWALK NEEDED HERE."  But there was no crosswalk.  There were elaborate makeovers requiring lots of construction of many neighborhood intersections, but nothing here.

Until now.  This morning, there were signs on Cumberland Road informing drivers that beginning the week of February 11, this intersection would be an all-way stop.  This is great news.  Now, if we can just get the crosswalk that goes with it, I'll stop complaining.

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.

Ride or Die

When I got home from work on Monday, I saw one of my neighbors out walking his dog.  We chatted for just a moment and he commented that he'd been enjoying being in the city over the holiday with so little traffic.  We've noticed that too, how empty the roads are, with schools not in session and so many people off work and out of town.  Even those of us who are here are not driving so much.  For me it's been trips to the grocery store and driving kids to movie theaters.

I guess it was last Saturday when I took Sarah to Phipps Plaza, where she was meeting a friend to see a movie.  Even with the city in reduced-driving mode, Lenox Road was still a slog and I had some time to look around at the sights of Buckhead while sitting at red lights.  So much new construction there (albeit all of it initiated and most of it completed before the real estate/fiscal collapse in 2008) -- with all those tall, gleaming buildings, it almost looks like a city.  But even on a day when many people were not going to work, the streets were clogged with cars and all I could think, looking at those buildings, was what on earth were they thinking, building them there.  Even though there are two -- two! -- MARTA stops in walking distance from the intersection of Lenox and Peachtree, almost everyone who works in or visits any of those buildings is going to come in their own automobile.  How are all those cars supposed to get there and back?  They can build the buildings but the cars still degrade the quality of the experience in very substantial ways.  (And I wasn't even thinking about parking.)

For Christmas, Caroline gave me a copy of Jeff Speck's new book, Walkable City:  How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.  The book includes many references to Atlanta, mostly as a bad example.  One of Speck's points is that traffic congestion isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as it isn't an excuse to build more roads (which only leads to more sprawl and more congestion on down the line); there's a lot of elasticity in the amount people drive and if the cost in time and aggravation is high enough, many trips just aren't made.  It also can -- in cities that have the political will to do it -- drive investment in transportation alternatives.  "The cities with the most congestion are often the cities that provide the best alternatives to being stuck in congestion.  Of the ten cities ranked worst for traffic in the 2010 Urban Mobility Report, all but three -- Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta -- have excellent public transit and a vast collection of walkable neighborhoods."

A couple of months ago I saw part of a presentation from the ProWalk/ProBike ProPlace conference in Long Beach in September -- I can't remember who the presenter was and I can't find it now -- in which the speaker made the point that the absence of transportation alternatives keeps poor people poor.  If the jobs aren't in your neighborhood and there isn't public transportation, you can't get a job if you're poor, because you can't afford a car.  This is not a rocket science kind of observation, but I had never thought about it that way before.

And I'm not very optimistic that Atlanta will be anything but a cautionary tale for the foreseeable future.  The road builders and the developers are too tight with the people who make the policies (and maybe are the people who make the policies) so there will continue to be strong pressure to build road capacity to support the unsustainable sprawl that makes up the Atlanta metropolitan area.  MARTA will continue to be hemmed in by counties that don't want transit (or at least don't want anyone from Atlanta to come into their county) and starved for resources by a state legislature that doesn't like Atlanta and likes public transportation even less.

We found this sticker on one of the Park Atlanta parking payment machines off Edgewood last month, and Iain got Sarah the T-shirt that goes with it for Christmas.  On the way back from the movie at Phipps I asked Sarah about her experience with MARTA.  It doesn't feel safe, she said.  Not enough people.  Right, because all the people who have cars are driving them, and even people who can't really afford cars have to have them because this is Atlanta and that's what we do in Atlanta.  

As long as cars come first, we'll continue to make what in the long term are the wrong decisions for the city.  That "Ride or Die" slogan might be for the metro area, not for its citizens.  Maybe we won't die, but we won't flourish, either, sitting in our cars looking at the tail lights of the car in front of us.

The Colors of Advent

Yesterday was the third Sunday of Advent.  There were red candles on the windowsills  surrounded by greenery, and wreaths with red and gold ribbons streaming down hung high above them in the tall windows on either side of the sanctuary.  A Christmas tree at the front of the sanctuary was topped with an illuminated angel.  In spite of the rain the pews were nearly full, with families with their children home from college, the winter family vacations not yet started.

Advent is the season of preparing for Christmas.  I grew up in a church that saw Christmas as a secular holiday that had no place in church (we should celebrate Christ's birth every Sunday, not just in late December).  I love the rituals of the liturgical calendar.  It's not that they bring back childhood memories but they connect us to ebb and flow of seasons and harvests and lives ordered by movements of the sun and moon, rather than Outlook calendars.

But yesterday wasn't about joyous preparation.  It was about the unspeakable tragedy that occurred  on Friday.  I was at clinic when it happened, with charts appearing in my box faster than I could complete a patient visit.  That morning I'd left my Blackberry on the dining room table and I had a doctor's appointment of my own in the early afternoon.  So it wasn't until later when I got to the office that I heard the full horror of what had unfolded that morning in Newtown, Connecticut.

Yesterday their names were listed in a black rectangle on the front page of the New York Times.  Twenty first graders, killed in their classrooms, and 6 adults from the school -- the principal, the school psychologist, and 4 teachers -- and the mother of the shooter, who had been his first victim, before he took her guns and her car and headed off to the elementary school.  There was selfless heroism at the school -- the principal and psychologist were killed when they tried to intervene, teachers tried to shield their young students from the gunman -- but they couldn't protect the children from a young man armed with a Bushmaster AR-15.

It's not that all mass murders are committed with guns -- they aren't -- or that they only occur in the United States -- they don't -- but they occur here more often than anywhere else and they almost always involve guns.  The ease with which guns designed to kill lots of people quickly -- like the gun the shooter used at the Newtown elementary school -- are obtained in the United States is  part of the problem, but gun regulation alone won't prevent these tragedies. We also need to do better with providing care for our mentally ill, and providing a safe place to grow up for all our children, including the odd ones who have few friends who get bullied or just ignored. By Friday night, the story the New York Times posted on line included the obligatory quotes from acquaintances of the killer. A high school classmate said “I never saw him with anyone. I can’t even think of one person that was associated with him.”

A sermon on the third Sunday of Advent about taking a stand, about being a part of a community that demands safety for our children.  Surrounded by the symbols of the season, thinking about guns, and mental illness, and wondering if this is the episode that is bad enough that we will demand action, that we will realize that we can't just demand, that we have to take action ourselves.  Otherwise, nothing changes.

There are no other people who are going to step up to the plate on this one.  There's only us.

An Empty Wall

Living Walls, a local nonprofit organization, hosted a wonderful street art event in Atlanta in August.  Artists painted amazing murals on empty walls in different parts of the city.  One of those murals, by the Argentinian artist Hyuro, caused controversy from the start.  It featured multiple images of a woman who -- initially nude -- grew fur that turned into a garment, then she stepped out of it and the wolf walked away.  It was a wonderful piece of art on a bleak corner across the street from the grounds of the Federal penitentiary.  While some in the neighborhood loved it, others didn't.  The mural was vandalized a couple of times, and when the issue went to the neighborhood association, the Chosewood Park neighborhood voted to have it removed.  So volunteers from Living Walls came and painted it over and now it's gone.  I haven't been back since that Sunday afternoon in late August when Sarah and I went to see it.  It was wonderful, and I am glad I got to see it.  But now it's gone.

And now it's happened again.  This time it was a French artist named Pierre Roti, who started the work soon after the Living Walls event.  The mural is on a long wall on University Avenue in south Atlanta in the Pittsburgh neighborhood, just off the interstate.  The wall is adjacent to Carey Limosine and is more than 200 feet long.  Roti paints with spray paint, and weeks of work went into creating this piece.  But some in the neighborhood found the imagery (including snakes) disturbing, and others felt it was disrespectful, that the neighborhood was not engaged consulted before the work was created.  In November, a group including a retired state legislator took it upon themselves to paint over the work.  The murals' supporters showed up and worked to remove the paint before it dried, and a crew from the Georgia Department of Transportation -- the actual owner of the wall -- helped clean it up.

But then there were issues about who approved what and although Living Walls did do what the city told them to do, in terms of permitting for this site, the wall actually did belong to GDOT and they hadn't approved it.  So there was an announcement that the work would be painted as early as this week.

Caroline and I went to see it on Sunday afternoon.  By that time, it not only had been defaced by the neighborhood group in early November but someone had glued posters over it.  But it still could mostly be seen.  It's huge and hallucinatory and I can't even describe it.  My French is not good enough to read the inscription which seems to include the word "xenophobia."  (To get a better photo of the inscription I would have had to step out into the street, which is something that didn't seem worth the risk.)

 

But now it's gone.  Yesterday the GDOT painted over it and now it's back to being a long gray wall, waiting for the next vandal with a can of spray paint or a pile of posters.  Maybe the community can agree on a new piece of art to replace this one, and get the appropriate permits from GDOT to place it there.  But given the dispute over this one, it's hard to see any kind of community consensus emerging.  There were plenty of people in the Pittsburgh neighborhood who liked this one.  Whose decision is it?  There always will be people who don't like a particular work of art.  Do they get to veto a work that it is in a public place?

This year Living Walls tried to place murals in some neighborhoods that had been hard-hit by the recession.  They were trying to help revitalize communities by installations of murals.  Now there's talk about the need for more involvement of the community, which sounds good, but it's hard for me to see exactly how that's supposed to work.  Twice burned, if I were Living Walls I'd stay in the neighborhoods where I was welcome.  And the community leaders who have driven the decisions to remove the murals may not own the walls but they are now responsible for what follows.  What happens now?

We'll see.

Update from the Construction Zones

I was out of town last week and wasn't able to attend the meeting Tuesday morning at Morningside Elementary School on the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) construction. Given the absence of news on the neighborhood email lists subsequently about what was discussed there, I don't know how many people were able to attend. In the meantime, East Morningside is still torn up with and the right turn bypass lane to North Morningside is closed. It doesn't seem that there has been much progress made on construction there. Perhaps the absence of news and the absence of progress means there's been no decision made. If they are still trying to figure out how to get drivers to slow down, I can understand the lack of progress.

In the meantime, I came across this blog post from the Atlanta Public Schools from last month, listing the goals of the SRTS project in Morningside. I had to laugh when I saw the first one was "Reducing traffic congestion around the school by 10% every year."

Although the work at the East Morningside/Rock Springs/North Pelham intersection seems to have come to an indefinite halt, the work seems close to done at the North Morningside/North Highland intersection. There still is an orange barrel indicating the obliterated right turn late from North Morningside to North Highland southbound; some better markings, with reflective paint on the new concrete that now blocks the lane, would help. The crosswalks are now marked and aligned with the new islands in the intersection.





At Cumberland and North Morningside, where the whole things started, the big pile of sand has been replaced with a larger pile of dirt, suggesting that they are filling in the new space that they created there. The small traffic island that used to be there is long gone. Instead there's a much larger area that is connected to the block between Sherwood and North Morningside on the northwest corner of the intersection. That work seems to be going slowly, too, allowing ample time for speculation. What are they going to put there, after all the dirt goes in? We've often discussed this, when we walk by on our regular walks with the dog. I've suggested that it might be a good location for the new sixth grade annex but I don't know that that idea has gotten any traction yet.



Of course, if they did that, they probably wouldn't meet that goal for a 10% reduction in traffic.