Games, Sports, and Illuminations

John Adams thought we would celebrate our nation's independence on July 2.  On July 3, 1776, he wrote his wife:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

 Although we were short on Pomp and Parade and Guns and Bells and Bonfires yesterday, we did manage Games and Sports (if watching the World Cup counts) and Illuminations.  We were cheering for Germany in the first game (although Iain didn't think of blowing the vuvuzela until after they scored their first and only goal) and Colombia in the second (Lorenzo, our neighbors' golden retriever, is currently a house guest and he is from Colombia so we thought it only polite).

Then Kathy and Steve and Tom's friend Edgar came over for ribs, slaw, jalapeno mac and cheese, and peach cobbler.  After dinner the kids took Lorenzo for a walk and tried to guess the Spanish words for what they wanted him to do.  (Lorenzo is well trained, but in Spanish.  So we probably confuse him quite a bit.)

By then it was dark and it was time for fireworks.  We had quite a few left over from some previous purchase (New Years?  A previous 4th of July?) and Tom really wanted them out of the house.  So after it was dark we headed up to the church parking lot with a laundry basket half-full of highly flammable devices.  They were the kind that are legal to buy in Georgia, so nothing very big and not even anything that made all that much noise, but once lit there were fountains of sparks in different colors and colored smoke.  Our neighbors Sarah and Ben strolled up and joined us; it probably took a good half-an-hour to set everything off, including Iain elaborately combining the fuses of some of the smaller fireworks so they would go off more or less simultaneously.  In the distance, it sounded like the city was under attack, with the noises from the professional fireworks shows and closer ones from front yards nearer by.  Occasionally we would see a shower of sparks from someone else's fireworks, through the trees.

A nice enough 4th of July. For next year, we'll need more fireworks.

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.  

Walking in the Rain

The Atlanta Bicycle Coalition hosted the second Atlanta Streets Alive event of the year a couple of weeks ago, on May 18.  This was the first Streets Alive event I attended without Iain, who had left for Dresden a few days earlier.  Rain was forecast; I had volunteered for the set-up shift, and told Tom that that was the only time I *had* to be there, that if it was raining hard I would come home after that.  It was also unseasonably cool, and expecting to get wet, I wore my long underwear.  This was not typical Atlanta weather.

My assigned partner and I set up water stations along the north end of the route but that was all that they needed us to do, so after we were done I got lunch at Cafe Agora.  I had ordered it to go but while I was there it started to rain pretty hard so I stayed there to eat.  While I was there the police officer assigned to the nearby intersection stopped in for coffee.  He didn't look very happy.  It didn't look like it was going to be a great afternoon.

The participation was down, for sure -- I've not seen a head count for this one -- but it was still fun.  While it did rain off an on throughout the afternoon, if you were dressed for it, you were fine.  There was the bicycle parade, heading north on Peachtree.

There wasn't much live music this time, but there was recorded music being played at several places along the route, and these two volunteers were dancing.

The wet pavement provided a good surface for chalk art, which I saw in several places.

There were lots of people taking pictures, and I took some pictures of people taking pictures.  The man with the suitcase, who I imagined was from out of town and had stumbled onto the closed street and been surprised, was taking a picture of a musician at Peachtree Center.

These young men formed an impromptu chorus line in the middle of Peachtree Street.

And these two older ladies were being photographed as another photographer captured the scene.

I'm not quite sure what this was but it would scare me to have it this on the back of my bicycle.  It was (I should add) not an actual person.

There were a couple of food trucks and other vendors in the usual place, over the interstate, and when I went by the first time business was very slow.  They were busier when I came by the second time and I was hungrier, so I got an ice cream sandwich from Atomic Ice Cream.  It was unequivocally the best ice cream sandwich I ever had.  I talked with the man selling them about the weather.  I told him that I had been astonished when I lived in Boston that people ate a lot of ice cream, all year round.  He told me that Seattle had the highest per capita consumption of ice cream sandwiches in the country.  I said, well, it's a Seattle kind of day here today, so I guess it's a good day for an ice cream sandwich.

As it happened, a couple days later I left for Seattle, and the weather was fabulous.  Clear and sunny.

Tunnel Vision

I had never ventured on foot into the Boulevard Tunnel until April 12, when Living Walls had asked for volunteers to help prepare the walls for an artist who was going to come paint a mural.  Since I don't drive to Cabbagetown or Grant Park often, the tunnel is more something I go past on the way to Caramba than it is something I go through.  I thought of it as a dreary place but not a horrible place.  But for those nearby, it was more than an eyesore.  It was a place that felt unsafe and maybe was.  Nicki Braxley, a Cabbagetown resident, decided to do something about it a couple of years ago and started the Boulevard Tunnel Initiative.  Since then, the city has replaced some railings and a security camera has been installed in one of the stairwells.  But the big leap forward was when Living Walls took on the task of turning the tunnel into a destination.  Living Walls -- an organization that does magic with the resources available to it, which are long on passion and commitment, and short on cash -- brought in the artist MOMO from New York to paint the tunnel.

The Boulevard Tunnel Initiative had organized a clean up and then Living Walls staff and volunteers showed up to prep the walls for MOMO.  There were a half-dozen or so of us there, painting with rollers.  I was only there for a few hours, but it was unexpectedly hard work. (Iain had spent the weekend in Athens, and when I went to pick him up the next day he said, "Mom, there's something on your face.  It looks like paint.")

MOMO arrived in town a few days later and began to work.  First the walls were painted with blocks of color, then the boundaries between the blocks disappeared, and then designs were superimposed over the painted walls.  An army of volunteers was involved.  I took off a day from work and helped one day.  It was an amazing thing to watch.

The project took a little longer than originally planned at least in part because of the weather; you can't paint walls in the rain.  But it did get done, and after it was complete, Iain and Caroline and I went to see it in early May.  It is an amazing piece of work.

Can art transform the tunnel?  Probably not all by itself, but as Nicole Braxley told Rebecca Burns, it may increase pedestrian presence in the tunnel, and that should help.  

After taking a few pictures that day, we walked up to Noni's for lunch.  On the way back, two men from Fort Lauderdale asked us if the bus that stopped at Boulevard and Edgewood went to Five Points.  We had to admit we had no idea, but pointed them toward the nearby MARTA station on Decatur Street.  It was only afterwards that I realized I should have told them about the new murals in the tunnel.  

Next time.

Living on Fumes

The report, "Measuring Sprawl and its Impact," was released from Smart Growth America last month.  In case you missed it, this was the report that named Atlanta the most sprawling large metropolitan area.  Right after that report came out, I had a trip for work.  I was sitting next to the window and it was a clear day.  This was not long after take off but I'm not sure how long; even if it's some distance from Atlanta, it illustrates the point -- housing in places where you have to have a car to get around.  There just is no other way.

As more of the people who could afford to live this way decide they don't want to do it, there's increasing demand for housing in real places, in actual neighborhoods, in places where there is somewhere to go and something to do and where you don't have to drive everywhere.  I am fortunate enough to live in one of those places.  But there's no more space, inside the perimeter, than there was when it was built, so the only way to add more housing is to fill in the empty spaces (there are some) or knock down something that was already there and build something new.  That happens, in my part of town, with houses and with commercial developments.  Of course all of the new construction is much more expensive than what it replaced, so there are fewer and fewer places for lower income people to live.  This means that our neighborhoods are less diverse and less interesting, because there are fewer and fewer places (for example) for the young people who make neighborhoods interesting and fun, and the people who can't afford to live here any more get pushed out to areas where housing costs less.

Where are those areas in the metropolitan Atlanta area?  There are still more affordable areas intown than my neighborhood, of course, and if you can't afford Morningside or Virginia Highland, there are other neighborhoods to go.  But at the bottom of the income scale, increasingly, those places are in the suburbs, those places where transit doesn't go, where you have to have a car.  What happens to the poor and the almost-poor and the one-broken-down-car-away-from-homelessness poor?  Rebecca Burns wrote about it today in Politico, in a piece entitled "Sprawled out in Atlanta," with the subheading, "What happens when poverty spreads to a place that wasn't built for poor people?"  (Not to pick on Cobb County, the subject of Rebecca Burns' piece, in particular -- the New York Times had the very same article today, but set in Moreno Valley, California, east of Los Angeles).  Both articles make clear how sprawl keeps people poor, with requirements for long commutes and the resulting high costs of commuting in both time and money to low-paying jobs.

It all circles back to the need for more compact development and density and the importance of transit.  Which brings me back to accessory dwelling units.  I know I just wrote about this, but in case you missed it, Virginia Highland just had an opportunity to support the development of accessory dwelling units (garage apartments and so forth) in their new neighborhood Master Plan but decided against it.  In Portland, Oregon, the city now allows accessory dwelling units, and there adding an accessory dwelling unit increases the value of the property, provides rental income for the property owner, and contribute to sustainable communities through dramatic decreases in construction waste.  According to the New York Times article, "additional living spaces are springing up everywhere, providing affordable housing without changing the feeling or texture of established neighborhoods the way high-rise developments can."

In our neighborhoods, we value property owners' rights so highly that they can build any kind of house that meets zoning requirements whether or not it fits in at all into the neighborhood, but not enough to let the property owner build a garage apartment that might be invisible from the street.