Coming Soon to My Neighborhood

Thanks to email and all the other ways we stay in touch now, I don't have to be in town to get updates on the neighborhood.  Last week I was out of the country but got an email with the news that Burger Tap, the restaurant that eventually opened in Caramba Cafe's former space on North Highland, was closed and was going to be replaced by Waffold, a gourmet waffle sandwich place.  That Burger Tap closed was not unexpected.  I never went there (illustrating perhaps the most fundamental problem with the business concept) but the on line reviews mentioned small, high-priced burgers and a bright-light, fast food ambiance with non-fast food prices.  This does not seem like a winner of an idea, especially in a neighborhood with so many excellent burger places nearby.  We go to George's or Yeah Burger in Virginia Highland; Tom says that Highland Tap may make the best burgers in town (I haven't been there, either).  The Family Dog (another place I haven't been), across from the former Burger Tap location, has burgers and beer and lots of people, which may have also contributed to the lack of success of the Burger Tap concept.

So...waffle sandwiches.  I am trying to figure out what research could possibly have been done in the neighborhood to make someone decide to put a waffle sandwich restaurant here.  Walking up to people out walking their dogs or on their way to Alon's or the Family Dog or Doc Chey's or the farmer's market and asking them, what kind of restaurant would you come to in the neighborhood?  If someone had asked me, I would say, a neighborhood place, a place you could go to with the kids or with a group of people from the office or later with friends.  Not too expensive -- pizza, maybe.  Since Everybody's closed in Virginia Highland, there's no pizza in the neighborhood.  They could do a good take out business from people who don't feel like cooking but don't want Alon's or a casserole. That's what I would have said.  I don't think I would have said, you know, I've thought for a long time what our neighborhood really needs is a gourmet waffle sandwich place.  We have to go all the way to (where would one have to go?  I have no idea) to get our waffle sandwich fix.

But no one asked me.  Last night, Caroline and Iain and I walked to Yeah Burger and on the way we ran into our neighbor Marion and her friend, who were on their way to George's.  She told us that Burger Tap was closed and a waffle sandwich place was going in there instead.  I know, I told her, we were just talking about that.  Did they ask around the neighborhood and see what people thought about this idea?  She said, I know, this isn't Perimeter Mall.  I said a neighborhood place would do well there.  Families/after work/grown ups late night.  Yes, she said, like Caramba.  She said she'd been to Caramba recently, in their new location.  I said we have too.

So ..... waffle sandwiches it is.  Can't wait.

A Virtual Porch

I love our house, even though we have too much stuff in it and not enough room (which is a stuff problem rather than a house problem), but there is one thing I wish we had been able to change when we did the big renovation back in 1998.  I wish we had been able to add a real front porch.  We went from a tiny one to a somewhat less tiny one, but it's not a real front porch with a ceiling fan and wicker chairs.  We do have nice front steps that face the street, and sometimes Tom sits there in the evening and practices his guitar, and I've occasionally sat out there with a friend and a bottle of wine for the evening.

Even without sidewalks we have lots of pedestrians on our street.  There are people walking dogs, pushing strollers, talking with friends.  Some of them are neighbors that we know, some of them we don't, but if we're outside we say hello.  If they know us or if we ask about their dog they might stop and talk for a couple of minutes.  When we're on the porch, people walking in the street might or might not take notice of us, but if we call out a greeting, it increases the odds.

A few weeks ago I was at Target and they had the outdoor chairs on sale.  I bought 4 heavy-duty metal folding chairs with the thought we could use them outside and keep them on the porch.  Our first chance was the 4th of July.  Tom cooked ribs and we ate inside, with Kathy and Steve and Mark and Fred and Max, but then moved to the front yard for ice cream.  It turned out the chairs weren't so stable on the lawn (they don't well on surfaces that aren't firm and even) but no one broke anything or even spilled their ice cream, so it was fine.

Later the guitars came out and we ended the evening with fireworks at the end of the driveway.  It was a fine way to celebrate the 4th of July.

We tried again last weekend, when we invited some of our new neighbors over for ice cream and ended up sitting outside until long after dark.  Even though the weather had been terribly hot during the day, it wasn't so bad in the evening, and there were fireflies.  Iain disappeared with the boys next door for battles with foam swords and sliding down their front lawn on a cardboard sled until it was really late and time to go to bed.  It was very pleasant.  We invited a few passersby to join us for ice cream; no one did, but a few people did walk up the driveway to say hello.

Cars and changes in design meant that our house -- built around 1950 -- didn't have a real front porch.  (As Akiko Busch wrote, "The layout of the suburbs was built to be driven through, not walked in.")  Older houses like the houses that make up most of our neighborhood (but not our street) do have them, but I don't see people actually using their porches very often.  And of course it's the usage, not the structure, that matters.  I've decided that if we don't have a front porch, we can use the space just in front of our house like it's a front porch.  No zoning variance needed.  But if you end up sitting in one of those folding metal chairs, be careful.

An Open House

Last night Iain and I went to the final public meeting of Park Pride's South Fork Visioning process.  I didn't really know that Park Pride did this until I got an email from one of the neighborhood email lists about the May meeting which I ended up attending.  I had arrived a few minutes late at the May meeting, and felt like I never quite got caught up with the discussion, so I made sure to arrive on time for this one.  But this was more like an open house, with maps up on the wall, paper and markers for comments, and two fluorescent green dots that we could place on maps to identify the sections of trail or other areas that we thought were highest priority.

Without a speaker to react to, there wasn't as much drama this time, but the woman who was at my table at the May meeting who wanted the bridge in Herbert Taylor Park blown up to keep people out was there, and there were comments on the paper on the wall, that the whole process was biased because there weren't red dots to place on the maps for the sections we didn't want built, that the so-called "pond" was only a mosquito-breeding facility.  Absent group discussion, we had to eavesdrop, and someone said -- correctly, I think -- that everyone attending the meeting was probably really for or really against the proposal, that everyone else was home eating dinner.  There was the statement that the entire South Fork project had been dreamed up by a small group of people, who were trying to force it on everyone else.  An the maps from the June meeting were posted on another wall, with "subject to approval by the neighborhood" and "no connectivity" written on them in colored marker.

According to the information sheet we got when we signed in, "Park Pride will publish a project book which will include a conceptual master plan," but "the community and community groups are responsible for moving projects forward or preventing trails where not desirable."  Certainly Park Pride was trying hard to get comments in writing, either on the paper posted on the wall or by a more private written message, and it will be possible to summarize them, as has been done for the previous meetings.  As we were leaving, the young women at the registration table asked if we had written any comments.  I said I hadn't yet, but I would -- and here they are.

A linear park through intown Atlanta, along the South Fork of Peachtree Creek, would be a wonderful gift for future generations.  And I have no doubt that increasing access to the area would drive advocacy to clean up the water, which would also be good.  There may be very good reasons why some sections should not be built.  But property values?  What makes this neighborhood so desirable -- and so expensive -- is walkability and diversity.  It's not our houses that are so valuable, for the most part, it's our proximity to interesting places to go and things to do.

So I wish Park Pride good luck in imposing order on a very disorderly collection of bimodally distributed opinions.  It's true, the people who came to the meeting are the people who care, one way or another; the others stayed home.  But there will be a project book; I can't wait to see it.

Small Change

At our block party last month I had a trifold board (taped to a table top, since it was breezy that evening), markers, and Post-it notes, and used Neighborland's fill-in-the-blank sentence as the assignment:  "I want ____ in my neighborhood."  I wrote "A crosswalk across Cumberland" on an orange Post-it note and then paid no attention to who was writing what for most of the evening.  There weren't many suggestions made -- just seven altogether, including mine -- but two of them were about sidewalks.  "A sidewalk," one person wrote, and below it another note, "Me too!!  We need sidewalks!"

There has been a lot in the news recently about pedestrian safety and sidewalks.  There's been the constant succession of pedestrian deaths in the Atlanta area, discussion about what the July 31 T-SPLOST referendum will and will not fund (reportedly some of the funding for Atlanta for local projects will go to sidewalks and other improvements to enhance pedestrian safety), and PEDS has continued to advocate for the City of Atlanta to properly support sidewalk maintenance rather than expecting property owners to do it themselves.  At the Streets Alive event in May, PEDS was collecting footprints on paper as a petition which they subsequently delivered to the City Council meeting, asking the city to fund sidewalk maintenance.

There are families with young children on our street, and there are no sidewalks, other than at the North Highland end of the street by the apartments and a narrow fragment mid-block, in front of a couple of the new houses.  I'd be all for sidewalks on our street if the street wasn't already so wide and the yards so small; carving out a big enough swath for a proper sidewalk to could a quarter or more of our yards, while we have a street that is wide enough for cars to park on both sides of the street without obstructing two-way traffic.  On Wessyngton Road, the cars already have a disproportionate amount of space, and if there's going to be a sidewalk, I'd prefer it to come at the expense of the street than our already very small yards.  I find it hard to visualize that happening, but if it did I'd be all for sidewalks on on our street.

There's a tactical urbanism approach to narrowing streets and reducing speed of cars by re-striping the street to create a bicycle lane next to the curb, moving the cars over, narrowing the street.  This as been done as part of the Build a Better Block projects in commercial areas, but I don't see why it couldn't be done in a residential area.  Re-striping doesn't cost much; if the cars parked 6 feet away from the curb, there would be room for pedestrians next to the curb, and they would be separated from the traffic by parked cars.  It would not be as good as a sidewalk, but it might be a feasible interim measure, and it wouldn't cost much.

But we do need a crosswalk on Cumberland, and that wouldn't cost much either.  Whether there are sidewalks on Wessyngton or not, we still have to cross Cumberland to get to the sidewalk on the other side of that street.  Cars come down the hill too fast sometimes on Cumberland, and every child who walks down Wessyngton Road to Morningside Elementary School has to cross Cumberland Road with no crosswalk there.

I doubt that T-SPLOST, even if it passes, will do anything for sidewalks in Morningside, but a big chunk of what makes our neighborhood so desirable is that it's walkable.  Absolutely, the city needs to come up with a long-term plan to fix the sidewalks.  In the meantime, though, there are things that could be done that wouldn't require a bond issue; they could be done with a couple of gallons of paint.

Redistricting and Inman Middle School

The Superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, Erroll Davis, Jr., is unflappable in the video, as he speaks with an engineer's precision.  "We have 10,000 middle school students," Mr. Davis said.  "We can't put 10,000 students in Inman and Sutton."  Although many of the issues associated with redistricting in APS have been decided, the capacity issues at Inman have been not.  There had been a proposal to have the Inman 6th graders attend a different school and only have the current Inman campus house the the 7th and 8th graders.  That was unpopular with many families whose children attend Inman as well as the neighborhood where the 6th graders would go, where they (1) wanted to keep their school open, and (2) didn't want kids from outside their neighborhood to come there when their children couldn't attend the school.

Tonight the Virginia Highland Civic Association is sponsoring a meeting at Inman to discuss the issue.  Nominally the meeting is about criteria for evaluating proposals for addressing capacity, rather than solutions to the capacity issue; I've seen similar notices of meetings in other neighborhoods.  I hope it's a good discussion and some good ideas emerge.  But I am not too optimistic that this public engagement approach will lead to a solution that shares the pain equitably - there are too clearly winners and losers, with underutilized schools with lower test scores that could take more kids, but families whose children attend schools with better test scores don't want their children sent there, especially if the better current school is closer to their home.  (Disclosure:  my kids went to private school after Morningside Elementary.  We could have sent them to Inman but did not.)

Inman could house more students if half attended in the morning and half in the afternoon (good luck with that), or if schools did like employers do who don't have room for everyone had let the kids with good grades telework (good luck with that one too).  There's no room on the current site to build out, although I understand they are adding trailers as a temporary solution for the 2012-2013 year; maybe they could do what intown homeowners do when when they don't have enough room and build up.  Maybe Inman could be 4 stories tall.

I've been reading some of the comments on Maureen Downey's blog on this topic from back in March, when the 6th grade academy idea was briefly on the table.  It's pretty depressing, and largely was focused on the contextual issues of race and socioeconomic status that make this so difficult, and recurrent suggestions that one or another elementary school -- one other people's children attend -- be zoned to another middle school.  That was pretty much it.

Mr. Davis is right - half the middle school students in the city cannot attend Inman, and right now there is not room at Inman for all the children in the 5 elementary schools that are currently planned to feed into the school.  Either capacity at Inman has to increase or fewer students have to come there.  One issue Mr. Davis raised in the interview was to bring back magnet schools.  How about a magnet school as a second middle school in the Grady cluster?  It couldn't be done overnight, but it could be done.

Mr. Davis is as best I can tell making a heroic effort to manage the bad hand he was dealt, with the mess APS was left in, following the departure of his predecessor.  There are no easy solutions here and I'm glad it's not my decision.  More to follow, I'm sure.

A Block Party

We had our block party earlier this month.  It was the Sunday evening of the weekend of Summerfest, the Virginia Highland Civic Association's huge outdoor festival that usually takes place the first weekend in June. Summerfest ends late afternoon and our block parties don't start til evening, so we thought it wasn't too much of a conflict.  And it's not like we spend all day preparing for our block party -- although there is some preparation (perhaps a little more than is visible) it is not much, and we don't think anyone stays home and cooks all afternoon.  So we thought the date would work.

Lynsley talked to Morningside Presbyterian, and got permission for us to use their parking lot.  I printed up some flyers and Sally distributed them.  I sent out some emails and posted it on the Wessyngton Road page on Facebook.  Since one of our neighbors doesn't have email, I dropped a flyer and a copy of the email onto her porch through the cat door.

Late Sunday afternoon I put orange cones at the two entrances of the parking lot.  Mark dropped off a large folding table, Kathy and Lynsley brought card tables, and I took a folding table and a table cloth up to the parking lot.  Steve brought a charcoal grill and a bag of charcoal.  I brought sidewalk chalk and bubbles and glow bracelets, and paper plates and plastic cups and plastic utensils and napkins.  Lynsley brought a pitcher of ice water and a bottle of hand sanitizer and her trash and recycling bins.

Our neighbors -- most of them people we had met before, but not all -- came with food and folding chairs and small coolers with drinks.  Small kids and then bigger kids drew on the asphalt with chalk.  Caroline and Iain tossed a frisbee back and forth for a while  There was music, thanks to Mark and several friends of his.  There was plenty of food.

Some of us stayed there until long after dark.  I had forgotten about the glow bracelets while the children were there -- they had long gone home -- so the adults wore them and I put several together to make a blue glowing necklace for Bullwinkle.  Eventually people made their way home along with the chairs and the tables and by morning all that was left were the drawings the kids had made on the asphalt.

It wasn't the biggest block party we ever had, and there are others when things have gone on later into the night or at which there were more new neighbors we'd never met before.  But I think the street's youngest resident (at that time) and oldest resident both attended, along with people who'd live on the street for decades and others who were recent arrivals, and people who live in big new houses and from small older homes and from the apartments that are on the street.  This diversity is one of the special things about my street.  My favorite memory of the evening?  We have a neighbor -- I think she may be the oldest resident on the street -- who is an artist and speaks with a lovely Latin American accent.  She showed up fashionably late, towards the end of the party.  She was thanking the musicians for playing and then I saw her standing near them, listening, and dancing by herself in the dark.

Not in My Backyard

The watershed defined much of the street layout of our immediate neighborhood, with houses on the relatively high ground and behind the houses uninhabitable greenspace that usually includes a deep or shallow ravine.  Behind our house there are tall trees and dense undergrowth and a steep slope down and then back up.  When it rains, gravity takes the water down to the bottom of the ravine, but more gradually than immediately, since the rain doesn't run off the deep beds of leaves that cover the ground the way it runs of the pavement.  The gushing water in the creek at the end of Wessyngton last Sunday morning came from the street and driveways and any gutters that dump into the street, not from the wooded areas behind our houses.  The water ends up in storm drains and creeks and ends up in the South Fork of Peachtree Creek.

Sunday morning it was cool (at least for Atlanta, in June) and raining when I took Bullwinkle for a walk.  We started on our usual walk, up Wessyngton Road toward Highland, right on Highland, then right again on Morningside.  We headed back into the grounds of Morningside Presbyterian Church and then headed down the path into the woods toward the foot bridge.  That morning it was cool enough for the dog to enjoy the walk so just before the bridge we took a right turn onto the trail that headed into the wooded area between Morningside and Wessyngton, back toward Cumberland.

The last time I walked on this trail, it ended at a timbered semicircle, with two benches made from rough-hewn logs; restoring the trail and either constructing or restoring this stopping place had been an Eagle Scout project for one of the boys in Iain's Boy Scout troop a few years ago.  I also knew that another boy had recently had another Eagle Scout project in the same area -- Iain had spent a weekend afternoon or two there, helping out -- but I hadn't been there since the recent work.  Now the trail was extended farther down, so Bullwinkle and I continued into woods, toward a place we'd never been.  So we walked on.

At the end of the new path I was astonished to find the remains of a large fireplace -- the kind used for outdoor cooking  -- on a concrete pad at the end of the trail.  This is just across the street from me, and I had no idea it was there; I felt like I had stumbled onto an archaeological site. Tom told me, later in the day, that he thought there had formerly been a cabin there, left over from the days of a very large Boy Scout troop at Morningside Presbyterian at some point in the distant past.

This reminded me of the discussion at the Park Pride meeting I attended last month, about the South Fork Conservancy's proposal to develop trails along the South Fork of Peachtree Creek, and the staunch opposition from many of the people present.  Some of the arguments had to do with private property rights and some with privacy and some with fear of crime, and the discussion got me wondering how I would feel about a trail through the greenspace behind my house.  But there is a trail through the greenspace across the street, and as best I can tell, nothing catastrophic has happened.  There aren't homeless people living there, there was no trash, and no flat screen TVs that were abandoned by thieves who had entered unlocked backdoors.  There was just a path through the woods, and a wonderful place to walk with the dog on a rainy Sunday morning.