Peachtree Street Alive

Atlanta Streets Alive, the wonderful Open Streets event that is sponsored in Atlanta by the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition, came to Peachtree Street on May 19.  The first Atlanta Streets Alive event I attended was last spring, when North Highland was closed to cars between Virginia Avenue and Inman Park.  Iain and I spent a Sunday afternoon exploring the neighborhood in a way I'd never seen it - it was amazing.  Then there was another one in the fall that included the same route but added the Beltline trail.  It was good to get people on the Beltline, and we enjoyed it, but there wasn't the density of bicycle hockey, performance art, and street food, with the event spread out over a longer route.

This spring the event -- now with major support from the City of Atlanta, thanks to Mayor Kasim Reed -- moved to Peachtree Street.  The route went from West Peachtree to Ellis Street, starting north of Woodruff Arts Center and ending downtown.  The weather had seemed to not be cooperating, with heavy rain forecast, but the rain was supposed to end by early afternoon, and by the time 2 p.m. came around, the rain had stopped.  So Iain and I packed up our rain jackets (just in case) and headed off.

The street closure at the north end of the route was confusing motorists -- a police officer was waving them to turn around but they seemed incredulous.  There was no one else there, at that point, but Iain and I walked down the middle of the street just because we could do it.  There wasn't much activity until we got close to Woodruff Arts Center.  The Museum of Design Atlanta had a bicycle decorating activity set up.  Since we were bikeless, we didn't stop but we appreciated the idea.  Nothing seemed to be going on at the Arts Center other than music playing through loud speakers.  At Colony Square, there was a stage and more amplified music, but nothing that looked like we wanted to stop and check it out.

On down the street, we had lemonade at the Atlanta Women's Club and took a tour.  I didn't know the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta was on Peachtree, but we walked by that and also by a FDA building that I also had never noticed.  There were performers outside the Laughing Skull.

We found a water station at 5th and Peachtree that hadn't been set up.  We (I guess that would more accurately be "I") decided to remedy that, so we set the table up, assembled the corrogated cardboard recycling containers, and took one of the empty 5 gallon water jugs across the street to the taqueria/bar across the street and asked them to fill it up with water for us.  They did and we had a completed water station as our contribution to the success of Atlanta Streets Alive -- and thanks to the guys at Escorpion for helping us out.

Our favorite Atlanta Streets Alive activity, Free Poems on Demand, was set up in front of the Fox Theater.  Jon Ciliberto took Iain's order for a poem about MARTA ("how bad it is" was what Iain said; I suggested a more positive approach of how much better it could be) and we continued on down the street.  

There was the REI climbing wall, food trucks near the section of the street that crossed the Downtown Connector, and tables and chairs where people were enjoying their food.  

We saw friends and neighbors on bicycles and browsed through the Army surplus store.

Outside the Shakespeare Tavern there were costumed actors but disappointingly no Shakespeare being performed on the sidewalk.

We counted churches on Peachtree (seven, as I recall) and marveled that on Atlanta's Main Street there were boarded up buildings.

On the way back we picked up our poem, which Jon read to us.  

Late in the afternoon the rain started again, but only lightly.  Most of us took out our rain jackets and umbrellas, but some people took refuge on the patios of bars and restaurants; they were full with people, watching the people walking with their dogs, riding their bikes, walking with friends and family.

No one walks on Peachtree; it's a street that the cars own. Except for a Sunday afternoon two weeks ago, when at the last minute the weather mostly cooperated and for just one afternoon we got to see the street how it might be, if only we had the will to do it.

The Future of Education

May 1 was decision day, the day by which high school seniors need to have selected which college they are going to attend.  Sarah has just been through the whole college application-admission-decision process and it was exhausting and stressful for everyone involved, especially her.  And we've talked a lot about "what's worth it," at our house -- which schools might be worth accumulating student debt for, and which ones aren't.  The cautionary tales in the newspaper, about young adults whose hopes for the future are on hold year after year, because of student loans that are outsized compared to their salaries, who feel like they can't get married, they can't buy a home.  The kids who borrowed money and got degrees and now can't find work in their field, and work as bartenders.  The kids who didn't even get the degree but still have the loans, and the parents who co-signed them.  The discussions in Washington about how much expensive student loans should be.

The major reason I have been absent from this blog for so long was Philip Zelikow's world history course on Coursera.  The course started in mid-January and ended in late April.  I was one of the almost 5000 on line students who completed the course and earned my Statement of Accomplishment.  I printed it out and put it in the folder with the certificates for all those courses I am required to do at work, even though no one cares that I did this and no one will ever ask me for it.  Registration was easy (a click of the mouse) and the course was free, although I bought the textbook and most of books that were on the additional reading list.  I didn't do all the reading but I did a lot of it and I watched every lecture, with frequent pauses for the note-taking that was required to do well on the weekly quizzes.  I printed out the maps and graphs that were the course's visual aids and they are with my notes in a binder that is now on the shelf with my textbook.

Of course a free online course -- even an excellent one like this -- is not the same as being in a small seminar with an excellent professor.  You don't have the real-time, in person discussion that helps solidify learning, and I didn't have to write anything at all, which certainly would have been required in Professor Zelikow's in-person, for-credit class at the University of Virginia.  But most university classes -- especially the introductory classes that I have been required to take along with my classmates at every institution of higher education that I have ever been enrolled in -- are not small seminars with excellent professors.  If you're lucky, the introduction to art history or political science or psychology class that you are required to take is taught by someone who has mastered the art of conveying information in a sufficiently engaging way to keep the attention of the hundreds of students in the class (a task that is probably far more difficult now because there are so many more things available to distract students than there were when I was in school).

Predictably the pushback at universities has started, the fear that professors will be replaced, that universities will be dismantled.  I would have more sympathy for this position if the courses that were at risk were seminars-with-excellent-professors, but they aren't -- they are (for now anyway) those huge classes that are required to get a degree, and at many schools are not available to all the students who need them.  Already in California there is discussion about giving credit for on line courses if the on campus version is not available (I don't know if the proposed legislation passed or not).  But it's too late.  The current model -- young people taking on huge debt to attend universities where they can't get the classes they need and when they can they are in huge classes that are no more personal than my video lectures by Professor Zelikow -- is broken.  It's going to change, and it needs to.  There are new models already, and there will be more.

Almost Done

I haven't posted for months because what free time I have (which is not all that much) has been taken up with other things (probably more about that later), so it's time to catch up on some things going on in the neighborhood.

At long last the never-ending construction at the Pelham/East Rock Springs/North Morningside intersection seems to be almost complete.  For months it seemed like nothing at all was happening (Tom had heard there was a lawsuit, but I assumed it was just taking a while to get a new design finalized and approved that would leave the bypass lane that allows drivers from East Morningside to North Morningside avoid the four-way stop).  Whatever the reason for the delay, not long ago the work restarted and at this point is nearly complete.  New curbs, new sidewalks, and new sod are all in place, although there still are some orange cones around and things are not quite finished.  But yesterday when we went by the new grass was already turning brown.  Without watering, I don't think it will make it, and no one is going to water it.  So there you have it.

Likewise, the de-paved area at Cumberland and North Morningside is now filled and sodded, with stone neighborhood marker in place (either that or it's a tombstone indicating the burial place of a Mr. or Ms. Park).

Walking through the area last weekend I asked Iain what he thought the new parklet should be used for; right now all that is there, besides the neighborhood marker/tombstone is a single, lonely-looking shrub.  He said he thought bands should set up and play there, which I thought was a great idea.

This conversation took place on the way to Celebration of Summer, MLPA's annual celebration of the end of school.  It used to be on the Friday at the end of the last week of school, but this year (presumably because of Memorial Day weekend) it was the Saturday of the weekend before APS ended classes.  There was music and snow cones and pony rides and inflatable jumpy climbing things for small- and middle-sized children and ice cream (which was fabulous) and beer for adults. The neighborhood was there blankets and lawn chairs.  It looked to me like everything came off without a hitch, in spite of the repeated last-minute requests for volunteers that kept being posted on the neighborhood email lists.  And somehow the tradition of older elementary school and middle school kids armed with powerful water guns has been eliminated, much to the relief I am sure of the organizers and the musicians with instruments and electronic gear.

And for weeks if not months on my way to work in the morning I've seen workers going into the former Caramba/Waffle Tap location on North Highland.  The brown paper still covers the windows except for the one now covered plywood, and new neon signs, not yet turned on, promise pizza and calzone at some point in the future.  Here's hoping the next restaurant in this location does better than the last two did.

Update:  Iain and I stopped by the former Caramba/Waffle Tap site so I could take the pictures posted above and learned that the new restaurant will be called Timone's (or is that timone's?) and that they are now hiring.

But that wasn't the only sign posted -- there was also this one, on the door.

More to follow, I'm sure.

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.