Why Dogs are Good for the Neighborhood

Leonard, the dog we adopted from Atlanta Lab Rescue last summer, is doing better.  Tom says he's now "doggier" than he used to be, and I think that's right.  Even though he still doesn't ask to go into the backyard regularly, he does occasionally, and we can now get him to go outside with the promise of a treat (he's not big on dog biscuits, but he'll do anything for Pupperoni).  So we end up walking him at least twice a day and sometimes more frequently. 

Although I still have one child living at home, somehow it works out that I end up doing the preponderance of the dog walking, at least when I am home.  Tom certainly helps out -- often walking him while I'm at work or sometimes while I'm making dinner -- but when I'm around I do most of it.  And being out on the street with the dog once or twice a day, I've seen the changes day by day in the new house that's being built and the one that's being renovated, and the lack of anything at all happening at the corner, when the apartments used to be.  I've seen babysitters arrive early in the morning and leave at the end of the workday, and I've met neighbors I'd never met before, even though I've lived here a really long time.  And there are other neighbors -- almost all neighbors with dogs -- that I now see regularly enough that I know them better than I did.  If you see the same people enough times, you know them well enough to talk to them, and if you know them well enough to talk to them you might get to know them better.

Caroline gave me a copy of  "Life Between Buildings:  Using Public Space" for Christmas.  In about two hundred pages of text and photographs, Danish architect Jan Gehl picks up where Jane Jacobs left off to identify specific features of the built environment that create places where people want to be.  There are things we have to do -- go to work, go to the grocery store, go home -- that we will do whether they are fun or not.  But if there is something interesting along the way-- if on the way home, you walk by a neighborhood bar or coffee shop and spot friends -- you might linger or take a detour,  Then there are things that you do just for fun, that you don't have to do at all.  And if we are making a choice, we prefer lively streets to dead ones, a shopping district with interesting, unpredictable things to see and lots of people and musicians on the street corners rather than a mall, and places that are pleasant to be rather than, say, walking along Buford Highway.  A common denominator here is there being other people around who might be doing something interesting, or with whom we might strike up a conversation, or we might already know and could catch up on what they've been doing since the last time we saw them.  This is what the book is about,  It sounds obvious, but it's not, or at least it wasn't to me.

"Low-intensity contact is also a situation from which other forms of contact can grow," according to Gehl.  

"Contacts that develop spontaneously in connection with merely being where there are others are usually very fleeting -- a short exchange of words, a brief discussion with the next man on the bench, chatting with a child in a bus, watching someone working and asking a few questions,and so forth.  From this simple level, contacts can grow to other levels, as the participants wish.  Meeting, being present in the same space, is in each of these circumstances the prime prerequisite."

If "being in the same space" is the prerequisite, getting out of your house and not being sealed up in your car is really important.  He continues,

"The possibility of meeting neighbors and co-workers often in connection with daily comings and goings implies a valuable opportunity to establish and later maintain acquaintances in a relaxed and undemanding way....Frequent meetings in connection with daily activities increase chances of developing contacts with neighbors, a fact noted in many surveys.  With frequent meetings friendships and the contact network are maintained in a far simpler and less demanding way than if friendship must be kept up by telephone and invitation.  If this is the case, it is often rather difficult to maintain contact, because more is always demanded of the participants when meetings must be arranged in advance."

Every once in a while, someone goes crazy on one of the neighborhood message boards or email lists about dog waste left in their yards, or in plastic bags in their trash cans.  (Trash cans?  Really?)  (My favorite recent one included a long post about what a health hazard dog poop was, full of coliform bateria and other microbial agents, followed by a response to the effect of "I can see why people don't pick it up after their dog - they are afraid.")  Dogs are good for the neighborhood because neighborhoods with people who walk their dogs are going to have closer social connections with their neighbors.

I have to stop writing now. I have to go walk my dog.

Everyday Life in Color, 1956

A couple of weekends ago, the girls were both still home for winter break from college; Tom wanted to go on a hike, but the weather forecast wasn't promising.  So we (and apparently everyone else with relatives in town and the day off from work) went to the High Museum instead.  Before we left we had taken a quick look on line at the current exhibits.  There was "Cézanne and the Modern," including a van Gogh painting, that was closing the next weekend.  We walked through that while a choir sang in the adjacent Florence Cathedral exhibit.  

Sarah wanted to see and hear Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet, a sound installation in the contemporary art galleries.  Cardiff recorded 59 individual singers as they performed composer Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui(1556), which (according to the High Museum's description of the exhibit) translates to "In No Other is My Hope."  Walking around the large circle of audio speakers, it was like you were walking through the choir.  You could hear the individual voices.  Most of the visitors to the gallery fell silent and listened, transported to a 16th century cathedral by sound.  It was wonderful.

What else was there to see?  We asked a guard where "the photography exhibit" was, meaning one that I no longer remember the name of, and getting instead directions to the exhibit of photographs that Gordon Parks took for Life Magazine in the 1950s of everyday life in the segregation era south.  We did find the small exhibit I had asked about, and that was interesting, but then we continued to the Gordon Parks exhibit.  

Gordon Parks grew up in Fort Scott, Kansas, and attended a segregated elementary school.  He became a photographer and during the 1950s worked for Life Magazine. Later he became a film director; Shaft is his best-known film.  Much of his work for Life Magazine had not been exhibited before, but now several exhibits from Parks' archives have been assembled.  One, on what happened to his classmates from his segregated elementary school, includes photos that were never published.  They are now on exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in New York.

Most of the photos in the exhibit at the High Museum were taken in Alabama.  Some of the pictures were included in a photo essay that was published in Life in 1956, entitled "The Restraints:  Open and Hidden"; others in the exhibit weren't published before.  The exhibit focuses on the ordinary lives of ordinary people, including Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton, Sr., of Mobile, Alabama.

Writing about this exhibit for the New York Times, Maurice Berger wrote,

More than anything, the “Segregation Series” challenged the abiding myth of racism: that the races are innately unequal, a delusion that allows one group to declare its superiority over another by capriciously ascribing to it negative traits, abnormalities or pathologies. It is the very fullness, even ordinariness, of the lives of the Thornton family that most effectively contests these notions of difference, which had flourished in a popular culture that offered no more than an incomplete or distorted view of African-American life.

The photos speak for themselves.  A few examples.  This is Joanne Wilson, one of the Thorntons' daughters, with her niece, standing outside a movie theater in Mobile, Alabama.  Above this well-dressed young woman and small girl is a neon sign, "Colored Entrance."

In this untitled photo from Shady Grove, Alabama, a family orders at a window at a drive-in restaurant.  Between them and the wrap-around sign announcing shakes, sundaes, and cones is the sign designating the window as "Colored."

"Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956" showed children looking through the fence at a whites only playground.

These pictures were taken almost 60 years ago, and a lot of things have changed since then.  The pictures are jarring to see now.  We still have plenty of issues around race and inequality in the United States, but we don't have the kind of segregation any more that we had when these pictures were taken.  I also wondered, seeing these photos, what became of the people in them?  What about the children looking through the fence at the playground?  They are not much older than I am.  Where are they now?  

We do know something about what happened to some of the people Gordon Parks photographed.  Some of them paid a price for their participation in the photo essay.  The Thorntons' daughter Allie Lee Causey was quoted advocating integration.  She lost her teaching job soon after the piece was published and, fearing for their safety, she and her husband left Alabama.  Her sister Joanne Wilson, the woman standing outside the movie theater with her niece, was interviewed by Maurice Berger for the Times in 2013.  She married in 1956 and she and her husband had two children.  After she graduated from college, she became a school teacher and taught American history and economics at a high school in Prichard, Alabama. According to that article, "Like her father, Albert Thornton Sr., she believed in the power of education to uplift African-Americans and prepare them to overcome racism and segregation. Each year, she organized a bake sale to finance a trip to Atlanta for her female students and introduce them to the city’s historically black colleges."

And there's another link to Atlanta.  The exhibit includes a photo taken at the Atlanta airport in 1956.  In this photo, an African-American woman in a starched white uniform holds a white child, while a well-dressed white woman sits nearby.  Since we visited the exhibit, the Times' Lens blog on photography had a feature on this photo, soliciting information about the people in the photograph.   Assuming the two women were from Atlanta, there may still be someone in the city who knows them; they might even still be alive.  According to James Estrin's post,

"In the notes he sent with the film to the Life magazine lab, Mr. Parks wrote about Roll 24: 'These shots were all taken candidly in the Airlines Terminal in Atlanta.' This image, he said, 'shows the continuous matter of servitude which extends into the terminal around 2 a.m. Here, a white baby is held by a Negro maid while the baby’s mother checks on reservations, etc. Although the Negro woman serves as nurse-maid for the white woman’s baby, the two would not be allowed to sit and eat a meal together in any Atlanta restaurant.'"

The last time I saw at the High Museum that moved me and made me think as much as this one did was back in 2008, when Tom and I saw "Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1957-1968."   According to what I've read, Gordon Parks saw empathy as an important tool in ending the injustice of segregation; he hoped that photographs that demonstrated the essential, shared humanity of people who were relegated by law and custom to second class citizenship could lead to social change and justice.   "Gordon Parks:  Segregation Story" will be at the High Museum until June 7.  Don't miss your chance to see it.

The Great Good Place

Caramba Cafe is closed again.  We got the news via Facebook on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, I can't remember which.  We went there last Friday night and again on Tuesday.  We tried to make it there early both evenings because we expected them to be busy.  On Friday night, when I took the picture above, they weren't so busy yet, but on Tuesday night we got the last table that was available; there were several multifamily groups there already and they kept coming - all of us wanting one last dinner at Caramba.

Caramba Cafe used to be in Morningside, where Timone's now is, and we used to walk there.  They closed in 2010, and when they reopened on Decatur Street, some of the Morningside regular customers became regulars there.  There were people we saw there almost every time we went.  We saw our neighbor Marian there frequently, and Caroline's reading teacher from early elementary school and his wife seemed to be there all the time.  I've taken out of town colleagues there for dinner and margaritas, and we've had dinner there before being dropped off at Irwin Street for the last two lantern parades on the Beltline (this one and this one).  We continued to celebrate birthdays and report cards and the girls coming home from college there.  I celebrated the last couple of my birthdays with shots of tequila with Mia.  We took our German exchange student there several times during the six weeks or so that he was at our house; he discovered that he really liked fajitas.  There were kids there Iain's age who he'd gone to elementary school with, and the two of them would wander off to talk to other high school kids who were there.  Sometimes we sat at the bar and talked to people we didn't know, but more often we were at a table by the window.  We watched one of the protest marches following Michael Brown's death from that window; the kids took off to watch, and I stayed long enough to pay the bill.  There almost always were hugs before we left from George and Rachel and Mia.

A couple of years ago I started reading a book that I never finished, The Great Good Place, by Ray Oldenburg.  (This was one of those books that would have been a great article in The New Yorker or The Atlantic, but there wasn't quite enough for a whole book).  The idea is that the public places that you and your neighbors go to regularly, whether it's a neighborhood tavern or a diner or a coffee shop or a barber shop, are important to neighborhoods and communities.  They are places you can go where they know you, and they facilitate strangers becoming acquaintances and acquaintances becoming friends.  It's a safe environment for sociability in a society where many people live alone or are far away from family and may not know their neighbors.

Back when I was reading this book, the example from my own experience that kept coming to mind was Caramba Cafe.  This was our family's great good place, and we are going to miss it very much.  If there's a great good place in your life, go there often and take your friends.  Appreciate it with your presence and your patronage.  

The last night we went to Caramba - the next to the last night they were open - I went through the piles of books next to my bed, looking for this one.  I was going to give it to Mia, but couldn't find it. 

Best of luck to la familia Caramba, and to all of us who felt at home there.

Lost and Found

I think the flyer is stapled to every utility pole on our side of North Highand, between Alon's and North Morningside.  It might be on others, too, but that's where I've seen it while walking to Alon's or walking the dog.  A purse, stolen from a parked car parked late at night in front of Alon's, contained some irreplaceable things that would be of no value to anyone other than the person from whom they were stolen:  a wedding and engagement ring, that had belonged to her mother; some letters; a card from her father's funeral.  So there were flyers, and an offer of a reward.

When I first saw these, Iain and I were walking to Alon's.  Do we really think the perpetrator lives in the neighborhood, I asked him.  But of course the wallet could have been taken from the purse, and the purse discarded, and someone might have found it.  But if someone had found it, I doubt that the finder would have waited for an offer of a reward to try to get it back to its owner.

My father died in 2003, and the following year my mother had a devastating stroke; she died nine months later.  During the time between my dad's death and my mother's stroke, I remember her telling me with great sadness that she had lost her wedding and engagement ring.  Years before, she had had the jeweler fuse them together as a single ring, so when she lost one, she lost them both.  My mother was not a highly emotional woman, but she was sad that the rings were missing.  She said she'd looked everywhere, that she was sure that they weren't in the house, that she was afraid the rings had slipped off in a supermarket vegetable bin. I was sad for her, but there was nothing I could do to help.

After she died, there were so many things to get rid of.  We gave things away, threw things away, and sold things at auction.  There was a car that we didn't want.  A friend of my dad's suggested that if we were willing to give it away, the youth minister at my dad's church could use it. He was a young man with a wife and children, and maybe they needed a second car, or a bigger car, or a more reliable car, I'm not sure.  Anyway, that would get it off my hands, so I signed the title and gave it to him.

I was at my parents' house sometime later - still dealing with the contents of the house, probably, although I don't remember for sure - and the youth minister came to see me.  He had found something in the car, he wasn't sure but thought maybe I would want it.  It was a ring.  It was small, he said, he thought it might be a child's ring.  He took a small brown envelope from his pocket; it was my mother's rings.

I hadn't thought about this for years, but seeing the sign on the neighborhood utility poles reminded me of it.  Once lost, things of value only to you sometimes do find their way back. 

Learning from Soccer: Buying the Scarf

Two of my favorite local institutions are in trouble.  I am referring, of course, to the Atlanta Silverbacks and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.  Although they both play on Saturday night, there are some differences.  For one, the Silverbacks are a minor league soccer team and the ASO is a major league orchestra; the ASO wins Grammys, and I've never seen the Silverbacks win a game.  I've gone to the ASO, off and on, ever since I moved to Atlanta and I first went to a Silverbacks game a couple of months ago.  I learned about the doubts about the Silverbacks' future near the end of their season, and the lockout delayed the start of the ASO's season.  Both organizations are losing money; the Silverbacks are owned by some guys who have been cutting costs and still haven't turned a profit, and the symphony is under the Woodruff Arts Center board which has been cutting costs but actually is in charge of a not-for-profit entity.  The Symphony has terrible brochure -- whose idea was this terrifying naked flying nymph motif? -- and as far as I know the Silverbacks do not.  (I just included that last part because I have wanted to say something about the terrifying naked flying nymphs for a while, and this really was my first opportunity to do so.)

I started going to the symphony when I was in medical school.  I bought a series subscription to open rehearsals, and sometimes splurged and got tickets to concerts.  So it's natural for us to go to the ASO; that's something we do.  But not everyone goes, even as much as we do, and that's the rub for the ASO.  There should not be empty seats in Symphony Hall.  How do you grow the audience?  (Probably not with terrifying naked flying nymphs.)   But I will give them credit for trying something new last season, with the first Friday concerts that are earlier in the evening, only an hour long, and less expensive.  I've heard that other orchestras have tried late night concerts with a more club-type atmosphere.  But they really need to fill the seats in Symphony Hall with full-fare ticket buyers.

Which brings me back to the Silverbacks.  I had never been to a professional soccer game until a couple of months ago.  I am not very knowledgeable about soccer (I still don't understand what "offsides" means) and I have never been that much of a sports fan.  But once I went I wanted to go back, The first game we went to, we ended up sitting behind Terminus Legion, one of the supporter groups, and that made it lots of fun to be there, even though we lost the game.  (The Ottawa Fury ended up with six yellow cards - not exactly what we expect from Canadians, I might add.)  On our way out that night we bought Atlanta Silverbacks scarves, and later both Iain and I joined Terminus Legion.  We came early to games and joined Terminus Legion's tailgate party, and Iain sat with them on the front row and played the drum.  I sat a few rows back from the group but joined in the chants (my personal favorite -- after a questionable call, "I'm blind - I'm deaf - I want to be a ref.")

A week ago on Sunday there was a fundraiser for the symphony musicians at Moe's at Ansley Mall.  This had been scheduled before the lockout ended, and ended up being more celebratory than originally expected.  Throughout the afternoon and into the evening musicians and members of the chorus were there, and recordings of the symphony were playing on the sound system.  (I've never heard Mahler in a restaurant before, I don't think.)  This was right after the first concerts since the lockout had ended, and we were so glad we had been at the Symphony on Saturday night.  A long talk with a violinist from the neighborhood, who said she'd seen Tom and me in the audience the night before, and how glad she was to see us there.  She told me that they were working on a new piece by Richard Prior, a local composer who is on the faculty at Emory, and they'd be playing it in a program the following weekend with Beethoven's 5th, and we should come.  I bought one of the black T-shirts that said "ATL Symphony Musicians" that had been ubiquitous during the lockout.  

After that conversation, I wanted to go to the next concert.  Tom had something else he needed to do, but Caroline was home for the weekend, and she and I went.  It was wonderful. 

I have been thinking about how one soccer game made me a Silverbacks fan, and wondering if something about the symphony experience could change to make it more likely that a first-time symphony goer would -- figuratively speaking == buy the ASO scarf after attending their first concert.  Somehow, I thought, the experience needed to be more social and more participatory.  But maybe it wasn't the symphony experience that needed to change, but my engagement with it.  What made it more social and participatory, for me, was a conversation with a violinist at Moe's about the next concert.  I did buy the T-shirt, although it's not exactly symphony wear.

And the scarf?  The symphony now has supporter groups, too, and one of them is selling a scarf.  Mine is ordered, and I'll wear it to the next concert.

Destruction, With or Without a Permit

First, the good news on the construction front.  The house at the corner of Wessyngton and North Highland, across Wessyngton from where the apartments used to be, is being renovated rather than demolished and replaced with a completely different house.  As it turns out, they didn't even dismantle the garage - it has new siding, as does the second floor on the back of the house.

Another piece of good news is that the rental house on our street that is currently vacant got a new roof put on it this week.  This strongly suggests that the owner doesn't plan to sell it to anyone who will demolish it and replace it with new construction any time soon.

The new, very large house that was built where Angela's house used to be is no longer yellow. It has now been painted a sort of tan color.

Yesterday morning, when I was walking the dog, I noticed something I'd never noticed before.  This is the sign that is in the yard at the duplex -- I took this picture back in September, when the sign was first placed there.

Note the wording:

A. Stillman doesn't only have permission to remove the trees marked with the orange "X," he or she has permission to destroy them.   That's a pretty strong word.  Yesterday afternoon, when I was walking the dog the next time, Iain came with me and I pointed this wording out to him.  Were they trying to make it completely clear that the trees in  question were going to be killed, reduced to firewood and sawdust, and not relocated to some forest on the outskirts of the city where they would live out their lives, safe from developers?  Permission to "remove" the trees might suggest that.

Let's be completely clear about this.  The trees have been sawed into chunks of wood and are awaiting disposal.  They are definitely not being relocated to a tree sanctuary.  This is the view from Lynsley's deck.  (Incidentally, the structure is the upper left hand corner is the garage of the very large new house that used to be yellow and now is tan.)

Yesterday afternoon Iain and I continued on around the block.  Usually we cut through the parking lot at Morningside Presbyterian back to Wessyngton, but I told him I'd noticed a yellow sign on the house on North Morningside near the church that used to have the front yard completely filled with bamboo, and I wanted to see what it was.  So we walked past the house with dog statues in front of it on to this house, which had the ubiquitous dumpster in the front yard.

I don't know what the story is with this house, but there are good sized trees growing on the roof, suggesting a certain degree of lack of attention to maintenance.

The yellow sign that I'd caught a glimpse of from the street was a Stop Work order.  Apparently there weren't the proper permits for construction or demolition. 

There's a large tree in the front yard, marked with two X's in fluorescent orange. But there is no sign from the arborist in the yard, about a request to remove a tree. And looking at the drawing on the back of this tree, in the same bright orange, I am thinking that the arborist didn't paint those X's.

There was this sign in the yard, in front of the house.  I was amused by it, as it didn't seem likely that the intent was to renovate, restore, or renew, unless by renew one meant "demolish and replace with new construction." But of course I could be wrong.

And I guess they're planning on a new tree, too.

Research Made Easy

There are three construction dumpsters on the street right now.  Here's the update.

At the incredibly large house on the other side of Kathy and Steve's house, the one with the great views of our back yards, the siding is up, the windows are in, and the brickwork that covers the foundation is getting done.  The architect has posted his name in front of the house, suggesting a certain disconnect in perception between him and most of us who live nearby.

The siding on the house is yellow, and I assumed that was the final color that the house would be.  That seemed to me to be one of the less objectionable things about it, but Tom thought it was a completely terrible color and was speculating that it was just primer.  Now several different colors of gray have appeared on the front of the house.  I am hoping maybe we'll get to vote for which color we like best.

It seems like that would be a small concession to the neighbors who have been inconvenienced by construction vehicles that obstruct our driveways and the nails left in the street.  One day last week I picked up three 2-1/2 inch nails from the pavement in front of this house.  

Two houses down, at the duplex, they've started removing trees.  Lynsley said that last Wednesday her house shook when they brought them down.

The picture below was taken back in September, after the city posted the announcement that the owner was allowed to remove some trees.  It's not a very good picture -- the back yard was very overgrown -- but they were big trees.  And now they're down.

The only good news on the construction front (at least I hope it's good news) is at the corner of Wessyngton and North Highland, across the street from the still-vacant lots were the apartments used to be.  That house sold a few months ago and has been vacant for a while, but now there's work going on there.  It looks like the insides of the house are getting ripped out, which suggests renovation and not demolition.  They are taking apart the garage - the white building on the right side of the photo below, so maybe they plan to add on to the house.  Or maybe they just didn't like the garage.

There's an article in the New York Times today about researching one's future neighbors, about how neighbors really matter to lots of people, and how the real estate agents either can't or won't tell you anything much about them.  (This being New York, the neighbors are in your building, not on your street, but the principle still holds.)  Since the real estate agent is unlikely to know anything about our street other than which houses might be future knock-downs, I will provide some helpful information that will be easily available to anyone interested in our street who can spell it properly (admittedly, not the easiest thing) and do a Google search.  

Tuesday night a small dog, owned by the parents of one of our neighbors, escaped from their daughter's house and made a run for it.  This prompted a street-wide search involving a large number of people.  Sally brought over Christina's father to give me a description of the dog and Christina's phone number so I could send an email out, which I did.  Separately, another neighbor posted the missing dog information on the street's Facebook page, and the neighbor that had found the dog posted it on Nextdoor.  (Myself, I don't have a problem with redundant systems.)  The exchange on Facebook that followed the dog's return said it all.  Several expressions of relief that Christina's parents had their dog back, and then Christina said thank you, and how relieved her mother was, and "she also commented about what an amazing street we live on!"

That's our street.  If this sounds good to you but >$1 million for one of the new houses is outside of your budget, there's a house for lease right now.  One the plus side:  immediate availability, as best I can tell.  On the down side:  it's between the first and the second construction sites described here, and soon there will be neighbors on both sides with great views of your back yard.  But if this is the kind of neighborhood you want -- a great neighborhood and great neighbors at a more affordable price, or your dog is an escape artist -- it might be worth putting up with the noise for now.  The lack of privacy in the backyard, unfortunately, is forever.