Tomorrow!!!
See you there Atlanta!!
gloATL gave its first of five free, public dance performances, “Utopia Station #1,” on Friday at the corner of 15th and Peachtree streets. The exhilarating hour-long work featured 16 dancers seemingly risking life and limb while interacting with cars in the middle of Peachtree and tumbling down church steps, all while crowds gathered and watched with wonderment. Friday’s dance featured music by Sonic Generator. gloAtL has given many of these types of public dance performances, including at a MARTA station, which combine the flash-mob mentality with a choreographed experience. Founder Lauri Stallings was kind enough to email some answers to questions I had after seeing Friday’s performance.
215 Church Street, Decatur, Georgia
by Wendy DarlingYay for original door still in place on this building, along with the glass block. See it on Google Street View here. And, yep, me reflected in the doorway.
The Viewpoint condo was designed to preserve (or at least spare from demolition) this 1923 Neel Reid apartment building on 7th Street. According to an official press release from 2006, Novare, the developer, planned to restore the building and convert it to “luxury residences.” Six years later, and the structure sits silent. Hopefully it doesn’t deteriorate to the point of no return, but things don’t look good. The nosedive of the condo market hit Novare hard, and they’re now developing an apartment high rise over on West Peachtree. Perhaps they could show a little love and follow through on making these rentals once again, or at least sell it to someone who will.
The 1949 aerial survey of Atlanta that’s been digitalized by GSU is a gift from baby Jesus. 124 high quality photos are ripe for dorking over, and I plan on doing just that. Well, maybe not all 124, but I will be picking apart the ones I find most interesting.
Click here to see the killer hi-def version of this image, and here to access the rest of the fascinating aerials. Be sure to zoom in!
These are my observations on this photo, # 60, which covers Midtown from roughly the site of the Connector on the west, almost to Taft Avenue on the east, south to 8th Street, and just below 15th street to the north.
- Juniper Street stopped at 12th Street.
- 10th Street was kinked at Crescent Ave and West Peachtree Street.
- The future path of the Connector was oddly undeveloped. It’s like it was meant to be…
- The odd tile-roofed brick classical 1/3 of a building that fronts the electric substation on Spring Street between 13th and 12th Streets was whole. I’ve gathered that this structure was involved in powering the trolleys, but I need to do some more research. I wonder at what point it was severed?
- 10th Street at Peachtree was such a dense commercial district! It’s sad that the street level activity of that node has been lost. People are walking there, but they’re usually en route to somewhere else.
- 14th Street was really a signature residential thoroughfare, and many of those homes became hippy crash pads 20 years later. The construction of Colony Square signaled the end of that era.
- Peachtree Place did not exist between Peachtree Street and Juniper Street.
- 9th Street has never linked Piedmont Ave and Juniper Street.
- The 10th Street School was a major building between Piedmont and Juniper. That’s a building I wish would have made it to current day; from what I can tell it occupied the empty lot next to the fire station. I wonder when it bit the dust?
- At least since 1949, the intersection of 10th St and Piedmont Ave has only had one building that’s built out to the street corner (the one that currently houses Outwrite). From what I can tell the other 3 corners have held gas stations at one point or another.
This is the corner of Mitchell and Forsyth in SW downtown Atlanta
Where is this?
Roa - Living Walls by Tristan Manco on Flickr.
so cool
Midtown Archives, Ponce de Leon Park Postcards, Atlanta, GA, c. 1870s (via pecanne)
“Midtown Atlanta had its own amusement park, Ponce de Leon Park, and it was known as “the Coney Island of Atlanta.” That area is now comprises the location of several prominent Big Box chains, such as Home Depot, Staples, and Whole Foods. The Atlanta Crackers used to play at that site, but before Ponce de Leon Park came along in the very early 20th century, that area had a spring and some little man-made lakes with summer houses. Before the parking lots, the Ponce de Leon Lake was filled in to become a ballpark for the Atlanta Crackers in 1907. The Amusement Park nearby extended the entertainment areas to include swings as well as such fantastical activities as alligator wrestling. When Ponce de Leon Park opened June 1, 1903, it offered such amenities as the lakes, ‘greenspace’ for picnics, along with ‘the theater, the merry-go-round, the laughing gallery, the cave of the winds, the penny arcade, the Japanese ping pong parlor, the Ferris wheel, the pony track, the miniature railways, the Gypsy village, the shooting gallery, the knife and cane boards, the baby racks, two attractive restaurants, pop corn and candy stands and two elegant soda water pavillions.’ Read more about the park at Southern Spaces in this fascinating article “Vale of Amusements: Modernity, Technology, and Atlanta’s Ponce de Leon Park, 1870-1920” by Sarah Toton, or about the ballfield at the New Georgia Encyclopedia, or check out these old postcards of the park. If you have the money or can find it at a library, David Kaufman’s Peachtree Creek: A Natural and Unnatural History of Atlanta’s Watershed is also a great read on the springs and park.”
Rein Pirn, Spivey Hall at Clayton State University, Morrow, GA, 1988(via jaffe)
“Spivey is considered one of the best recital halls in the country.”
