Another good question! And a question that gets to the heart of what makes our whole city special both culturally and architecturally.
In our last post, on the state of public art in Atlanta, we left you at the scene of Resurgens Requiem, a historic performance by the acclaimed Spelman Glee Club during this year’s South and Appalachia Creative Placemaking Summit.
Part of this event’s historic nature was where it took place: inside the Krog Street Tunnel. Four of the city’s heavy hitters—Spelman College, the Cabbagetown Neighborhood Improvement Association, Georgia State University’s EPIC Pop Culture Program, and Atlanta BeltLine Inc.—joined forces to turn the iconic public canvas for visual expression into a temporary public stage for musical expression.
The choral performance asked us to notice the acoustics and the soundscape of the tunnel, because its walls are so loud with paint and style writing that we forget to hear what is actually making noise. Their graphic din set in relief the stately elegance of the Glee Club members.
For 30 glorious minutes, our city’s contradictions fell into blessed harmony. A testament to the power of art to transport us in time and space, it was equally a testament to the power of place to ground us in the strengths of our communities.
So how did Krog Street Tunnel come to hold this power?
An enduring bit of early-20th-century infrastructure—relatively rare in a city known for tearing down and building new, for perennially “rising up”—this bit of urban infrastructure, barely a block long, became a place so definitively Atlanta that decision makers chose to route the city’s most significant urban infrastructure project in half a century through its dimly lit graffitied skid. Come again?
It’s all true! “How” is really too big a question for our little column to answer in full, but let’s start with how place is grounded in community and community forms around art and art can turn walls—the most basic symbol of exclusion—inside out. Because that is what we heard when we reached out to a couple of people in our design orbit who know the tunnel and street-art scene better than we do.
The Inside Out
First, Curt Jackson, a doctoral candidate in Georgia State University’s history department and project lead of the Krog Codex, a public-facing digital archive of the tunnel’s art and cultural significance, hosted by GSU’s EPIC program. “I’ve heard it called the atrium to the neighborhood,” he says.
By “neighborhood” he means Cabbagetown, where Jackson was a resident when the tunnel first made an impression on him. Depending on which way you’re going, though, it might just as likely welcome you to Inman Park. Built in 1912 by the freight-rail company CSX, which was then servicing the Atlanta Stove Works factory (now Krog Street Market) in Inman Park and the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill (now the Stacks at Fulton Cotton Mill lofts) in Cabbagetown, the tunnel has been the only direct connection between the two neighborhoods for more than a century.
Circa 2018, Jackson used to wait in morning traffic inside the tunnel on his way to work. He remembers that often a new piece would catch his eye, he would make a mental note to check it out later, and by the time he returned at the end of the day, it would be gone or painted over. As a historian of subcultures and their civic influence, Jackson knew that important historical information was being lost. Here was the city’s livest party for recording our comings and goings through the daily cycles of news and viral media—and he just so happened to be taking a course on the digital tools that could record, preserve, organize, and contextualize this invaluable resource. It took a couple of years, but the Krog Codex eventually launched under the auspices of GSU.
“Krog can be labeled as so many things: an experiment in the decriminalization of certain petty crimes, a gathering place for creatives, a selling point for real estate development, a testament to community autonomy, or just a neat phenomenon of density. [It] is a mirror of unrestricted and authentic public attitudes and creativity and is an integral piece of Atlanta’s cultural fabric.”
Lucy Ferguson, “A Brief History of the Krog Street Tunnel,” Krog Codex
The Outside In
From the outset, Jackson has respected the value of the tunnel as a “community resource” (Ferguson). “There is production going on constantly in the tunnel, and how is that a benefit to the local community?” he asks, meaning not only to the community of residents who arrived in the last 15 years, but to the community that has established graffiti as a resonant art form—in and outside the tunnel—over the last 60 years. In addition to photo documentation of the art, the Krog Codex conducts and transcribes oral histories with artists and people who have significant connections to the tunnel. We may not have documentation of the tunnel’s art before 2019, but we will have accounts of what was there and how it got there.
In fact, most of the artists doing work in the tunnel come from other parts of the city, Jackson notes, and increasingly other parts of the country and even the world. “I don’t think we have actually interviewed an artist that literally lives in the neighborhood,” he says. Yet he is quick to preempt any assumptions about where the artists hail from. “A lot of times when people think about graffiti, they make … this association with Black and brown. The ideas and the culture of graffiti—and the art of graffiti—may have come from there, but it’s far since spread to many different cultures.” Recently, he has spotted Hindi, Chinese, and Korean around the city, to name just a few of Atlanta’s graffiti languages.
So the tunnel makes for a good meeting place because it is a landmark, being the only connection under the railyard. It makes a good archive for one of the same reasons it has become common ground, which has a lot to do with its architecture. As Jackson describes it, the tunnel is both a “containing unit” and a “contained space.” It holds space for the traffic and the art—and the singing—but it also holds it in.
More or less. “The murals grew out of what was happening in the tunnel,” Jackson says, referring to the art livening the Cabbagetown-facing walls stretching east and west along Wylie Street outside the Krog Street Tunnel. “You know, some of the folks who used to paint in the tunnel went on to become the folks who now organize and run Forward Warrior, for example, and Stacks Squares.”
“They called them Wall Keepers, and they originally proposed it to the rail line as an alternative to the graffiti … spilling out of the tunnel.”
Joe Dreher, aka JOEKINGATL, on the origins of the Forward Warrior Mural Project in Cabbagetown
These two initiatives of the Cabbagetown Neighborhood Improvement Association (CNIA) curate a changing roster of artists who, either by invitation or through application, receive a patch or square to design and paint. At the annual Forward Warrior event, the streets are closed to cars, and the neighborhood and street-art communities turn out to paint, mentor, learn, and play together. It’s a formal recognition of the common ground the tunnel’s graffiti culture has made possible, while it preserves the space for that culture in the tunnel itself. “It’s become a monument,” Jackson observes.
A Social Art
In our last post, we highlighted the difference between temporary and permanent public art and noted the prevalence of the temporary kind in Atlanta. Cabbagetown’s Mural Projects honor the way ephemerality invites community, ironically by calling people back to the same place to update and reinvent it.
Ephemerality also respects a community’s claim on the place that’s been painted. This is a point our second voice from the community, Joe Dreher, aka JOEKINGATL, can’t emphasize enough. Most of the artists he knows embrace the fate of being painted over. “The fact that a community would … take enough interest [to say] ‘We’re gonna activate, and we’re going to go paint over it,’ what better thing could your artwork do than to encourage people to do something like that?” Dreher got his start in the Cabbagetown scene. He painted his first mural on Wylie Street about 10 years ago, as he was still bouncing back from the loss of his architecture firm to the 2008 recession. “I used to like the white box, you know, the modern architecture and stuff. Now I just see it as a blank canvas, right? I wanna paint it.”
He started doing street photography and tagging along with his teenager in the city’s nascent Living Walls community. Always showing up to support and paint with others, he was eventually offered a section of wall at the cotton-mill end of Wylie. He tracked down the person in one of his photographs and ended up painting the photo he had taken of Brian Phillips, who has since donned a mask, blazoned the mask with vote, lost the mask, and continues to evolve.
Dreher now makes his living as a muralist and has painted walls all over the city. You might know two of his recent works, easily spotted on Midtown Union from the 17th Street bridge as you descend into the Arts District. He doesn’t call himself a muralist, though, or refer to his own work as public art. He calls it “social art,” for all the reasons we’ve been highlighting in this post: it brings people together, it stays with the community that wants and cares for it, it builds relationships.
Even a high-profile permanent commission like Midtown Union can grow the village. Krista Jones, aka JONESY, showed up for Dreher on that project. Now Dreher will be showing up for her out on Sugarloaf Parkway this summer. No doubt they will catch some more villagers while they’re at it.
No Place Like Krog
But the ephemerality of the art in the Krog Street Tunnel—especially the speed with which it changes, hour to hour—reveals something critical about the power of place to bind community: It’s not necessarily about being together, much less about trades or transactions. Or more precisely, it is not about being together at the same time.
Look at Frank Morrison, Dreher says. He’s a Jersey-bred fine-art painter and book illustrator who leaves his daughter at ballet on Sunday afternoon and then drops into the tunnel to paint “the most incredible graffiti piece that you could imagine.” It might be gone or scribbled over the next day, but Morrison didn’t do it to leave a lasting mark. He did it because that’s how he likes to spend his time. “Sometimes that’s a solo thing,” Dreher explains. Maybe someone comes along while you’re doing your thing, likes what you’re doing, gets to painting beside you, and then you’re alone together. And then maybe your pieces start speaking to each other even though you’re not. Dreher says, “It’s more about being in a place.”
That bond is so palpable at the Krog Street Tunnel, which is why there is no place quite like it in our city.
Nevertheless, Jackson and the Krog Codex team have their eyes on seven other sites to document and archive with the EPIC program. He divulged three to us. The one most like the Krog tunnel is the Boulevard underpass at Decatur Street—you know the one. The other two sites are wildly different from Krog and from each other: At Mason Mill Park in Decatur, graffiti is welcomed on the literal ruins of the industrial mill, where park trails wind around in full view of the art. At Herndon Stadium on the Westside, graffiti blankets the abandoned structure, which once hosted Ray Charles and Olympic field hockey and where it is definitely not welcomed.
Across Atlanta, our walls are speaking. What a resource! We invite you to peer into the built environment with an architect’s—and graffiti artist’s—eye. You’ll start to hear the chronicles of life in our city.
And that’s our last word on public art for now. We plan to linger in the public realm, though, and turn to public space in our next post. Where the heck is Atlanta’s town square?
Don’t forget to let us know what you’re seeing in your neighborhood, on your commute, at the stadium, in the park … We’re at designandourcity@perkinswill.com.
