Category: Michelle Hiskey & Ben Smith

Dozens of customers were waiting outside when Tony Powers unlocked the door of his Intown Ace hardware store in Decatur the morning before the ice storm.

Before the day ended, he had run up 22,000 steps, the equivalent of 12 miles on his fitness app, after assisting customers swarming for snow removal chemicals and sleds and fixing the broken knob on one guy’s propane grill tank – mine. He sold four pallets of ice melt and 200 sleds in the first two hours and seven generators and all the kerosene, firewood and lanterns before anyone felt the first drop of ice or snow.

Ryan Hidinger’s dream of opening his own restaurant did not die with him. That dream, which the late chef had shared with his wife, Jennifer, to make a living running their own establishment, has grown into something much larger: a restaurant that will provide financial support to restaurant industry workers beset by catastrophic illnesses.

The service industry is the backbone of Atlanta, the reason that thousands of people gather here every year for conventions and big events. However, those who choose service careers – like the restaurants Hidinger worked for and devoted himself to –  are especially vulnerable to catastrophic events. About 250,000 of them work in metro Atlanta, and tend to be counted among those most likely to be uninsured, and hit hardest by lost wages when they lose shifts due to illness. Hidinger, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 gallbadder cancer in December 2012, experienced this firsthand.

The week before the Super Bowl, Kavin Caruso showed off his stellar memory by naming every NFL title winner in the 1960s and the teams they defeated. With a mental vise grip for dates and statistics, he’d be a ringer for any trivia team. But in the wider arena of job competition and social acceptance, Caruso is a decided underdog. At 32, he is mostly deaf from the massive ear infections he suffered as an orphan from India before his adoption by a family in Tucker. He also suffers from a mild form of schizophrenia and anxiety.

These disabilities are huge strikes against him in his quest to find a job, like the one in sales at Home Depot that he held for nine years until the economic meltdown. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the unemployment rate for adults diagnosed as mentally ill is three to five times higher than the general population. Caruso’s persistence is a hopeful sign, especially for those among the thousands of Georgia’s long-term unemployed. Faced with so many reasons to give up, Caruso does not.

In fiction, superheroes often elude the camera, their legends created by what bystanders thought they saw. Inside an Atlanta photography studio, Batman, Wonder Woman, Nightwing, Superman, the Green Lantern and other beloved superheroes are captured in light and shadow and framed as stylized fashion portraits.

These are real people from Atlanta, not movie stars or models. They make their own elaborate costumes and wear them to entertain hospitalized children. They are now the subjects of a photographer using his eye to elevate their zeal into an art form. The photographs, currently on display at the Showcase School of Photography, are windows into the world of fantasy, and show the power of refining the lens we use to look at the world.

The unfinished trail is bordered in part by cedar trees native to the Himalayas. It runs by a creek where, on a recent morning, fallen leaves floated like boats and a blue heron glided gracefully over the water. Up a steep bank, cars and trucks roar along Interstate 85.

Welcome to the new Creekside Trail, a transformative project by the Georgia Department of Transportation to turn a half-mile of scrubland north of Lindbergh Drive into a hiking path. This is one example that the BeltLine is becoming a catalyst for other trail projects.

The trail, between I-85 and the North Fork of Peachtree Creek, is the first nature trail built by the state transportation agency. It reveals more than just a small oasis right under the tires of thousands of daily commuters in Atlanta. It’s a spawn of the mothership BeltLine, a secondary trail that is supposed to beckon Atlantans out of their cars to walk or bike to work in Buckhead and northeast Atlanta.