I’m one of those rare people actually born and raised in Atlanta, and I spent a lot of my formative years at my godfather’s home off Flat Shoals Avenue.
During the 90’s- early 2000’s I watched the eastside change first-hand. I saw East Lake, Kirkwood and Downtown Decatur transform, but East Atlanta – more specifically the village – was particularly interesting.
Atlanta’s Zoning Review Board voted a moment of relief to some of the folks in an East Atlanta neighborhood yesterday, when board members recommended the city deny a developer’s rezoning plan that envisions building 20 houses in a place known as “Ormewood Forest.”
Voters in parts of Atlanta from Downtown to East Lake have a choice for their District 5 City Council seat this year: a veteran of City Hall or a first-time candidate. City services and the cost of housing top are top issues, the candidates say.
Protecting Atlanta’s urban tree canopy is facing a real-world challenge in East Atlanta.
An inspiring group of neighbors and citizen activists have launched a grassroots initiative – Save Ormewood Forest – a 6-acre tract with old-growth trees.
Residents of East Atlanta who helped build a community gathering place found that they built something in addition to a park – a real sense of community. To hear Joe Peery describe it, the community park came together in a fashion similar to the soup in the folktale about stone soup.
Pass through Kirkwood and East Atlanta, and still you’ll see the simple symbol X everywhere. In spray paint graffiti on utility poles, on mass-produced placards in homeowners’ yards, in duct tape on a street sign near the spot where X’avier Arnold, 21, died the day after Christmas—these signs remain all over these east Atlanta neighborhoods.
Here, the X reminds the public that memorials don’t have to be made of stone or steel to endure. Sometimes the strength of collective resolve is enough: X stands for a community’s desire to end the kind of violence that claimed his life.
With her two-month-old baby strapped on, Brit St. Clair of Decatur was not in prime position for clothes shopping. Her body wasn’t back to where she wanted, and she didn’t want to spend a lot of money on an in-between wardrobe. On a rainy Sunday afternoon in late spring, she and 40 women enjoyed the girlfriend vibe as they reinvented their look for less by trying on each other's discarded clothes.
Given Take Boutique – a pop-up clothes swapping business – is the brainchild of energetic entrepreneur mom Adrienne Lewis Tankersley of East Atlanta. After she left her career to stay at home with her children, budgeting on a single income made her extra mindful of stretching a dollar.
“This is my first swap, and I’ve found pretty good stuff,” St. Clair said. “It’s an awkward transition between maternity and the size I was before. And I like the idea of recycling, that what everybody gives to the swap gets reused.”
While Christal Presley was uncovering her and her father’s scars from his service in Vietnam, she also ended up unearthing subterranean trouble familiar to other city of Atlanta homeowners:
Water meter problems.
Despite minimal water each month, and even in a city beset by the highest combined water and sewage bills in the country, Presley’s bills were about double her neighbors’.
To write her book and solve her water problems, she had to probe what for too long had seemed normal.
Answers came from questioning authorities – first her own father, and then the city of Atlanta.
