I was browsing through my copy of Atlanta: Triumph of a People, a hefty illustrated history of the city by Norman Shavin and Bruce Galphin, when I came across this drawing of “an artist’s 1910 conception of how Peachtree Street would appear a century later” – as in 2010. This futurist was still not quite forward-thinking enough to imagine Portman’s “honky tubes.”
Well, now I feel disappointed.
Here’s what Peachtree Street looked like around the time of the above rendering.
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You snooze you lose, Thomas Wheatley…you’re in Central European Time right now. Sorry, Mark Davis…you don’t write about zoo animals anymore. My new favorite match made in heaven of local journalist + beat is Christian Boone covering the grotesque horrors of metro Atlanta’s hoarders. The latest is “Uncle tipped cops off about little girls living in filthy house.”
He first flaunted his hoarder coverage chops with updates on the Sandy Springs hoarder – we all know that didn’t end well, but just recently we had a follow-up story about the business that cleans hoarders’ homes. Mr. Boone gives a whole new meaning to the title “muckraker” – am I right or am I right?
Let Mr. Boone’s stories be a lesson to you, all you who played hooky from your jobs to buy three dozen soiled desk chairs at City Hall East this week. I didn’t have time for such a wasteful pursuit of junky possessions; also, the sign for Lee Haney‘s World Class Fitness Center wasn’t for sale anyway.
photo from I Saw It On Ponce
The broad north-south avenues like Juniper and Piedmont have the showcase homes with the giant yards and consistent landscaping, things that belong on stately southern boulevards. But the narrower east-west streets have cobblestone alleys, idiosyncratic architectural embellishments, and sweet little carriage houses pushed right up on the sidewalk.
I have been obsessed with these first three houses for a long while now. This one below, right behind St. Mark UMC, is a duplex that was fairly recently fixed up. It still looks so strange – the facade has nothing to do with the rest; the windows on the side and back are all 1920s-ish.
This one I call Grey Gardens because…
If anyone loves a good mystery, it’s me. But I want my mysteries solved within one and a half, maybe two hours (allowing for commercial or bathroom breaks). That’s why, readers, I NEED YOUR HELP with the things that have been keeping me up at night (besides ghosts and booty jams).
Riddle me this:
1. What is going on with Buddy’s extreme wine/convenience store makeover? What is the intended outcome in removing their iconic, decayed lettering?
2. What is “The Phoenix, the newspaper of Underground Atlanta”? This was in the back flap of a recipe book called Georgia Receipts that was at Antique Factory ages ago. (Here is the cover.)
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Maybe you didn’t hear that today is the 90th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment! And did you also know that Georgia didn’t ratify the amendment until 1970?? Georgia was actually the first state to reject the 19th amendment! Yes, we have always been trailblazers here. However, the amendment still became effective in 1920 when Tennessee was the 36th state (only the third Southern state) to ratify, so Georgia women were still able to vote prior to 1970. Still, Georgia law required that a voter be registered six months prior to an election, so women here couldn’t actually vote until the 1922 election. It’s so complicated for my feeble female mind!
The good news, sort of, for Atlanta ladies was that in 1919 they were allowed to vote in municipal primary elections. And what a glorious day it was for upstanding suffragists on that May day in 1919 when they took to the courthouse to register for the very first time.
The Atlanta Constitution, May 27, 1919
Yes, the subtitle here is “Basket of Roses and Daises Brought to the Tax Collector’s Office by One Woman to Give ‘That Feminine Touch’.”
In case you are wondering why you look so radiant and lovely right now, it is due to three things: the devastating southern heat and humidity, the dwindling water resources brought to you via our crumbling sewer systems, and the excess of hair salons (which go up $10 in service prices every month it seems). At least this was the Atlanta Constitution‘s booster-ish theory in at 1926 article which detailed some of the most modern beauty treatments available to the city’s “many beautiful women” as well as its “lady strangers and visitors.”
June 17, 1926
When the paper wasn’t hyping Atlanta ladies’ aptitude for beauty via its editorial department, the advertisers were happy to point out some of the services and products available for female improvement.
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