Stumptown, GA

In Hot Pursuit

 

If you watched an old, low budget, action flick on YouTube that featured a house-moving scene within a zany police car chase...

and the movie was based on true events and shot on location in 1975 in Clayton County, Georgia...

and the house was a noble old bungalow with dark shingles, sold and relocated for $7000 cash...

would you feel a little sad about seeing it carried off and wrecked?

I imagine it was somebody's childhood home from Mountain View or College Park. 

Polk County Pot Plane, AKA In Hot Pursuit, is worth watching if only as a weird artifact of Clayton County's late '70s real estate free-for-all – a brief time when house-moving sightings were common and the houses themselves seemed almost disposable. (And the hairstyles and lousy acting are entertaining, too.)

 

Evidence of Plunkett Town

I'm having trouble pinpointing the location of Plunkett Town, Georgia.

I first heard about this area from a loquacious old man I met at Clifton Men's Sanctuary. Homer was his name, and he was homeless. We started chatting about growing up near the airport and he told me stories about the black neighborhood north of Mountain View. He called it Plunkytown, and for a long time, I could find almost no information about the place.

Eventually, I interviewed some white people who mentioned Plunkett Town, the neighborhood literally on the other side of the tracks, and the open field that lay between the two communities. Children, both black and white, ventured into the field to hunt rabbits, play baseball, and set off fireworks. 

Knowing the official spelling of the place, I was able to dig up these 2 mentions in the archives of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. One article states that Plunkett Town was "located south of Hapeville city limits." Not sure if I have permission to do this, but I wanted share them here as evidence of Plunkett Town's existence. 

"Black Crackers Play Hapeville '9' Today" from The Atlanta Constitution, 1938

"Grand Jury to Begin Lottery Racket Probe" from The Atlanta Constitution, 1944

Mini-houses of Mountain View

The city of Mountain View, GA lost its charter in 1976 and most of the property was purchased by the City of Atlanta as a buffer for the new Atlanta airport terminal. While the people of Mountain View can be found reuniting on Facebook, it’s proving much harder to track the diaspora of the city’s structures. What happened to all the houses? Most were sold, moved, and reconstructed in new locations.

I’ve been trying to piece together the general fate of these houses, in hopes that I would find a clue about my old house on South West Street. I spoke to L.C. Cole last week, a retired Forest Park Fire Chief and State Fire Marshall, who had a hobby or “sideline” as a private developer. He bought and sold, built and relocated large groups of Mountain View houses during the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.

He told me about one quirky case of mass relocation that I had to go investigate.

East Fayetteville Drive in Riverdale is one of Chief Cole’s “developments.” He purchased a group of brick homes at a housemover’s auction in Mountain View and had them relocated to a semi-rural lot south of the airport. The houses – too small to meet code in Clayton County – were a bargain. As fire chief, he had the advantage of knowing and enforcing building code, so he got creative. He placed the tiny houses together in pairs to make a whole neighborhood of duplexes.

Instant slum! I thought, as he described the project with pride. Cheap houses mashed together must be worth even less than the sum of their parts. Especially now that the airport had its new runway slicing across the top of Riverdale, I expected a noisy, neglected, dead end street, dotted with weedy, abandoned duplexes.

But I was surprised with what I found. East Fayetteville Drive still feels semi-rural. It dead ends into a horse pasture. The airplanes landing to the north are as small and muffled as the ones I see from my house. And the duplexes have held up well. They're not only all occupied, they look well-loved. I spotted a basketball goal in the street and a tire swing in a tree. A family was walking to the mosque nearby.

Like the former residents of Mountain View, scattered across the southside of Atlanta, the houses have new lives now. I wonder if the new residents have any clue about their houses' wild history.

Return to Murray Hill Ave

In 2001, a developer called Enclaves of Kirkwood, LLC bought 332 Murray Hill Avenue. They proposed to tear down the structure, clear-cut the property, and subdivide it into 10 residential lots with 10 new single-family homes. Despite protests from the Kirkwood Neighbors Association, they finally bulldozed the historic Queen Anne farmhouse in 2006. Then, I guess, the real estate bubble burst. 

The property is still vacant, but I recognize the yucca plant by the stone steps where Mug kissed me for the first time. This is me, pondering my lousy luck with houses.

Southside Apocalypse

This weekend, I went down to Conley to take photos of Safety Wolf Recreation Outpost, a new and excellently-named paintball facility. Conley is an unincorporated community north of Forest Park where many of my friends and schoolmates grew up, including my husband. Right at the intersections of I-285 and I-675, it's best known as a hub for commercial trucking.

Safety Wolf is the reincarnated Truckstops of America complex on Thurman Road, a major fixture on the drive from Forest Park to Little 5 Points. My brother-in-law had his first job working as a busboy at this massive truckstop in the early '80s. The motel, fueling stations, and restaurants have been shuttered since 2005. It's been converted to a "combat sports facility" and – during the month of October – is the site of the Atlanta Zombie Apocalypse. I am so excited about this kooky reuse of urban blight!

Maybe blight isn't the right word. The recession has left us with so many empty buildings – foreclosed homes, half-built commercial developments and subdivisions. I'm not sure what to call these formerly-bustling, now desolate zones. Some see the end times, while others see opportunity in the dirt cheap ruins. What I love about this project is that the rundown qualities of the truckstop make it an ideal training ground for SWAT teams, paintballers, and zombie hunters. And the over-the-top camo paint job makes me smile.

A Date at the Airport

Friday night after work, Mug rode MARTA a few extra stops to meet me at the airport for a date. I wanted to see the photo exhibit commemorating the 30th anniversary of the “new midfield” terminal, or the airport as we know it today. It’s a whole different experience to visit the world’s busiest airport when you aren’t determined to catch a flight or locate an arriving traveler. It reminded me of going to a mall at Christmas – lots of people, very focused. Here’s some things I hadn’t ever noticed before:

• The prodigious talent of the piano man at Houlihan’s.
• More than one homeless person taking advantage of the accommodations.
• The price of candy. It’s like $3.99 for a bag of Sour Patch Kids.
• The orange sodium lights and abrupt end of air conditioning make the entrance to the MARTA station feel a little spooky.

So the exhibit. It consisted of a few photos and architectural renderings mounted to the pillars of the atrium. As we cruised around the columns, taking photos of photos, reading the captions aloud to each other, and generally giggling and acting amused, a few busy commuters paused to assess the exhibit. It’s hard to explain why we found it so entertaining.

Maybe because the airport has been such an enormous presence in our lives, and this was like a rare chance to view the family album. Mayor Maynard Jackson and his wife Valerie were there, cutting ribbons alongside a baby-faced Jimmy Carter and the young Shirley Franklin. The CEOs of Delta and Eastern were captured in a rare moment of camaraderie.

At the anniversary shindig, George Berry, who served as general manager during the transition, said:

That day had to be one of the high points of all our lives, every one of us who worked on it, dreamed about it, and who thought that being a part of such a dramatic undertaking would be something that would mark us for the rest of our lives – and it has.

I have come to think of September 21, 1980 as a day that impacted my life, and the lives of all Southside residents, in ways that are hard to estimate. It was the beginning of the end for many residential communities around the airport.

Both the 1961 and the 1980 terminals were the biggest, most advanced airports of their day, and both were quickly overwhelmed by the growing demand for affordable air travel. The "midfield" terminal survived because it was designed to be scalable. In the last 30 years, Concourse E and the International Concourse have been added to the east/west layout, along with the 4th and 5th runways to the south. This modular concept is simple and smart, but not very pretty. Terminal engineers took it as a compliment when Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New York Times said, “You’ve built a giant Xerox machine!” Each time it replicates, another chunk of my neighborhood is erased.

Before: Approach to the 1961 terminal. 

After: The Xerox machine welcomes you.

Before: Glittering tile, terrazzo, potted plants, and “The Oasis Lounge.”

After: Burgundy carpet, molded plastic chairs, and chrome. Lots of chrome.

(From my notes: the ‘60s era photos were credited to Roberts and Company; The 1980 photos to Stevens and Wilkinson.)

As we dined on $10 chow mein and enjoyed people-watching in the food court, I considered our date night at the airport as a southside tradition. For generations we have come to these grounds for romance and adventure, either at the old observation deck or parking at “blue lights.” Even though this massive airport makes it possible for me to fly cheap 2 or 3 times a year, I still identify with the homeless folks who wander these halls, just here for the scenery.

 

Airport Remains

Last week my family met us at Thai Heaven in Hapeville to celebrate my birthday. This top floor restaurant on Virginia Ave overlooks the airport.

As we waited for our supper, Dad leaned over to Gayle and asked, "What does that remind you of?" He pointed to a crusty strip of concrete below.

"Going to the airport," she said, remembering with a smile. They have done this as long as I can remember– shared inside jokes and memories at the dinner table while we tried to guess what they're talking about.

Eventually, Dad explained that we were looking down on the former entrance to the airport, the bold symmetrical ramps that led to the 1961 terminal. This post card from Atlanta Time Machine shows how they would have looped the terminal.

"Did you fly much?" I asked.

Dad laughed.

"We were always picking someone up or dropping them off. I didn't fly for the first time until my 40s."

Then he told me about "Blue Lights," an infamous high school destination for necking near the runways. The long stretches of pavement were marked by low blue runway lamps, and virtually unsupervised.

I did the math. As Forest Park natives, my parents grew up with the airport, but it was the '90s before they ever actually flew anywhere. By then, it was a completely different airport– new name, entrance, tower, and terminal. It had become a place equipped to handle 4 times the passenger volume, and that volume included the very residents it had displaced.

The entire operation shown in that postcard now fits in one parking lot of the modern airport. Everything pictured there is gone, but for some reason, the entrance and exit ramps have survived. They lead nowhere and have no purpose. They are cut off and floating.  What planning oversight or sentimental urge allowed them to remain? I think the lingering concrete is part of a secret map of old Air Castle of the Jet Age, only visible from the air.

Public Housing

 

These are “the projects” down the street from my house. Isolated between Hillcrest Cemetery and the Highway 166 overpass, I routinely drive past them on my way to the freeway. Over the last 6 months, I’ve noticed that they are being vacated and boarded up. Only a couple cars remain parked out front, a few lingering porch lights are left on at night. I wonder if East Point is following the example of Atlanta, which has now demolished all of its large-scale public housing projects.

I knew almost nothing about the East Point Housing Authority until they made national news yesterday with their tragically disorganized effort to disseminate Section 8 applications. The sight of these boarded up buildings may have contributed to the urgency of the crowd. How can there be enough vouchers for everyone who has been displaced? I am constantly thinking about the ache of lost homes, and here that feeling is multiplied by hundreds.

I parked at the cemetery to visit the vacant complex. The plaque told me that it has a name: Hillcrest Homes, dedicated in 1951. With the blue sky and puffy clouds, and the cicadas humming along with the traffic, it reminded me of a summer camp after all the campers have gone home.

Set in Stone

After 5 years of driving past this graveyard on Cleveland Avenue, and many more years of eyeing it from I-75, I finally stopped to visit the Gilbert Memorial Cemetery. Maybe I put it off so long because I always imagined visiting the plot would require parking in the emergency lane and darting across a few lanes of highway traffic. Actually, you can park at Krystal, cross the exit ramp at a crosswalk, and enter through a circle of mature crepe myrtles. Inside, there’s a white marble obelisk that you would never notice from the interstate. This is a popular corner for prostitutes and other street professionals, a few of whom shared my fascination with the memorial. 

The Georgia historic marker says: “use of these grounds expanded to provide burial for members of various churches and fraternal lodges of the neighboring black community.” Down the hill, 50 or 60 concrete graves are nestled in the freeway exit loop. I had assumed the DOT built around the cemetery, but their uniformity suggests that these are not the original headstones. 

It’s a “memorial cemetery,” meaning that the graves were displaced and later marked in the perfect circle of grass created by the southbound entrance ramp. The obelisk marks the site of the original 1861 burial plot, but the graves were “destroyed by unknown persons in the late 1950’s.” Some time later, “concerned local residents and local clergy” rallied the Federal Highway Administration, Fulton County, and Georgia DOT to recognize the cemetery with a permanent monument. It's difficult to think that the memorials themselves needed a memorial. They placed the state historic marker in 1983.

Before / After

Before: Tall, red, '80s-era Interstate sign for the Farmers' Market. I always liked the distinctive type.

After: Just spotted the new version. Looks like they forgot to design it.

I'm almost as bummed about this as the demolition of Main Street, but not everyone's a vintage type nerd. The good news is the market was hopping. I bought Japanese Maples on my lunch break for half of what I paid in the spring. Long live the Farmers' Market!