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

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.

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!

Eulogy for Main Street

Demolition is underway on Main Street in Forest Park.

 

  
  
 

Holdouts

(Hart Cemetery, 2010)

I could fill an entire blog with Atlanta's holdout cemeteries. You see them encircled by interstate cloverleafs and sandwiched between parking lots. The National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act prevent their erasure, so these spooky little burial grounds dot the edges of Home Depots and McDonalds all over the metro area.

There are still 2 graveyards inside the "world's busiest" airport– Hart Cemetery and Flat Rock Cemetery. The runways, built high on trapezoidal green hills, form these pockets of stillness. Overhead, the cruising fins of aircraft, the ceaseless breeze, and the white drone of air traffic seem to circulate around a quiet, unchanging core.

(Flat Rock Cemetery)