Neighborhoods

At some point, I suppose, it will stop being a surprise that movie folks ask Atlanta to stand in for so many other places. Odd enough that Woodruff Park was a facsimile of seventies-era NYC complete with overflowing garbage cans and yellow cabs for Anchorman 2. But today, while strolling around our neighborhood, my husband and I came across a crew hard at work constructing a faux Rhode Island streetscape on a long-vacant lot at the corner of Kirkwood Avenue and Pearl Street in Cabbagetown, about the most quintessentially Southern pocket of Atlanta you could hope for.

Walmart made retail history today by opening its smallest store ever. While a tiny Walmart—the store near Georgia Tech's campus is around 2,500 square feet—seems like an oxymoron, don’t let the size fool you.

When I moved to Cabbagetown a couple of years ago, I quickly learned what it means to be “on the other side of the tracks.” Literally. For those of us who live south of the CSX and MARTA rail lines that slice through the heart of intown Atlanta, getting around can be problematic.

The original 1835 layout of Marietta Square was modeled after squares in Savannah, with grid-like streets converging at a tree-shaded, bench-lined oasis

Tucker native Brendan O’Connell has been painting scenes at Walmarts around the country for a decade now, and in the last year they've actually made him pretty good money ($1,500 for small paintings, $40,000 for larger ones). This week, at the company's invitation, he spent a two-day residency at a store just a few miles from his boyhood home.

The neighborhood takes its name from rail workers in the 1880s, but it was also home to many prosperous Jewish merchants and, later, influential African American entrepreneurs.

Frank Mills’s home at 246 Main Street in the town of Toomsboro, forty miles east of Macon in Wilkinson County, is not for sale. This would not be particularly noteworthy if not for the fact that practically the entire town around this eighty-nine-year-old man is.

Not far from Wilmington, North Carolina, Bald Head Island is 12,000 acres, with 10,000 set aside for beach, marsh, and maritime forest nature preserves. There are currently 1,200 residences divided into dozens of neighborhoods.

The crowd of about two hundred trickled in late (apparently traffic in the I-75/I-285 corridor can get a bit gummy for 7 p.m. weeknight events) and left early.