Bicycle Tour of Atlanta

A bicycle can give you a good workout, let you blow off steam, get you where you're going, help you have fun with friends, and/or provide an excuse to get out in the great outdoors.  It's also an ideal means to learn some history.  Yesterday my sister, brother-in-law, two nieces, Robert, and I went on an outing with Bicycle Tours of Atlanta.  It was thoroughly enjoyable!  Whether you're a visitor or an Atlanta native, I highly recommend one of their tours for an excellent overview of Atlanta's history, public art, and resurgent spirit.

We gathered at the office/staging area of Bicycle Tours of Atlanta.  It's located on Auburn Avenue in the Old Fourth Ward, at the current southern terminus of the Eastside BeltLine Trail.  Each tour participant is assigned a comfortable cruiser bicycle, helmet, and water bottle:

Our group had about 12 people, who hailed from metro Atlanta, other parts of Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Malaysia!  Four tour guides - Carrie, Robyn, Tim, and Victoria - accompanied us to narrate, navigate traffic, and make sure everyone had as pleasant an experience as possible.

We headed north on the BeltLine.  The BeltLine is one of the most exciting things to happen in Atlanta in recent years.  Sections of old rail lines have been converted to pedestrian and cycling trails where no cars are allowed.  Currently, the BeltLine system consists of 33 miles of trail.  All of the sections eventually will be connected and encircle the entire city.  Interestingly, the idea for the BeltLine came from the masters thesis of a Georgia Tech city planning graduate named Ryan Gravel.  (Go Jackets!)  The BeltLine has rejuvenated blighted areas, connected neighborhoods, and provided urban exercise and recreation opportunities.  Additionally, the BeltLine is billed as the world's largest public art exhibit.  The frequently changing art-scape includes paintings on walls and bridge underpasses and sculptures along the paths.  Our tour group stopped at a particularly stunning sculpture by William Massey, which he built from trash.  This is the back side:

Now check out the front side:

This is the image of Tony, a young homeless man.  Tony later got back on his feet, even starting street churches to help others in need.  Perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to toss aside what we might first consider to be trash.

Before we exited the BeltLine, we paused at the portion called the Peace Path, which connects the King Center and the Carter Center.  Both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Jimmy Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize.  What a uniquely rich civil and human rights heritage Atlanta has!

Next we pedaled to Little Five Points.  L5P is home to such iconic locales as The Vortex, The Junkman's Daughter, Dad's Garage Theater Company, and Outback Bikes.  All but two of the businesses are locally owned, which means the people of this community are truly vested in it.  It's an eclectic mix of people who not only coexist but also thrive together.

We continued to Inman Park, Atlanta's first planned subdivision, dating to the late 1800s.  It was named for Samuel L. Inman, who was the world's largest cotton broker of the day.  Therefore, you can imagine that it was a pretty swanky neighborhood.  It was the first area outside of downtown Atlanta to have such amenities as public sewer and gas.  One of the early residents was Asa Candler, founder of the Coca-Cola company.  Growing up in Atlanta, I knew of Asa Candler, of course, but yesterday was the first time I saw his house:

A few blocks away, also in Inman Park, we saw the home originally owned by Ernest Woodruff.

Asa Candler's children sold their Coca-Cola stock to Ernest Woodruff, whose son Robert made it an international company.  Robert and his brother George were noted businessmen and philanthropists in Atlanta.  The Woodruff name can be found throughout Atlanta, from the Woodruff Arts Center to Woodruff Park to buildings and scholarships at just about every college and university in the area.  Our tour guide Robyn told us a particularly notable story about Robert Woodruff.  When Martin Luther King, Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, a dinner was planned in his honor.  However, ticket sales were lagging because not everyone in Atlanta's white power structure considered Dr. King's work a good thing.  Robert Woodruff reminded the movers and shakers that Atlanta needed Coca-Cola, but Coca-Cola didn't need Atlanta.  This got their attention, and tickets sold out within a few hours.  Atlanta's striving toward racial equity hasn't always been pretty.

After a few decades, homeowners began to move farther from downtown to neighborhoods like Druid Hills that were designed for the emerging car culture.  The Inman Park houses fell into disrepair.  Antique dealers came in and stripped them of chandeliers and other fixtures.  Then along came Robert Griggs in 1969, who renovated one of the dilapidated houses, bringing it back to its original glory.

He convinced a bunch of his friends to buy and fix up other nearby houses.  At the same time these renovations were occurring, the state was planning to build a freeway from downtown Atlanta to Stone Mountain.  This would have sealed the deal on Inman Park's demise.  Griggs organized a successful push to stop construction of the freeway.  Inman Park once again became a desirable place to live.  That community spirit of rebirth still exists today, as symbolized by the butterfly flags seen on the fronts of many houses:

Next we crossed the railroad tracks to Cabbagetown and Reynoldstown.  Cabbagetown was originally inhabited by poor, white people (see below for more information), and Reynoldstown was founded as an African-American community.  Today, these distinctions are immaterial, but they are the realities of Atlanta's history.  The passage under the railroad tracks is through the Krog Street Tunnel:

Artists hone their skills as they constantly change and add to the paintings that cover the inside of the tunnel.  Although I didn't take any photos here, it was a perfect segue to additional spectacular public art.

We saw several fabulous examples of Living Walls, dazzling murals throughout the historic neighborhoods that we visited.  The mission statement of Living Walls explains what they are all about: "Living Walls seeks to promote, educate, and change perspectives about public space in our communities via street art."

Here's our tour group, which gives perspective to how massive these paintings are:

We saw more paintings along the retaining walls next to a CSX rail line.  CSX granted permission for the walls to be painted.  The murals are definitely preferable to the graffiti that otherwise would cover the walls, and nearby residents have an aesthetically enhanced neighborhood.  Here's a painting that caught my eye because I love crows and other corvids.  I'll bet my niece Sylvie liked it, too, because she's an avid amateur ornithologist.

We continued riding through Cabbagetown.  Although Cabbagetown is now quite a desirable in-town place to live and visit, not too long ago it was a different story.  When I was growing up, I had heard of Cabbagetown but didn't know much about it other than it was a place you didn't want to go.  Back then, Cabbagetown was a very rough, crime-ridden neighborhood.  One time I was in the car with my mother, headed home on the interstate.  Traffic was terribly backed up on the Downtown Connector.  My mother took the first available exit, intending to wind our way home via surface streets.  She unintentionally drove through Cabbagetown and kind of freaked out until we got to a safer area.

I especially enjoyed learning about Cabbagetown's history from our tour guide Tim.  It was built as a mill town to support the cotton industry during Reconstruction.  (I am familiar with mill towns in rural areas but didn't know that the same type of community also existed in urban Atlanta!)  People from the Appalachian areas of North Georgia and Western North Carolina were enticed to move to Cabbagetown with the promise of work, a place to live, and a community with churches and stores.  The catch was that they were paid with company scrip (essentially like Monopoly money) that was usable in the Cabbagetown stores but worthless in the outside world.  Therefore, Cabbagetown was very insular, and the residents were little more than indentured servants.

Cabbagetown still has a number of the original shotgun houses, which are very long and narrow.  On the tour I learned how this style of house came about.  At the time they were constructed, property taxes were levied based on street frontage.  A house with only 10 feet or so of frontage would be assessed much less tax.  Today's Cabbagetown residents often expand the house footprint, but the basic shotgun layout is still discernable.

Although Atlanta has a reputation for razing historic buildings, recently there has been a good bit of momentum to repurpose old buildings.  A stunning example is The Stacks, which are loft apartments constructed in an old Cabbagetown cotton mill.  This is part of the old millworks:

The lofts behind this aren't visible, but I did get a photo of the complex's swimming pool.  The remnant wall makes a breathtaking backdrop:

Our next stop was Oakland Cemetery.  I can't believe that I had never been here before.  It's the resting place of such famous Atlantans as Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell, golf legend Bobby Jones, and mayors Ivan Allen, Jr. and Maynard Jackson.  By the way, when I was about six and first becoming aware of the news and current events, Maynard Jackson was mayor of Atlanta.  For a while I was confused about what the head of a city is called; is it a mayor or a maynard?

Graves of Confederate soldiers

If you zoom in to the Atlanta skyline, you'll see the Equitable building. This is appropriate because death is equitable, coming to all.

As we rode through Oakland, we passed another tour group on Segways.   They were stopped as their tour guide pointed out something of interest.  As we rode by, our two groups waved to each other.  I also taunted them, "We could take y'all!"

Oakland was designed to be both a cemetery and a public park.  The Victorians had a different perspective on cemeteries than many modern people, but it's really much more sensible.  They would take picnics to cemeteries and visit the graves of their deceased relatives.  Thus, these were places for both the living and the dead.  In Monticello where I now live, we have the Deer Dash 5K every year.  I was involved in the planning in the early years.  The racecourse used to go through a cemetery in town until the "cemetery ladies" raised a ruckus.  They thought it was inappropriate to have the race go through the cemetery.  I disagree.  If I were buried there, I would love to have runners visit me.

From there we rode to the King Center.  Several historic sites lie near each other, including the burial sites of Dr. King and his wife Coretta Scott King; the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site Visitor Center; Ebenezer Baptist Church Heritage Sanctuary, where Dr. King, his father, and grandfather preached; and the Martin Luther King, Jr. birth home.  Because our group had only about ten minutes to stop, and I had been to the visitor center before, I wanted to go inside Ebenezer Baptist Church, which I had not visited previously.

Although it is perfectly allowable to take pictures inside the church, I felt like I should take a picture only of the outside.  The sanctity of the inside was abundantly evident, yet I found a certain comfort in the familiarity of pews, stained glass windows, and pulpit.  They reminded me of the foundation of love that weaves us all together into the Beloved Community.

Robert and I also paused at the Kings' crypt.  The bicycle tour was my group birthday gift to Robert and my sister's family.  Robert's birthday was this past week.  He and I considered the sobering fact that Dr. King was assassinated only a couple of months before Robert was born.

As we rode the few short blocks back to our starting point, I heard tour guides Tim and Victoria discussing an excellent book that I read a few years ago, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn by Gary Pomerantz.  The Allen family in white Atlanta and the Dobbs family in black Atlanta were pretty much the most influential in their respective worlds.  They gave Atlanta two of its most noted mayors, Ivan Allen, Jr. and Maynard Jackson (both buried in Oakland Cemetery, as described above).  Particularly if you're a native Atlantan, this is a great way to learn about the important contributions both families made to government and civil rights.

Also, Robyn mentioned a book that I'm adding to my to-read list, Mr. Anonymous: Robert W. Woodruff of Coca-Cola.  When I Googled the book, I saw that the author is none other than Charles Newton Elliott. As in Charlie Elliott of the Charlie Elliott Wildlife Center, one of my favorite places here in Jasper County where Robert and I live.  Now I want to read Mr. Anonymous even more!

Bicycle Tours of Atlanta offers several types of tours.  The one we did was the "Fall in Love with Atlanta Bike Tour."  It is aptly named because it made me love my native city even more.  And I'm so glad I got to share it with my family!

After the tour, the six of us went to lunch together at Krog Street Market.  It's a unique mix of restaurants and shops built into a 1920s warehouse.  We ate at Superica, a delicious Tex-Mex inspired restaurant.  While we were there, I saw a man wearing the best shirt.  He was very friendly and graciously agreed to let me take a picture.  I can't think of a more appropriate place than Atlanta to proclaim this truth: