cabbagetown is burning
In 1996, after the Olympics came to Atlanta and then were gone, I wrote:
It was worth everything, all my troubles with getting to work and taking care of my daily responsibilities, to see so many people from so many places enjoying themselves in Atlanta, in downtown, which so many people have predicted doomed or dead in recent years. I hope that the area's reinvention of the recent months does not fade back into ignominy. I hope that this legacy lasts.
As it turned out, the legacy not only lasted, but prospered. Today, two and a half years later, the intown areas of the city are booming. Midtown in particular has a dozen high-dollar, high-visibility construction projects in various phases of progress, including a new corporate headquarters for Equifax, a new Post apartments complex overlooking Piedmont Park, several new residential loft projects along Peachtree Street bringing new life to formerly boarded-up or otherwise decrepit buildings, a refurbishing of the historic, once-glamorous Biltmore Hotel for commercial use, development of the eyesore Atlantic Steel site as a mixed-use retail/residential community, and a planned new BellSouth facility right next to Midtown's North Avenue MARTA station, a new Federal Reserve Bank, and more. Other less-established intown neighborhoods are seeing the advent of gentrification as well---around the time of the Olympics, I lost many Midtown friends to the Grant Park neighborhood, and now that Grant Park is well re-established as an up-and-coming urban residential area, many of those same intown pioneers are moving to nearby East Atlanta Village, which is rougher yet around the edges than nearby Grant Park, but coming up as well.
And then there's Cabbagetown. Cabbagetown is rich with history, but not the kind to be painted over and resold at a monster profit by adventurous yuppies. The neighborhood, which originated in the late 1870s as Pearl Park, has always been working-class, its people living in flimsy, tiny one-story bungalows and working in its factories. In modern days, it is of course oh so counterculture to whine about what urban gentrification does to a neighborhood's existent culture and community, but Cabbagetown is keepin' it real---too urban, too unmoneyed, too close to too many bad neighborhoods to be overtaken by said yuppies. The only people moving to Cabbagetown and fixing it up are true urbanites, the sort who choose their paint colors based on what strikes them as groovy at the moment, not on what will resell well---the sort who don't mind the occasional drunken bum shambling down Boulevard talking to himself. Many local musicians, poets, and other creative types live in Cabbagetown---the late "Panorama Ray" was a Cabbagetown-based photographer and painter whose eclectic, larger-than-life visions of life in his little corner of Atlanta garnered him fans from around the world, and Chris Lopez of the Cabbagetown-based band Rock*A*Teens said in a 1997 interview with Creative Loafing, "I hate the term 'grass roots,' but [Cabbagetown] is this place where a bunch of dip-shits that I've known for two or three years have lived and played in a million bands. It's unrecognized because it's still a neighborhood thing." The term "street cred" gets tossed around in regard to Cabbagetown's position as a nexus for local artists in the same interview---this is definitely not an area suffering the same sell-out stigma as many other urban neighborhoods that have seen sudden revitalization in recent years.
In fact, not even the renovation of the massive Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, built in 1881, Atlanta's largest industrial employer by the turn of the century, and closed down and left to decay one hundred years later, could strip the area of its authenticity, or its low-income residents who were Cabbagetown when Cabbagetown wasn't cool. In part, this was due to the federal Empowerment Zone initiative, which contributed nearly eleven million dollars of the funding required to develop the Cotton Mill for mixed residential/commercial use---all Uncle Sam asked in return was that a certain amount of the revamped Cotton Mill's residential space be rented at a discount to low and middle income tenants. And this seems to have been the trick that kept the Cotton Mill project from being just another yuppie enclave with barbed-wire fences and security intercoms to keep all the local color at a safe distance. The Mill was transformed in less than two years from a hulking, decrepit pile of brick and rust fit only for wee-hours visits under the influence of double-dog-dares or mind-altering drugs, to a dream for an entire community. I myself was caught up; I wanted a loft (still do), but wasn't willing to pay the exorbitant prices charged for ritzier developments in better parts of town. And the Cotton Mill was grandiose, after all. 12.5 acres, nine original buildings, over half a million square feet of floor space, a spot on the National Register of Historic Places and in the history books for the role a strike there in 1914-1915 played in the early days of organized labor, and a clear view of downtown only a few miles away. These were lofts to beat all lofts, without a doubt, and I dreamed of renting one for myself---I remember poring through floor plans with my husband over gumbo at a Little Five Points cajun restaurant; I remember visiting the Cotton Mill's office and marvelling over the lovely color artists' renderings provided by advance leasing agents.
My wish to live there didn't work out, in the end. But that didn't stop my heart from breaking just a little bit this afternoon when I got into my car after a meeting to hear on the radio that the Fulton Cotton Mill Lofts had caught fire, the original oil-preserved pine-wood beams and floors of a building under construction for a future phase of the development project going up like kindling, due to causes as yet unknown. Much of the complex was gutted, and high winds blew embers all over Cabbagetown, the burning windborne debris destroying or damaging several homes and businesses in the area. Twelve hours later, the fire still burns, and the power to Cabbagetown has been shut off, leaving the neighborhood completely in the dark---it can be safely assumed that a fire of such magnitude caused major damage to power cables and transformers in the area, but it's still too hot for anyone to get in to investigate the potential threat of such damage. Emergency vehicles with flashing lights of all colors surround the perimeter of the endangered area, keeping an eye on the wind and the dying flames, and without a doubt, there's a lot of Cabbagetowners wondering tonight if they'll still have homes tomorrow.
The city, and indeed the state, are on a self-congratulatory high right now, all patting themselves on the back for the undeniably heroic rescue of a construction worker trapped in a burning crane high above the inferno, his only escape route a Department of Natural Resources helicopter and an Atlanta city firefighter on the end of a very long rope. What the chopper team and that firefighter did was spectacular, yes, and that construction worker is very lucky to be alive. But there was no heroic rescue of Cabbagetown itself. The area has been bone-dry due to a lack of recent rain; the century-old wood of the massive old factory building must too have been a conflagration waiting for a spark; there is no stopping the wind---there was no containing this fire, once it began. And there will be no celebration of the heroism of the diehard residents of Cabbagetown---those who lived there through good times and bad, those who always lived there because it was home. But in a few days, after the mayor gets done commending the rescue crew with special photo-op ceremonies at the Capitol building, after the inevitable media rush on the rescued man ("Was there ever a moment when you thought you were going to die?"), after first the daily and then the weekly papers have their chances to do full photo spreads on the dramatically roiling inferno and the black clouds of smoke visible from upwards of ten miles away, then all of us will realize that a dream died this afternoon when the Cotton Mill Lofts burned; a dream, and years of progress and money and time spent making Cabbagetown a place where someone might want to live, on purpose. Or, not quite all of us---it seems certain that the residents of Cabbagetown have already had this thought. They cheered as loudly as any of us did when the DNR helicopter lowered the fireman and the construction worker to safety in nearby Oakland Cemetery, but now instead of turning off their televisions and exclaiming over how it was just like something you'd see in the movies, the residents of Cabbagetown now must face rebuilding not only their own lives, but an entire community as well.
Atlanta's chosen symbol is that of the phoenix, the mythical bird rising cyclically, triumphant, from the ashes of its own funeral pyre, a reference to Atlanta's rebirth after Sherman's burning of the city in 1864. Cabbagetown burned then and was reborn---today it's happened again, another cycle, just as in that myth. But unlike the fabled phoenix, what rises from the ashes today is not renewed beauty and vigor, but only two soot-blackened and lonely red brick smokestacks amidst a stark plain of smoking debris. It's a great, painful loss for the village of Cabbagetown and for the city of Atlanta, and it is my fervent hope that it does not take the passage of another 135 years to bring back to Cabbagetown the sort of spirit and hope that the Fulton Cotton Mill Loft project so grandly bespoke.
After-the-fact (4/13/99):
* Initial news coverage from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, photos and stories
* Aftermath and reaction from the AJC, photos and stories
* Coverage from Creative Loafing, story and one great photo of the collapse of a wall of the mill that was damn near exactly the same as the one the AJC got---I guess they train journalistic photographers to be able to identify the precise moment at which you've gotta take the picture or it's too late.
* Last but not least, I rented Freejack, which was filmed in Atlanta in 1991, using the Fulton Cotton and Bag Mill as backdrop for a good portion of the movie (as well as using downtown's streets for an extended car-chase scene, right up until the moment Emilio Estevez drives like a bat out of hell through a roadblock on a tall bridge and dives at the last moment out the car window into the river----we in Atlanta have neither fancy bridge nor city waterfront). The verdict is: eh.
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