A few days ago the Gold Dust Twins reached out from a crumbling wall and grabbed me by the eyeballs. They haven’t let go yet.

 

I walk the dogs on Auburn Avenue. Left out the front gate onto Edgewood, right on Randolph, left at Lotta Frutta. Five minutes, tops.

The rap on Atlanta is that the city’s history all got bulldozed or burned. Hard to to make that case on our walks. If we turn right out the gate instead of left, there’s the clunky mansion Asa Candler built when Coca-Cola first made him kind of rich, before he got really rich and built an even worse one up on Ponce.

Or turn left on Krog and duck through the tunnel under the train yard, into streets of shotgun shacks where you almost still smell the cabbage cooking. Mill houses span out from the big smokestacks of the Fulton Bag Company, tidy and tiny as the seconds on a clock face.

Or walk on down Edgewood a mile or so and smack into the Curb Market, chugging along strong, a few years shy of a hundred. Need a pigfoot? Get in there.

There’s plenty of new, plenty of shiny, to be sure, and plenty of history got plowed under. But mostly the bulldozers went where the money was. For most of the 20th century, that wasn’t around here.

Around here, the gabled, shingled Queen Anne-style mansions got chopped up into boarding houses, and gas stations got built next door. The people who built those big houses bugged out for greener pastures, or at least whiter ones. The black middle class and the white middle class played a fifty year game of leapfrog, fleeing the city center for the ‘burbs, taking the doughnut with them, leaving the hole behind.

We live in the oldest schoolhouse in Atlanta, but that distinction is relative; history here is on the young side. I have a friend, a guy my age, whose grandfather was born down near Five Points before the Civil War, when Atlanta was barely two decades old. In 1892, when our schoolhouse was built, my friend’s dad wasn’t yet born. The city’s entire history. Three generations. A scale akin to the human. If you know what you’re looking for, history’s all around you, close enough to touch. For a story that played out so starkly in black and white, it sure looks like shades of grey, which is where the Gold Dust Twins come in.

So– meanwhile, back at Auburn Avenue, walking the dogs: Sadie the Catahoula, and Kip the Fox Terrier. Behind us cranes and bulldozers chug away, carving out the Beltline and piling up the condos. In just a few weeks, inside a factory that once turned out cast iron stoves, a new market will open up, soon-to-be home of the artisanal hamburger and the gourmet dog treat. White subway tiles. Edison-style light bulbs. Marking with no intentional irony the passing of the industrial era. Romanticizing the just-killed.

Human nature.

We turn onto Auburn.

Out one era and into another.

The cars give today away, as does the porch furniture. Strip away those thin top layers and the street stands largely as it did a hundred years ago. You can check that online. The Sanborn Insurance Company commissioned maps of Atlanta, block by block, building by building. They’re digitized. They’re addictive. Click through the endless maps of the city as it stood in 1911, street after street, house after house– scrolling through space at some timeless pace, moving at about the speed of, say, a dog on a hot summer afternoon. I pull up these very mapped blocks on my phone. The pen and ink work of some long-dead survey team floats under my thumb. Realities pile up– virtual, actual, historical, digital, hand-drawn. Look down: screen: then. Look up: street; now. Transparencies assemble in my head: two, and three, and four dimensional. All sorts of ghosts in all sorts of machines.

Kip and Sadie sniff their way into parallel dog realms, nosing out evidence of a past I will never know, decoding left-behind scents stretching back in time– how far? Last week? Last year? Last century? Do Kip and Sadie strain on the leads trying to pull themselves back toward the past, just as I do? It starts to feel like too much information (today’s lament). I consider doubling back to Lotta Frutta. Drown my troubles in a smoothie.

The dogs tug. We press on.

(to be continued)