For Art’s Sake - Sense of place

Disappearing buildings chip away at city’s soul

At the end of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane — after numerous reporters have attempted to divine the meaning of Charles Foster Kane’s last word, “Rosebud” — we watch a child’s wooden sled being thrown into an incinerator. That symbol of childhood, of the past, is obliterated and no one will ever know its significance to Kane.

Atlanta’s historic architecture, its mom-and-pop businesses and its landmarks are a lot like Rosebud. These seemingly ordinary, material things constitute our emotional tether to a personal and communal past. They are incorporated into the emotional fabric of our lives. When those places are destroyed, often silently and stealthily, another piece of the city’s soul is chipped away. We define ourselves by the places where we live, and when a place becomes featureless and generic, there is a chance we too could adopt those qualities like a chameleon.

The recent sale of the 79-year-old Clermont Hotel to Inman Park Properties set off worried flutters in the community that illustrated just how profoundly the city’s residents are connected to its continued presence. On July 28, many Atlanta residents fretted and mourned for the closing of Paschal’s Restaurant, an important meeting place for leaders of the Civil Rights Movement including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The former “black city hall” will be demolished to make way for a Clark Atlanta University dormitory.

Longtime residents of Atlanta recognize the familiar paradoxes of the city. There is a sense of small-town intimacy where you can’t help but know someone at any large gathering. But there’s also a sterile, generic quality, too, of the franchise-faced Anytown that has become a global epidemic.

What gives a city warmth and charm and imbues it with character is its familiar architecture. I experience a rush of pleasure every time I bypass the highway and drive into downtown Atlanta on Lee Street. For an all-too-brief interval, Atlanta is an old Southern city lost to time and defined by freight yards and crumbling brick factories, massive trains and that most peculiar of all Atlanta spectacles, pedestrian traffic.

Love of place is often defined by an architecture formed more by sentiment than inherent worth. A feature of the Lee Street drive was always Pilgreen’s Restaurant, home to a homegrown icon: a deliriously smiling T-bone wearing a crown. Like the joy-drunk cartoon swine hungry for obliteration at barbecue restaurants, that cheerful steak nearly begged to have a knife plunged into its rosy body. The smiling T-bone was spontaneously sketched onto a cocktail napkin by a customer inspired by the Li’l Abner comic strip character “Shmoo,” whose sole purpose was to bring happiness to others. After 58 years on the Lee Street strip, the family-owned business has closed for good. The building caught fire last April, and the cost of getting the building back up to code was simply too great, says Linda Gold, whose husband is the grandson of the business’ original owner, Ira Pilgreen. Two family-owned Pilgreen’s remain, one in Morrow and one in McDonough, but there are certain elements of quirk you just can’t replace or replicate once they are gone.

Everyone has their own litany of Atlanta fixtures it would be impossible to imagine the city without. That might include the Cyclorama, Oakland Cemetery, the Starlight Drive-In, the Peachtree Amtrak Station, the Polaris, the Marietta “Big Chicken,” the Atlanta Masonic Temple, George Harwell Bond’s Plaza Theater and a personal obsession, architect A. Thomas Bradbury’s early ’60s Ben W. Fortson Jr. Archives and Records Building, a cool, monolithic sentinel standing guardian on Capitol Avenue. The archives moved in May 2003 to a new facility in Morrow, and the building will be, like many other Atlanta structures, evaluated for maintenance or destruction by the new Perdue administration.

I never had a Pilgreen’s smiling T-bone or a plate of Paschal’s famous fried chicken. I never pumped my gas at the long gone Bluebird gas station whose fairyland sign once floated next to I-75/85. But I also don’t believe that you have to know a person intimately to be sad when she dies. I can mourn vicariously for the people through the generations who frequented those places and who understand that they’re more than just sleds.

Look more

- There is still time to see the charm-filled contemplation of summer in the large but remarkably cohesive photo show Flash: Swimsuits and Sports at Jackson Fine Art (www.jacksonfineart.com). Flash cuts to the heart of what we know intuitively about summer — that it is filled with a newborn-each-season awareness of flesh. Through Aug. 30.

- In what may be the coolest move in recent Atlanta theatrical distribution history, the new Landmark Midtown Art Cinema (formerly Midtown 8) will show Matthew Barney’s entire Cremaster epic art film cycle this fall.

The most recent film, Cremaster 3, screens first, Oct. 31-Nov. 2. The rest of the films show in double features: Cremaster 4 & 5, Nov. 2; Cremaster 1 & 2, Nov. 2-4; Cremaster 4 & 5, Nov. 5-6.

felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com

For Art’s Sake is a biweekly column on Atlanta’s visual arts scene.