Walk+in+Atlantic+Station+4+14+06

This walk was recently posted on Ratsalad Deluxe, in an expanded edition with photographs. [|Here it is.] Walking in Atlantic Station, April 14, 2006

I park in a vast underground lot – called “Central Park.” (Heh heh.) It appears to be coextensive with the entire complex, in the style of Century City in Los Angeles (a 1966 development). One arrives then on the streets of Atlantic Station through a stairway that resembles a subway stop, an inversion of 20th century urban form.

Nick, Julie and I meet in front of the theater – a movie theater. Then we go for a coffee. The coffee place has fake leather sofas, fake marble tabletops, loud top 40 R&B music, bad café art on the walls. We sit at a table outside. The street is very quiet. Nick spots a group clad in uniform black and runs across the street to talk to them. They are all working for a natural foods restaurant. They ask him not to photograph their feet, because they are not wearing dress shoes.

After some coffee we set out down the street, talking about the Atlantic Station development. Julia says it was an industrial brownfield, and only very recently built. The signs of incompletion are everywhere. The upper stories are not finished, and a number of shops are vacant. Signs advertise for tenants: “The Lease We Can Do.”

The buildings are clean, large, and curiously featureless: broad shapes, few details. They are like a memory of architecture, displaced to a realm of commercial invisibility, indistinct forms like display cases. The architecture – or its memories – is varied, some recalling a whiff of 19th century beaux arts, others imagining themselves modernist.

We enter a small storefront marked as an information center. There is a very abbreviated display selling leased space, and a rack of tourist brochures about Atlanta. The young man seems not to know much about the (admittedly short) history of the complex. I inquire about public art in the complex – “I’m all for fine art,” says info booth attendant, “but the bosses are all for dollars.” We note a poster advertising a show of Zimbabwean sculpture. I pick up a glossy thick-paper consumer magazine full of ads, and think that these pages might be suitable as flags to mark particular locations.

We come to a kind of green, or square between two expensive restaurants. The sod has been recently laid, and the patchwork is clearly visible. A green-colored speaker sprouts amidst the flowers like a toadstool, pumping out music.

We ascend an escalator to an upper level, where a promenade looks down on the streets of Atlantic Station. There the Zimbabwe sculpture show is installed, many small pieces. It was closed. It is explicitly a “sales exhibit,” and the poster advertising the show depicts an artwork with a hand closing over it. The space in which the show is mounted is unfinished, the reflective metal insulation material still visible on most walls.

We continued walking to the Publix supermarket. Employees there are making a “cookout,” cooking and selling hamburgers and hotdogs on the street. Café tables are set outside the supermarket. Julia emerges from the market with blue marshmallow “Peeps” candies which we can use for markers. Peeps marking gets quickly out of hand. The the sugary candies seem to have minds of their own, and seek to alight on every surface, regardless of significance – in trees, impaled on twigs, licked and stuck to vinyl signage, under construction flags, staked to the ground, and so forth.

A little quietly hysterical fun seems necessary in this environment. I have already forgotten enough of the real city – time-layered and heterogeneous – to be a little desperately bored and depressed by submersion into the banality of this new-styled shopping mall.

Lured by the distant sight of an industrial tower, we drift to the edge of the development. It’s like Truman, that is the movie with Jim Carrey where he is being filmed his whole life. And he can’t leave the town. At the edge of it the police cars stop him and force him back. So at the “Truman edge” of the Atlantic Station we linger, and put out Peeps. There are many interesting phenomena – piles of debris, obscure combinations of plastic fences, trenches, piles of rocks, odd uses of materials, and scary signage.

We walk along the edge, the checkerboard greensward smeared with spray painted lines, hoses poking up through the grass. All here is refreshingly incomplete.

At the western edge of the commercial development, we cross the six-lane highway. We are in front of a large oval park with a reservoir-style lake in it, an ovoid ringed by tall residential buildings. It’s like Haussmanized Paris, tall residential buildings of a uniform height. Instead of a Place de l’Opera at the farther end, however, it’s a bright blue and yellow Ikea.

Flanking the entrance to the park-lette are two statues, labeled Peace and Justice. They are realistic bronzes, florid and complex, although not expertly fashioned. (A little short on definition in the features and extremities; the composition, as the critics of the 19th century would say, is “lax.”) Examining the statues I puzzled on the iconography. In both a winged child stands between the legs of a seated female. In one statue the child holds a cornucopia and raises a finger to its lips. This is labeled “Justice.” In the other, the child holds a scale by its side and raises a hand. This statue is labeled “Peace.” It is impossible to escape the conclusion that the inscriptions are reversed. (The Greek inscriptions above the statues, Nick tells us later, are reversed yet again.) It seems a perfect metaphor for the times…

Julia said these large bronzes were carried by horse from the coastal city of Savannah (whence the name “Atlantic”?) by horse-drawn cart. After a time it is intended that they form part of a reconstruction of a famous Parisian triumphal arch.

Back in the Station we eat at a Mexican café. (As in L.A., they are often very good here.) As we finish, our empty plates blow into the ever-clean streets. Our Group included: Alan Moore Julie Puttgen Nick A Demos [|www.neosymbolism.com]