If only this photo had been available in 2015 ….
I would love to use it in my Decatur book. The image speaks to so many things about Decatur’s gentrified Oakhurst community specifically and the city generally.
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Category Archives: Decatur
So Long John Hamilton
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Our 10-year-old basset hound decided that we were getting up this morning at a little before five. I opened Facebook on my phone while moving between the bedroom and giving our 17-year-old cat her morning medicine. The first post that I saw was one from Hannah, a woman we met 10 years ago while we were living in Georgia. Back then, she had recently lost another dog and had come to one of my programs on gentrification in the city where she lived to look for answers about why her neighbors acted the way they did.
Hannah’s post referred to her dog John Hamilton in the past tense.
Our pets are our family and sometimes our friends’ pets become important, too. I cried this morning when I learned that the dog Hannah adopted a decade ago had died. I know that it won’t be nearly as much as how Hannah will miss John Hamilton, but I will miss her posts about him and her photos of him accompanying her on her many adventures.
Hannah is one of the best things that happened to us in the aftermath of moving to Decatur, Ga. She is one of the few good people in a city of more than 20 thousand. It’s tempting to think that most people are “good” everywhere, but there are some places on this planet where a majority of the people are bad because of their actions or their inaction: silence in the midst of evil is complicity and betrayal. Decatur is such a place filled with bad people, brightened in spots by people like Hannah.
At the program Hannah attended in March 2014, she recounted the recent loss of her dog Heidi. Hannah told me in an interview the following week:
People haven’t noticed that Heidi died. Like why doesn’t anybody ask about my dog? When the two gay guys walk with their three dogs and somebody’s missing, I ask. Uh oh, where’s the other one?
Nothing.
Then a couple of times I’ve noticed that like – now I’m a aware of it and so I say something extra nice and they’re surprised.
Hit by the loss of her dog and the sense of disconnection from her neighbors, Hannah embarked on a mission to create connections, community.
I decided that I was just going to kill them with kindness and say “Hi.” Usually I don’t like the “How are you?” I say, “Hey there.” They’ll either say nothing or “How are you?”
And then I decided that I know and I feel guilty about neighbors that are very close that I have not met and so I don’t bake cookies anymore because I’m a vegan so I’ve made my own homemade deodorants, a lavender scent and tangerine scent, to pass out to those neighbors. And I have a little recipe card with my name and my phone number – not my email – and the ingredients of the deodorant and I’m introducing myself to people. And I get super nervous but I still do it. It’s really fun, though.
She joked about what she should call her project: “It’s really just meet the neighbors but maybe the, ‘Hi, hey there club.’ It’s just me in it.”
Hannah now lives thousands of miles away from Decatur and the city’s social pathologies. I wrote about how we met and her experiences for the History News Network in a 2015 article titled, “Doing Public History: This Is What Success Can Look Like.” Back then, I had to use a pseudonym to protect her from retaliation by her neighbors, the bad people, and in the article I called her “Susan.”
In a way, our pets sparked a friendship. Had it not been for Heidi, I never would have met John Hamilton in Hannah’s small apartment and I never would have met Hannah and learned her touching story.
I hope that John Hamilton was greeted at the Rainbow Bridge by our own Hannah (1998-2012), Emily, Zeke, Ziggy, Emerson, Rufus, Clyde, and Flagler.
Decatur Day 2023
The email that I received 11 days before this year’s annual reunion of Black residents in Decatur, Ga. was troubling: “I just wanted to let you know that the City is trying to get rid of Decatur Day.” I have gotten many similar emails, texts, and phone calls since 2011 when I began documenting gentrification, racism, and erasure in the Atlanta suburb.
I replied to the email asking for additional information. I also reached out to earlier collaborators in my work, current and former Black Decaturites that I have interviewed. They, in turn, connected me with others who had deep attachments to Decatur Day. Their belief was crystal clear. “People in the neighborhood saying the whites don’t want blacks at the park,” one told me.
The park that my collaborator mentioned is Decatur’s McKoy Park. It is located in the city’s Oakhurst neighborhood, the site of Decatur’s latest displacement phase — one of many stretching back more than a century.
I did multiple telephone interviews in the four days after receiving the initial email. Decatur Day participants sent me photos from past years. The digital editors for the Urban History Association agreed to consider an article on serial displacement, Decatur Day, and contemporary public policy. I completed a 3,500-word draft in two days. One day after submitting it, I received an email from the editors: “Looking forward to running the piece.”
The article, “Decatur Day and the History of Serial Displacement in an Atlanta Suburb,” is now out in The Metropole.
An amusing postscript to the reporting that I did for the UHA article appeared yesterday in a heavily illustrated puff piece published in the Decaturish.com blog. Two people from the blog’s staff attended the Sept. 2 event.
The article’s featured photo shows a man studying a poster mounted on an easel. The poster reads, “Displaced But Not Erased.” It includes three images: two historic newspaper clippings and a photo of a street sign juxtaposed against the Decatur High School football stadium wall.
All of the images originated from my 2020 National Council on Public History virtual walking tour of Decatur’s former ghetto, the Beacon Community: Displaced and Erased: Decatur Walking Tour. Even the language that organizers used in the poster to resist Decatur’s tendencies to erase Black people and Black history derived from the 2020 tour.
Zoe Seiler, who wrote the article, also tweeted a different photo showing the poster. The content in the tweet is more legible than the photo published in the blog, especially the street sign photo.
I photographed the Robin Street sign on June 11, 2018. The framing was intentional: to tell the story of how Decatur city officials used the high school stadium wall to prevent residents in the adjacent Allen Wilson Terrace apartments from watching the football games. But that context seems to be missing from the story published in the blog.
I am honored that my work continues to influence people in Decatur. The local blog’s coverage of the event reinforces my assertions that the city and its white residents silence, erase, and whitewash history and current events.
© 2023 D.S. Rotenstein
A landfill is no place for “missing middle housing”
In 2003, Decatur, Ga., playwright Valetta Anderson, her partner Cotis Weaver, and several neighbors sued the City of Decatur to prevent the redevelopment of an apartment building into high-end townhomes. The lawsuit and conversation it started could have been a turning point for Decatur to preserve affordable housing and diversity. Instead, the city went in a different direction.
Now, 20 years later, the home Anderson and Weaver lived in, along with hundreds of other affordable single- and multi-family homes have been demolished and sent to landfills. Earlier this year, the City of Decatur was forced to confront more than 20 years of policy missteps by amending its zoning ordinance to allow for so-called “missing middle housing.” The problem is, the city had lots of missing middle housing (and diversity).
Continue readingMaxwell Street, Decatur, Ga.
I have an assignment to write an article on affordable housing in Decatur, Ga. It’s been a while since I surfed through Zillow to see what things are selling for in the city’s Oakhurst neighborhood. I nearly fell out of my seat when I saw this map.
I can recall that in 2014, Oakhurst’s first million-dollar house went on the market. I can’t imagine a house on Maxwell Street selling for 2.75 million or another one a block away from where we once lived selling for 1.28 million.
For a taste of what Oakhurst’s Maxwell Street looked like a little over a decade ago, here’s a video I cobbled together documenting the transformation of one lot, one of the first teardown-mansionization conversions. Many of the houses pictured in the driving scene at the end are now gone. So, too, are the people who once lived in them.
I made the Maxwell Street video two years before a different builder transformed another one of the lots into a spectacle by tearing down a small home built in the 1940s and building what he dubbed a “1,000 Year House.” The builder live-tweeted and blogged about the project, from start to finish. The real farce was how city officials and others bought into the hype that the new brick manor was somehow affordable and sustainable.
There are many more examples over on the Ruined Decatur site.
©2023 D.S. Rotenstein
Missing Middle Housing
I found Decatur, Ga.’s “missing middle” housing. It turns out that it wasn’t missing after all. Most of it — affordable apartments, duplexes, etc. — ended up in Atlanta area landfills. A snapshot from 2011-2014 appears in the Ruined Decatur blog.
Bad History
Ann Crichton was elected to the Decatur, Ga., City Commission in 1971. Her colleagues in 1977 selected her as mayor of the municipality that is organized under the “council-mayor” form in which the mayor is a ceremonial position. Individuals are “elected” by their peers to chair city commission meetings and to perform other symbolic functions.
Crichton, an Agnes Scott College graduate, became a nationally recognized expert in municipal government, community development, and affordable housing. After being ousted from office in 1979, Crichton went on to serve as President Jimmy Carter’s Atlanta-based regional director of the Economic Development Administration. After that, Crichton briefly moved to the United Kingdom before returning to Atlanta and founding her own economic development consulting business.
“More than 4 lily white blocks”
In the summer of 2011, I watched as multiple residents of Decatur, Ga., duked it out over the city’s spatial boundaries in cyberspace. The exchanges spurred me to explore the city’s media ecosystem and how its residents and government officials create and reinforce Decatur’s identity online in the news and in social media. The city’s privileged white residents displayed considerable angst when reporters lumped the great expanse of unincorporated DeKalb County, which shares Zip Codes with the incorporated city of Decatur, into a singular monolithic “Decatur.” One now-defunct account admonished a prolific Decatur tweeter by writing, “[Decatur] is much more than 4 lily white blocks.”
I mothballed the posts that I wrote about Decatur’s online identity when I pulled the plug on the short-lived local news site that I created. As I write about the ways Decatur residents weaponize cyberspace and engage in online redlining, I am revisiting a lot of this material from 2011.
The 2011 posts included video clips from interviews done with municipal officials and residents with big online footprints. Here are a couple of the videos originally published at Dateline:Decatur in the summer of 2011. In them, a resident describes the physical and virtual Decaturs.
A Hashtag’s History (August 2011)
The Physical Decatur (August 2011)
The Cyber Decatur (August 2011)
Eulogy [Updated]
Earlier this week I got a Facebook message from a friend who lives in Decatur, Ga.: “More construction in Decatur Oakview Rd.”
I am used to messages like this. They have arrived via email, Twitter, Facebook, and text for the past decade. Many of them come from people like my 60-something Decatur friend: the senders are Black, elderly, and many have been lifelong Decatur residents. They include photos of buildings being demolished and the McMansions that replace them. They also include comments about displacement and racism. For years these folks have tried to get relief from city officials and to get their stories told by the press.
Unlike local bloggers, overworked newspaper reporters, and disinterested broadcast journalists, I listened and I wrote. A lot. I earned the trust of a lot Decatur residents while also angering many others invested in the myth of a liberal and progressive city that only exists in their minds and the city’s flashy advertising campaigns.
The site shown in the message I received is located on Oakview Road, between Second and Third avenues, just inside the Decatur city limits. Until last year, it was one of the Oakhurst neighborhood’s few surviving twentieth century commercial nodes. The one-story buildings occupied by a beauty parlor and grocery store had been community fixtures for decades.
The Whitewash
In the spring of 2021, a group of Decatur, Ga., residents approached local institutions with a request for information about the history of Juneteenth in the city. They wrote to the DeKalb History Center and to city officials, including assistant city manager Linda Harris.
Harris replied to an initial query by directing the group to the City’s “Historic Decatur” web page and to a page dedicated to the history of Decatur’s erased Beacon community. It’s curious that Harris would direct someone asking about Black history in Decatur to the “Historic Decatur” page because the information there only discusses white history and Black history is completely absent. In fact, the page is such a clearcut example of whitewashed history that I use in in my lectures, one as recently as August 6, 2022.
