Rich Mintz  

More on my trip to Atlanta last week… and of course most of the places I went that are worth talking about have something to do with food.

Immediately upon my arrival I was hungry, and a little anxious, and so I went straight to the Dwarf House, where the Chick-fil-A Original Chicken Sandwich was born. It’s in Hapeville, hard by the airport, and still has waitress service 24 hours (except on Sunday). You can get things here that you can’t get at a Chick-fil-A drive-through (like a Hot Brown), but I ordered the basics, same as always: tossed salad, original sandwich, fries, sweet tea. A crew of Delta ramp employees were having their dinner break at the next table.

The next morning, I had breakfast at Radial on Dekalb Avenue, the industrial-chic diner that was one of the first restaurants to open in the industrial gulch defined by the CSX rail line that slices Atlanta’s intown east side in half. My bookstore was two blocks away, and I probably came in here a hundred times. It’s expanded since I was last there, the menu has improved, but it still feels the same: informal, a bit provisional. You can see the railyard out the window right across Dekalb Avenue. I had excellent cheese grits and excellent pancakes.

Before leaving, on my way through downtown, I went looking for barbecue. I gave Rolling Bones a drive-by, but for some reason (apparently a fire) it was closed, locked up tight with the chairs upturned on the tables. So I went around the corner to Daddy D’z. Their barbecue isn’t upscale, but it’s wholesome and fresh, and I ate a mountain of it.

I’ve let my Atlanta experience sit in my brain for a couple of days before writing about it, because it was more emotionally affecting than I anticipated. (I’ll write separately later about the actual places I went.) Consider: This was a place I lived in for six or seven years. While there, I spent most of my time at work, or with my (then-)boyfriend, making relatively few friends outside of work, and no close ones. In fact, when I left, I took with me a lot of professional relationships that I’ve maintained, but no real friendships.

But what I discovered last week is that what I miss is not people — it’s the place. To my surprise, I realized that I love Atlanta (and the South, and if you want to argue that Atlanta isn’t really the South, well, take it somewhere else, because although I understand what you mean I don’t care; what I love is the South as it is, not as it was in 1960 or 1930 or whenever; but I digress) in a way that I don’t love New York. Sure, I like New York and I enjoy New York and I appreciate New York — I have a uniquely rich and interesting life here of a type that would be hard to achieve elsewhere. I understand why I am fortunate to be here. And yet…

In Atlanta I lived in a 1905 bungalow with original detail in a lovingly preserved, leafy neighborhood (Grant Park), one block from a large park and two miles from the center of town, with river birches in the front yard and a picket fence and four fireplaces, which I bought for under $250,000. Then I lived in a classic 1940 tract house, in an adjacent former streetcar suburb full of similar houses (Ormewood Park) that had all been so remodeled and modified and loved by their owners that it was difficult to imagine that they were all once identical.

That second house backed on five acres of tall-tree woods full of birds and animals, on a steep grade that ran down down to a gully. I had a pond with a bullfrog in it who somehow survived every winter to croak again in the spring. I had two decks, which I designed and had built, facing the afternoon sun. I had hedges of mallow running up the walk, and volunteer mimosa trees in the front yard which I protected, and a flag above the door that I changed every few weeks. I bought that house for under $150,000. Both times I went home-shopping, I had dozens of options — places I could afford, that I liked.

I owned and operated a neighborhood bookstore, and took part in community festivals all year round. I didn’t know my immediate neighbors well, but I knew plenty of people who lived within a short walk or drive. I was involved in community advocacy (bicycling, urbanism, parks), knew people who were more involved than I was. I shopped in neighborhood commercial districts where I knew many of the shopowners; I ate in good restaurants that were reasonably priced. I knew the manager of my local bank; I knew my city councilmember. When I needed something from a city or county office, which I occasionally did as a business owner, I could go downtown or to Decatur and get it taken care of in half an hour. Each of the dozen or so neighborhoods I frequented had its own character, but what they had in common was physical beauty (trees and architecture), homeowners and renters who felt proud to live there, and a sense of accessibility. They were nice places, loved by the people who lived and worked there, that ordinary people could afford, and they still are.

The small business climate was better than New York’s, because rent was cheap, which reduced your risk. My bookstore, objectively, was a failure, and it took me years to pay off the debt I incurred; but it was a positive experience overall, and the level of risk associated with opening a small business in a place where your rent is $850 a month (as mine was) is much gentler on the soul than the risk involved in opening a store in Chelsea or even Carroll Gardens. I survived, and I’d do it again.

In those years I didn’t have everything in the world, but I had everything I needed, and my life was rich and much more earnest than my life in New York is. I knew people (many of them, of a range of denominations) who were religious and serious about it and not idiots. I  ate just as much “ethnic” food as I do in New York, and on average ate better American comfort food.  (I ate much better pasta, and equally good Mexican food.) I enjoyed a wider variety of music than I do here, without having to apologize for it. I knew just as many creative people there as here, and experienced more organic, informal art on a routine basis, in part because many more young people could afford to “do their thing” in the general area without having to commute from an hour away. (Across from my old bookstore on McLendon Avenue, a 1500-square-foot commercial loft in a one-story corner commercial zone is currently for rent for about $1,000 a month.)

I traveled widely and easily throughout the South during those years. I saw every city and town in north Georgia. I spent significant time in and got to know Savannah, Charleston, Columbia, Greenville, Spartanburg, Charlotte, Durham, Asheville, Knoxville, Nashville, Little Rock, Birmingham, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Richmond, and Charlottesville well enough that I could give you credible tourist advice in, around, and on the way to all those places. I went to Chattanooga half a dozen times, and to the Dillard House above Clayton a dozen times.

In short, it was a terrific seven years, good for my soul. And it obviously didn’t hurt me professionally, since I’m doing fine now.

The problem with living in New York is that it takes a lot of work. Living comfortably in Atlanta, on the contrary, took almost no work. On a normal salary, I could afford to live in a beautiful house, in a neighborhood full of houses that ordinary people like me were restoring and making pretty for everyone to enjoy. Or, if I’d chosen to, I could have lived in raw loft space in a commercial conversion with interesting, creative neighbors.  Much of what I needed commercially was a five-minute drive away, and within twenty minutes’ drive was as much variety as you can find anywhere in America save New York itself. I was five minutes away from a gigantic 24-hour Kroger, and 10 minutes from a much nicer Publix open until 10pm. Sometimes in New York, late at night, I miss that — being able to get in the car at midnight (as I sometimes did), drive five minutes, park right in front, and fill up the car with groceries.

Below are photos of my two houses.

I’ve been here about 2 hours and am still managing to keep my composure. When I landed I wasn’t ready to take on the city, so I stopped at the Dwarf House in Hapeville, hard by the airport. The DH is the original Chick-fil-A, open 24 hours (except Sundays) with table service and a broader menu than the franchise restaurants.

It was a little emotional to drive through my old neighborhood after dark. I’ll go back tomorrow morning early and take some photos in the light of day, but for now you’ll have to content yourself with the photo at upper left, which is the front of what used to be my bookstore in Candler Park. I can’t tell what it is now — it appears to be the lair of a rock band, but since rock bands don’t usually have lairs that might not be accurate. It will probably be more obvious in daylight.

In East Atlanta Village, most of the businesses I remember are still open and appear to be thriving, although there’s been some turnover. And there’s been some new shops and so on come in, but not as many as I might have expected — there was a lot more growth and change from 1999-2005 (when I was living here) than in the six years following, for obvious reasons.

On my old corner, 3 houses down from mine, on a double or triple corner lot that used to be home to a ramshackle house much older than most others in the neighborhood, that house has come down, and there’s a way-too-bulky house built right up to the lot line. It was done sensitively, and the new house isn’t unattractive, but its bulk is out of scale.

More to come…

I’m off to Atlanta today, for the first-time-but-one since I moved away (and that last time was just a day trip, and I saw pretty much nothing). It will be emotional — in the end, I left in a hurry, without much opportunity to say goodbye to anyone or to make peace with the fact that I was leaving a place I loved. I’ve blocked a couple of hours tomorrow morning in the city to tour the places I used to know, so prepare for some photos and stories from my past.

I’ve always liked Nashville, a city big enough to be interesting and livable but still small enough to be easily managed. Like Atlanta, it’s historically been a crossroads, crisscrossed by intersecting road and rail lines; like Atlanta, it’s culturally significant beyond its geographic size. But it doesn’t have the sense of boomtown self-importance that Atlanta has, and perhaps as a result, it never grew quite as big or as traffic-choked. Nice place.

The last time I was in Nashville was in 2004, stumping for Wes Clark on the day of the Tennessee primary. At the left edge of the photo at right you see a highway overpass I stood on with a gigantic “Clark04″ sign, near the White Castle (also visible) where I had the first (and, I hope, only) White Castle burger of my life. On that visit, I remember eating at Noshville and at Jack’s Bar-B-Que, and so on this short visit, I looked forward to a good meal or two.

For dinner I went back to Jack’s and had, basically, one of everything (see photo below), This is the kind of barbecue I really like — not perfect and precious and artisanal like Hill Country, not industrial like Corky’s or Sticky Fingers or Red Hot & Blue, not “is that a piece of snout?” like the South Carolina Lowcountry places I’ve tried, but just authentic and well-smoked and falling apart in pieces, not necessarily pretty but absolutely delicious. Even the chocolate pie was good. I’d venture to say this meal was as good as anything I ever had at Whole Hog, which is high praise. And of course I had about a thousand calories’ worth of sweet tea to go along with it.

The only place I know well that’s comparable is Williamson Bros in unincorporated Cobb just outside Marietta, Georgia (fun fact: Newt Gingrich used to have them cater his parties in Washington), which like Jack’s is family-run, smokes on the premises, and has looked just about the same for going on a century. Williamson is one of the few things that ever brought me to Cobb County voluntarily while I was living in Atlanta. (Looking for it? Head up 41, then take a right at the Big Chicken.)

This morning I got up early so I could make another stop, at the Pancake Pantry at the edge of the Vanderbilt campus, for what everyone promised me would be a solidly good breakfast. It was. When you have a really good soft buttermilk pancake, the kind that fills your mouth like peanut butter, you wonder why you ever bother eating the other kind. (Also, why do pancake houses make better bacon than anywhere else? I remember having perfect chewy slices like these from the Original Pancake House on Cheshire Bridge Road in Atlanta, and almost nowhere else.) By the time I left the Pantry, there were 30 people in line.

Now on the plane home, I’m having a diet Dr. Pepper, and I guess I’ll have another one for lunch, and another one for dinner.

More Nashville photos below.

With the news that the DOT has approved the release of $47 million in TIGER II funds to underwrite the Atlanta streetcar project — effectively greenlighting its construction — I took a closer look at the project.

The TIGER II grant application (PDF) makes a compelling and systematic case for the value of the streetcar, which ties in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood on the city’s near east side with the central core, and also connects the Centennial Olympic Park attractions through Fairlie-Poplar to Woodruff Park and Georgia State University. It’s less than 3 miles of track, but it’s effectively a circulator for the hundreds of thousands of people who pass through downtown Atlanta each year; combined with MARTA service from the airport, it makes it even easier for conventioneers to “do” Atlanta in a satisfying way without a car.

In the short term, the winners will be the merchants of Fairlie-Poplar (who will see increased tourist traffic), Georgia State, and the Auburn and Edgewood corridors. But over the long term, this demonstration project — which is almost certain to meet ridership expectations, given the volume of tourists and conventioneers downtown without enough to do — will whet the city’s appetite for attractive, short-headway above-ground transportation options. The grant application suggests that future extensions are likely to be fundable via the county transit tax assessment.

Even in this first phase, the route will reach almost to the edges of Grant Park, Cabbagetown, and Inman Park (with a stop at Auburn and Jackson, at the edge of the Old Fourth Ward). In fact, from the house I lived in in Grant Park in 1999, for my occasional trips downtown it would have been a shorter walk to the streetcar than to MARTA at King Memorial.

As someone who’s mostly lived in regular-sized houses as an adult, i enjoyed Susan Orlean’s post on the metastatic growth in the size of the American house over the past twenty years (which seems to have topped off and even maybe turned around).

When I lived in this Atlanta house — at under 900 square feet, not the smallest place I’ve ever lived, either — there were plenty of times when I wished I had more space. But on the whole the house, while not expensively tricked-out (in fact, it was the least expensive house I’ve ever lived in my adult life) was quite well designed. All the space was usable, and I bought furniture carefully to keep it functional. I loved the setting, backing on a broad ravine running between two streets, at the top of a deep woods studded with mature trees and blanketed with thicket and kudzu. There was a pond behind, with a bullfrog, and a deck behind and another on the side, and a long flowering hedge leading up to the street, and (despite the humidity and the occasional mosquitoes) I mostly lived with the windows and doors open in warm weather.

One of the things I liked best about living in Atlanta is that someone who earned a more or less normal salary could afford a lot of housing choice. In the parts of Southeast Atlanta where I spent most of my time, there were hundreds and hundreds of houses I could afford to buy and would have enjoyed living in. That was an experience I’d never had before, and I’m not sure I’ll ever have it again. But it didn’t lead me to buy a gigantic house — it led me to select carefully among the many options available so that I ended up in the right house. And in the end, despite the drawbacks of that little house (starting with the fact that it was a dozen steps below the street, with no way to pull the car up to the door), when I had to leave it, it was a sad moment.

I now have quite a bit more square footage, even here in New York; but by the standards of anywhere but New York, this is not a particularly large home.  But I have more than enough space for everything I need and for plenty more besides — there’s even room for an 8-foot flat elephant (pictured).

Whenever I feel cramped (and in New York, no matter where you live, you occasionally do — as much as I like this apartment, I look out on the windows of another family and not, you know, across 1000 waving acres of grain) — I think about my father, who (like everyone else he knew) grew up in a house about the size of my Atlanta house, where he and his brother and their parents all lived in two little bedrooms, and didn’t feel “poor,” and objectively weren’t. They lived in a house with a flower garden and a comfortable back patio on a sunny street in a neighborhood of people with steady jobs in a prosperous city, in circumstances more or less similar to everyone they knew.

I can see wanting a bit more space, or even a lot more — but who needs 4,000 square feet?

I’ve always thought of ribs (whether of the beef, pork, spare, or baby back variety) as something that Other People cooked — you know, people who weren’t cut until the fourth episode of Top Chef, or got a culinary degree like my brother, or had a grandfather with a little store out on US 78 near Bamberg. At the very least, I assumed you needed either a restaurant kitchen, or a pit in the sand, or an oil drum cut in half and a stack of artisanal Long Island willow branches, along with a bunch of knowledge I didn’t have the benefit of.

Obviously in a Mason-Dixon world, I’m a Yankee. But I lived in Atlanta off and on for years, and during that whole time I was dating a Southerner — not the sort of Southerner that lives out in Powder Springs and drives a pickup with a gun rack and listens to this, but the sort whose family is still living out in the rural Lowcountry of South Carolina, near where they’ve been for generations. And during that period I also spent months in Arkansas (which we’ll talk about another time), and driving back and forth via Birmingham and Memphis. And, besides, I came to Atlanta with an open mind (it’s a lot more fun that way), and so broadened my tastes in such close-to-the-heart matters as music, home decor, religion, politics, and food (come to think of it, that last link could have worked for “home decor,” too).

My childhood memories of “barbecue” were mostly of “ribs,” and with few exceptions, those were all of either the “Tony Roma’s” (i.e., charred and sinewy) or what New Yorkers would recognize as the “Dallas BBQ” (i.e., boiled and soused in what is essentially syrupy ketchup) variety. Meh.

I learned better barbecue habits when I came South: the sauce-ingredient loyalties that identify one as a partisan of a particular region, state, or in some cases county; what good ribs taste like, in about 40 incarnations in eight states; and what side dishes are worth bothering with. (Cole slaw, rarely, except at Newt Gingrich’s favorite Williamson Bros. in Marietta; cornbread, never within 10 miles of the Georgia State House except in restaurants established before 1950; collards, everywhere that bothers to offer them.)

However, until this week I never tried cooking ribs at home. By “never” I mean I tried it a few times when I was a young adult; the results were always absolutely awful; and I gave it up for 20 years. Let’s face it, ribs are tricky. You start with a rather intricate hunk of raw animal matter. You may need to do a bit of prep to trim off bits here and there, which is a turnoff for the squeamish (e.g., almost everyone under 70 living within a 10-mile radius of Times Square). You need a long cooking period, at a low heat, that keeps the meat moist enough but not too wet. And then there’s the near-religious question of rubs, seasonings, infusions, and/or sauces. It’s enough to make you throw up your hands and put a box of Trader Joe’s frozen macaroni and cheese in the oven.

But when I saw this story in the Times (for what it’s worth, the print paper) — and, in particular, this recipe — I decided to give it a shot. I’ve always had a weakness for a caramelized exterior on a rib (one reason I’m such a fan of Whole Hog, which fortunately was about a 2-minute drive from my Little Rock apartment, aka “Bates Motel Rock Vegas,” right around the corner from a real-live murder house!… but again I digress), and I wanted to see if I could pull it off.

Guess what? I could! And the recipe was not hard to follow, and is hard to ruin and easy to adapt to your taste and/or the sauce ingredients that happen to be on hand, and is so uncomplicated that once you’ve done it a first time, you can do it again from memory. Photo of part of the fresh-out-of-the-oven results at top (click for larger). Here’s what I learned:

Follow your instincts. I wanted something much spicier than the recipe called for, and because I had them on hand, I added both ajvar and Vietnamese chili-garlic sauce (in place of ketchup, which I don’t bother keeping in the house because I don’t go through a whole bottle of it in 3 years). I worried about the ajvar, since it’s full of eggplant and peppers, but with so much sugar and balsamic vinegar as the base, you could probably mix in half a cup of mucilage and the sauce would come out okay. The caramelized coating was a little lumpy, but who cares? I wasn’t cooking for the Queen. Similarly, I like sauced ends, so I cut the racks in smaller pieces so there would be more of them.

Cook longer, and slower, than you think you have to. The ribs came out delicious, but they would have been even better with another 30 minutes in the oven. Similarly, I had to boost the oven for a while because I had other dishes in there too; that probably inhibited my collagen liquification just a bit.

Caramelizing the surface of a rack of ribs is not brain surgery. It is a matter of “put something sweet and greasy under a hot fire for just a little longer than you normally would, keeping your eye on it.” That’s it! The crappy broiler in my run-of-the-mill gas oven did the job just fine.

Like so many other things you cook, ribs are better 3 days later. Not much to say here, except that they were perfectly fine right out of the oven, but that by the third day the flavors had melded such that I could have eaten them cold out of the fridge.

Try a drip pan. The recipe as written kept the ribs tightly sealed in the packet; that essentially braised them in their own juices, which is fine, but it yielded a slightly wetter final product than I like. (The Whole Hog product is dry, which I note is not the same thing as “dried out.”) I think next time I’ll try cutting the underside of the foil for the final 30 minutes and letting the excess liquid fall out the bottom.

Thank God for my heavy saucepan, which I seasoned properly early this year after reading this post from the Clever Cleaver and now use four or five times a week, more than any other item of stoveware that I own. In fact, as you can see at right, it’s sitting on my stove right now. You can make a sauce like this without a heavy saucepan, but you’ll be happier if you use one, and you need one anyway. A good seasoned saucepan is like nature’s Teflon; it can get much hotter and holds heat much better than industrial-coated pans do, which lets you cook more gently and more effectively.

I follow the news from the city I lived in from 1999 to 2007, and a couple of things I’ve read recently, such as this short piece from the Economist’s American politics blog, have got me wondering whether Atlanta — like Phoenix and Las Vegas — may have hit its growth ceiling in the current recession, and whether the Atlanta of, say, 2030 might not be somewhat smaller than today’s.

I’m not talking about the city of Atlanta (2008 pop: 537,000), the municipality at the heart of the metro area, which has absorbed rapid growth over the past decade (due to both densification and immigration) and can presumably absorb plenty more on its ample vacant land. I’m talking about the Atlanta metropolitan area (oops, the “Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta MSA”) — the agglomeration of 20 counties, covering an area the size of Massachusetts, that is home to 5.4 million people.

Much of that land — and virtually all the land outside the Perimeter, except along traditional rail and road corridors like US 41 — was rational to develop only in an economy that counted on three things: unlimited cheap gasoline married to an unlimited willingness to build new highway mileage; endless real estate appreciation, leading to endless speculative residential construction; and a core city of Atlanta that was perceived as unsafe, tax-hungry, and crumbling. The recession’s taken care of the first two; and the third has been taking care of itself, as the city has spiffed itself up, embraced its advantages, and started living within its means. (When I left for good, the city of Atlanta was a much nicer and better-kept place to live than when I arrived eight years earlier, and the progress has continued.)

Geographically speaking, Atlanta is in an arbitrary spot. It is located where it is because of the decisions of railroad-builders and local boosters more than a century ago. Unlike most American cities, it is not on a river, not on the fall line, not on a traditional trade route. And it’s so far up in its watershed — in the Piedmont of the Appalachians — that even something as basic as water can by no means be taken for granted.

When I was in high school, the late Father John Gill, who taught me 9th-grade European history — and was also a California history fetishist, and our chaplain, and probably one of the most interesting adults who took me seriously before I moved away for college — said that if we wanted to make a mint, we should all study riparian law. He was thinking of California (where it’s also true), but his advice would have been useful in Georgia, too. The endless squabbling with Florida and Alabama over water rights — in which, the Economist writer points out, all of Georgia downstream of the Atlanta metropolitan colossus inherently sides with Florida and Alabama — may well be resolved in the favor of those downstream, which would make it difficult to sustain a population the size of Atlanta’s indefinitely without major civil engineering projects.

The City of Atlanta — the hole in the doughnut — will likely be fine. Dense enough to justify infrastructure investment, it’s also proportionally wealthier now than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, so a solution will be found to serve the water needs of 600,000, or 800,000, or a million. But at least two or three of the remaining four million in the metro area are living unsustainably, and as foreclosures hollow out their neighborhoods and job losses devastate the county tax bases, there’s going to be a lot of shrinkage in the doughnut itself. And it looks like the go-go days of a decade ago are probably gone for good.

In the long term and even the medium term, that probably means densification, infrastructure, and quality-of-life improvements that my old friends in Grant Park and Candler Park and East Atlanta and Decatur, and the other inner neighborhoods I used to frequent, will get to enjoy. But it will also mean a lot of pain, spread out over a decade or two, for people who bought into an unsustainable lifestyle in places like Suwanee and Buford.

Because I have a geeky side (shh, don’t tell), I’m a subscriber to various roadgeek email lists, where I was recently reminded that there exists a longstanding web site to keep track of which US counties you’ve visited, and people actually do this. And are competitive about it.

And have arguments about what kinds of visits count. Some people say it only counts if you step into the county courthouse. Some people say you have to see the county courthouse, or set foot in the zip code where the main post office for the county seat is located. Some people say it doesn’t count unless your feet touch the bare earth of the county, so changing planes doesn’t count unless you step out of the airport. (Note: That rule is patent lunacy. Oh, and on an unrelated note, I count myself as having set foot in France due to stepping out through border control and back in while changing planes at Charles de Gaulle on the way from Hamburg to Atlanta. I never left the airport, but my passport says I was in France, so I was in France!)

But most people, myself included, respect a looser standard that permits what someone on the list recently referred to as “bipping,” which means taking a detour on a road trip to drive just over the county line of a new county, and then turning right back around and going on your way. (That is how I first set foot in Vermont, back in about 1984, by making a side trip from Keene, New Hampshire, and getting out of the car in the parking lot of a place called Basketville, no joke. It’s also how I first visited Alabama, and I remember finding it funny that the road I was on, in northwest Georgia — in Chattooga County, if you want me to be precise — turned to a dirt track at the Alabama state line. But I digress)

Many years ago I started keeping track of my Georgia counties visited (which, I see, are far out of date at this point — the ones I bothered to tag comprise mostly metro Atlanta and the road to Savannah). I just now filled in my Arkansas counties visited, which you can see by clicking the image above. To fill in the whole US, it’s going to take some time and some reconstruction with a good map that shows county lines in front of me, but I’ll get there. And then I’ll be able to show you a gigantic US map of every place I’ve ever been.