Paradise Regained
One sunny Sunday afternoon almost thirty years ago, Robert Sherer and two coworkers from the Lefont Theaters piled into a junker car to make the ninety-minute drive up to Pennville, a tiny Appalachian community where churches outnumber stoplights on the outskirts of Summerville. The punk rockers were on a “pilgrimage to Paradise”—the otherworldly garden created by Howard Finster, the Baptist preacher whose transformation into an artist had made him a quasi-celebrity.
Morris Brown College used to enroll 2,500 students. Today, there are 40.
After losing accreditation and selling buildings, officials at the school—the first institution of higher learning in Georgia founded by black people, for black people—say it’s rebuilding. Faith abounds, but is it enough?
Wes Gordon: Driven by Design
If there is such a thing as an intentional life, Wes Gordon—the most interesting fashion designer Atlanta has ever produced—is living it. By preschool, he was selecting his mother’s daily outfits for her job at an advertising agency. For his fourth birthday, all he wanted was a suit and a ticket to Phantom of the Opera, and a year later he refused to go to kindergarten without his red suspenders and blue suede bucks.
Did Anthony Hill have to die?
When DeKalb County officer Robert Olsen shot and killed an unarmed man, Anthony Hill, in March 2015, it brought up many questions about how police handle people with mental illness. This is the anatomy of a police shooting.
21 Reasons We Love Atlanta: Because The Colonnade, 98, will live to sling fried chicken another day
Atlantans panicked last summer, when The Colonnade, the city’s second-longest running restaurant, went up for sale. After many decades, owners Jodi and David Stallings had decided to retire. The beloved 98-year-old Cheshire Bridge Road institution, famed for its meat-and-threes, had just crept out of the pandemic when a pair of road closures caused by bridge fires threatened to collapse the iconic eatery’s business for good.
21 Reasons We Love Atlanta: Because Betty Lindberg, 100, still runs the Peachtree Road Race
"I saw all the really good racers go by, the ones in wheelchairs and the professionals, and then the big crowd that’s out there cheering. I thought, Well, maybe I could do that. I ran my first Peachtree at 64 years old."
There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills!
Digger Don disappears beneath the surface of the water, where it courses seven feet deep, to guide the three-inch nozzle of his dredge over the crenulations of quartz and granite, burrowing through silt and sand toward the hard-packed bedrock in Tesnatee Creek, a storied destination on geological maps of the "Gold Belt" arcing across northeast Georgia.
The Polaris Comes Full Circle
From the moment you push the oval Polaris button inside the glass elevator of the Hyatt Regency, the stomach-flipping wonder returns. In nineteen seconds, you’re rocketed up the atrium’s hanging ivy–accented twenty-two stories, through the roof, and out into the Downtown sky. Then you ascend into the space-pod lounge, hovering 312 feet above the lobby of the forty-seven-year-old hotel.
Social Disgraces: The murder of Lita McClinton
After years on the lam, a journey that took him from Costa Rica to Thailand, James Sullivan has been brought back to Atlanta and will stand trial—again—for allegedly orchestrating the murder of his wife, Buckhead socialite Lita.
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