Year of Boulevard

“On this cool, cool, cold night, we feel the warmth of the love of those in the Fourth Ward,” said Fort Street United Methodist’s pastor Joseph Crawford as he delivered the benediction, thanking God for “the relationship we have with one another.”

In 2005, on the day before Thanksgiving, a fire destroyed two apartment buildings in the Village of Bedford Pine and left sixty people homeless. In the eight years since, the corner lot at Boulevard and Angier where the apartments once stood has remained vacant. During that time, Wingate Companies, which owns and manages Bedford Pine, the largest Section 8 subsidized housing project in the Southeast, has talked about redeveloping that lot—and dozens of other properties it owns along the Boulevard corridor. It looks like something is finally going to happen.

The wooded pocket park with a picturesque downtown skyline view has been transformed into District 2’s latest amenity, an off-leash dog park with designated areas for small and large dogs—the first such facility in downtown Atlanta.

As weed whackers thwacked yard-high grass and tangles of kudzu along the fence at Boulevard and Boulevard Place, they also disrupted a couple of anthills. The dislocated insects marched out across the sidewalk and over the feet and ankles of Reverend Joseph Crawford.

A couple of months ago, the mashup of old-school and hipster entrepreneurs in the squat brick building at the corner of Howell and Irwin streets might have seemed a sign that a troubled neighborhood was turning around. The lower-level storefronts included Banna Grocery, Suhrid Das’s convenience store; Retro Razor, Mister Saffold’s barbershop (yes, Mister is his first name); and Sugar-Coated Radical, where pastry chef Taria Camerino sells confections crafted with fair-trade ingredients. Then, on the evening of February 22, a man entered Banna Grocery, one arm covering his face, the other holding a gun. He shot Das in the stomach and left him bleeding. Hours later another man broke into Camerino’s upstairs apartment, threatened her two kids, and forced the candymaker to go downstairs and empty her register. That night, Das died.

In 1983 Edna Moffett took a job as assistant property manager with Wingate Management Co. and was assigned to the Village of Bedford Pines, Wingate’s sprawling collection of Section 8–subsidized apartments along the Boulevard corridor.