Tag: Love Letter

It was February 2022 when I laced up my skates for the first time in nearly 20 years and hit the ice at Center Ice Arena. I stepped on to the rink and immediately fell—intentionally. We were learning how to pick ourselves back up.

This year Starlight Drive-In, an Atlanta landmark, quietly celebrated 75 years of operation. Over its seven decades, generations of Atlantans have grown up with Starlight’s double features and low prices. Today, its history shines as one of survival through adaptation and location.

Gokul Sweets stands as a haven for Indian Americans like me who long for those neighborhood stands we grew up with. During the days leading up to the festival of Diwali, shelves empty out within minutes, and lines can be through the door. And I am certainly one of those loyal customers waiting for my turn.

Andrew Knowlton, the former deputy editor of Bon Appétit, who was raised in Atlanta, called it “one of the best cheeseburgers on the planet” in his 2016 ode to the Hillstone Restaurant Group. As a restaurant critic, I have eaten a lot of great burgers around the world, but the Houston’s burger is something special.

You can have your Space Needle. Your Chrysler Building. Your Burj Khalifa. Your Sears Tower, or whatever they’re calling it now. Give me Bank of America Plaza—the tallest building in Atlanta for more than 30 years, a certifiable supertall skyscraper—any day.

I love the Piedmont Park Robot Bathroom. Not because it’s pretty or pleasant. A basic green-and-stainless-steel box, this public bathroom was designed to be vandal-resistant, fully automated, and self-cleaning. It was a futuristic eyesore when it was installed in 2008, inside the stately Charles Allen Gate. Outside, it looks like a misplaced elevator. Inside, as one Department of Parks & Recreation employee told me, “It looks like a prison toilet.”

Through her editorial guidance at SoVo and GaVo, which she launched in 2010, Chris Cash taught me and others the importance of bringing our authentic selves into our reporting and the inherent value of queer people covering our own communities.

Born out of porch chats among neighbors, the Reynoldstown Rangers are an engine that runs on curiosity, committed to mapping and marking our place, making neighbors out of strangers. The Rangers were ideal stewards for what we dubbed “Reid’s Seeds.” Month after month, long into fall, past a gate magically left standing open, Ranger volunteers harvested the spiky brown seed heads, dried them out, and packed them into mason jars. Then we waited.

You can learn a lot from local radio. Wherever I travel, I make a point of listening to nearby stations; when I relocated to Atlanta, it was the radio that taught me about my new city. One afternoon, escaping Buckhead in bumper-to-bumper traffic and fed up with Top 40 radio (How many personal-injury lawyers are out there, really? I wondered), I turned the dial and discovered my favorite gem of them all: WREK (91.1), Georgia Tech’s student-run radio station.

Here’s what I packed in my car on a recent Saturday morning: 17 cans of paint, 8 propane canisters, 2 old iPads, a Medusa tangle of electrical cords, and a bag stuffed so full with bags it had to sit buckled into the passenger’s seat. “Can you take this too?” my wife asked, thrusting some kind of enormous Geiger counter into my arms, another technological casualty of her rainy field season in Costa Rica. I took it, and so did CHaRM.