Tag: Old Fourth Ward

Using milk from Southern Swiss Dairy out of Waynesboro, Cora Cotrim concocts creative flavors like brown butter–whiskey–pecan and cold-brewed coffee with cacao nibs.

Last month, Amazon rolled out its Prime Now one-hour delivery service to Atlanta. There are a few situations—a hangover, a colicky baby, an “Orange Is the New Black” binge—in which we could imagine being too desperate for essentials to get off the couch, let alone leave home to run errands. But could Prime Now help us out of more prosaic dilemmas? We constructed a few plausible scenarios, synchronized our watches, and placed orders at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, May 13, from six metro neighborhoods.

Sometimes restaurants have a lot going for them—just not all going at the same speed. Last Word, in the Old Fourth Ward, is one of them. It’s trying to do a lot: bring craft cocktails to a level of housemade everything, build a menu reminiscent of the co-owner’s native Lebanon and also the Maghreb countries of Morocco and Tunisia, and include late-night plates to complement the ambitious drinks.

While traveling in Europe, Glen Donaldson saw houses crafted from old shipping containers and was intrigued. But back home in Atlanta—where rail lines carry more than a million boxcars a year—he couldn’t find anything similar. So Donaldson located an affordable lot in an area where zoning permitted modern houses, secured an architect, and designed his dream home.

When I moved to Cabbagetown a couple of years ago, I quickly learned what it means to be “on the other side of the tracks.” Literally. For those of us who live south of the CSX and MARTA rail lines that slice through the heart of intown Atlanta, getting around can be problematic.

If you’ve found yourself in the Old Fourth Ward—maybe strolling up Irwin Street toward Bell Street Burritos or heading down the Atlanta BeltLine to Studioplex—you’ve undoubtedly spotted that giant concrete tower. And you’ve wondered, Just what is that? Or, more intriguingly, Does anyone live in there?

Last week, something lovely happened at Truly Living Well’s Wheat Street Garden. There among the beds of squash and tomatoes, on a concrete slab where a housing project once stood, a farmers market blossomed.

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.

After nearly twenty years dishing out gyros and Greek salads, Nick Poulos no longer looks quite as frisky as his cartoonish portrait painted on the large sign outside his business. His bristly mustache turned gray long ago, and at sixty-nine, he moves a little more slowly. But his carryout restaurant continues to thrive in a dreary area near Daddy D’z BBQ Joynt just west of Oakland Cemetery. In the nineties, Poulos’s brother ran a liquor store a block and a half away from the restaurant—then an empty lot—and suggested the location. The package store is long gone, but neighborhood loyalists have kept Nick’s Food to Go busy for years, largely through word of mouth.