Tag: Sweet Auburn

Time to get outside and play! From basketball to fishing to hiking to hanging out in a hammock, here's 50 great things to do outdoors around Atlanta.

The original Atlanta Life Insurance Company building at 148 Auburn Avenue has sat empty, its windows boarded up, for nearly 40 years. Now, a new portrait series, “Windows Speak,” aims to honor the individuals who built the company, including its founder Alonzo Herndon, Atlanta’s first black millionaire.

Bring the little ones to Toddler Takeover, an arts festival especially for kids at the Woodruff Arts Center, or listen to live music and peruse the vendors at the 35th annual Sweet Auburn Springfest.

Rosa Duffy's bookstore, For Keeps, is more than a place for visitors to purchase rare and classic black books. Duffy designed it to also be a reading room where people can stop in and interact with history that is often overlooked or placed in the bottom of the dollar bins at other bookstores.

Author Gary Pomerantz published his book Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn in 1996 after five years of uncovering slave graves in the woods, conducting more than 500 interviews, and filling the holes left behind in Atlanta’s history by a lack of proper documentation. He spoke Thursday in honor of the opening of Gene Kansas's new coworking space, Constellations.

Watch a musical version of Candide, explore Sweet Auburn during the annual Springfest, and light up the sky at the Decatur Lantern Parade.

Billed as “Co-living for Changemakers” and an antidote to housing shortages and displacement, Awethu House’s suites are available via memberships to a property management and incubator group called the Guild, which has operated a fellowship program for entrepreneurs in East Lake for two years.

Gene Kansas has an affinity for adaptive-reuse projects, especially those on imperiled Auburn Avenue, the heart of a district famously dubbed Sweet Auburn when it was thriving during the first half of the 20th century. Kansas knows how fragile community and history can be, having seen his hometown literally underwater.

Mayor William Hartsfield and Police Chief Herbert Jenkins, both white, stood before Atlanta’s first eight African American police officers as they prepared for active duty. Hartsfield gave a rallying speech, warning that though 95 percent of the white cops didn’t want them, they were here to do what Jackie Robinson had done for baseball the year before.

Freddy Cole sits at a table in a back corner of Sweet Auburn Seafood restaurant. The linens are crisp, the decor modern: shimmering tile, high-backed benches—all unmarked by smoke or time. This place is a welcome sign of slow resurgence in this historic part of town.