Terry's Tiny Tour: 16 in Scottdale Georgia Off the Main Roads

I hope nobody is home when I cruise neighborhoods taking pictures. On this day nobody was around.

And I'm always wanting to see what's off the main roads in Scottdale. I'd blogged the houses around the green before, just charming, but never south of the tracks.

Scottdale, Georgia is just inside the Perimeter just north of Avondale Estates and east of Decatur. It was a mill town but I'm not sure it was ever an official town. Your Dekalb Farmers Market is in Scottdale.

I shot these for our House Portraits - House Painters - Vernacular Cracker show at VintageATL but I didn't have time to make anything of it.

My tiny video tour of Scottdale lasts 3:07. I'm fascinated. This is familiar territory in the south, familiar to me for my whole life. What do you think?

Please click here if you can't see the video.

Shutze's Gate Gets a Circle that Improves My Life

Bless those engineers.

Do you live near Emory University, drive through Emory, visit Emory from time to time? I do and my life has just improved thanks to the traffic engineers and to the planners and the politicians that put them to work.

Emory Village has a traffic circle and I feel fine. (I hope you don't mind if this Georgian pays a oblique tribute to R.E.M.)


The Haywood Hopkins Gate by Philip Trammell Shutze is on the circle. It's Emory University's front door per the master plan by Henry Hornbostel. It's a modest entrance to a campus that seems set in a wooded park.

Until this summer the gate faced a bleak, busy, bottle-necking 5-points wasteland, the intersection of North Decatur, Oxford, and Dowman, home of Everybody's Pizza. It's been horrible since my first visit in 1968.

If you've driven there, you know what I mean. If you've crossed the streets on foot, you know.


So they moved gate a little, made it an entrance, closed it as an exit...


...and put in the circle. It's not quite done yet. It's going to have trees and bushes and less paving.

Bless those engineers. They've removed 2 traffic lanes lanes, cut paving in half, made space to landscape, improved auto and pedestrian safety. In the process they gave Emory Village a more friendly center.

They improved traffic flow by slowing things down.

It's all so I can spend less time driving and more time at home.

Remarkable. Here is new left turn to the west from Oxford to North Decatur. This simple turn could take forever. Here I breeze though without a full stop.



Bess those engineers.

Scottdale Gables

Scottdale Mills? Scottdale, Georgia? Agnes Scott College? Same family. When I'm in the area, I take a little drive around. It's only a few blocks. I am a gable guy and swoon at views like this. (There is a secret picture for garden bloggers Tara and Pam, will they notice?)



Scottdale is one of the Atlanta area's milltowns, preserved differently than those in Cabbagetown, The Old 4th Ward, and Home Park.



It's not in a "hip" area. These 2 are on a green, unlike any other in Atlanta, as far as I know. No hip shops or restaurants; no cool residents in sight (but they must surely be very cool). No tourists, no parking problems, no scene.



These 2 houses were built as duplexes. They didn't need these nice details. Notice the two chimneys, one for each apartment.


The modest chimney has looked great every day of it's life.


You see these hipped roof porches on period houses everywhere.


Faith Walk is the house with the fancy gable window.


I don't think the other house has a name but it's a beauty too. This is the secret picture for garden bloggers: Gravel and grass, know what I mean?


There are single family millhouses too, one in pink, or is it salmon?


You visit the Dekalb Farmers Market right? So drive a bit further out on Ponce. Find the antique stores in cute little houses, turn left and find the green. There you are.


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Thanks,
Terry
terry @ surf303.com

Briarlake farmhouse vernacular beauty

FLASH March 14 2009. I've just learned that this is the John N. Gresham home place built Built in the 1880s(?) by Forrest P. Hudson another picture.

It's a farmhouse with out-buildings. It's inside I-285! You probably can't even see it in summer. Unless you live in the neighborhood or are an extreme architecture tourist, you'll never see it in any season. It's on a relatively huge property and is certainly doomed to be a tear-down. (update Spring 2015, maybe it's safe)



It's a southern version of a "connected-building vernacular" described in Katie Hutchison's House Enthusiast post. Ms. Hutchison's example is in Maine, where keeping warm is the thing. Down here, cooling off on the porch is the thing.


Well, I'm totally charmed. I regret that I'll never know how this home came to be and how it managed to stay around this long.