Atlanta - or the city of neighborhoods Aug 14

Dear Topos,
I had a brief bout in Atlanta GA this week. Krystan had plans to go up there for a night and day with a friend so I decided to tag along. Once in Atlanta I was on my own - sort of. I hoped on a bus, train (called the “marta” in Atlanta which is most like the bart in California), and foot, in search of “Little 5 points” where I was told would be the safest neighborhood to arrive in late at night. I found a coffee shop/bar and tried to meet one or two of these young, PBR drinking, fixy biking, music lovin’, Little 5 point dwellers in case I needed a place to crash the night. One such fellow I meet and asked about the city said he never really went anywhere in Atlanta except Little 5. I guess this neighborhood has everything one needs: coffee shops, bars, record stores, vintage thrift shops, snazzy pizza and sandwich shops, natural food markets – it is all there. In the morning waiting for the local food co-op to open I got to talking with a man. He was old, black and had lived in Atlanta most of his life. I asked him if he lived around this neighborhood. He told me he lives down town but there are no natural food stores out there so he has to come all the way out to Little 5 to get food, because he is trying to eat healthy. Latter talking to him at a bus stop he told me how this neighborhood used to be totally different. “Right there where that Starbucks is, it used to be houses, just a couple of years ago. Starbucks bought those houses for a big buck and blew ‘em down and put in that shop.” Where did those people all go? The man did not know. I don’t know. Are their homes really worth the cash to them – now that they are living somewhere far away and their old homes are dust and people drink Starbucks where they used to sleep and play? I spent the rest of my day in Atlanta walking from Little 5, to the wealthy neighborhoods, the gay neighborhood, the broken down neighborhoods, and into down town. Each neighborhood has its own population. Each place is home to a totally separate group of people. On the train into Atlanta I got directions to Little 5 from a young guy in bling who said he had never been to Little 5. He was about the same age as the guy at the coffee shop in Little 5 who had never been in Atlanta outside of Little 5. The neighborhood, not the city, appears to be the unit of home in Atlanta. Only some people cross borders to buy healthy food.