When my parents split at 2, I was already in a home daycare with a woman named Kathryn Brookshire (Nanny). She had been taking care of me since I was an infant and just happened to own a duplex in Candler Park, a pretty well to do area in the city of Atlanta. The house was built in the early 1900s and she purchased it in the early 50s for what is chump change now. When my mom and dad divorced, she opened up the other side of her home to my mom and I. Because my mom worked full time I spent most of my childhood on Nannies side, which is represented in the photos.
Welcome to 445 Oakdale RD.
So many of my childhood memories are found on this front porch. From being a little girl sitting with Nanny and playing a game where we tried to guess the color of the next car coming by, or being a grown up with my own kids and her sitting waiting for us to arrive on it. The porch furniture never changed between to the two, and no matter what major renovation changes were happening to the houses around hers, the view was always close to my heart.
Nannies spot. The chair itself changed over the years, as well as the contents of the little stand, but if we were in the living room, Nanny was sitting here. Maybe she was watching Days of Our Lives, or golf. Maybe she was doing a crossword puzzle. Maybe she was sneaking a sweet treat from a drug store bag hidden beside the chair.
Slip and slide and splinters- all experienced on this floor, from my little feet to my kids little feet. Everything from the outward aesthetics of this house, to the closed room inside layout has completely shaped what I want in a home. It's crazy how something so material can shape your taste. When we bought our house recently my only real deal breaker was a front porch. If it didn't have that porch I didn't want it.
Here are just a few of the original to the house things I will always love. The best light fixtures, door knobs, mantel details, and light switches. I didn't want to bore you, but there is way more of these cool shots of random original hardware.
So that is a new stove- kitchen appliances don't last forever when you cook as much as Nanny, but those cast iron pans are the same ones she cooked cornbread in before I was even old enough to ingest it. And you can bet that little chrome pot is full of bacon fat. The curtains may have changed, but I have pictures of myself and both my babies having baths in that sink.
When you wash your hands in this bathroom, you must chose really cold or really hot. Unless you wanna use that amazing rubber plug and fill the sink for a middle ground.
There you have it. A little taste of what will ALWAYS be home to me. It was this house in this neighborhood, where I could walk a block to my best friends house, or another block in the other direction to see other friends, that has absolutely convinced me that the streets of Atlanta are paved in gold. I know it's all nostalgia but the force is strong in this one.
Now, the other part of this blog is that this house, 445 Oakdale, was located a couple blocks away from what in the 80's and 90's was Atlanta's punk rock, misfit mecca. This place, Little Five Points, was about 10 blocks of pierced, tattooed, dirty colored mohawk, drunken teenage squatter types. There are stores and restaurants lining the streets and in its heyday seemed like something out of the wrong side of the tracks from Pretty in Pink. The stores sold clothes and gifts and housewares that before the internet and Hot Topic you wouldn't find anywhere else and the people that worked there were covered in tattoos way before they were mainstream enough to no be blatantly stared at. On the weekends crazy religious folks would come and yell through mega phones about how Satan was present there. Meanwhile the orange robed Hare Krinshnas lovingly handed out pamphlets.
And from a very young age, I ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT THERE. I loved the people and how they looked, I loved the stores and the weird crap they had. I loved sitting inside Zesto's with my soft serve and people watching or going with Nanny to pick up her medications at Ira's Drugstore where there was an old school fountain bar in the back. And I never stopped loving it there. Even when I moved to the burbs as a teenager I made it a point to get there every time I saw Nanny, and when I moved back at around 18 I got a job at Little Five Points Pizza where I slang slices.
The past few years when I have gone home, Little Five Points is but a shell of its former self. The streets are empty, even concerning the homeless population. Some of the same places are there, but most of them have closed up shop and been replaced with much less cool counterparts. There is even an American Apparel down there now, and if THAT doesn't represent the mainstreamness of the current situation I don't know what would. I do still go though. When I am home I always go back and walk through the cool shops that are still there, and even some of the not so cool new ones.
I am pretty sure if I hadn't been exposed to the sort of place Little Five was as a kid and teenager it is quite possible I would have much less colorful skin, fewer scars on my face and perhaps lamer taste in music.
So there you have it. That's where I come from.
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