Scott Stephens - "West End"

  When we moved to Atlanta in 1981, we found a house in West End. We were looking for something close to downtown, near a MARTA station and an old house with character that needed fixing up. The house on Queen Street met all these criteria. We lived there for thirteen years.

The first time we brought friends over we were taking a tour of the house and someone noticed a bulge in the living room ceiling. I stuck a broom handle in the bulge and out poured a stream of dirty water from a roof leak. There was no bathroom, just a toilet and tub on the side porch. The kitchen was incomplete. For the first weeks we did the dishes in the tub and ate lots of peanut butter and jelly.

  Although living conditions were primitive at first, it didn’t seem abnormal. There was a pioneer spirit on our block. It seemed that half the houses had been recently renovated or were in a continuous state of renovation. Our neighbor across the street spent ten years making changes to his house until he died of AIDS after a long and brutal illness. His main addition to the house was an aviary in the back with tropical plants and over 200 birds. It was, like most of his projects, a wonderful concept that never quite jelled.

  West End is one of America’s most unique neighborhoods. It defies categorization. Shaped like a right triangle, it is just southwest of downtown Atlanta. It is bounded by Lee Street and the north/south MARTA line on the east, Interstate 20 on the north, White Street which parallels a railroad track on the south and comes to a point where Abernathy and Langhorn meet near the Kroger. The population is mostly Black, a mix of southern renters and northern immigrant home owners. Many artists and the politically connected have been attracted to West End. There are also many people of limited means, not poor so much as out of the American mainstream of consumerism and ownership, people who are content with a modest home on a quiet street in a busy city.

When we moved to West End, the local high school was Brown and there was a fine elementary school on Peeples St. Since then, the elementary has burned and Brown became a middle school. There was also a well-stocked hardware store, a Sears, a bookstore run by a pistol-packing novelist that carried the New York Times and three grocery stores. Almost all these are now gone. Where the Sears stood is now a blighted empty lot. Clothing and fast food stores now line Abernathy.

  One of the most interesting houses in West End is Joel Chandler Harris’s house, the Wren’s Nest. It was transformed while we lived there, from an elderly white ladies’ social club to a racially diverse preservation and story-telling association. The house itself was renovated in the 1980s and is a fine example of Victorian architecture with a Southern flavor. The house began as a simple four-room cottage which was greatly expanded as money came in. Because it’s off the tourist path it doesn’t get the visitors it should.

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As West End changed from a white to black neighborhood in the early sixties, businesses and home ownership changed. Sometimes this resulted in empty lots. One large lot on Lawton Street was used by the Muslim community to keep a herd of goats. An empty lot behind Starvin’ Marvin was a home site with a pecan orchard. The pecan trees are still there towering above rows of daffodils that were planted in the former backyard.

The Sears lot is still vacant and since it’s owned by a church, probably will remain vacant for some time to come. Some lots were so large they were never redeveloped and have become de facto parks. One is near the new library on Peeples Street. Others are along I-20, the highway that rent West End as it did so many other neighborhoods in Atlanta. The only evidence of the past is the broken steps leading from the brick sidewalks to the grassy expanse that was once housing.

   Ever since Joel Chandler Harris lived in West End and rode the streetcar to his job at the newspaper, the neighborhood has attracted writers as well as artists, musicians and politicians. Lee Brown, the Atlanta Chief of Police, lived on Peeples St. Lee May, a gardening columnist for the AJC, also lived there. Ronnog Seeberg has written an epic poem about Queen St. and Bill Cutler, a friend of the Seeberg’s who lived a block away, wrote for Brown’s Guide to Georgia. When he died, he left an unfinished autobiography and a rose garden on an empty lot on Grady Place.

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   My next door neighbor was John Diamond, a professor of religion at the Atlanta University Center who questioned everything. We shared several interests. Like me, he was renovating a house and enjoyed the hands-on aspect of fixing up. He also liked to heat with wood and soon we both were heating our houses primarily with wood heaters. He and I spent many hours together cutting and hauling firewood in his white Ford pick-up. He was a great conversationalist and could talk knowledgeably on almost any subject. He was one of the first people I knew to become really computer savvy. He read omnivorously and edited a journal at the university.

  A few years after we became friends, his sister and brother-in-law bought the empty lot on the other side of our house. Paul, John’s brother-in-law, was very handy. He built a house from scratch with used building materials that he found at a wrecking yard. Soon, we found ourselves situated between the houses of a brother and sister. I assumed Paul and Evelyn were an interracial couple. Paul looked white. It was only later, after we had moved from West End, that John’s son mentioned that Paul identified himself as black. But that’s one of the beautiful things about West End – it didn’t really matter.