Strip Mall at Dusk: an evening on Buford Highway

In need of some serious inspiration, I ran out to Northeast Plaza, a massive strip mall on Buford Highway. In many ways, this spot was the genesis of this project. It's the strip mall I had in mind when I decided to take this direction for my project.

My first trip there was for dinner with some friends from Athens and it struck me as, well, amazing. I noticed the center featured a wealth of restaurants: two Ethiopian, one Bangladeshi, one El Salvadorian, one Peruvian, two Panaderias (Mexican-style bakeries), a Ray's Buffet, a Pizzeria, three "Rey de..." restaurants and a pollo-joint. I'd been back a few times to hit up the Good Will and Super Mercado. There's also an exceptional tacqueria across the street (in the shadow of a Taco Bell).

On this return I noticed one of the Ethiopian spots had closed, but everything else was pretty much as I'd remembered. It's a remarkable kind of place. Lots going on, several night spots – one music club, a pool hall and a bowling alley. It also looks like Rey de Todos (king of everything), could be a great place to throw down on weekends.

This place really does have everything: many clothing stores, two health clinics, a dentist. Not to mention, the grocery store is like a strip mall unto itself, with a restaurant, insurance sales, a bank, a jeweler, a few swag/clothing booths all within it's big box structure. So much seems to happen here on several levels. It's a place where people come to work and play, to purchase the goods that they need from day-to-day and over the long-term.

And it's all about 4 or 5 miles from Midtown Atlanta. The commercial heft and dining options available in this one massive strip led me to question what the differences and similarities are between this spot on Buford Highway and Little Five Points. Can a strip mall be considered a district? Or would this full under the umbrella of Buford Highway's cosmopolitan identity? Can the Buford Highway corridor be considered a district? All things to consider.

Patel Plaza

Patel Plaza is conveniently located on Church St. in North Decatur. I say "conveniently located," because it's on the way to Your Dekalb Farmer's Market, which is where I head every other week for the best produce around.

Patel Plaza is home to Last Chance Thrift Store – great bargains await on 1/2-price Mondays – as well as several Indian and Pakistani specialty stores. There's a little Wafflehouse tucked away on the side road that runs behind the shopping center to Dekalb Industrial Parkway.

To take a tangent, it's always amazed me how two clashing nationalities, Indian and Pakistani in this instance, can occupy the same spaces in the U.S..

My first exposure to such a phenomenon was in D.C. when I had an Eritrean friend who mingled regularly with Ethiopians while the two countries were at war. It was an interesting dynamic and spending Friday nights with him and his mates showed me how closely intertwined the two nationalities had become states-side.

I was shown the differences between Eritrean and Ethiopian night clubs, cuisine, music and dance moves, but none of these places were ever exclusively Eritrean or Ethiopian and they were generally within close proximity to one another (U Street Corridor or Adams Morgan). The scene was especially electric when the two countries agreed to their final terms of peace in 2003.

The perils of field work, or pigeons be trippin'

Last Tuesday I went out to run some errands and since most of my errands take place within or close to strip malls, I took my camera. I nabbed the pano above at a shopping center at the northeast corner of the intersection of Lawrenceville Highway and North Druid Hills Road. Usually there's nothing too noteworthy about that shopping center (save the two awesome Indian lunch buffets within), but on this occasion something, uh, magic happened.

I had parked in a distant part of the lot to get a good perspective for taking multiple shots to stitch together. At the moment I opened my car door it was engulfed by pigeons, about twice the amount in the picture above. I popped back in and zipped to another part of the lot, no pigeons were harmed.

I made my way to another spot that I deemed safe for photographing. About half-way through the process, the same flock of pigeons buzzed me a la Top Gun. I was a little freaked out, but managed to get all my shots. Later, when I was getting ready to leave, I saw a minivan zipping through the parking lot headed straight for the flock with its horn blaring.

I then recalled that the huge cavity in the strip mall used to be an Indian super market. Not too remarkable, but I always remembered seeing a lady out there in front of that market throwing massive amounts bird seed out for the pigeons. Now I'm no ornithologist, but I'm pretty sure these pigeons have been conditioned to hang out there and, perhaps, have been trained to attack graduate students who are trying to get some inspiration for their masters project. That and they're probably pissed about malicious minivans... what's left to do than become a renegade pigeon?

Hypothesizin'!

I was in Philadelphia over the weekend visiting with my friend and former colleague Jasper Sluijs. It was an excellent opportunity to get away from things for a while, but, with Jasper's help, it was also an excellent opportunity to tease a hypothesis out of my concept.

Being from the DC-area I have a very strong mental image of what a city is, or should be, and living in the south (Austin, TX and then Atlanta, GA) has really challenged and expanded that image. I'm also a product of the Maryland suburbs and have, or had, an ingrained notion of what strip malls were: their basic function, appearance, etc.

So, sitting street-side in South Philadelphia, sipping on a Yuengling after a long walk around the city, Jasper and I started to talk about narrowing my focus for this project. Although it sounds like fun, it's simply not enough to cruise around and snap shots of strip malls and say: these are cultural centers with levels of expressiveness heretofore unexplored. That would be easy.

Together we surmised that this project needs a solid hypothesis and we started thinking about city codes and planning. And there's something in that: perhaps due to lack of, or overabundance of, city planning ordinance, strip malls have become cultural centers in Atlanta. This is a relationship that should be relatively easy to suss out. For instance, the coding that allows for an occult shop to operate on a block in South Philly would in Atlanta allow it to operate in a strip mall off of a highway.

Does city planning place constraints upon or facilitate cultural commerce? To take this a step further, I also plan to investigate how these constraints could be/should be represented in a digital environment. I am open to any suggestions that may help refine or refute this train of thought: so holla in the comments!