Posts Tagged "midtown atlanta"

I am a drinker. I’m not out of control or anything, but I can say I like to put them away more so than the average guy. I like to have a good time. I like to party. I have friends that like to party and they have friends that like to party. I indulge in the activity of drinking at least once a week but most likely more than that. I have noticed that most social gatherings, when you are in your twenties, has to do with drinking and most of the time it has to do with drinking a lot. Sometimes more than others, but most of the time it’s enough to make you take a cab home. Society today really embraces drinkers so everyone seems fine with the idea of “going out for some drinks after work”. That’s just the way it is. I didn’t really see the whole extremity of the situation until I decided to stop drinking for a month. It’s almost strange how it is so natural to drink when “going out” or when “hanging out with friends”. It’s just what we do and the way things are. And we all know that people stick with what they know and what seems comfortable.

I can’t take credit for the idea of giving drinking a break. Though it seems like a simple concept, I hadn’t met anyone who had actually considered doing it until I met Priscilla’s good friend Meghann Quirk. She gave up drinking for Lent a couple years in a row before I had decided to partake. This was about two years ago now. I didn’t really quit because I gave myself three “give me’s”. Three days that I could drink within the six weeks that I couldn’t. It made it a lot easier and it more than made up for the days I didn’t drink by getting plastered the days I could. By the end of it, I did feel a small sense of accomplishment, but it was short lived.

This time I didn’t give myself any free days. I set a time to start and a time to finish. It just happened to start on my friend Dennis’ Bachelor Party and ended on his wedding day. It seemed fitting since I knew I would be drinking heavily at the Bachelor Party and then again at the wedding. The four weekends in between were uneventful unplanned weekends without traveling, or guests, or parties, or birthdays or holidays. With nothing to stand in my way, I knew it would be the easiest time to be successful. Is that cheating? Maybe a little, but I still had my hardships and those four weekends filled up pretty quickly with drinking events.

Right off the bat I had a run in with temptation. I joined a kickball league with friends that had games every Tuesday night after work. The games were sometimes followed by dinner and drinks at a local Pizza joint Mellow Mushroom. I drank my water and ate my pizza. It was harmless. Nobody really got wasted so it wasn’t that hard. That weekend Priscilla and I went to a concert to see Rascal Flatts. (A gift from me to her for our Anniversary) We tailgated and everything. I watched Priscilla try to down as many beers as she could in the four hours we were there. It was pretty entertaining to try to get her drunk. That was until the ride home when she complained the entire ride about how she had the hiccups and wanted to throw up. All in all it was still fun though.

The following weekend was uneventful. A weekend of rest and being lame. We stayed in both nights. The weekend after that was looking to be a challenge though. We were visited by Priscilla’s college friend Michele and her husband Jake. I thought I would have some long nights at the bar in front of me being miserable the whole time. I lucked out though because they were ready for bed after dinner each night. Now don’t get me wrong, they had plenty of wine and drinks through dinner as most people do, they just didn’t want to get crazy and stay up all hours of the night. I wasn’t complaining.

Then the last weekend came a visit from the in-laws. This doesn’t seem like it would be hard, but they do drink so it is was present. Plus, a few drinks while the in-laws are around makes everything a little easier to withstand. The weekend was fun and we filled it with shopping and cooking. It wasn’t bad at all.

So now the wedding and the cutoff date is slowly approaching. Only a couple more days left. It really hasn’t been hard. People wouldn’t understand when I would explain I wasn’t drinking. They mostly would give me a strange look like, “what a weirdo”. Everyone would ask me, “why are you not drinking?” I would always answer, “Just for Fun” but the real answer is that I just wanted to take a break from something I do all the time. A break from something that isn’t good for me and something I most likely should cut back on doing. I still like to drink and I think I will most likely will be getting pretty drunk at the wedding this weekend, but I do plan on cutting back when I start back at it. Not completely, but maybe through this experience I can have a better perspective on how much I drink. But especially how much I drink cause everyone else does.

UPDATE: I drank the day before the wedding cause I counted the days and it had already been 32 days. So I had a couple to get my liver ready for the wedding the next night. The wedding came and went and yes, I drank enough to get drunk. It was a good time. By Monday I was sick as a dog and had to miss work cause I had a fever. Hooray for alcohol.

Sometimes it is hard to find a weekend when everyone is in town and willing to hit the town hard.  This was not one of those weekends.  Our good friend Mandi came into town with her boyfriend Kevin.  Mandi is a good friend of our little click and when she moved back home to Michigan we immediately anticipating her return.  Kevin planned this surprise vacation and wanted it to be a special one.  This is because he ended up popping the big question just one day before the plan ride down here.  The way I see it, it’s just one more reason to party.

Now living in Atlanta we have a number of great restaurants to choose when deciding where to eat, but most of the time you pick the spot you like and the one that’s convenient.  Well this weekend we were venturing out into the unknown.  Friday night we went to a restaurant in Inman Park.  Inman Park is an area we rarely visit, but has a number of great spots to eat.  That night we tried P’Cheens.  With a mixed variety of food, P’Cheens was a great place for a night out.  I got the Tom Yom Noodle Bowl which ended up being pretty damn good.  I tried a new beer to Atlanta called Mothership Wit made by New Belgium.  It’s made by the company that makes Fat Tire.  I guess it is supposed to be awesome.  It was ok.  

Anyway, after dinner we went down Highland Avenue to Dark Horse Tavern.  Now, Dark Horse is actually a place we have all been to quite a few times before, but it was close, convienent and it is a pretty awesome little bar.  We took a Jack Daniels shot and watched Lebron hit a ridiculous game winning shot with 1 second left then made our way home.  Since Priscilla and I live in Smyrna, the ride was about 20 minutes.  That 20 minutes seemed like an eternity to Kevin and Mandi.  I guess they drank more than I thought cause when we stopped for a pee, Kevin lost his dinner in the parking lot.  I guess that means we are showing them a good time.  That, or they can’t handle their Jack Daniels.

Saturday was a “hung over” day and amounted to watching movies at home and straight chillin’.  We knew that Saturday night was going to be another great night out.  We made our plan, got pimped out and made our way to yet another new restaurant.  This time we headed to Cabbagetown to a little restaurant called Agave.  This fancy Mexican place has a cool vibe plus it has over 100 different tequilas on their menu.  After some good food, good times and some 100 proof Margaritas we made our way to El Bar on Poune de Leon Avenue.  It’s the place no one knows about but everyone would love.  Literally attached to  the back of an El Aztca Restaurant, this little bar was small and loud, blasting the hits from the 90′s and 80′s.  It was awesome.

After way too many shots, we walked down to The Clairmont Lounge.  If you don’t already know, the Clairmont is the oldest strip club in Atlanta.  They have been around for more than 50 years.  The catch is that most of their strippers have been too.  Headlined by their most famous dancer ” Blondie” who crushes beer cans with her boobs, Clairmont is the strip club where strippers go to die.  It is a freak show at it’s best, but the drinks are cheap and the crowd is always entertaining.  As for me, I was in bad shape before I walked in the door.  I could only handle an hour before I decided to leave everyone and take a cab home.  I drank too much.  What can I say.

The next day we were all miserable but once again decided to make our way to a bar.  (I wasn’t the one voting for more drinking.)  So we decided to (yep again) try something new.  We made our way all the way to Decatur to a small but incredibly awesome bar called Brick Store pub.  With an endless amount of beers on their menu we had plenty to choose from.  We ate some food and drank some strange brews and called it a day.  

Monday was Memorial day and honestly the nicest, sunniest day of the weekend.  We went to lunch at Garrisons and then went to the movies and saw Terminator Salvation.  The movie was better than I thought.  Later that day we dropped Kevin and Mandi off at the airport and sent them on their way.  It was a great weekend full of new experiences and lots of drinking.  CONGRATS MANDI AND KEVIN!!

So I bought a new house so I live in a new spot.  New spot.  New Commute.  Now when I was looking at houses the location was a huge deal for me.  Not so much for Priscilla, but she considered it.  I had to make sure where we were made sense for both of us now and in the long term.  Obviously location in Atlanta effected the price significantly so when looking I limited our search to only the convenient locations.  

Atlanta is a big city.  There are a lot of choices on neighborhoods and communities to live in.  But not all of them made sense for us.  Before we bought our house we rented in a condo in Vinings.  We love Vinings and the area around it.  We didn’t want to go far so Smyrna was an obvious choice. Smyrna is located just outside of Vinings and just outside the perimeter of Atlanta.  Yep OTP.  Though Smyrna is not the hippest neighborhood in Altanta, it is close to the city and it is reasonably priced.  Because of this, there are a ton of young families that call Smyrna home.  It may not have the party atmosphere of Brookhaven, but it does have new houses that are affordable.

Our new house is located on the corner of Atlanta Road and Spring Road. It is the heart of Smyrna and is located just a block from the Smyrna Market Village. My office is in midtown off Northside Drive right across from Six Feet Under. My commute from Vinnings, even though it was only three miles from our new house, was a lot better and quicker. It was more convenient because it was located so close to the freeway which made it a quick 10 minutes to work. Now with living in Smyrna, I am a good ten minutes from the freeway and the same 10 minutes from there. Because of this, I take the back roads.

A straight shot down Atlanta road takes you to Chattahoochee Road which then hits Howell Mill. My office is on 11th Street which is right off of Howell Mill. It clocks in at about 15 to 20 minutes but with no freeways.  The trip is painless on most days.  Some are worse than others, but there is very little traffic and never any cops or accidents.  This mostly just means that the commute is mostly the same day to day.  

The only thing I would have to say is a deciding factor is the bridge that crosses the Chattahoochee on Atlanta road next to the Water plant.  From what I have heard, the bridge has always been two lanes.  It has always taken Atlanta road from 4 lanes to 2.  Who planned this city anyway?  The traffic is pretty much the same everyday.  Easier in the afternoons, but it still sucks.  The light has five roads coming together which makes the light extremely long anyway, then add that it’s backed up a half mile.  It takes me at least ten minutes just to get through the light.  When it is done, my commute will improve immensely.

Overall I love my new commute.  It is quick and safe and isn’t through a ghetto.  My new commute is only one of the great new things I get with living in our new house.  Now lets just hope that Indigo doesn’t move to Kennesaw.

I work at Indigo Studios which is located at 660 11th Street Atlanta Georgia 30318.  11th Street is located in between Howell Mill Road and Northside Drive in Midtown Atlanta.  Northside drive is a very unique place to work and is shared by a number of different kinds of people that makes Northside such a wonderful place.  There is always something different, something new.  There honestly could be a reality show purely based on the trials and tribulations of the characters that reside on the street they call Northside.

Northside actually runs from my condo in Vinings then through the edge of Buckhead and then all the way to my office in Midtown.  Its about a ten mile ride with numerous lights along the way which is why I bypass most of it with a quick jump on the freeway.  It’s kinda funny to think of the type of people that litter the streets only ten miles apart from each other.  You see, up by my house Northside is a forested community with rich mansions and preppy neighborhoods that include some of the riches people in Atlanta.  Celebrities such as Jermain Dupree, Oprah,  and Elton John  also have been known to live up in the north end of Northside.

But that’s not the Northside I work in.  The Northside I work in is the south end.  Almost everyday I have been driving the stretch of Northside that starts at Interstate 75 and ends at Georgia Tech.  Lets just say that it is the ghetto part.  Yeah it’s ghetto, but it’s also an artsy, cool kinda ghetto.  It is beginning to be an art deco neighborhood with a ton of digital art shops like Indigo itself.  We have several competitors right down the street from us.  It also is on the up and up with a couple giant new developments including the wonderful Atlantic Station that is right down the way on 17th Street.

Northside also has a large community of music recording studios that almost completely make up the local Atlanta Rap scene.  Actually Indigo shares a building with Solar Sound Studio that pumps out mad beats that we can hear all day through the wall we share.  The vibrations are accompanied with a heavy stench of marijuana which is something our clients just love.  Also, 5 years ago Indigo was located just a mile down Northside and we were neighbors to the infamous Atlanta rap duo Outkast.  It was pretty cool to see them and there hallowed out cigar remains in our parking lot.

Northside Drive also ends directly at the inner city college Georgia Tech.  It is a beautiful campus with a extremely diverse demograph of people.  Mostly those include nerdy Asian kids and 24 year old women that have never been laid, but overall I’m glad the campus is close.  It is still a college.  It brings a whole other element to Northside and is the main reason it has begun to grow with all the new developments.  College kids need apartments to live in and they are going up everywhere.  Even with such a shitty housing market, there is a massive complex being built right next to Indigo that now dwarfs our building.  I’m just excited cause we are getting a Smoothie King and a Jersey Mikes right next door.  Holler!

But all this is not the true deep down entity of Northside Drive.  Northside itself has its own residence.  It is littered with a large amount of homeless that can be seen daily walking up and down the street.  There has been copper stolen from our neighbours and Indigo itself has been broken into.  There is a metal scrap shop at the end of 11th Street along with three abandoned homes that look as if they were built in the fifties and left to rout in the seventies when cinder block homes went out of style.

We also have grown to get to know our homeless friends.  At Indigo, we constantly get a knock on the door from the same 2 homeless men asking for our collection of coke cans.  We also have one guy that drives around on his tricycle talking to himself and dancing through traffic. We lock our doors when we see him.   There is actually an abandoned bank where homeless people live, but not in the building just under the covering for the once active drive through ATM.  We often see a skinny black woman sitting in the parking lot of the bank  holding her knees rocking back and forth whispering to herself.  We also see our old friend that used to live in the parking lot of building next door in an abandoned house before they tore it down to build the new apartments.  He calls himself the Sheriff because he watches the neighborhood.  We found out later we was a regular at the local bar Northside Tavern.

Northside Tavern actually is on Howell Mill which is one street over but it is worth mentioning because it is so famous for its live Blues music ever night.  Northside Tavern is one of many wonderful bars and restaurant that are found all over the Northside area including Taco Rio Del Sol, Flip Burger and Six Feet Under.  Unfortunately they are also accompanied by a number of trashy strip clubs and novelty shops.

I once saw a movie named “Crackheads gone wild” that has a wonderful quote from an Atlanta crackhead that said, “I buy my shit on Northside drive!”  I thought it summed up the neighborhood pretty well.

So I have lived in Atlanta for about eight years now and I can truly say that this is NOT the city I originally moved to. This city changes more times then any other city I have ever seen. I mean I go back to Sacramento at least twice and year for a couple of days at a time and I see buildings and houses I’ve never seen before. But when I get back from Atlanta after those two or three days, I see full skyscrapers I’ve never seen before. I remember empty abandoned parking lots that now have high rise condos for sale. I’ve seen hip Midtown dance clubs leveled and giant thirty story hotels put in it’s place. Just recently I moved from Buckhead to Vinings and every time I go back there is another street corner gone. Now all Buckhead is is a giant hole in the ground, waiting for high end store front shopping to go in.

But recently Atlanta decided to take a bad traffic situation and make a really bad traffic mess by tearing down the whole 14th Street Bridge and build a new one. Now I know this is going to be nice when it’s finished. I know it will make my commute better in the long run. I know I should just be happy they are making the city better for the future. But man does it suck. Not only does it suck because 75 South is pretty much slammed everyday I drive to work. It sucks because I am getting married in July and my whole wedding guest list is staying in Midtown. Not to mention they are all from out of town. I just hope that all their navigation systems know about all the detours. It will be a mess anyway, so hopefully most people will take the streets and stay away from the highways.

So I did a little research and found some cool new photos of the new 14th Street Bridge. It will have “Several enhancements will be made to improve aesthetics, functionality, and safety in the corridor.

• Midtown’s streetscape palette will be extended throughout the 14th Street corridor and will include wider sidewalks, new street trees, decorative lighting, pavers and street furniture. The bridge itself will have decorative fencing and light pylons to enhance the pedestrian experience.
• The 14th Street corridor will contain a median extending from Fowler Street to West Peachtree Street to improve safety and help beautify this major gateway to Midtown. The medians will bplanted with seasonal flowers, trees, and shrubs and will be maintained by Midtown Alliance.
• A slip ramp will be created on the west side of the connector for southbound vehicles from I-85 that are exiting to 10th Street. Vehicles will no longer”

So I guess it’s cool for now. They never even gave a estimated finish date so I assume this will be going on for years to come. But downtown will be nicer. It should accommodate all the new high rise condos they will be building in the oncomings years. So I can’t complain too much.

Check out this picture from the view of the original 14th Street Bridge in 1953.

resource: http://www.14thstreetbridge.com/