DECATUR

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T
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he sky was blue and full of
promise, and I was
wearing my S89 Korean suit
which is electric black and
seems to say, "Your bullets
turn to water!"

My neighbor, Guy Hunt, was

in high spirits, too, so we took a
walk out Decatur Street.
Hunt has a way of greeting
strangers (in a loud friendly voice)
that makes them stop and tell
him everything. He involves them
in an amusing conspiracy. He
penetrates their scams with a laugh.
He should have been a detective.
I think he imports olive oil.
Decatur Street is seedy but
rich with tales. It gets its name from
the fact that it heads toward Decatur. "You could rightfully call it
one of our original streets,"
Franklin Garrett tells me. It used to
be one of Atlanta's liveliest black
shopping districts, too, with three
movie theaters, including the
Royal 81. Garrett's own memories
of the street go back to World
War I. "There were all sorts of
shops and fish markets and restaurants. You could always smell
the odor of frying fish."
The area around Courtland
Street was known for brothels, and
people rode in from the dry lands
to buy cheap booze. Pete Schell, coowner of the Kimball House restaurant, says the street was still
booming in the '50s. "It had lots
of furniture stores, and they had
some weird place that sold herbs
that would make you well," he said.
"It was a great street, full of
people," Estelle Strauss told me
from the top of her ladder at Walter's clothiers.
Anyway, Hunt and I started
out from Five Points on the south
side of the street.
Prophet Matthew wasn't
around. He's usua'ly the first person you see rocking on his
heels, staring toward heaven. Matthew has been blind since birth.
One day he told me the Lord commanded him in 1978 to call the
people home to God. He's 51 and
has been doing as instructed for
13 years. "I have a vision," he said
suddenly He saw tornadoes
striking Atlanta
Matthew can be quite eloquent when speaking in a normal
voice When warning of The End,
he tends to shout.
That first block of Decatur
sells instant print jobs and jewelled
belts and boom boxes and hairdos. A man from Bombay now runs
Dixie News. The Kimball House
restaurant is named after the old
Kimball House Hotel, which was
once glorious, later notorious and is
now gone.
We passed the sunless functionalism of Georgia State, whose
only marble building on Decatur
Street was evacuated in 1986. Asbestos. It's still empty.
Wo passed police headquarters, which plans to move uptown
into the old Sears building on
Ponce de Leon. We passed the abandoned City Jail, a five-story
nightmare in concrete. We passed
bottle shops ("checks cashed")
and package stores ("no checks")
and a liquor store whose propri-

Horace Beaton joined Walter's in high school 30 years ago.

FJve
Points,

Jean ShifnrVStaff

Decatur
Street
Edgewood Ave.

Cornelia-

Cvmttihy

Grant was president.

At about Cornelia Street
(where another railroad once
crossed), Decatur Street becomes DeKalb Avenue. But Hunt
and I had turned around and
headed back toward Five Points on
the north side of the street

COLN
I CAMPBELLS
'

DA
I RY
etor was so bubbly with hilarious
ouUawry that he begged me not
to name him or describe his 94year-old great-uncle or his weird
little store (which has been robbed
once since 1958)
Soon Decatur Street crossed
the 18-lane freeway. I find freeways
sinister as they pass through the
hearts of cities. Remember that evil
cartoon character in "Who
Framed Roger Rabbit" who
dreamed them up?
Decatur Street changes as it
crosses that smoking Euphrates. To
the west lies Downtown, frayed
but valued To the east crouch lands
now half-forgotten.
Grady Homes, for instance, at
Bell Street, is the liveliest place on
Decatur: 1,043 people live there
Decatur rolls east, silently,
for eight or 10 more blocks, past
welders and warehouses and
wasted brick buildings with fading
signs like "Bremen Steel." This
whole stretch used to clang with industry. Indeed, Decatur Street
parallels tracks that date back to
1873 and the old Atlanta and
Charlotte Airline Railroad.
The word "airline" had nothing to do with planes. It meant beeline or straight line; the name
survives in Airline Street. Now
MARTA parallels Decatur Street,
as "the Airline" did when Ulysses S.

We passed a whiplash clinic

called ATLANTA ECK AND BACK
and a dreary kitchen for the
homeless called Odyssey III. A
steel-mesh fence crowned with
Iraqi-style razor wire surrounded
its parking lot.
Hungry, we entered Georgia
State's General Classroom Building
and caught a crowded elevator to
the 9th floor. I was hoping to eat
with Tom McHarey a Faulkner
scholar. I felt Decatur Street needed intertextual analysis But
McHaney was listening to a visiting
Faulknerian speak on "The Writer as Cuckold," and we decided not
to barge in. So we picked up the
latest GSU Review (which is good)
and headed west, on foot, past
Walter's, a trip in itself.
Walter and Estelle Strauss be
gan doing business on Decatur 40
years ago and moved into their
present store No. 66, a former
pool hall in 1962.
Estelle's 6-foot folding ladder
gives her a view of the store's
crowded aisles of shoes and
warm-up jackets and whatnot.
The floor manager, Horace
Benton, deals with a crush of customers and clerks.
Hunt and I were getting weak,
so we headed for the Kimball House
and found hamburgers and teriyaki chicken. I eat there all the
time. (Also at Texas on Decatur
Street.) Jack Spidle, Kimball's bartending proprietor, tells me his
place is Downtown's oldest bar and
restaurant. It opened in 1967.
I like Decatur Street. It's a
tentacle of the octopus-neighborhood I work in. It's a flash of the
Big Picture and hell on tourists.