Church Street @ Ponce de Leon Avenue Decatur, GA (photo submitted by Matthew)

When real estate man Edwin Ansley moved from his lavish home in Decatur to his namesake “Ansley Park” in 1909, the large plot of land at the corner of College Street and McDonough was subdivided many times over, making way for the dense neighborhood of houses we know today.

The original house still stands (sans its central tower and front porch) awkwardly off McDonough – almost as if it refuses to acknowledge its current fate – and today is most commonly referred to by Decaturites as “The Marble House”.  It’s main use these days is as office space.  (Don’t know where it is?  CLICK HERE)

I still find it hard to imagine all that open land between College and Maple Street.

I love this rambling, slightly frustrated description of Atlanta’s Decatur Street on Wikipedia.

Having grown from very humble beginnings, the City of Atlanta’s streets are not organized in rational rectilinear patterns like better organized cities. Rather the Atlanta metropolitan area exhibits the “cluster of grapes” pattern; dozens of small communities (including Atlanta) squashed “cheek by jowl” with each having a road running to each in an overlapping maze. For that reason Atlanta’s streets, such as Decatur Street, can be confusing. Decatur Street for example runs from Atlanta to Decatur on the east. However once you pass by the “zero mile post” in downtown Atlanta’s Five Points district heading west, the same road runs to northwest to the community of Marietta. Hence Decatur Street is the same street as Marietta Street. The situation is made more confusing when leaving the city limits of, in this example, Atlanta, because when one enters the “neutral zone” between cities another street name is used, and when entering the “remote” city yet another name is used. So, traveling on this one street from Marietta on the northwest the sequence is: Atlanta Road, Marietta Boulevard, Marietta Street, Decatur Street, DeKalb Avenue (DeKalb being Decatur’s county), and finally Howard Avenue in Decatur; all this in under twenty-five miles. (This leave out the “West” and “East” variants that are also present.) For this reason you can see why it is frequently said “half the streets in Atlanta are named Peachtree but all the others have three or four names to make up for it.”

Civil War-era Decatur Street picture also courtesy of the Wikipedia entry.

Will your house ever go up in value again?

Yesterday’s New York Times points out the unique set of circumstances over the last half-century that convinced our collective consciousnesses that housing would always be a good financial investment.

For the first half of the 20th century, he said, expectations followed the opposite path. Houses were seen the way cars are now: as a consumer durable that the buyer eventually used up.

The notion of housing as an investment first began to blossom after World War II, when the nesting urges of returning soldiers created a construction boom. Demand was stoked as their bumper crop of children grew up and bought places of their own. The inflation of the 1970s, which increased the value of hard assets, and liberal tax policies both helped make housing a good bet. So did the long decline in mortgage rates from the early 1980s.

This is INCREDIBLE.  Another Decatur Walker writes in…

I was walking along West Ponce after dark the last Friday in July, and as I approached Decatur CD, I saw two people staring intently at the flowers out front. When I asked what they were watching, one replied, “A hummingbird.” Having never seen a hummingbird feed at night, I thought that was unlikely, but the creature’s wings were beating so rapidly and the body shape was so close to a hummingbird’s that I did a double-take myself. I’d read about moths that have a long proboscis specifically suited to deep-throated flowers and concluded that must be what we were seeing but had no idea they were found locally. Luckily I had a camera with a flash with me and quickly took a few pictures, hoping I could capture a clear enough image to identify the moth at home. (We confirmed we were watching a moth after it eventually took a break from feeding to rest on a nearby tree.) When I asked the other people watching the moth where I could send pictures if any turned out, one of the women said, “What about Decatur Metro?” I had more success than I expected given the moth’s quick movements, so here are a few pictures to share with your readers (and I hope the others who witnessed this amazing creature in action). Note that moth was actually in motion in all pics except one on tree.

Of course, I searched the web when I got home and found that what we’d seen was some variety of the hummingbird moth. (One woman – a teacher, I think – mentioned that possibility but wasn’t sure.) I didn’t find any web pictures that look exactly like the one we saw, but the hummingbird hawk moth is very close in appearance.

Two more pics after the jump! Read the rest of this entry »