Birmingham is for lovers
People come to Birmingham, Alabama, carrying a heavy script. They arrive expecting the gravity of the place to crush them. They expect the brick, the blood, the sermons and the steel. They treat the city like a crime scene or a classroom, a place you visit to pay respects to the struggle, to touch the scars of 1963.
They are not wrong. That spirit is there. But often, the visitors miss the point of venerating it. They forget what the struggle was actually for.
The fight wasn’t just for a seat on a bus or a lever in a voting booth. It was for the right to the city’s beauty. It was for the right to be at ease, to access the romance and the pleasure that had been hoarded for so long.
To truly understand Birmingham, one cannot just study the battle; one has to taste the victory.
Tasting Georgia in Paris at L’Arret by the Grey
“Foolishly, I was excited to see deviled eggs on the menu at L’Arrêt by the Grey,” the AJC’s Henri Hollis writes of the relatively new restaurant in Paris’ 7th arrondissement from acclaimed Savannah-based chef Mashama Bailey and her business partner, Johno Morisano.
The pair rose to prominence with the Grey in Savannah, where Bailey won the 2022 James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef, the foundation’s top national honor for an individual chef.
“This was just our second real meal in the City of Light and I naively assumed I wouldn’t be seeing this classic Southern appetizer on any other menus,” Hollis adds. “Little did I know that oeufs mayonnaise, a favorite of French country cuisine and a close cousin to the deviled egg, would be on nearly every bistro and brasserie menu I saw.”
Over the course of his five-day trip to Paris, Hollis says he ate gussied-up hard-boiled eggs like he was “at a college football tailgate.”
This was just one of many parallels between Southern cooking and classic French cuisine that Bailey has noticed in her years of visiting and working in France.
Both traditions have close ties to regional agriculture and a deep respect for pork in all its forms. There’s a similar dedication to seasonality, stubborn adherence to tradition over trends and appreciation for a slower pace of life.
🍽️ Explore L’Arret by The Grey’s menu linking the French countryside with the American South.
New places for food, fun to fill century-old Peachtree Street building
As downtown Atlanta prepares for an influx of visitors this summer, a nearly 100-year-old building along Peachtree Street will soon begin its next chapter as an entertainment and event destination.
A roadside Americana-themed bar with nightly live music, a sports bar with pub fare, a rooftop lounge and an event space are coming to 207 Peachtree this spring, according to a February news release.
The new spaces will join the Red Phone Booth cocktail lounge and Amalfi Cucina + Mercato, both of which opened in the building in 2016. RPB Management Group, the hospitality company that developed the two existing concepts, is behind the venture.
Located at the corner of Peachtree and Andrew Young International Boulevard, the building once housed Regenstein’s Department Store, described as “one of the South’s best known women’s apparel concerns” in a June 1929 Atlanta Constitution article, before its closure in 1978.
Four decades later, a New York-based real estate firm spent $10.5 million renovating the building into an office and retail space, maintaining its art deco facade and design elements.
🏙️ Learn more about other retail concepts advancing in downtown.
Antique details and contemporary art mix effortlessly in Charleston home
Tyler Rollins’ Charleston, South Carolina, home is a fascinating contradiction. With its quiet elegance, Spanish moss-draped trees, gracious piazza and lush garden, the 1870 house in the Harleston Village neighborhood is exactly what one imagines a Charleston home should be.
The interior of Rollins’ home, however, is a little less expected. A onetime New York gallery owner, Rollins is also an art adviser and collector whose home is filled with the kind of contemporary artwork you’d expect to see in a Manhattan penthouse. His focus is on contemporary Asian art, and his home is filled with sculptures, paintings and photographs by major midcareer artists from Southeast Asia.
“I love antique furniture and wanted to display it in a more contemporary way, less ‘fussy’ and with more emphasis on each piece functioning as a hand-carved sculpture,” he explained. “I wanted to put the main emphasis on my contemporary art collection.”
In addition to the main house, there are two buildings beautifully integrated into the backyard landscape dedicated to historic artworks rooted in Charleston’s history.
The kitchen house is largely brick and the heavy wood ceiling beams give it the cozy feel of an old English farmhouse. The carriage house, meanwhile, is bright and white, defined by carved painted woodwork that give it the feel of a dollhouse blown up to human size.
🏡 See inside the home that AJC contributor Felicia Feaster says confounds expectations.
Move over, ‘Punch.’ Georgia sanctuary has a plushie-loving primate, too.
While Punch, a 6-month-old Japanese macaque, has captured the hearts of millions online — he isn’t the only primate with an emotional support plushie.
In fact, plenty of the chimpanzees at Project Chimps, a sanctuary in North Georgia that cares for former research chimpanzees, grow attached to toys or blankets, executive director Ali Crumpacker told the AJC.
New chimps are offered lots of toys when they arrive at the facility, Crumpacker said. Some gravitate toward balls, blankets or stuffed animals, but for Lizzy, a 36-year-old female chimpanzee, the Grinch stole her heart.
“She just grabbed the Grinch doll and has never let it go. So we’ve had to get replacement Grinch dolls, and when one gets dirty, she won’t give it to us unless we have a clean one to swap it out,” Crumpacker said.
Her love for the Grinch makes it especially easy to identify Lizzy, since she‘s often clutching the fuzzy green toy or can be found grooming it.
For those who would like to get a closer look at Project Chimps’ chimpanzees, including residents like Lizzy, keep an eye out for Discovery Days coming up in May, where attendees can learn about the chimpanzees and walk around their sanctuary.
🐵 Find additional details — and more adorable chimpanzee photos — here
These warehouses could soon be the next Beltline hot spot
A pair of century-old warehouses overlooking the MARTA tracks south of downtown Atlanta are poised to become the next live-work-play hub along the Beltline.
The Beltline confirmed earlier this month it has finalized a partnership with Atlanta-based developer Urban Realty Partners to incorporate the historic Cut Rate Box Co. buildings along Murphy Avenue into a new mixed-use project.
The development called Oakland Exchange has started construction and will include retrofitting the two historic warehouses into more than 100 loft apartments and commercial spaces.
Urban Realty Partners in 2019 unveiled a plan to convert the buildings into 115,000 square feet of creative office space, but the ensuing COVID-19 pandemic stymied that effort.
The latest iteration involves multiple development phases, including converting the existing warehouses into 126 loft apartments and 16,000 square feet of creative commercial space. It also includes building 3,000 square feet of new retail and restaurant spaces along the Oakland and Murphy Connector Trail, a 1.3-mile spur planned to connect to the Oakland City MARTA station.
🏗️ Read on for the history behind the warehouses and what their next chapter holds
