Former ice cream shop, squirrel’s abode among Grant Park home tour

Before Miriam Gelfond leaves the door of her home open to visitors Saturday and Sunday for the 43rd annual Grant Park Candlelight Tour of Homes, she will place an old-fashioned glass milk bottle on the kitchen counter.

The bottle will honor the 1950s history of her home (585 Boulevard SE) as the former Georgia Milk Confederation Store and Miss Georgia Dairies ice cream shop. A 1956 advertisement in the then-Atlanta Constitution lists her home’s address among 21 other Miss Georgia Diaries ice cream store locations across metro Atlanta at the time. It markets a picture of a half-gallon cardboard container of “Ice Milk” promised at a sale cost of 53 cents.

One home on this year’s Grant Park Candlelight Tour of Homes, 585 Boulevard SE, is the former site of Miss Georgia Diaries. This advertisement from 1956 lists the home’s address. (AJC File)

Nods to history are present throughout most, if not all, of the 10 houses featured on this year’s self-guided tour.

A few doors down from Gelfond’s home, 532 Boulevard SE, a glass structure sits beside the main house. As legend tells, it was built to house a domestic squirrel that the former homeowners, both puppet and costume makers, had nursed back to health and made a pet.

532 Boulevard SE is another home on this year’s Grant Park Candlelight Tour of Homes. As legend tells it, a glass structure that sits beside the main home was built to house a domestic squirrel. (Courtesy of Grant Park Candlelight Tour of Homes)

At another tour stop, now home to the Atlanta Preservation Center, visitors can learn about the property’s history as the antebellum home of civil engineer Col. Lemuel Pratt “L.M.” Grant, for whom Grant Park is named. In 1863, the house was where Grant lived while designing the 33 miles of fortifications that defended Atlanta during the Civil War. The house, once saved from demolition by Margaret Mitchell, author of “Gone With the Wind,” is one of the last antebellum homes in Atlanta.

For visitors more interested in aesthetics than history, the tour also showcases a wide range of design and art.

“(The tour) tells the story of the neighborhood beyond just those early years and shows how it’s really evolved,” event co-chair Kristen Watts said.

‘Urban pioneers’

The tour has gone through several phases in its 43 years, first starting as a fundraiser for a private learning center located adjacent to St. Paul United Methodist Church.

In its nascent years, the tour primarily featured renovation projects in progress, said Robin South, who bought his Grant Park home in 1987 and later served on the tour’s planning committee for more than a quarter century.

When he moved to Grant Park, South was among a group of homebuyers Jeff McCord calls “urban pioneers” — the men and women who moved into the neighborhood during a time of decay and braved the task of renovating almost century-old historic homes dating back to 1895.

McCord moved to Grant Park in 2000 after attending the candlelight tour as a visitor. He joined the tour’s event planning committee shortly after and co-chaired the committee in 2016 and 2017.

The decay, he said, largely resulted from interstate construction in the 1960s, which divided the neighborhood, prompted the demolition of roughly 300 homes and led to a period of abandonment. Many of the homes were split into apartments or went uncared for.

But in the 1970s and ’80s, South and other urban pioneers like him who saw value in the neighborhood’s beautiful park, proximity to the city and history started purchasing homes.

“It started the resurgence of this beautiful, historic, intown neighborhood,” McCord said.

In his early years there, the area was still rough, South said.

“We had drugs, crime in the streets, cars being stolen,” South remembers. “We sort of just accepted that as the price of entry.”

South’s house, which dated back to 1904, “needed everything,” he said. “It was a big project.”

But South felt encouraged by the fact that he was surrounded by neighbors also tackling complicated historic renovations.

“We were all in this together,” he said. “There was a neighborhood esprit de corps from people who were there to fix things up.”

The owners then were mostly doing DIY renovations, South said. They took pride in doing the work themselves and “living every weekend at Home Depot.”

Because of that culture, in the tour’s early years, the event attracted primarily community members looking to get a sneak peek at half-completed projects.

“Someone would say, ‘I’ve only got walls up.’ Or ‘I’ve got some blueprints and some pictures of what it was before we tore things out,’” South recalled.

The tour’s evolution

In the early ’90s, the home tour changed hands. When the learning center folded, St. Paul UMC and the Grant Park Parents Network partnered to take it over. Later, when Grant Park Cooperative Preschool moved into the education building where the former learning center had been, the preschool joined as a third organizational and beneficiary partner. The same three partners operate the tour today.

By around 2005, South said, the tour and its following changed.

“The neighborhood had been gentrified pretty much by then,” South said. “House values were going up. People with money were buying into the neighborhood.”

More professional renovations became common. Visitors interested in design, art and architecture came to appreciate polished homes.

“If you’re walking the street, you just see the facade of the house,” South said. “You have no idea what’s going on inside.”

The tour has grown in popularity, too. The event now gathers roughly 1,000 visitors over the course of two days, some from other states.

“One lady comes every year from Iowa,” McCord said. “Another, from Chicago.”