Maddox was at a photo exhibit in the trendy Cabbagetown restaurant Agave looking at her old neighborhood. It was a world that, like her shoes, was coming apart at the seams.
The Cabbagetown of Maddox's youth was a little mill village, squeezed between the Fulton Bag Mill, Oakland Cemetery and the railroad tracks, and full of hardscrabble mountain transplants. Musical friends there might start off a Saturday night crooning Hank Williams tunes outside Bill's Grill and finish it with a knife fight on Gaskill Street.
"Who is that?" said Maddox, pointing to a photo of a skinny blond boy sitting near a broken bicycle, his chin in one hand.
"That's me, " said Jack Owens, 47, no longer skinny, no longer blond.
When they were bony kids, Owens and Maddox used to gather at a community center called the Patch in a building now occupied by Agave.
Created by community activist Esther Lefever to counteract the rapid decline of the neighborhood, the Patch gave Cabbagetown kids a place to play pingpong and piano. Teachers showed them how to use a potter's wheel and even helped them with school work.
The Patch fought a losing battle. The Fulton Bag Mill, founded in the 1880s, was tottering in its last years. It closed in 1977, and unemployment in Cabbagetown was rampant, as were drugs and violence.
But Lefever was a force of nature who would go on to serve in the Atlanta City Council, and she was adept at finding grant money and at persuading local businesses and banks to support the Patch. Among the part-time counselors whose work-study salary was paid by one of those grants was a young photography student at the Art Institute of Atlanta named W.A. Bridges.
In 1975 Bridges needed a final project for one of his courses, so he took portraits of the children that he cared for at the Patch.
Thirty-six years later those photos are seeing the light of day. Bridges, his 1975 Afro replaced by knee-length dreadlocks, spoke to the gathering at Agave, saying Cabbagetown was a "warm, wild and bustling place."
Under her breath, Harriet Treadwell Unfug added another adjective: "dangerous." Unfug, known as Sis back then, was a teacher and bookkeeper at the Patch. "I loved these kids, but they put you through hell, " she said as she traded hugs with Maddox, Owens and others.
"Here's where all the winos would hang out, " said Owens, offering a quick tour of Cabbagetown's two-block businesses district. He gestured to a tiny vacant lot between two houses on Carroll Street. When they couldn't get wine, Owens remembered, they would drink after-shave.
He showed where he used to sell peanuts for 5 cents a bag and where he used to roll old tires down Reinhardt Street and onto Boulevard just to watch the cars swerve.
Ronnie Edwards, 72, came by to see old friends and check out the exhibit. One of the few old-timers who still lives in the neighborhood, he spoke of rat killings and games of buck-buck and kick the can. His parents rented a three-room house for $6 a month, he said, and, like most houses there, you could look through the floorboards and see the chickens in the dirt basement.
What changed Cabbagetown? Not failure, but success. The Fulton Bag Mill was transformed into apartments and condominiums (in the $100,000 to $200,000 range), and the turn-of-the century cottages were snapped up and renovated by newcomers.
Singer/songwriter Joyce Brookshire, whose mother worked in the cotton mill for 45 years, said, "Yuppies came in and bought the houses for next to nothing, and a lot of our people couldn't afford to live there anymore."
Even the "mayor" of Cabbagetown, Leon Little, whose family ran Little's Grocery from 1929 until 2005, moved out. But his connection remains strong.
"It was a great place in the '40s and '50s, " a gray-haired Little, 69, said as he mingled with his one-time neighbors at the upscale Agave. "I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in the world."
