The stuff that decorates Manuel's Tavern — the photos, the paintings, the pennants, the what-have-you — is not just stuff at all.
It's important enough to preserve, according to a local research project. All together it becomes, as Georgia State University lecturer Ruth Dusseault described it for the New York Times in a new story, an "organic archive."
Dusseault is one of a group (including Emory University, the Savannah College of Art and Design and the Atlanta Studies Network) behind "Unpacking Manuel's Tavern," the project in the process of digitizing the contents of Manuel's, which will end in a virtual recreation of the tavern.
"By photographically scanning these surfaces we are, in a sense, detaching the walls from the building and laying them flat," Dusseault wrote in describing the project on its site. "Altering the form of the material, from a room into a flat scroll, we can begin to see it as an archive.
"Viewed flat in high-definition, we can zoom up close to a single picture frame on the wall and read the writing in its margins. We can think about the hands that hung it and the momentous circumstances that made hanging it the right thing to do."
What all has the project seen, once it really began to sift through the decorations of a bar that has been a favorite of local politicos, pundits and journalists for years?
The Times described the setting this way:
"An overwhelming accretion of dusty beer cans, moldering sports pennants, law enforcement uniform patches, snapshots of well-known politicians and anonymous tipplers, risqué oil paintings traded as payment for ancient tabs, and the unmarked vessel, mounted above a shelf of drying pint glasses, that contains the ashes of Manuel Maloof, the original owner."
Next to Maloof's ashes are two other containers: One for his brother, Robert, and a third for Calvin Fluellen, a regular and the first African-American to graduate from Grady Memorial Hospital School of Radiology.
Over the entrance is a stuffed rodent, the subject of an inside joke ("Darrel Caudill Memorial Door," a plaque beneath it reads) that the owners will not spoil.
And one entire wall is dedicated to law enforcement officers, including Sherry Lyons-Williams, shot and killed while serving a warrant minutes after stopping by the tavern to eat.
With the news in February that Manuel's had been sold and would be renovated, some long-timers wondered if that meant an end to the very stuff that it made the tavern important enough to remember.
Not so, Brian Maloof (son of Manuel), told the Times.
In fact, the digital project should help him keep track of where everything goes, he said.
“We want it clean and organized,” he told the paper. “But not too clean.”
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