Food Feature: There’s no place like home

On a walking tour of Auburn Avenue, the air smelled like rain, car exhaust and Jamaican food. Two middle-aged tourists from Scotland (burbling about the “hot Southern weather”), myself and a friend (another longtime Atlantan) ambled with our tour guide from the Atlanta Preservation Center for 90 minutes down the street. Starting at the African-American Panoramic Experience Museum, or APEX, we strolled east across Boulevard to the Martin Luther King birth home, a carefully restored 1895 Queen Anne-style home with a stately porch.

Without a lively guide, what was formerly Wheat Street is merely the fastest route from my house to downtown. Growing up in Atlanta, I presume I know the story of the historic district that was the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But at “gotta get to the gym” speed, I’ve overlooked a lot.

Atlanta Preservation Center guides, brimming with enthusiasm for the stories behind the bricks and mortar, lead scheduled walks through seven historic neighborhoods in Atlanta: Grant Park, downtown, Sweet Auburn, Inman Park, Druid Hills, Ansley Park and the Fox Theatre. They are architects, students and preservationists, who stop to point out the smallest details as they go.

Walking in a city where perambulation can cause people to do a double-take brings me face-to-face with things I would otherwise miss: the gleaming restored atrium of the Oddfellows Hall on Auburn Avenue, which once had a roof garden for dances, or the blue, black and white tiles spelling out “Gate City Drug Store” embedded in a curb.

Peering into old office buildings full of narrow, spindled staircases and linoleum lobbies evoked moments from a 1950s Chester Himes detective novel, all sonorous clarinet and whapping ceiling fans. Customers sat for a Sunday morning trim at the Silver Moon Barbershop like they have since the doors first opened in 1905. Needing neither haircuts nor private eyes, our guide shepherded us on.

Auburn Avenue started life as a Cherokee trail, and bloomed into a business center after the Civil War. Atlanta Life Insurance, the nation’s largest black-owned insurance company, and the Royal Peacock Club, where Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin and Louis Armstrong performed, are on Auburn Avenue. The Herndon Building, now hollow and abandoned, is a poignant reminder of the faded vitality of the district. Plywood covers the windows, painted with faux window shades, potted plants and the names of actual businesses that once prospered inside — a tip of the hat to long gone doctors, dentists and insurance agents.

Auburn Avenue chugs along. The day we walked, the National Park Service Visitors Center was swarming with visitors (many apparently buying tickets for the Without Sanctuary exhibit of lynching photography in America) and school groups were unloading from buses, assembling reverently, and snapping pictures at the Martin Luther King gravesite. The Auburn Avenue Curb Market vibrates with life: offering baked goods, produce, even an Italian delicatessen; and according to our guide, the Peacock Club still parties.

One walk through time wasn’t enough for me — I had warmed to the idea of seeing my hometown through a tourist’s eyes.

Standing with a dozen tourists in the terrazzo-floored arcade of the Fox Theatre, I hoped I wouldn’t have to admit that I’ve lived in Atlanta nearly my entire life. Twelve other people had an excuse to gasp at their first look at a mosaic of a camel, crescent and palm tree inlaid in the floor before an enormous corner staircase. I had none. I’ve been in the Fox countless times — watching Disney’s Mary Poppins as a first-grader beneath the twinkling ceiling lights, or escorting my niece to watch cavorting Munchkin friends in a live take on The Wizard of Oz. In between, there’s been Neil Young, the Grateful Dead, and at least one party in the mind-bogglingly over-the-top Egyptian ballroom. It took throwing my lot in with a group of camera-toting sightseers from places like Seattle and Syracuse to really get the groove of the images of Osiris and Ra in Jazz Age plaster above my head.

The smallest details take center stage on a walking tour. Take, for example, the dimly lit silhouette of a hookah-smoking gentleman over the door of both Men’s Lounges in the Fox Theatre. His image induced in me a mad desire to charge into the empty bathroom and find the answer to a long-held question: Yes, it turns out the Men’s Rooms are as deliriously embellished as the velvet-curtained Ladies’ Rooms, where the carpets are designed to resemble the Nile River. (Look closely at — or get your date to check — the hieroglyphics on the wall in the downstairs Men’s Lounge. One is a subtle sketch of a traffic light.)

The vivid Egyptian Ballroom on the second floor of the building (once a dance hall) was modeled after a Temple of Karnak and looks like the massive lair of a James Bond villain. Every square inch is covered with replicas of scarab beetles and animal-headed kings. Although two German-speaking girls led the charge up the stairs to the ballroom, tourists, guide and one local clustered together inside, awed by the weird majesty of the room.

In the 5,000-seat theater, the twinkling electric stars overhead are legend. Every kid who ever sat through a movie there remembers the indoor sky. The stars are designed to mimic the constellations above Cairo on a midsummer night. The clouds that traverse overhead during a show I always shrugged off as a figment of my imagination, overstimulated by the virtual Casbah of the Fox Theatre. They are as real as they can be, produced by a Brenograph machine original to the theater — rotating mica discs that toss cloud images on a cobalt-colored plaster sky.

If I don’t admit to anyone else on the tour that I already live here, I can join in and ask questions of the guide, pretending it’s the first time I’ve seen a glimpse of the best parts of my own city. In a way, it is.??