Atlanta’s Olmsted Linear Park
Sunday, December 8, 1 pm - 4 pm
We had 45 people join us December 8, 2024 for a ramble through Olmsted Linear Park, Atlanta’s historic 45-acre pastoral park and old-growth forest meandering along Ponce de Leon Avenue. The park was designed in the 1890’s by the legendary landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed New York’s Central Park. The park consists of six segments that are home to some of Atlanta’s oldest trees, and includes some of intown Atlanta’s most biodiverse urban stream and wildlife habitat. We were joined by special guest Olmsted Linear Park Alliance executive director Sandra Kruger, along with landscape architect Spencer Tunnell and forest ecologist Jonah McDonald.
Before he invented the profession of landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted was a traveling newspaper correspondent. In 1856 he made a two year reporting trip on horseback through the South to report on a region at the brink of a Civil War. Olmsted's dispatches argued that slavery was ruining the South, and predicted that seceding from the Union would be disastrous to the South for “half a century”. He returned home and spent that half a century becoming the foremost designer of American parks. He took his years of wandering through nature, and asked himself, how can people in cities be given the chance to wander too? Olmsted championed the concept of parks as essential, egalitarian, and naturalistic urban spaces. And then, at the end of his long life, Olmsted returned to a very changed South, to design this alternately elegant and shaggy, rambling park hidden in plain sight in the middle of the city.
Joel Silverman, Deepdene Lidargraph IV (2024)
Walking The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre
Sunday, September 22, 1 pm - 5 pm
This event is free and unticketed, RSVP below for updates and to help us gauge the crowd size.
We met at the Underground Atlanta plaza across from Five Points MARTA Station. This was a 3.5 mile one way walk to the South Atlanta neighborhood at Pryor Street & Moury Avenue.
Join Drift The Map and the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition to honor the memory of the victims of the anniversary of the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre. We will recall the resistance of the African Americans terrorized by white mobs for three days 118 years ago roaming through downtown Atlanta, lynching any Black person unfortunate enough to be in the mob’s path.
The Atlanta Race Massacre was largely ignored in official histories for decades and was not taught in Atlanta schools. We beared witness with special guest Ann Hill Bond, journalist and preservationist of the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, which has collected soil at the sites of Fulton County’s 36 documented racial terror lynchings in association with the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. This Drift retraced the steps of the lynch mob of at least 5,000 white men and boys who stormed down Pryor Street from Five Points to burn and ravage the Black neighborhood then known as Brownsville. On arrival in the South Atlanta neighborhood, we summoned the memory of the Atlanta ancestors whose struggle and martyrdom paved the way for the modern Civil Rights Movement. This event was a pivotal spark leading to W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Henry Moscowitz, and others organizing the NAACP three years later in 1909.
Le Petit Journal, France (1906)
About Drift The Map
Drift the Map is a series of free artist-led walks to explore Atlanta neighborhoods and talk about urbanism, ecology, history, architecture, public art and foodways. Every session will have an experimental format, and no two walks will be alike. We’ll always begin in a different neighborhood and then explore arbitrary routes guided by our conversations or participants' personal connections to the place. The walks are co-facilitated by a father-daughter team, artists Joel Silverman and Mira Silverman, along with stakeholders from the community along as invited special guests.
Walking
aimlessly
in
a
goal-centered
and
car-oriented
world
is
kind of
a subversive act.
The 1921 Map of the City of Atlanta, overlaid on a current 3D model of Atlanta.
(interactive with click/drag/zoom)
Drift the Map walks are unplanned journeys through urban landscapes, urging participants to drop their everyday routine from time to time and let themselves be drawn by the surprises of the city, a concept theorized by avant-garde artist Guy Debord in his 1956 "Theory of the Dérive". La Dérive is “the drift”. Group scrutiny of the city by drifting through it together leads to new collaborations and relationships formed and the thrill of discovery that always occurs when curiosity leads you to pull on a loose thread to see how it unravels.
This series seeks to explore the mythogeography of Atlanta, by exploring the way the city defines itself through urban legends, the official histories enshrined in street and neighborhood names and monuments, and the ways Jim Crow was encoded into the city grid through redlining policies, street names, and allocation of resources. We’ll talk a lot about names and renaming. Why do so many street names change when they cross from north to south across Ponce de Leon? Why was Grady High School renamed in the reassessment of Henry Grady’s legacy, but not Grady Hospital? Why have the Atlanta Braves kept that name even as the Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins abandoned their names? Will anyone really start calling Bobby Dodd Stadium “Hyundai Field”? What gifts and burdens were bestowed by the Candler in Candler Park, the Inman in Inman Park, the Grant in Grant Park?
These aren’t guided tours. They are walks led by artists, although they are not necessarily art walks. They’re intended to inject an artists’ sense of the city into the public debate: Hungry for more detail, sensitive to the aesthetic beauty of the landscape, curious about culture, critical about doublespeak, impatient for justice, interested in photographing and sketching and recording and smelling and eating our way through the city. Above all, willing to get lost and trusting in each other to find our way back home.
We’d love to hear your ideas for walks, or to be asked to lead a Drift in your home city. Please be in touch to chip in with ideas you have, neighborhood questions you've always wanted answered, and suggestions for experts and guest hosts that you’d like to see us invite.
Drift the Map: ‘Walking’ through history
Father-daughter duo Joel and Mira Silverman lead various, cultural walks to immerse participants in Atlanta’s history.
October 16, 2023
Drift the Map is a series of public walks around Atlanta neighborhoods in which artists Joel Silverman and his daughter, sophomore Mira Silverman, discuss the history of the city. Every walk begins in a specified location where a poem is read to set the tone. From there, the walks evolve into an exploration of the city and its culture. The series began when the father-daughter team went on a walk to see Joel Silverman’s great grandparents’ house, only to find it replaced by the interstate. “We went looking for the house my great grandparents lived in as early as 1910-1920, and it was under the highway,” Joel Silverman said. “We realized how much of Atlanta was sliced through when they built I-20, I-85, and I-75.” Joel Silverman found a 1921 map of Atlanta in which neighborhoods were redlined, meaning they were color-coded by areas where banks invested. Joel and Mira Silverman noticed the map’s reflection of Atlanta’s current location of highways and subsequent racial divides.
“The color-coded neighborhoods are divided by where banks would decide to make investments, and that’s why the highway was built where the highway was built,” Joel Silverman said. “The city decided with this map not to invest in neighborhoods that became where the poor parts of the city would be compared to where the wealthy parts of the city would be; it was the map they used for redlining.”
As they studied 100 years of Atlanta’s geography, Mira Silverman and Joel Silverman said they wanted to explore every inch of the map and compare Atlanta’s past geography to the present. For additional guidance on facilitating the walks, Mira and Joel Silverman contacted Darin Givens, known as “the ATL Urbanist,” who is affiliated with Thread ATL, a non-profit organization that promotes walkability in Atlanta. Right away, Givens expressed interest in the series because it aligned with his values. “We had a long conversation about ideas for the drifts and what kinds of takeaways I would like participants to have, in terms of being in line with ThreadATL’s advocacy,” Givens said. “We seemed perfectly aligned in terms of what we wanted people to get out of this; they’re going to end up viewing the environment of the city through a lens of looking at the present and thinking about the past in an artist-led way so that it’s not just a regular by-the-numbers tour.”
Joel Silverman said the point of the walking series is to let people connect with others and bring their own perspectives of the city to the group.
“We want the poem to set the tone that this is not necessarily a history walk, but a walk about the feelings that are raised by the act of walking through the city,” Joel Silverman said. “If that walk turns out to be an ecology walk because we have people who know about urban streamways, then great. If it becomes about where they built Freedom Parkway and tore down 20,000 houses, then that’s what it’s about. We don’t want to control it so thoroughly that it can’t be about the enthusiasm and expertise of whoever shows up.”
As artists, Mira Silverman and Joel Silverman approach Atlanta culture with a unique curiosity.
“There’s a long tradition of artists walking through cities, and we had the idea that these aren’t art walks, but we want to talk about art, and there’s a certain way artists see the world,” Joel Silverman said. “Artists are observant in a way that a lot of other people don’t choose to be. Mira and I are both artists, and we thought that would be an important lens for people to see the city through with that curiosity.”
During the walks, Joel Silverman leads discussions about Atlanta’s mythogeography, which is the way a city defines itself through urban legends, and how the city’s history affects its layout.
“An example of mythogeography is how Monroe becomes Boulevard when it crosses over Ponce, or how Charles Allen Drive becomes Parkway and Oakdale Road becomes Whitefoord in Candler Park,” Joel Silverman said. “ The reason all these streets change in name is because white neighborhoods in the fifties and sixties wanted to preserve residential segregation even after, by law, the city was integrating. That’s what mythogeography is, it’s the way Atlanta tells these stories about how it’s the city too busy to hate, but really there’s a lot of division in our past.”
Participants of Drift the Map look through the eyes of a bronze sculpture of the face of John Wesley Dobbs, an African-American civic leader of Atlanta in the first half of the 20th century.
Givens thinks that learning about Atlanta’s history outdoors with a group of participants allows full immersion that individual research does not.
“It’s wonderful to think about the stories and mythology of Atlanta when you’re sitting at a computer and looking at maps and images, but it’s completely different when you’re actually there in the environment looking around on the street,” Givens said. “You’re sort of looking at the city around you in a new way so you’ve got a whole new perspective where you’re not just on a sidewalk getting from one place to another; you’re on a sidewalk taking in what’s around you and thinking about the stories and mythology of Atlanta with others, and it becomes an immersive experience in a way that looking at a computer screen isn’t necessarily.”
Joel Silverman hopes that discussing the historical causes of the city’s systemic division will increase awareness and raise questions about these issues, even if those questions may not have answers.
“Every city has its own stories about itself that creates its own sense of culture, and a lot of those stories are based on facts and a lot of them are based on legends,” Joel Silverman said. “If you look at Grady High School renaming to Midtown High School, Henry Grady was a complex figure; he used to be this hero who created a vision of what a new south could be, reconnecting the south to the north after the Civil War, but he also had really racist opinions about preserving segregation in the South. That’s why Midtown renamed the school, but then why is Grady Hospital still named Grady? Why do we still have a sculpture of him Downtown? There aren’t any answers to those questions, but we want to ask them.”
Mira Silverman thinks the walks will expand Atlantans’ preexisting knowledge of the culture of where they live.
“It’s interesting because a lot of the participants are aware of these legends because they’re a part of Atlanta culture,” Mira Silverman said. “It’s interesting to see how we can use the walk to frame a discussion around what the participants already know to build on that knowledge.”
The father-daughter duo decided to make every walk free, making the experience more accessible.
“We both agreed really quickly that it ought to be free, and we shouldn’t ask for reservations, appointments or tickets,” Joel Silverman said. “Part of the magic is that whoever shows up shows up and that sets the tone of the group. It’s not something that’s too tightly controlled.”
Mira Silverman hopes the drift walks encourage Atlantans to connect with the city’s environment.
“What I think is most important to me is branching outside of your circle,” Mira Silverman said. “In the last year, where I’ve actually gone outside and walked around, I’ve expanded my connection to the city. Being indoors and curating your own circle is perpetually unchanging; when you’re actually outside and there are things that surprise you and catch your eye, you suddenly see the world in a very colorful light.”
Givens looks forward to endorsing Drift the Map and encouraging participants to have the realizations that he and Joel Silverman have had through extensive research.
“I’ve been obsessed with these things for many years and I think it’s great to help other people have the kind of epiphanies that Joel and I have had over the years,” Givens said. “When you do that kind of thing, reading books and whatnot, you have all these epiphanies, like, ‘oh, that’s why Atlanta is shaped the way it is.’ It sort of awakens you to the way that the history of the city and its urban renewal practices have affected the current situation of the city. I think it’s very gratifying and also important to help other people have those epiphanies, even if they’re not going to go down the rabbit hole like me and Joel.”
By facilitating these free walks, Joel Silverman said he hopes to bring residents of different communities together to learn more about the city they share.
“It’s an opportunity for people of different communities to come together and cross the red lines,” Joel Silverman said. “By creating walks that anyone can come to, people will be surprised by who they meet and what communities can be formed in a city where we only know a small circle of people that we see everyday. We’re hoping that if people become more familiar with every corner of the city, they’re going to care more about the future of the city.”
in collaboration with Thread ATL, a nonprofit organization advocating for improved urbanism in the City of Atlanta
