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See All Street Team '08 Blogs
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This blogger is a member of Street Team '08, a hand-picked group of state-based citizen journalists who are contributing to MTV's Choose or Lose election coverage.
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Want the latest election coverage on your phone? Text ST to 84465, check m.streetteam08.com, or subscribe to the FLO TV service and watch our "Best of Choose or Lose" show each week.
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Adobe Youth Voices
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Adobe is the exclusive software partner of Street Team '08, as part of Adobe Youth Voices.
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*Street Team '08 members are independent journalists. Any views and opinions expressed here are their own, and not those of MTV or The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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See all of shelbinator's blog posts
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A Twisted Tale of Two Neighborhoods
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Posted March 20, 2008 at 6:40 AM
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For those of you just returning from your vacation under a rock, we had some weather here in Atlanta last weekend.
At 9:44pm, as my girlfriend and I prepared for a quiet Friday evening with a video, I got a text message from Georgia Tech's emergency broadcast system. It informed me that we were under a tornado warning and suggested I seek shelter. We looked at each other and shrugged it off: "That's silly, tornados don't hit the city." The rain, wind, thunder and lightning got bad outside, but it didn't interrupt our movie.
Two hours later, I checked Twitter, the instant and text message-based social network, to see what my Twitter peeps had done with their nights. I saw the flurry of chatter about the weather and, stunned, turned on the TV. All of the local networks and CNN were broadcasting live from downtown showing widespread damage from a tornado touchdown in the city.
A tornado touchdown in the city. We sat glued to the television until after 2:00 a.m.
While the fact that downtown juggernauts like Phillips Arena and the CNN headquarters had sustained serious damage made for spectacular background footage, the most shocking initial report came from the Cabbagetown neighborhood. A building at the renovated historic property, the Fulton Cotton Mill Lofts, had several floors collapse in a "pancake" fashion, according to one official briefing after midnight. The local media rushed over to the scene to cover the devastation.
That news sent a chill down our spines because if you're in our general demographic and you don't have a friend in the Cotton Mill Lofts, you know someone who does. It is a very hip property in a very hip part of town, if you'll forgive the double use of a word that I come nowhere near embodying.
Fortunately, it was soon determined that the building that had collapsed was still in development and was reportedly largely unoccupied. By morning, sweeps with search dogs had found no fatalities. Still, all through the night and into the following day, Cabbagetown and the Cotton Mill Lofts were prime real estate for media coverage of the twister's path, second only perhaps to the bent metal and shattered glass that littered the streets under the pock-marked downtown skyline.
As I watched the continuing "disaster porn," as one local blogger put it, on the TV, Twitter filled another gap and alerted me to the distinct lack of coverage of the neighborhood where the destruction began. "No [mainstream media] in Vine City yet. It's bad there I hear," reported local new media adventurer Grayson Daughters. Weather services determined that the tornado first touched down in Vine City, just west of downtown, before moving east across the city and into Cabbagetown.
Newly armed with my own personal Nokia N95 -- the pocket-sized powerhouse that enabled our Choose or Lose coverage of Super Tuesday -- I headed west. And sure enough, I was the only relatively journalistic-looking person there by lunchtime.
Residents were out with chainsaws and tarps, cutting up fallen trees and nailing down makeshift covers to keep the coming rains out of the holes in their roofs -- if they still had a roof. Those who weren't working were sitting on porches listening to battery-powered radios for news and alerts, as the whole neighborhood was without power or traffic lights. Several utility trucks were on scene removing fallen power poles and securing cables on the street.
A few people asked me who I was with, as my citizen journalist credentials, with an MTV nametag on one side and an old Huffington Post badge on the other, wouldn't stop spinning around my neck in the wind. When I said I was "just freelancing" and would maybe send footage to CNN's iReport so people would know what was happening here, I heard mumbled appreciation that at least somebody was here.
I shot digital footage and started editing it for upload directly on my handset in Vine City so I could wait around for any more "breaking news." I was receiving text updates that Congressman John Lewis was out surveying the damage and might be heading for this stricken neighborhood.
Vine City is an historic neighborhood that has seen better days. Settled in the 19th century as one of earliest African-American neighborhoods in Atlanta, it has suffered economic and population decline since the 1960s. And while Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. moved to Vine City in 1967, and his widow Coretta remained there for some time, Sunset Street where he lived has not seen the same kind of landmark renovation that the neighborhood of his birth, in the Old Fourth Ward just north of Cabbagetown, has experienced. Many houses and lots lie vacant or abandoned, and one of the nicest looking, most modern buildings in the heart of the neighborhood is the relatively new police precinct. The Vine City Health and Housing Ministry is struggling to revitalize the residential neighborhood before it becomes a cheap target for commercial expansion as nearby downtown grows with convention, sports, and entertainment facilities.
Cabbagetown, meanwhile, is booming by comparison. Created around the same time as Vine City in 1881, the neighborhood consisted largely of white mill workers that moved in around the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill. After the mill closed in 1977, Cabbagetown also experienced hard economic times, but it began a turnaround in the late 1980s and was one of the neighborhoods that enjoyed attention during Atlanta's "intown renaissance" of the 1990s. Today it is a prime destination for young intown residents seeking an expensive margarita on a hot summer day, or a lazy Sunday brunch as eclectic as the artsy neighborhood itself.
So perhaps Vine City just wasn't as interesting as Cabbagetown for on-the-scene news standups because there wasn't much of interest there to be destroyed, unless it happened to be your home that lost its roof or found a tree laying across it.
As I waited for my phone to process its video clips and checked my text messages for any updates on political celebrity appearances, another group of residents asked what was going to become of my footage. "You tell whoever you're sending that to that I need some federal assistance," barked one man half-jokingly (I hope).
"Well, Congressman John Lewis is on his way, I hear, so you can tell him yourself," I reported to them.
Their reaction was flat. A young man in his late teens or early twenties cocked his head as if rolling his eyes and repeated in a long, slow, melodramatic fashion, "Connnnngressman Johhhhhhhn Lewis!" Another man quipped, "Man, what is he gonna do?" A couple of "Mmm-hmms" of agreement were audible.
"Well, what do you think about his seat, then, what about the new guy? Reverend Markel Hutchins -- you think you might vote for him this summer?" They perked up at the news, unaware that there was a challenger for Lewis's House seat this year, but it was apparently welcome news.
I waited around and walked through the neighborhood as long as my battery would allow and finally headed home around 3:15. I had seen neither a news truck nor a politician trying to penetrate the small army of utility vehicles, although hot on my heels was a reporter for the local alt weekly, Creative Loafing. Just as I got inside, the next wave of severe weather rolled over the city with another nerve-wracking tornado warning.
After the afternoon storms passed and the sun broke out again, I was on the phone with CNN vetting details of my video when I finally saw the first network report from the Mt. Gilead church in Vine City on the evening broadcast. Two local stations had finally found the story that had done the rounds on the blogosphere and Twitter all day.
Whether the rest of the city will find -- and help preserve -- Vine City remains to be seen.
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