Very quiet sunrise.
Monday, April 27th, 2020
John Portman at Williams, looking east, 9:14 am, Monday, April 27. ©2020, jcburns
When I first moved to Atlanta in the late 1970s, I looked at all the then-new John Portman architecture and thought “whoa, cool, it’s like living in a science fiction novel.” And certainly more than any city’s share of post-apocalyptic dramas have been shot here.
Parts of the city were very quiet this Monday morning, and parts nearby were most certainly not. There’s a lot of construction going on right now. Infrastructure. City streets. New buildings. Hospital expansion. And somehow the enormous dump trucks and oversize flatbeds with prestressed concrete beams are rolling around as if they are in command of the streets.
The crews pulling up street plates and trenching for sewer pipes were, for the most part, unmasked and in close proximity to each other. A few blocks away on Courtland Street, a couple of dozen homeless and needy, with a small handful of masks in various states waited for a morning meal. And at the places—hair salons, massage therapy, tattoos—in the metro where to do your job means coming into close contact with people, the next day of “reopening” got underway.
I guess we won’t know too much about how all these stories end for a few weeks.
