Honoring the Old

With the new year upon us, I've been thinking a lot about the old and the new in our lives. Not so much "out with the old and in with the new," as honoring the old and celebrating the new. This New Years Eve, we had the privilege of doing both.

Mostly because our other morning plans were thwarted, Jim and I decided to take the boys downtown to visit City Hall East. If you don't know Atlanta, City Hall East is an enormous brick edifice built in the 1920s to be the regional distribution center for Sears and Roebuck Company. Sears added on to the building in the 40s and 60s, making it large enough to occupy several city blocks, abandoned it in the early 80s when it went out of use, and then sold it to the city in 1991 to become the site of various municipal government offices. Now it's empty again, but on its way to being redeveloped, and Jim is involved in that process. For weeks, he has been telling me what an incredible old building it is and urging me to come look around--to see what's there now and catch a vision for what it can become by preserving the best of the old and bringing it a lot of fresh and new. All very appropriate for the dawning of 2011.

So we went. And I played photographer. Here's what we found.

In case you're wondering, we held quite tightly to the boys the whole time. The building is as strong as it gets, but we didn't want them near chipping paint, or bathrooms that have been left uncleaned for a decade or two:).

We expected that they would love the wide open spaces and run laps around rooms like this...

And Little Brother probably would have if we had let him down long enough, but Big Brother, to my surprise, was very nervous about the whole thing. He didn't like the dark, and it bothered him immensely when I hung back to take pictures. Instead of doing much exploring, he consumed himself with making sure that we were all together and that no one in his family got lost. Sweet guy. I think he was glad to leave.

Some of the coolest elements of the place are the relics left behind from its heyday as a Sears distribution center. Like old school freight elevators.

And mechanical parts. 

And the equipment that was once used to operate the building itself.

For crazy people like us, who love to think about what can become of a place, and what that can mean to a city--City Hall East is a pretty incredible building. I can't wait to see what 2011, and the years that follow, will mean for it.

As for celebrating the new, I have another post in the works...the subject of which is so wonderful and so incredibly joyful that I just couldn't add it on here (not to mention that I have a lot of editing left to do on the pictures). So stay tuned.

And Happy New Year!!