Let us plant together: The Urban Gardeners of Candler Park

Posted by Kate Sandhaus
May 19 2013

From Scott Jacobs:

Gardeners of Candler Park, unite. Whether you garden vegetables or flowers, organic or traditional, experienced or just beginning with your first seedling, this group can help us all be better gardeners, enjoy our successes, learn from our failures, work collectively, share resources, and just have a good time with other gardeners. The group will be able to think about several kinds of activities, including:    

•              Companionship for gardening addicts: Meeting to exchange gardening methods and information

•              Touring gardens in the neighborhood

•              Trading seeds and seedlings (those of us who germinate always have too many seeds and seedlings)

•              Showing novice gardeners some techniques and advice such as fertilizing, pest control, and trouble shooting

•              Working with researchers to pilot new plant varieties in Atlanta   

•              Organizing relations with local food banks to deliver excess produce

•              Selling produce as part of charity events

•              Organizing with local restaurants “Eat Local” nights where meals are prepared with local produce

•              Supporting local gardens at rest homes and schools with knowledge and seedlings

•              Discussing technologies such as rain water retention and raised beds

•              Keeping rodents out of gardens J

The first kickoff event will be held in June 2013. If you are interested in having more information, please send an email to gardenersofcandler@yahoo.com, Scott Jacobs, who can also be reached at 404 222 2402. 

Next up: May 22 draft Master Plan forum

Posted by Ken Edelstein | Filed under:
May 14 2013

Candler Parkers took a big step at a "Charrette Overview" on May 4 toward completing our neighborhood master plan.

About 70 residents attended the forum, where they were guided by a professional planning team through exercises designed to tease out details on neighborhood priorities. And if you missed it, you can now make your own voice heard by offering specific feedback on the very same topics online. Simply click here.
 
Charrette Overview meeting at Frazer Center. Photo by Aaron FortnerThe next step in the Master Planning process will be a "Draft Plan Community Forum," (7-9:30 pm, May 22, at the Epworth Church Fellowship Hall). At that meeting, planners hope to present draft proposals and more exercises on a wide variety of issues  — ranging from land use to traffic calming to the future of our parks.
 
Then, the planners will cobble together an actual draft plan, which will be made available for online comment and for discussion at a CPNO monthly meeting (tentatively, the June meeting). The trick will be to come up with a draft plan that has broad enough support to gain CPNO approval.
 
“There really is no science behind it,” said Aaron Fortner, who leads the planning team. “We’ll be putting everything forward to the [CP Master Plan] Steering Committee, and collectively we’ll be deciding what should move forward, what should come out, or what should keep being tweaked to keep seeing if we can get somewhere.”
 
“The goal of the plan is to document the community conversations that occur throughout the process and to delineate strategies for implementing those recommendations that have broad-based support,” Fortner said.
 
A refined draft plan should be ready for consideration by CPNO in late summer. And, finally, if approved by CPNO, it would go to the Neighborhood Planning Unit and on to City Council for official adoption.
 
It’s important to remember that having a Master Plan by no means guarantees that its proposals will come to fruition. But it does provide a roadmap for future decisions within the community, and it's likely to influence city officials as they make policy and funding decisions for the neighborhood and the adjoining areas. It also puts Candler Park in a better position to get money for such improvements as traffic calming, streetscapes and park facilities.
 
A similar article appears in this month's Candler Park Messenger.

Fox Bros. Renovations to be Complete by Friday

Posted by Kate Sandhaus
May 14 2013

Fox Bros. renovations will be complete by later this week. See the Patch article here.

Proactive Rezoning & Transit-Oriented Development

Submitted by Kate Sandhaus on Sun, 05/12/2013 - 10:45pm

Date: 
Tue, 05/21/2013 - 6:30pm
Location: 
501-7 Mitchell St, Atlanta, 30314

Candler Park Movie Night - CANCELLED

Posted by Kate Sandhaus
May 11 2013

Due to an ugly radar map showing successive bands of rain coming through tonight, the movie night has been cancelled. It's rescheduled for next Saturday, May 18. Sorry, folks!

New mural on L5P post office wall

Posted by Kate Sandhaus
May 9 2013

Anyone else sick and tired of the ever-present graffiti on the L5P post office wall?

Good news! Check out the awesome new mural that just went up. Hopefully this'll put an end to the graffiti, and instead serve as a nice welcome to the area. Thanks to Lauren Welsh for the heads up and the photo!

Volunteers needed for Tour de Fat in Candler Park this Saturday

Posted by Lauren Welsh | Filed under:
May 7 2013

 

The Tour de Fat event will take place this Saturday, May 11 from 11 am to 5 pm in Candler Park and will include a bicycle parade, music and more. It's very family friendly, and all money raised will support bicycle focused nonprofits here in Atlanta - the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition, Sopo Bicycle Cooperative and SORBA.
The group needs help with volutneers, so please consider signging up. Below is the volutneer sign-up and more information:

Candler Park Movie Night - The Princess Bride

Posted by Kate Sandhaus
May 6 2013

Keep your fingers crossed that the rain will blow outta here. The next movie night is this Saturday, May 11 in the park. And watch out for rodents of unusual size because this week's feature is The Princess Bride!

Festivities begin at 7 pm and the movie goes on at dusk. See you there.

The Princess Bride is a 1987 American romantic comedy adventure film directed and co-produced by Rob Reiner. It is based on the 1973 novel of the same name by William Goldman, an American novelist, playwriter and screenwriter.

It’s Charrette Week: Heart of the master planning process

Posted by Ken Edelstein | Filed under:
Apr 28 2013

Excuse me??!!! You haven’t yet imparted your wisdom to the Candler Park Master Plan?

No sweat. This week, we get our best opportunity to collaborate on this fresh vision for our community's future.
 
For three consecutive evenings (5 p.m. to 8 p.m., April 30-May 2), the Master Plan Charrette will be held at the Hall House on the Mary Lin Elementary campus. Then, on Saturday morning (9 a.m.-10:30 p.m., May 4), at the Frazer Center in Lake Claire, we’ll all gather to hear about and discuss the concepts that emerged from those evening workshops.
 
What, you ask, is a “charrette”? According to the font of all knowledge (Wikipedia), it’s “an intense period of design or planning activity” and “may refer to any collaborative session in which a group of designers drafts a solution to a design problem.”
 
In our case, all community members are welcome to join in the collaboration. At the work sessions, expect a series of illustrations, exercises and questions meant to flesh out ideas that residents proposed during last month’s Kickoff Meeting, on online Snapshot Exercises and in less formal discussions.
 
Many big questions are searching for answers: What park improvements, for example, are we united in favor of? How can we make our sidewalks, roads and intersections safer for pedestrians and cyclists? Could the MARTA station be made more inviting? Could we bring to frution many people's dream of a Candler Park farmers' market? Should the neighborhood favor specific design guidelines? Can DeKalb Avenue be re-imagined as a pedestrian friendly commercial street, and if so, how could we make that transition?
 
Those three afternoon/evening sessions at Mary Lin also provide people who drop by with an opportunity to discuss problems and solutions in more detail with the professionals hired to help us with the plan. And the sessions will be dynamic: Lead planner Aaron Fortner and his team plan to capture the concepts from each three-hour session, and to reflect them back to participants the next evening. The result: Evolving elements of what eventually will be honed into a Draft Master Plan.
 
But if you can only make one Master Plan meeting, Saturday morning’s Charrette Overview Community Forum is the one you don’t want to miss.
 
To steal a couple of sentences on the Overview Forum from the Master Plan website, our planners “will provide a deeper contextual narrative for each of the emerging concepts and will then facilitate a process for obtaining feedback from the community on each of the ideas and recommendations.” (To reserve free childcare for the Overview Forum, click here. For directions, to the Frazer Center in Lake Claire, click here.)

Tonight's Candler Park Movie Night

Posted by Kate Sandhaus
Apr 27 2013

Hello friends,

As you probably know, tonight is the first Candler Park movie night of the season - The Three Stooges.

Mother Nature is being persnickety at the moment, so we are in weather watch mode. Mark & co will make the final call by 3 pm as to go / no go. If tonight's movie ends up being a no go, it'll be rescheduled for next Saturday.

Please stay tuned!
Kate