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FEBRUARY 2020 • VOL. 14 — NO. 2
Buckhead
Reporter
A
Perimeter Business
City authorities
grant tax breaks,
school districts eye
budget impacts
WORTH KNOWING
These
‘angels’
save pets
P10
ROBIN’S NEST
Glamour shots
dress up
your
food
P15
ART & ENTERTAINMENT
P25
2020 Atlanta Jewish
Film Festival
showcases
64 films
im o
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PHOTOS BY JOHN RUCH
Sam Massell is embraced by his wife Sandy Gordy shortly after announcing his
retirement as president of the Buckhead Coalition at its Jan. 29 annual meeting. For the
92-year-old former mayor, it may be his retirement from public life. Story, p. 2. ►
Exhibit explores stru;
successes under Jim trow
BY DYANA BAG BY
dyanabagby@reporternewsj>apers.net
In the center of the life-sized portrait, a
woman wearing glasses stares directly into
the camera. She is surrounded by men and
women, some seated, others standing, all
wearing their finest clothes. A staircase and
doorway serve as a backdrop.
The woman’s name and those with her
have been lost, but they are some of the first
faculty members of Atlanta’s Morris Brown
College, a private, historically black college
founded in 1881 by members of the African
Methodist Episcopal Church. The portrait is
part of the exhibit, “Black Citizenship in the
Age of Jim Crow,” that runs through June 30
at the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead.
See NEW on page 30
Buckhead
leads push
to '
stations
BY JOHN RUCH
johnruch@reporternewspapers.net
When Rachel Thorn’s Pharr Road con
do caught fire in 2016, all five fire stations
in Buckhead’s Battalion 6 responded. Fire
fighters couldn’t save her life, but they
bought her precious time.
“They ran into a burning building,
ran up two flights of steps wearing 75
pounds of gear,” recalled her mother, Eliz
abeth Gill. “She lived for a few hours, long
enough to say goodbye.”
Gill was grateful for that help, and with
her experience as a former president of
the Buckhead Business Association and
the Rotary Club of Buckhead, she won
dered whether there was something she
could do for firefighters in return. In an
era of aging stations and tight salary bud
gets, it turns out the answer was a lot. Now
she’s helping Buckhead to spark what the
Atlanta Fire Rescue Foundation hopes is
a citywide push to adopt stations and im
prove their conditions.
Gill joined Rotary Club members on a
tour of the local stations. “I was just ap
palled by the condition... shocked and ap
palled,” she said, recalling cabinets with
out doors and “furniture you wouldn’t put
in your basement on a bet.” And firefight
ers on 24-hour shifts are left paying out
of their own pockets for their meals and
their internet service.
City Councilmember J.P. Matzigkeit of
Buckhead’s District 8 said there is a reviv
al of longstanding neighborhood concerns
about the local stations, some of which
date to the 1950s. He got Renew Atlanta
bond money earmarked for renovations
of Fire Station 26 on Howell Mill Road,
See BUCKHEAD on page 22
