This Week's Tour...
...met at 9:00AM Saturday in front of Inman Perk coffeeshop (240 North Highland Ave NE). We walked for 1 1/2 hours, covering 1 mile of the Beltline, ending at Ponce City Market.
"The Tourists"...
A beautiful day for a Beltline tour with folks from all over Georgia...including a recent New York transplant, a returning/repeat Beltline enthusiast, and my mom!
Thanks for a great tour!
More cool tour-related stuff!
As we approached the massive art piece "Wake" near the Fourth Ward Skatepark, I was trying to geek out on the meta-ness of it all - that this sculpture represents a ship and figurehead that represented the famous opera singer Jenny Lind and that we might be more familiar with as a character in the Hugh Jackman musical "The Greatest Showman"...all of which represent different types of mass marketing...but my brain completely blanked. Below is a better description of the art itself.
"Wake is a large-scale installation modeled on the structural ribs of the nineteenth-century clipper ship U.S.S. Nightingale that rise up from the ground and frame a 21-foot-tall figurative sculpture. The carved sculpture, derived from a figurehead on the prow of the Nightingale, represents the opera singer Jenny Lind. Lind, the first international “superstar” to tour America from 1850-1852, was a spectacle orchestrated by P.T. Barnum and is considered one of the first examples of mass marketing. Subtle animatronic motions allow her to slowly breathe and scan the sky, adding a contemporary upgrade. The Nightingale clipper ship was captured by the Union Army in 186o, ending an attempt to transport enslaved Africans. Specifically for its Atlanta presentation, the figurehead casts her gaze toward 501 Auburn Avenue, the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Wake forms a quiet space for the public to consider the past and future. This work was originally installed in Times Square in New York in 2018."
