Adair Park I Historic District: The Tour

Lyrics

Good morning. If you'll all gather in. A little closer.
It is ten a.m., second Saturday. Welcome.
Yes, the coffee is from the thermos, help yourselves.
My name is Lydia Coney, and this is the Adair Park I Historic District.
Our walk begins here.

We begin in the 1890s. A streetcar plat.
Note the roofline on this first home, number 412.
A Queen Anne confection, all turrets and projecting bays.
See the fish-scale shingles just below the gable?
This was aspiration built from wood and Georgia clay.
A statement before the bungalow simplified the dream.
We ask that you stay on the sidewalk, please.
The brass plaques are numbered to correspond with your pamphlets.

This is how we hold a story.
By pointing at the transom window, the porch spindle, the slate roof.
This is the National Register's careful catalog.
A walking tour is an act of memory, polished and performed.
Each numbered plaque is a footnote to a ghost.
We tell you what the brick remembers.

Now, as we turn onto Stewart Avenue...
you'll see the vernacular shift toward the Craftsman style.
Lower rooflines. Deeper porches. Exposed rafters.
A more horizontal conversation with the street.
On this block, a permit was filed in 1904.
For a cast-iron boot scraper, to be bolted to the front step.
It is gone now, of course.
But its absence is also part of the record.

This is how we hold a story.
By pointing at the transom window, the porch spindle, the slate roof.
This is the National Register's careful catalog.
A walking tour is an act of memory, polished and performed.
Each numbered plaque is a footnote to a ghost.
We tell you what the brick remembers.

What my clipboard doesn't say...
...is who scraped their boots clean in 1904.
What the census fails to record.
The rent paid, the children raised, the arguments whispered behind those wavy glass panes.
Preservation is a selective art.
We save the blueprint. We save the facade.
The rest is... atmosphere.

And that concludes our tour for this morning.
Feel free to wander, the Welch Street Market is two blocks west.
Thank you for coming.
Thank you.