Crushing on retro

I have a crush on my neighborhood.

For those of you familiar with Atlanta, we are renting a 1950s ranch house in the urban/suburban area near Toco Hill Shopping Center. It’s one of Atlanta’s first “car suburbs.” (Atlanta’s first suburbs—now considered by many to be intown neighborhoods—were the streetcar suburbs of the 1920s and ’30s. Our section of North Druid Hills was still dairy farms until the mid ’50s when these subdivisions, designed for the city’s new car commuters, were built.)

Why is this woman smiling? Photo credit: RetroRenovation

Maybe it’s that I’m getting older, or maybe it’s the oddly “retro/modern” bent of my current life, but I find myself attracted to and comforted by these aging strip malls and flat brick rectangles of houses on huge lots with carefully manicured lawns.

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