Inside
Buckhead Reporter
Light up the skies
Where Eagles soar Scout troop makes history AROUND TOWN 9
Jingle Mingle
www.ReporterNewspapers.net
Toys for Tots event on a mission MAKING A DIFFERENCE 12
DEC. 11 — DEC. 24, 2015 • VOL. 9 — NO. 25
Make a wish upon a tree
COMMUNITY 21
Wishing tree offers place to ‘take a moment to appreciate everything’ BY JOE EARLE
joeearle@reporternewspapers.net
Debra Minkley checks some of the paper tags covered with wishes that she has hung on on a tree in front of her home on Powers Ferry Road. Passersby write down their wishes, which she displays on the Wishing Tree. ‘The idea is kind of to throw them to the wind,’ she said.
PHIL MOSIER
Dozens of brightly colored paper tags flutter in the breeze. They’re tied to the bare limbs of a dogwood like leaves that haven’t yet fallen for the change of seasons. They record wishes. “The idea is kind of to throw them to the wind,” said Debra Minkley, who started the Buckhead wishing tree in her front yard Thanksgiving weekend. Minkley made the first wish herself. Since then, passersby on Powers Ferry Road have stopped and left dozens more. They fill out tags with colorful Sharpie pens from the roadside display Minkley set up at the foot of her dogwood tree. A small sign instructs a visitor to record a wish on one side of a tag and to record something he or she is grateful for on the other. Visitors leave their wishes in a glass jar. Minkley collects them, laminates them or covers them with waterproof tape and hangs them from the tree. The wishes cover a lot of territory. “Some of them are poignant,” Minkley said. Some seek peace, for the wish-maker, or for others, or for the world. Some ask for improved health or improved love lives. Others are more idiosyncratic: “I am grateful to be SEE WISH, PAGE 26
Trails show where walkers really want to go BY JOHN RUCH
johnruch@reporternewspapers.net
Dunwoody resident Rashaud Stockdale walks to work on Cotillion Drive in a rut worn in the roadside grass. The road is a major connector to I-285 and the Georgetown commercial district, but for pedestrians, it’s like rural pastureland. “I’d say it feels dangerous,” Stockdale says of the off-road hike he sometimes has to make in the dark. Meanwhile, in Sandy Springs, Cedron Tigner escorts his visually impaired relative Hershell Horton along Hammond Drive. Instead of a sidewalk, there’s a muddy trail, studded with exposed tree roots and stones, which looks imported from a backwoods park. “Taking a chance every time,” Horton says of his walk to a convenience store. These trails blazed by pedestrians are known as “desire paths” or “desire lines”—or, more picturesquely, “goat
trails.” For decades, Atlanta’s car-centric suburbs left pedestrians to fend for themselves. But that’s changing. Sidewalks are now replacing desire paths on such routes as Buford Highway in Atlanta and Brookhaven. But finding the money can be tough, and public accessibility can still spark debates over keeping desire paths in such places as Buckhead’s Atlanta Memorial Park. Desire paths are “especially common in areas where people have no choice except to walk or use public transit” because they don’t own cars, said Sally Flocks, president and CEO of the Atlanta-based pedestrian advocacy group PEDS. “I think attitudes nationwide are changing. I do think a lot more people want the sidewalks,” Flocks said. SEE ROADSIDE, PAGE 10
A plan to add paved walking paths to parts of Atlanta Memorial Park has touched off neighborhood debate. For a larger version of this map go to ReporterNewspapers.net.