Picture of the Week (10/26-10/30)

Your Name Here

Atrox Factory

Last year we said we were going to go to the Atrox Factory in Leeds, Alabama. We held true to our word. We did indeed go to the Atrox Factory.

It’s hard to imagine that a 20 minute haunted walk-through would be worth the two hour drive to Leeds, followed by a two hour wait in line, followed by a two hour drive home. But sure enough, it was worth it. It was worth the time spent in transit and the admission price too ($15 per person).

Leeds is a small town, but the folks who run Atrox have managed to find a perfect place for their sprawling event. We were told by an employee that all of the folks who work there are volunteers, which would explain why there was so much more passion there versus what we saw last year at the disappointing Sloss Fright Furnace in Birmingham. We were also told that the proceeds of Atrox went to a charity benefiting children, but we weren’t told which one.

That should be a hefty amount, because on the Friday night we went (the last weekend before Halloween), the place was slammed. There were a lot of teenagers there, although none seemed to be there for the “celebrity” that Atrox had brought out to sign autographs — some guy who played a killer coal miner in a 3-D remake of a Canadian horror movie called My Bloody Valentine.

But the autograph signing and horror movie screening are really just diversions to consume time while waiting to walk through the haunt. And that’s the real story. The whole thing is highly-professional and well worth seeing. It might be spoiling a bit of the fun for you to read this very favorable review from Haunt World, but probably not.

I don’t want to give away too much of what you’ll see when you go through the exhibits. The shock of it all is part of the fun. But even a jaded veteran will find it exciting to push through the doors and barriers into each scene, which are highly detailed and staffed by actors and actresses who are experts at frightening. There’s a good mix of animated props and sets, atmospheric dread, and simple masked folks stepping out of shadows. None of the scenes feel like cheap gimmicks and even though we got separated from the group we walked through with (we think they just sprinted ahead out of terror), the actors managed to “reset” the scene to still give us a scare even though our group had fragmented.

All in all, we were in the palms of the hands of those who put on the production. Nearly every twist or turn evoked either dread, genuine shock and fear, or, at minimum, a feeling of being impressed by all of the time and effort that went into the detailed renderings of, say, the mad scientist’s lab or the crazy butcher shop of corpses or the giant demon thing feasting on the contents of coffins. There was gore. There was sawdust. There was a trippy disorienting tunnel with a tilting ramp. There was, of course, a chainsaw.

The adrenaline of a good long scare just can’t be replaced. Well worth attending.

Montgomery’s Drinking Water

Just put up a post over on our other blog project, Toxic Culture, that implicates the fine city of Montgomery and our drinking water. Go check it out!

If You Go: Auburn

Our trip to Auburn wasn’t due to the best of circumstances. We needed to take the dog to the Small Animal Clinic at the School of Veterinary Medicine. We were determined to make the best of our five hours in Auburn, known by some as “The Loveliest Village On The Plains.”

It was pouring rain. Like a lot. This put a damper on our willingness to wander to and fro, but we still made a serious effort to explore some of the town.

We had lunch at Veggies to Go on College. It’s a meat-and-three type place, and they take the “to go” part pretty seriously. Even though there are plenty of tables in the joint, all the plates/cups/forks/etc are disposable – not so great from an environmental perspective, for sure. But despite the needless landfill bulk, the veggies are good and reasonably priced (four for $4.99, as I recall, drink not included). The cornbread was a little weak, and the banana pudding was pretty light on actual bananas, but we’d eat there again for sure. Great options on the number of veggies to choose from, even if the atmosphere is a little institutional.

Then we went down to the area around Auburn University. First stop: lemonade at Toomer’s (on Toomer’s Corner – they have a webcam here in case you want to see live toilet papering of a tree). Classic Auburn.

Toomer’s Drugs really doesn’t seem to be a drug store at all. It mostly hawks Auburn Tigers schlock, with a tiny little section of the store devoted to a few shelves of over the counter pain killers, just, I guess, so they can keep calling it a drug store. The fabled lemonade itself is a little pricey (more than $3 for a tiny plastic souvenir cup), and was not mixed appropriately, so that the first half tasted like water, and the real lemonade goodness came only once you were close to the bottom.

We walked down the street looking for a place where we could sit and maybe have a beer and play some pool or read. No avail, but we did walk by a bakery with the awesome window art pictured above. Across the street we wandered into Stamp, a print shop with some very cool things for sale. They were very nice. They gave us a map, which was helpful. We made our way to Gay Street, where we found The Gnu’s Room.

We are pretty convinced that The Gnu’s Room is the best used bookstore in the state of Alabama. Anyone got another nominee? Let’s hear it. We love us some Reed’s, sure, but there’s so little there we actually want to read. And New South is SO expensive. Obviously we also love Capitol Books here in Montgomery.

But Gnu’s is up there as the best in Alabama that we’ve ever seen. The collection is great — full of books you actually want to read, with books in boxes on the floor for extra foraging excitement. Prices are quite reasonable, the people are super nice, and it looked like there was good freshly-brewed coffee and food. We look forward to coming back.

After buying a few things, we went next door to the Amsterdam Cafe. We only sat and had a beer, but the food looked good and the atmosphere was nice. It seemed a little spendy, but we might go try it sometime. Seems like a nice place for a chilled out date night kind of atmosphere.

Not sure what else to say about Auburn, exactly. We’re sure people who have spent more time there can say more about the nightlife, and we know that there are other shops & such that we didn’t go into, but we did spend a pretty nice afternoon there, all things considered. We’ll definitely be back to go to The Gnu’s Room, and are certainly open to being given a more extensive tour to highlight the things we may have missed during our unguided explorations.

In the Amsterdam Cafe

The Gnu’s Room

Inside, for reading and chilling out

What’s to eat

So many good books

Wintzell’s Montgomery

There was a great rejoicing from our group of Montgomery friends when it was announced that Montgomery was going to be getting a Wintzell’s Oyster House. And honestly, that note of anticipation was pretty much the high point. Wintzell’s is known by many Alabamians as a great place for seafood. Many, many people speak fondly of the Mobile location(s). If only a fraction of the chain’s good food and service would come to the new expansion location, there would be much more rejoicing. Unfortunately, although we love oysters and seafood places, our heart remains with the Capitol Oyster Bar (and not at all with Young Barn Oyster Pub).

The news was good at first. Wintzell’s would be coming downtown. Anyone who has been faced with lunchtime downtown would obviously celebrate this entry into the gaping maw of the under-performing restaurant scene. Yet, there was dismay attached to the news that instead of fixing up one of the many existing awesome old buildings downtown, the franchise would instead patch onto one of the few parts of downtown that didn’t need any renovations at all, the Marriott Renaissance hotel — which already has a perfectly functional (if overpriced) restaurant.

So finally they opened, latched onto the downtown hotel and slammed full of customers for the first week or more of their time in business. What did we think when we finally got around to checking it out?

The service is just terrible. Look, we’re not those high maintenance customers who order things “extra crunchy” or sub in various ingredients. We’re happy if we can find something on the menu and if you keep our glasses full. We are even good tippers and have personal experience of how difficult life can be for servers, especially in new places where all of the bugs haven’t been worked out yet.

Yet, we have been twice (just to give the place a second chance) and the service is feast or famine. At first, it was the super annoying thing where five servers plus the manager come by to see how everything is. Total overkill. Hard to even get a bite of food in between people checking in on you. One guy even stopped in and seemed to make fun of how much food we had ordered. I reminded him that his place of business charges money for the food and he should be encouraging us to purchase it instead of gawking at the amount that we were consuming.

But then, the famine. Where the parade of people once came by to examine the details of our dining experience, suddenly, we were abandoned. So, again, we’re pretty patient customers here, but at a certain point, you have to get up and just go refill your own tea at the server’s station. And that’s annoying.

Adding to this is the quality of the food. Some of the diners in our party seemed happy. A round of oysters was enjoyed and the beer was cold and in frosty glass mugs. But my dozens of oysters were filled with flecks of shell and grime. And my blackened fish po boy, well, when asked how it was, the only word I could muster was: “toilet.” It took several pieces of the butter drenched toast to wash away the aftertaste of that toxic fish-slab. The fried oyster po boy was overly bread-y, spiritless, and sad. And at dinner it’s about three times the price of a much better sandwich over at Destin Connection.

And the atmosphere just isn’t the kind of place I want to have food. With bare concrete floors, there is massive echo from the swarming crowds. And this magnifies the booming effect when the staff comes out and screams one of their quirky Happy Birthday songs to some unlucky diner. It’s the kind of crap you’d expect at a Flinger’s restaurant from Office Space where they count the pieces of flair on your vest. But it’s not the kind of thing right-minded people want to hear when they are trying to consume some food.

The Montgomery Wintzell’s is going through all the motions. They have studiously assembled some of the atmosphere from the Mobile restaurants; taking the quirky aphorisms from the wall of the original (a great place to eat, in Mobile’s oldest wood frame structure, where layers of scribbled and fraying lawyer jokes and take-my-wife-please themed puns manage to seem authentic because they basically are), lining them up and stapling them up and down the wall. Nothing says funny like a joke calling a woman a battleaxe. In any case, the total fakeness of the quirk made us totally nostalgic for the first Witnzell’s and hate this one. Also the oysters were small. Not so in Mobile.

Yes, they have dollar beer and $5/dozen oysters at happy hour. But at what cost?

Our Heterosexual Riverwalk

We were wandering after a decidedly mediocre meal at the new downtown Wintzell’s (review forthcoming) and decided to walk down to the river. It’s awfully nice down there, especially at dusk, with all the twinkly lights, children running in the fountain, and couples promenading to and fro waiting for their “cruise” to start.

I’d never been down there before, despite having lived in the city for a year and being, in general, pretty civic-minded. Maybe it’s that I don’t want to spend money to ride around on the riverboat (although I’m sure that would be reasonably interesting, and we’ll probably do it one of these days). Also, even though we work downtown and sometimes hang out there (what with the Renaissance happy hour being pretty awesome and all), we’re not especially inclined to wander around, much less to the river. It’s nice and all, and I expect that if we lived downtown (Does anyone actually live in downtown Montgomery? I know The Advertiser periodically runs 50+ redundant photos of loft developments, but am deeply skeptical of someone saying they wanted to live in the Alley as opposed to, say, Cloverdale) we’d value it more as a neighborhood park than we do now.

Anyway, it’s nice. There’s the boat for cruisin’, the stage for bands (check out the list here and consider the total Squidbillies scenario of going to see Molly Hatchet play down there), a fountain zone, and what looks like a place designed as a wedding photo backdrop.

I was interested to find out that Riverfront Facilities is a whole municipal department of the City of Montgomery, with nine full-time employees and some part-time employees. That does seem like sort of a lot, until you consider that “Riverfront Facilities” includes the train depot (including gift shop and Official Montgomery Visitors’ Center), the skate park (cool!), and the “Court Square Round-a-Bout.” Can there possibly be a full-time person necessary to maintain the Court Square area?

The best part of the City’s Riverfront operation has to be their MySpace page, which you can visit here. Never mind the horrifyingly lurid green guitar background, against which the green typeface cannot be read. No, the very best thing on the page is the fact that among the “Riverfront Facilities Details,” someone has decided to declare that the Riverfront is Straight. They chose to fill that out; you do not have to declare your sexual orientation on MySpace, but for some reason it was necessary to make it very, totally, MySpace clear that the Riverfront Facilities are not gay.

The takeaway message here is that the Riverwalk area is pretty great. It’s scenic. They clearly spent a ton of money on it. And they are doing the best they can (it seems) to have events down there and make it a place people want to go. If we can learn anything, not just from the cities of Europe, but from the major fading industrial cities of the North, it’s that it’s good to build your town around a river. People like to look at rivers. It’s in our DNA or something. So it’s nice that the city has finally, nearly 200 years after its incorporation, decided to try to draw average citizens down to the riverbanks.

We hope the citizens of Montgomery will see the river as more than an economic resource for transporting goods and more than a place for dumping industrial waste. And we hope they’ll see the river period, since most people probably just know they have to go over a bridge on the Interstate towards Birmingham and that’s about it. Our river — where the Coosa and the Tallpoosa merge to form the profluent body bearing our state’s very name — is a major asset of our city and we hope to spend a little more time with and on (if not in) it.

Your Wedding Here

At dusk, the doorway

Playing in the fountain

Bobby Bright’s legacy to the city. That and the empty lunch trolley.

The bandshell. Hell, Alabama played here!

Friends, Romans, Montgomeroids…

Nice view of the river

High water marks

The boat, pre-cruise

The grain towers, now a police substation

Fort Toulouse National Historic Park

Up in Wetumpka, where the Coosa and the Tallapoosa join to form the Alabama River, there is a place once described as among the most important strategic sites in the world. It was the talk of kings and ministers all over Europe as France, Spain and England played the Great Game for world domination with the territories and peoples of the so-called New World as both pawns and prizes.

We took the dog to Fort Toulouse National Historic Park on a beautiful fall Sunday. Maybe because the Alabama National Fair is going on, and football season is in full swing, we were among very few visitors that day, and this among any number of other factors seemed to depress the man staffing the Visitor Center. He seemed like he might be easy to depress, but did cheer up slightly when telling us about the park’s upcoming Alabama Frontier Days (Nov 4-8). Then he seemed sad again advising us to come on the weekend for that event (“Unless you want to be around thousands of schoolchildren. Though we used to get 15,000 or so…down to about half that now, with proration and other things”). We plan to go, so expect a full report.

When you drive in to the Park, the Visitor’s Center is a small white house adjoining one of the main parking lots. It has a small gift shop, where we purchased what seems to be the definitive work on Fort Toulouse – Fort Toulouse: The French Outpost at the Alabamas on the Coosa, by Daniel H. Thomas. We paid $20 for it at the gift shop, and were pleasantly surprised to find that this was basically the list price. In any case, the Visitor’s Center also has a room that clearly was (at one time) supposed to be a museum-type room with glass cases, exhibitions, etc. This has not worked out, or is in transit, or something. But we already know a little bit about the site, so we head off in the direction of Fort Toulouse.

Which is where the reproduction of Fort Jackson is. On the original site of Fort Toulouse. And vice-versa – a reproduction of Fort Toulouse’s stockade currently occupies the site where Fort Jackson was. Which is very strange, and must have mortified whoever it was who made what seems like a fairly critical archaeological error.

Fort Toulouse was built by the French as an extension of the Louisiana territory. It was designed to create, basically, a goodwill outpost/early warning station in relation to the Alabamas, who were seen as strategically key to the whole business of keeping the English bottled up in the Carolinas and the Spanish contained in Florida. The French feared that if they lost the goodwill of the Alabamas, their whole operation could be in danger. So, contrary to the inscription on the monolith pictured above, the fort wasn’t set up in defense against the locals at all.

In any case, once you walk into the Fort Jackson replica on the old Fort Toulouse site, you can go through to an old Mississippian mound and a site that was probably occupied for thousands of years before Europeans ever showed up. The banks of the rivers are surprisingly steep around here, and you can really see why this was a perfect place to have a settlement or fort – extremely strategic and defensible.

One of the many William Bartram nature trails in Alabama and elsewhere is also here, although we didn’t walk it. It’s .75 miles or so and goes down to a boat ramp.

Up by the Visitor Center is the old Fort Jackson site, where the Fort Toulouse replica is. There’s a blacksmith shop in the process of being restored by prison labor, its roof partially covered with FEMA tarps. There are also some “Indian houses” which we did not enter. They seemed like they might be full of spiders, and in any case it’s hard to imagine how they could be weirder than the “Indian houses” at Moundville with their strange staged scenes of native life.

There is also a campground and picnic area. Overall, we found this a great place to visit. It is easily the very best place we’ve taken our dog in the Montgomery area. There are plenty of beautiful fields to walk through, and it’s really quite verdant and lovely. We plan to go to Frontier Days and will report back.

The greatest spelling for the greatest number.

The visitor center

On the trail, one small dog

The walls of Fort Jackson, reconstructed. On the Fort Toulouse site.

Historically inaccurate

The woods are really beautiful

This way to Indian Mounds

The mound. Plus one dog.

So much moss!

The river view

At the Bartram Arboretum. Evidently his Seminole nickname was “Puc Puggy.”

Why did someone repeatedly stab the plaque?

Father of all the Fontenots

I wonder if Mike Fontenot knows about this

The fort.

Ok, just kidding. This is the fort.

Door hinges at the fort

Chimneys

“Indian Houses”

Garden, with small black dog

Lovely flowers

The cannon “never fired in anger.”

The house inside Fort Jackson.

The house inside Fort Toulouse

FEMA!

Fort Jackson

Official designation

Picture of the Week (9/21-9/25)

Wanted: Economic recovery

Picture of the week (9/14-9/19)

Greenwood Cemetery

We found Greenwood Cemetery the same way we find lots of things in town – just driving around. We had gone to Oak Park, and decided to follow Highland across Ann Street to see the neighborhood to the north of  and behind the Wal-Mart. That’s how we found the mid-century white gates and Old English font. We both love cemeteries. There’s the obvious essential humanity about mortality and its accompanying rituals; add in the history and culture of burial ceremonies and memorials, the poignancy of being surrounded by some of the last visible remnants of lives lived to their utmost (or not) and the inevitable weirdness you find in any place where folks have been visiting over an extended period of time, and a cemetery can be a great place to get a sense of a community, its culture, and its quirks. Greenwood didn’t disappoint us.

Greenwood’s been open since 1901 and spreads across 150 acres. I learned this from the cemetery’s parent company – it is owned and managed by Dignity™ Memorial (visit their bland corporate-looking website if you wish, although I can’t imagine why you would want to).

The actual real estate is divided into a variety of sections for sub-populations like the Jews, the Masons, and the veterans. And then there’s the super-creepy Babyland, tucked away in the back. Featuring no more than 30 graves or so, Babyland backs up against a chain link fence at the cemetery’s edge. When we were there, a dog was barking at us from a yard on the other side of the fence. We studied the tiny graves, many featuring Santas or toys. The stained toys add to the already tragic atmosphere. Curiously, the burials in this section seemed to end in the mid-70s. Did they run out of space? Was there some kind of problem with Babyland? Customers lost interest in the sales pitch? We may never know.

There are some famous people buried in Greenwood – people like Lister Hill, David and Dixie Graves, and Jim Fyffe. Greenwood’s most famous residents are George and Lurleen Wallace, buried at the “Circle of Life.” Their daughter Peggy wrote this affecting essay about an experience at Greenwood last year. I found their gravesite using the Find a Grave website, where George’s page curiously says that “The Virtual Flowers feature has been turned off for this memorial because it was being continually misused.”

Eternity – with rain gutters and a few dozen strangers

An unsettling name for a cemetery section

2 be 1 ask 1

Jesus in his slightly worn grotto

He seems like he might be angry. Also wistful.

A closer look at a mausoleum

Babyland

Sad

Sadder

Saddest

Poignant. The hatch pulls away to show a picture. Note the shaker.

The grave of Auburn’s former announcer.

This is the part you see from the road.

Mysterious marker.

The Circle of Life

Closer look

Where the urn used to be

George

Lurleen

Seems like a new business venture’s in the works at Greenwood.