Hippie House a.k.a. The Dump a.k.a. Peggy Mitchell’s apartment. In the first floor apartment of this 1899 Victorian mansion at Peachtree and 10th, an iconoclastic woman journalist named Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind.
When I lived in the Hippie House a.k.a. The Dump a.k.a. Peggy Mitchell’s apartment, I was totally alone. I was the caretaker for the abandoned building and lived there rent-free for nine months during 1977. Only gradually did I become aware of the apartment’s history. For about three months in the fall of 1976, I had rented a storefront at Peachtree and Crescent where I was going to begin a freelance photography business. Woeful choice. I was broke. So I asked Boyd Taylor of the Australian/Atlantan real estate firm Hooker Barnes whether he had any maintenance work to be done on his properties since I didn’t have the rent money. Sure, sez he. We’ve got this big old house at the end of the block we’re going to tear down and replace with a midtown skyscraper. You can stay there rent free if you make sure vandals don’t break in and burn it down. And so I became the last resident of The Dump from February-November 1977.
I had two great parties there. One was in the summer on behalf of WABE when public radio superstar Bob Edwards came to Atlanta. It was an old South barbecue in the backyard with Spanish Moss courtesy of my grandfather’s place in Florida. The second was a benefit for Radio Free Georgia on Halloween, 1977. While Rodger French and Toni Shifalo juggled flaming torches in the backyard, some looped friends and I went into the abandoned and very dark third floor with a candle and the hand of a department store mannikin. We held a seance for the spirit of Peggy Mitchell or the daughter of the house’s builder, reportedly killed on the third floor by a jealous lover.
The seance worked.
(to be continued)
Boyd
In the first floor apartment of this 1899 Victorian mansion at Peachtree and 10th, an iconoclastic woman journalist named Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind.
When I lived in the Hippie House a.k.a. The Dump a.k.a. Peggy Mitchell’s apartment, I was totally alone. I was the caretaker for the abandoned building and lived there rent-free for nine months during 1977. Only gradually did I become aware of the apartment’s history. For about three months in the fall of 1976, I had rented a storefront at Peachtree and Crescent where I was going to begin a freelance photography business. Woeful choice. I was broke. So I asked Boyd Taylor of the Australian/Atlantan real estate firm Hooker Barnes whether he had any maintenance work to be done on his properties since I didn’t have the rent money. Sure, sez he. We’ve got this big old house at the end of the block we’re going to tear down and replace with a midtown skyscraper. You can stay there rent free if you make sure vandals don’t break in and burn it down. And so I became the last resident of The Dump from February-November 1977.
I had two great parties there. One was in the summer on behalf of WABE when public radio superstar Bob Edwards came to Atlanta. It was an old South barbecue in the backyard with Spanish Moss courtesy of my grandfather’s place in Florida. The second was a benefit for Radio Free Georgia on Halloween, 1977. While Rodger French and Toni Shifalo juggled flaming torches in the backyard, some looped friends and I went into the abandoned and very dark third floor with a candle and the hand of a department store mannikin. We held a seance for the spirit of Peggy Mitchell or the daughter of the house’s builder, reportedly killed on the third floor by a jealous lover.
The seance worked.
(to be continued)
Boyd