Atlanta
— — a city that came back from the fire.
Not only on a wall.
“A city built where the rail lines met in the red-clay hills of north Georgia, burned down to its tracks in 1864 and rebuilt around its own seal of a phoenix. The skyline now reads as a forest with towers in it, the trees holding their ground between Midtown and the Beltline. Magnolias in May, dogwoods earlier, and a humidity that takes the edges off the light. The civil-rights story is here, plainly, on Auburn Avenue.
Atlanta, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Atlanta is the capital of Georgia, founded in 1837 as the southern terminus of the Western and Atlantic Railroad and originally called Terminus. The city sits in the rolling red-clay hills of the north Georgia Piedmont at an elevation around 1,050 feet, higher than most cities of the American South. Population inside the city limits is roughly 500,000; the metropolitan area is the ninth-largest in the United States with about 6.3 million residents across some 28 counties. Hartsfield-Jackson, the world's busiest airport by passenger volume, sits south of downtown and anchors the regional economy.
Atlanta is one of the most heavily forested major cities in the United States, with tree canopy covering nearly 48 percent of the metro by some surveys, and the in-town view from any high floor reads as a green sea broken by towers. Summers are humid and warm, regularly into the low 90s Fahrenheit, with afternoon thunderstorms that move through quickly. Spring brings the dogwoods in late March and the magnolias by May; November color comes later than New England and is mostly oak and hickory across the Piedmont ridges.
The civil-rights heart of the city is along Auburn Avenue in the Old Fourth Ward, where Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929 and where the King Center, his birth home, and Ebenezer Baptist Church are now administered as the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park, run by the National Park Service and free to enter. The Atlanta BeltLine, a 22-mile former rail corridor now being converted into trail and transit, has become the city's most-used public space, particularly the Eastside Trail.