I work at Indigo Studios which is located at 660 11th Street Atlanta Georgia 30318.  11th Street is located in between Howell Mill Road and Northside Drive in Midtown Atlanta.  Northside drive is a very unique place to work and is shared by a number of different kinds of people that makes Northside such a wonderful place.  There is always something different, something new.  There honestly could be a reality show purely based on the trials and tribulations of the characters that reside on the street they call Northside.

Northside actually runs from my condo in Vinings then through the edge of Buckhead and then all the way to my office in Midtown.  Its about a ten mile ride with numerous lights along the way which is why I bypass most of it with a quick jump on the freeway.  It’s kinda funny to think of the type of people that litter the streets only ten miles apart from each other.  You see, up by my house Northside is a forested community with rich mansions and preppy neighborhoods that include some of the riches people in Atlanta.  Celebrities such as Jermain Dupree, Oprah,  and Elton John  also have been known to live up in the north end of Northside.  

But that’s not the Northside I work in.  The Northside I work in is the south end.  Almost everyday I have been driving the stretch of Northside that starts at Interstate 75 and ends at Georgia Tech.  Lets just say that it is the ghetto part.  Yeah it’s ghetto, but it’s also an artsy, cool kinda ghetto.  It is beginning to be an art deco neighborhood with a ton of digital art shops like Indigo itself.  We have several competitors right down the street from us.  It also is on the up and up with a couple giant new developments including the wonderful Atlantic Station that is right down the way on 17th Street.

Northside also has a large community of music recording studios that almost completely make up the local Atlanta Rap scene.  Actually Indigo shares a building with Solar Sound Studio that pumps out mad beats that we can hear all day through the wall we share.  The vibrations are accompanied with a heavy stench of marijuana which is something our clients just love.  Also, 5 years ago Indigo was located just a mile down Northside and we were neighbors to the infamous Atlanta rap duo Outkast.  It was pretty cool to see them and there hallowed out cigar remains in our parking lot.

Northside Drive also ends directly at the inner city college Georgia Tech.  It is a beautiful campus with a extremely diverse demograph of people.  Mostly those include nerdy Asian kids and 24 year old women that have never been laid, but overall I’m glad the campus is close.  It is still a college.  It brings a whole other element to Northside and is the main reason it has begun to grow with all the new developments.  College kids need apartments to live in and they are going up everywhere.  Even with such a shitty housing market, there is a massive complex being built right next to Indigo that now dwarfs our building.  I’m just excited cause we are getting a Smoothie King and a Jersey Mikes right next door.  Holler!

But all this is not the true deep down entity of Northside Drive.  Northside itself has its own residence.  It is littered with a large amount of homeless that can be seen daily walking up and down the street.  There has been copper stolen from our neighbours and Indigo itself has been broken into.  There is a metal scrap shop at the end of 11th Street along with three abandoned homes that look as if they were built in the fifties and left to rout in the seventies when cinder block homes went out of style. 

We also have grown to get to know our homeless friends.  At Indigo, we constantly get a knock on the door from the same 2 homeless men asking for our collection of coke cans.  We also have one guy that drives around on his tricycle talking to himself and dancing through traffic. We lock our doors when we see him.   There is actually an abandoned bank where homeless people live, but not in the building just under the covering for the once active drive through ATM.  We often see a skinny black woman sitting in the parking lot of the bank  holding her knees rocking back and forth whispering to herself.  We also see our old friend that used to live in the parking lot of building next door in an abandoned house before they tore it down to build the new apartments.  He calls himself the Sheriff because he watches the neighborhood.  We found out later we was a regular at the local bar Northside Tavern.

Northside Tavern actually is on Howell Mill which is one street over but it is worth mentioning because it is so famous for its live Blues music ever night.  Northside Tavern is one of many wonderful bars and restaurant that are found all over the Northside area including Taco Rio Del Sol, Flip Burger and Six Feet Under.  Unfortunately they are also accompanied by a number of trashy strip clubs and novelty shops.

I once saw a movie named “Crackheads gone wild” that has a wonderful quote from an Atlanta crackhead that said, “I buy my shit on Northside drive!”  I thought it summed up the neighborhood pretty well.