Checking my Google Reader for the first time in months brought some sad news: the Whale Wall will soon be no more.
The girls at Pecanne Log, my all-time favorite Atlanta blog, have a posted a nice little tribute. They’re right that the mural was kind of crappy and weird, but so were most of my favorite things about Atlanta.
The Whale Wall is one of those things I saw once and then could never seem to find again, convincing me that I’d made it up on some overly-hot summer night. I don’t generally do a lot of hallucinating while riding my bike, but you know how the memory makes strange things seem stranger.
The parking garage the mural used to adorn had some of the coolest ramps to ride — tight corkscrews spanning several stories — and there really was one sweaty summer evening where we rode up and down them till we nearly puked. Getting up to the top is fun, but I was so dizzy I nearly took a spill off the side. Imagine if the Whale Wall was the last thing you saw before you died. Getting down again the correct way was much harder since we had to fight the downhill momentum, keep to the tight turns, and not stop pedaling, then thread the needle between giant concrete pillars with our heads still spinning.
I don’t think I managed to find my way back to the Whale Wall once in the intervening 5 years, until exploring downtown this summer. That was the day we learned about the Hustler’s 10 Commandments, What the Chicken?, and the awesomeness of mixing giant beers at the CNN Center with running in the fountain at Centennial Olympic Park.
I love this wall too. I haven’t seen it in years, but it was on the way to my dad’s work, so I’ll never forget it!
It seems like everyone I know has a Whale Wall story. It makes me even sadder to (not) see it disappear.
Pingback: Summertime in Fishtown « Alexandra Kingsley