lakewood

well, after 17 years, the lakewood flea market, or "antiques show," as it so styled itself, is closing tomorrow---it was jam-packed today---i get burnt out on all the stuff pretty quick, but it's always interesting and i wanted to see the buildings again before they get boogered up or, worse, torn down----although it seems like it has been open forever, the antiques market didn't start until 1989---but i found a lot of stuff there, including all of my old mission furniture and a big portion of the furnishings for recreating the interiors of margaret mitchell's apartment--

the city has bought out the rest of the lease on lakewood park and is trying to figure out how to redevelop the site, which is where the city's first waterworks opened in 1875 (the paper dated it 1893, but that's when the "new" waterworks was constructed off howell mill road)---the city built exhibit halls #1 and #2 and opened the first "southeastern fair" at lakewood park in 1916---fulton county built a race track around the lake about the same time, which by the 1950s was being used for stock-car racing---richard petty won his first professional race there---two other exhibit halls (the last, #3, completed in 1948) finished out the original plaza plan on top of the hill above the old lake---it was an agricultural fair, so there were all kinda cattle and poultry and canned preserves and what all---great midway, too, including a wonderful wooden rollercoaster (c. 1920) called the greyhound and a giant ferris wheel---the fair closed in the mid-1970s and the greyhound was blown up for filming of Smokey and the Bandit in 1978---the racetrack was demolished in the 1980s and the lake was long gone before that---the ampitheater opened in the 1980s, too---

anyways they say it's the biggest parcel of undeveloped land in the city now that atlantic station is built---with carver homes gone and pryor road lined with new housing, something is gonna happen---