I Love Virginia-Highland, Atlanta, Because It's Really Uncool

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Dear Virginia-Highland,

You’ve never been cool. Even though you’re less than three miles north of downtown Atlanta, you haven’t been hip since the turn of the century. (As in, the last century.) Maybe you had a moment in the 1990s, if we’re being generous. But even now, it’s only Emory bros who consider your identical Bud Light-filled watering holes a good night out.

People don’t come to the sleepy streetcar suburb that is you for cocktails or farm-to-table restaurants. Trendy places don’t stand a chance against red-sauce restaurants whose names translate to “the table,” in Italian, or those 40-year old sports bars with decidedly average wings. There’s almost nothing to induce FOMO on social media. I’m not trying to hurt you, but I want to be honest—people don’t come to you unless they already live here.

But that’s the beauty of you. I moved here three years ago, after leaving an ultra-hip area that was gentrifying faster than you can pour a latte. With your family-friendly pace and not-exactly-glitzy nightlife, you gave me more time to spend with myself. Va-Hi (this nickname might be the most embarrassing thing about you) is so far from cool that I finally felt removed from the pressure to join everyone else’s Instagram story, allowing me to figure out what my own story was as a queer woman.

Credit: Tess Malone

And you don’t have just one narrative, either. Everyone fits in, from the families raising their kids in 1920s bungalows to my fellow millennials hosting porch parties in their vintage apartment complexes—some of the few still-affordable places in this rapidly developing city.

As I sit on the balcony of my third-floor walk-up like the narrator of Richard Scarry’s “Busytown”, I spy all the things that make you feel like not just a place to geotag, but a place to call home. There’s the businesswoman walking her pudgy pug, the little girl dancing to a boombox in the front yard, and the dad push-mowing his lawn—the same guy who once swept up glass from a neighbor’s broken-in car because he felt bad.

Sure, you don’t have an Insta-worthy French bakery, but you have all the vestiges of community that people stay for: A hardware store with a charming older man who will cut new keys to onlooking toddlers’ delight, a 60-year-old burger bar with Tuesday trivia that pits boomers against millennials in the best kind of way, and a summer festival where we can all just listen to Fleetwood Mac cover bands. You’re surrounded by everything that is changing Atlanta for better or worse, yet you’ve managed to stay the same. I love you because of how un-Instagrammable you are.

You are not cool, but you’re my home.

Love,
Tess

Happy Valentine’s Day! Read more neighborhood love letters here.

I Love Atlanta’s Virginia-Highland Neighborhood Because It’s Really Uncool