Here’s how our neighborhoods change: little by little, then all at once. When Reid’s Body Shop on Memorial Drive closed up shop in 2022, Reynoldstown suddenly felt different. Nobody who ever took them a fender bender didn’t love Doug Reid and his son Robbie. Across 68 years they cared for our cars like they were their own. In their kingdom — a scruffy city block, wrapped in chain link and barbed wire, half full of junkers and clunkers — folks got a square deal.
Robbie credits his mother Betty for that square deal mentality, and her love of wildflowers for Reid’s visual signature. Every summer, for as long as anyone could remember, thousands of brilliant orange flowers took over that entire chain link fence — perhaps the finest swath of cosmos in all of Atlanta. Swarming with bees and butterflies. Beacons of beauty and grace, growing up through the cracks. Intentional, not accidental. A reminder for Betty Reid of her country childhood. Any summer morning you walked out the front door of Home grown, full of Comfy Chicken Biscuit, and looked off to your right, there they were, glowing in the slant morning sun. Sublime.
A love letter to Reid’s Seeds
I’m not mad that Reid’s closed. They had a great run, went out on their own terms. Nothing lasts forever. And it’s super that our neighborhood is getting denser. I love having all the new neighbors. This is how cities work best.
But are there ways to keep the past alive, even as you move into the future? What makes a place a place?
Reynoldstown has long grappled with questions like these. Our household count has tripled in just twenty years, yet essential ineffable things remain. The smell of sidewalk barbecue from Franklin and Williams. The rattle and clatter of Hulsey Yard. Gathering under the mighty oak tree at ParkGrounds.
Other neighborhoods have stone monuments and brick mansions. Reynoldstown has skinny streets and very nice weeds in chain link fences. The markers still matter.
Now, though, with the bulldozers warming up, our very nice weeds — that flash of orange saying ‘you are here and it is now’ — were at risk. That’s where the Reynoldstown Rangers came in. Born out of porch chats among neighbors, the Rangers are an engine that runs on curiosity, committed to mapping and marking our place, to making neighbors out of strangers. We’d already revived, after 20 years of dormancy, the iconic Reynoldstown Quilters. The Rangers were the perfect stewards for what we dubbed ‘Reid’s Seeds’. Month after month, long into fall, past an unlocked gate magically left standing open, Ranger volunteers harvested the spiky, brown seedheads, dried them out, and packed them into mason jars. Then we waited.
On the first Saturday in spring, a few dozen neighbors gathered, then split off into teams. The Rangers had mapped out thirty sites where the cosmos might thrive — marginal soil, all-day sun, unlikely to be mowed. A bit of chain link fence nearby. Cosmos aren’t natives, but they are good neighbors, thriving in tough spots, pollinating like crazy, reseeding tidily. Lots of the teams were headed by moms, kids in tow. Like Betty Reid, these moms were passing along their love of wildflowers. Their Reynoldstown kids will grow up in a place where a flash of orange signals that it is summer and they are home.
This article originally appeared in the June 2024 issue of Atlanta Magazine, and can be read here.