Remembering Virginia Highland’s Past

By Collin Kelley
Editor

Re-connecting with old friends has become de rigueur on Facebook, but local poet Rupert Fike has taken a reunion with old friends off social media and to the streets of Virginia Highland. Fike and four of his childhood buddies – Bill Perry, John Burns, Pete Kelly and Franco Demarco – have been meeting regularly on Saturdays to walk the neighborhood and reminisce about people and places long-gone and to visit the ones still thriving.

“These are guys I grew up with 50 years ago in the late ’50s and early ’60s,” Fike says. “I hadn’t seen any of them in years and then we found each other on Facebook.”  

The friends first got together back in November to walk around VaHi. Fike said after people got over the “suspicious looking guys stopping in front of houses pointing and staring,” residents would come out and tell their own stories about the neighborhood. “Virginia Highland has changed so much,” Fike says.  “It was a working-class neighborhood, and there were even boarding houses for working men that offered a room and meals.”

Some of the places Fike and his friends remember fondly – and not so fondly – are Virginia Fine Foods on Virginia Avenue, which Fike says “were not fine, but cheap.”  Moe’s & Joe’s, a VaHi landmark since 1947, was the closest bar to the Emory University campus and was always full of professors and students, since DeKalb was a dry county in that era.

Another favorite, and still popular today, was George’s, now known for its burgers, but Fike and Co. remember it as a deli where you could get great sandwiches on hoagie rolls. The spot where the Highland Tap is now was once Murrah’s Grocery Store and then became the Texas Drilling Company, a gay bar.

Ragtime and blues guitarist Blind Willie McTell played at the Blue Lantern, which is now the site of The Local. The group also remembers taking the alleyways up to the old Plaza Drugstore (now Urban Outfitters) and Plaza Theatre, then going over to another favorite greasy spoon, Majestic Diner. Some homes in VaHi were lost during the state’s plans to run proposed Interstate 485 through the middle of the community, most notable on the three acres that is now John Howell Park, which would have been the Virginia Avenue off-ramp. Luckily, the community fought back and the character of the neighborhood began to evolve into what it is today.

The guys are meeting up again tomorrow (Jan. 5) at 11 a.m. on Virginia Avenue to walk and tell stories. If you see them, stop and say hello and tell your own story about VaHi.