As you can read in the printed pages and online here, the City of Sandy Springs is celebrating its 20th birthday. While many of the city’s intrepid founders, including newly reelected Mayor Rusty Paul, like to say that the push for independence from Fulton County began decades earlier, there is no question that Sandy Springs set the stage for the cityhood movement that has reshaped Metro Atlanta. 

I wasn’t much older than 20 when I left Sandy Springs, a decade before Eva Cohn Galambos and crew would achieve their goal. Truth be told, I couldn’t wait to spread my wings and experience other places. I needed independence, too, and getting away from my childhood home was how I felt I would achieve it.

That’s what makes the second milestone so poignant, if not slightly ironic. 

A crazy, lucky idea

Five years ago this month, I bought Reporter Newspapers and its portfolio of trailblazing local newspapers whose (declining) revenue came almost exclusively from print advertising. While the endeavor thrilled me, it was, admittedly, an odd time to do so. Media was being upended by technology, and some people were still spraying their mail with Lysol, let alone picking up printed newspapers. 

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The gamble has worked out beyond my expectations. In addition to creating the perfect job for myself, we are closing 2025 with record revenue, and readership approaching one million people each month across print, web, newsletters, and social media.

I don’t take any of this growth or success for granted. As you have read here before, industry headwinds remain fierce, and macroeconomic uncertainty is a constant threat to advertising investment.

I know we are reaching more and more people every week. In fact, a young journalist recently told me that “Even my friends who don’t follow the news read Rough Draft,” and I blushed and beamed simultaneously, pride fighting its way through my imposter syndrome. 

People are reading Rough Draft in print, online, and via email because the work our team puts out day after day is some of the best in town. Not only do I hear it from other local journalists, but I see it in our readership numbers and in the feedback from neighbors who tell me that they rely on our publications to stay informed. 

Our goal is to give you a mix of the news you need (local government, public safety) and the stories you crave (food, arts, real estate), and five years into this local media adventure, I’m really proud that we are hitting that mark. 

Please keep your feedback coming via email (keith@roughdraft.news) or via our year-end survey (it will take you less than two minutes). 

Coming home again

At a recent dinner to talk about the state of Black-Jewish relations in the wake of October 7 and George Floyd, I sat at a table where four people had grown up in Sandy Springs and fled as young adults, only to make their way “home” in the last five or six years. We shared similar stories, but all agreed that we were happy to be where we were. 

Real talk, as the kids say: I never thought I’d be engaged again in the community, let alone own the newspaper that has given me a front-row seat from which I can proudly say, “yeah, I grew up in Sandy Springs. It’s pretty nice, isn’t it?”  

Happy Holidays! Here’s to another 20 years of prosperity for the city and for local journalism.

The post Publisher’s Note: 20 years later, home again appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta.

The second time the girl with the falcon and the Latin tutor meet, he’s embarrassed. 

The first time they met, he mistook the girl – Agnes (Jessie Buckley) – for one of the serving girls, and, in quite a forward move, kissed her before she ran off. He has since learned that she’s the eldest daughter of the family he’s been working for and has come, chagrined, to apologize. But he doesn’t necessarily regret his actions, just his mistake. He’s fascinated by Agnes. In fact, she renders him a bit dumb. “I find speaking to people sometimes difficult,” he tells her. 

Agnes finds his inability to speak a little ironic (and has no problem calling it out). And it is a bit ironic, given that the Latin tutor is William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal). Not yet known for the works that will make him the most famous playwright in history, but a known intellectual and wordsmith around their small town no less. As his stuttering dies down, Will decides to tell Agnes the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. He transforms, then, from an awkward boy to a man alive with the power of the poetry pouring out of him. 

This will become a theme in Agnes (more commonly known as Anne Hathaway) and Will’s relationship — her emotions coming easy, raw, and unfiltered, while he finds it necessary to process his through art. “Hamnet,” Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, dramatizes that dynamic in connection with the death of the couple’s 11-year-old son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), which in turn inspires perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous play, “Hamlet.” (The film begins with by telling us that those two names would have been interchangeable at the time)

While a bit clunky in its narrative setup, “Hamnet” slowly nestles into your heart, evolving into a beautifully considered meditation on art and legacy, but not necessarily in the way you expect a movie that’s, at least in part, about William Shakespeare to be. Although “Hamnet” is unmistakably about grief, it feels trite to pin its considerations down to just the process of dealing with unimaginable loss. Instead, “Hamnet” is also about the pain and joy of creation, both in parenthood and art. It’s about two people in a constant dance with each other and the world, reckoning with their pasts in an attempt to build something stronger together. 

With “Hamnet,” Zhao seems deeply invested in what the novel has to say about legacy. Not from a grand perspective, but rather how we reckon with what it is our parents have left us. Agnes has a strong desire to stay connected to the physical world around her — a trait she picked up from her late mother, and a desire completely divorced from that of her husband, who falls into his imagination to escape his abusive, overbearing father (and even that isn’t far enough away). Her fingernails are dirty, her hair a tangled mess. She chooses to have her firstborn daughter, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) in the woods, the wind wailing, moaning, and screaming with her. 

These are all superficial markers of a woman connected to the natural world, but for this character, it’s less about the forest itself and more about reaching for some spiritual connection to the mother who loved the woods well, and who left her too early. The second time Agnes gives birth to her twins, Hamnet and Judith (Olivia Lynes), she’s forced to stay inside. She wails for her mother, for the relative ease of this process when she could feel her presence in the trees. 

This second birthing scene also represents one of the core ideas of “Hamnet,” which is creation as communion. It might be a very singular thing, to give birth — or, to write a play — but the effect is communal. Agnes’ mother-in-law Mary (Emily Watson) is firmly in the anti-Agnes camp when they first meet, but it’s here where an understanding finally blooms between the two women. In Agnes’ pain and grief, Mary comforts her by telling her that her husband was born in this very room. Took his first breaths over by the window in the corner. She is communicating to Agnes that she and her children belong here as much as they belong in the woods, soothing a fear and creating a new safe haven in the process. 

Will and Agnes are often creating together, but even the things they ostensibly create separately — he misses the birth of the twins, his imagination forever taking him away to London, and later, she is unaware that he is writing a play that shares a name with their deceased son — are forged with both of them in mind. There’s a reason the backdrop for “Hamlet” looks exactly like Agnes’ woods. She is up there as much as he is. 

When grief strikes though, it’s difficult to find that sense of togetherness again. Zhao films many of the scenes in “Hamnet” like a play, a static camera that lets the actors move about the space. The effect can be strangely alienating at times, but when it works it captures the tragedy of change. There is a particular shot of the twins’ room that repeats throughout the film — the shot is the same, but the context is different, a simple way for Zhao to show us the sadness of a space, despite its physical characteristics barely changing, 

In that sadness, it becomes painful to create. It’s agonizing to put so much of yourself into something, dedicate your life to nurturing and protecting it, and have it be gone in an instant. There’s a tension between Buckley and Mescal’s performances throughout the film, but their reactions to Hamnet’s death draw out those stark differences. Buckley is so free with her movements, whether it be an upward quirk of her mouth or the guttural scream she releases upon the death of her son. Mescal feels more self-conscious in a very male, artistic sort of way. He lets out a small, “That’s my boy” when he looks upon Hamnet’s body, the tears only fully coming when he’s alone. 

Agnes has no issue telling him how little she thinks of how he handles his grief. She derides his decision to retreat back into that place in his head, to go back to his stories instead of confronting this head on the way she is forced to. There is an argument to be made that he’s running away. Even with the film’s eventual end, with Will confronting Hamnet’s death through his work, he still left a family behind to do so. He retreated into himself, leaving them to go it alone. The movie never really contends with that damage, rushing through Agnes’ hurt over finding out about the play, whereas the novel wraps you up in her boiling rage. 

And yet, in his retreat, Will finds another act of creation, not to recover what he has lost, but to share in that grief, and joy, and wonder with his wife and the world in the way he knows how. “Hamlet,” thankfully, does not represent a one-to-one of the tragedies of “Hamnet.” So, as the rest of the world feels the pain of a young man avenging his father, feels Agnes and Will’s pain siphoned through a different lens, Agnes is able to finally hear her husband’s grief as best he can express it, to see her son’s desire to be one of his father’s players borne out in the young actor at the show’s helm (Noah Jupe – the real life brother of Jacobi Jupe). It’s just as it was in the beginning, when she was able to hear Will’s love and affection for her through the lens of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. 

Through “Hamlet,” one of the aims of art is achieved: Will, Agnes, and Hamnet’s story becomes something universally understood, but it is still theirs — something forged out of their own pain, and pasts, and joys. Shared, but completely their own. 

The post ‘Hamnet’ and the act of creation as communion appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta.

Go Deeper: More stories about Sandy Springs @ 20.

My first instinct was to look in the daily metro newspaper, but I found only limited coverage of what, at the time, was important news for my neighborhood. That doesn’t seem right, I thought; with so many issues confronting Georgia’s newest city, there should be a local newspaper for residents to read and rely on for up-to-date information.

I had moved to the unincorporated area 10 years earlier and, busy with work and family, watched from a distance as the Sandy Springs cityhood movement finally succeeded. Now, it seemed that we needed a paper of our own, focusing on everything that was happening in our community.

So, I put my publishing experience to work and, with the help of some family and friends, started Springs Publishing. A year later, in January 2007, the first issue of the Sandy Springs Reporter rolled off the press. (Eventually, Springs Publishing would include five more community publications.)

From the beginning, the intent was to offer readers a credible and colorful source of local news with a singular mission—to provide timely and useful information about our new city. We were focused on the people who shaped the community and made it a lively place to live. They were friends and neighbors, reflecting the diversity and energy of this new hometown.

From that first issue, reader feedback in the form of letters, comments and story ideas grew noticeably — along with the number of ads from a wide variety of businesses that could now market their goods and services in a cost-effective manner to nearby readers.

In the first year, the Sandy Springs Reporter provided extensive coverage of the city’s efforts to establish its own police force, pass a tree ordinance, and adopt a comprehensive development plan, among other key initiatives. The paper also shined a light on some overlooked local historic sites such as Glenridge Hall and Morgan Falls Dam.

Some of our best stories over the years came from local people and places: Friends chatting at the Saturday farmer’s market, a homeowner’s group addressing a city council meeting, a school fundraiser, a neighborhood business owner. Usually, the local matters we covered didn’t make the headlines of a big city daily newspaper or fit the sound bites of radio and television news. Nor do they pop up in a Google search. Yet, they were – and still are – the cornerstone of our mission.

It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years since Sandy Springs became a city and nearly as long since the Sandy Springs Reporter was created to inform and illuminate its residents. Five years ago, I was delighted to welcome a new owner, Keith Pepper, who expanded the print and digital reach of the papers while adhering to the same editorial mission and values.

I’m retired now but continue to call Sandy Springs home, with grown kids and grandchildren nearby. And I still get my local news from the Sandy Springs Reporter. Steve Levene is publisher emeritus.

The post Founding publisher: Incorporation drove paper’s creation appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta.

Staying at a business and family favorite hotel in Midtown, with the same name as my first born child, The Barclay. Planning several New York tourist jaunts to see the massive Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, then the nearby Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular with the Rockettes and Santa Claus. With tickets for the latter exceeding the price of our airline flights, that kick line better be good. 

AAA is projecting 125-million Americans will be hitting the road or flying the not-so-friendly skies between Christmas Eve eve and New Year’s Day. The worlds’ busiest airport, Hartsfield Atlanta Jackson International is expecting nearly 4-million passengers through its seven concourses and few hundred gates during that same period. That is roughly half the population of metro New York City through one airport in just over one week.

Weather and flight delays during these jammed flight weeks are more customary than not. Tight flight connections can add another layer of anxiety. However, with the exception of the light crowds during the Covid years, I’ve not seen a holiday travel season without witnessing one or a handful of passenger meltdowns. Most of these occur in the terminal, aimed at Gate Agents, but more than a few in the air as well.

Travel delays cascade, and foul weather at one major airport or hub on the east coast can impact the entire system. Passengers grow sullen and increasingly insistent for answers on the adjusted time of departure and landing… or break out profanity and swear off an air carrier, while swearing at the agent or flight attendant NOT in charge of the proceedings at hand.

Please pack your patience and understanding. When an airline or airport is operating at capacity, impacted by foul weather or even mechanical breakdown, your foul mood will not change the weather forecast, nor expedite an answer on when your flight will make the air. And similarly, on the flight, cold air from Canada and points north can mix with warmer tropic air and hot pockets, causing turbulence or even times when the hot air moves above the cold, that the jet can make a seemingly dramatic drop. Hot air lifts and rises. Cold air, not so much.

If you think about the sheer number of passengers, packages and luggage moved from points A to B to C in such compressed time frames, it really is a marvel of logistics, until you or your flight become the cog jamming or getting caught in a sometimes overwrought system.

My three part treatment plan to reduce your agita and better prepare you for your destination: Consider train travel where Amtrak does go. Rail travel has its own logistical challenges, primarily caused by freight traffic, but I vastly prefer the slower pace, time to rest, write or converse with other passengers and see the country in a way that few now do. Olivia, like me, loves trains, so we will be returning from NYC on the Crescent, sort of the Polar Express in reverse. From the great white north, heading south into the hopefully snow-covered Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, then the Blue Ridge Mountains thereafter, later Charlotte and eventually, mid-Christmas morning, back home in Atlanta.

When traveling with children, turn the various traumas of travel into a game or competition, keep loose score and award the BEST traveler with their first choice of restaurant selection when you reach your holiday destination. You will likely be dining out anyway at some point.

And try to remember, even if the airport or weather in transit is hellish, there are plenty of people out and about with nowhere to go, no one to see, possibly with not even a home to sit in warmly but alone. You and yours are amply blessed, try and turn that frown upside down, sit back and enjoy the ride. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and safe holiday travels.

The post One man’s opinion: Over the river and through the woods appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta.

The closing of the Cheshire Motor Inn on Cheshire Bridge Road hit me with a grief I didn’t fully anticipate. It felt like losing a relative no one ever talked about, but everyone secretly loved, one who held family history in the wrinkles of its sheets and the creak of its floorboards.

As an Atlanta native, I grew up with Cheshire Bridge Road as a living, breathing entity, a stretch of the city that embodied the raw, unfiltered sensuality and liberation that gay men carved out for themselves long before apps, curated nightlife, and rainbow marketing campaigns claimed to stand in for queer community. But the Cheshire Motor Inn was something else entirely. It was a sexual commons, a makeshift temple of longing, a sanctuary where desire could unfold without apology.

Cheshire Bridge Road in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s was notorious and beloved in equal measure. It was Atlanta’s great erotic artery, a place where the boundaries between nightlife, underground culture, and queer self-determination collapsed into one brightly lit, neon-humming ecosystem. Every disco, leather bar, strip club, adult bookstore, every drag bar, every massage parlor, every parked car holding two (or more) men negotiating possibility under the glow of a streetlamp – together they formed a kind of erotic democracy.

Cheshire Bridge was where you learned to recognize and accept desire in the brief flick of an eye, where the coded rituals of cruising were passed down with the precision of “oral” history. As one longtime local put it in the press, Cheshire Bridge was a place where “you can get the best Italian food in the city. You can get [oral sex]. You can buy a dildo. It’s all right there.” It was an ecosystem that existed outside respectability politics, unapologetic and deeply queer.

Within that landscape, the Cheshire Motor Inn became legendary. Built in the late 1950s, the motel was unremarkable in architecture yet extraordinary in cultural function. It was a waystation, a pickup point, a sexual playground, a refuge for men who needed an hour, a night, or a weekend to be fully themselves.

Reviewers online unintentionally preserve what queer oral history often loses: men mentioning the “classic ‘50s look,” the friendly if bemused accepting staff, the rooms that smelled of urine, time and secrets, and in more candid cruising forums, the glow of possibility—“lots of cruising here,” “stairwells are active after midnight,” “Room 115 was friendly,” “met a beautiful married guy here once who changed my life,” “weekend nights are good if you know how to read the signs.” Even the reviews that griped about dilapidation, police presence, or slow nights reveal the deeper truth: this wasn’t just a motel – it was a vessel of intimacy, a queer social network long before such things had digital interfaces.

For me, Cheshire Motor Inn was woven into the fabric of my coming-of-age as a gay man growing up in the conservative oppressive heat of Georgia. It was a place where I had several memorable encounters, moments that helped me understand my own body and desire(s) not as something to fear or conceal but as something alive, tender, electric, and human.

I remember the scuffed carpet, the smell of air-conditioning fighting Atlanta’s summer heat, the roaches, muffled laughter (and screams) from another room, the dirt, the phone that didn’t work, the way the metal railing outside the upstairs rooms vibrated slightly if someone walked by. These sensory fragments form a personal archive: the nervous excitement of waiting for a knock; the shock of instant attraction; the tenderness that sometimes followed; the silence afterward that felt neither lonely nor sad but deeply human.

That personal history inspired me in 2023 to host the Cheshire Motor Inn Biennale in Room 153 – a one-room fearless festival of memory, performance, and reckoning. It was my way of reclaiming and honoring the motel while it still stood, paying homage to the generations of queer men who had passed through those doors. I filled the space with art, stories, and rituals. It became a temporary queer reliquary, an altar to the courage, risk, pleasure, and defiance that had perfumed that room and others for decades. Motel management (wisely) shut it down. But it didn’t stop it from happening. The Cheshire Motor Inn Biennale in Room 153 continued online – inviting everyone virtually into that space, to feel its history and its ghosts. It was a pure reminder that queer sanctuaries don’t need official recognition to matter deeply.

The loss of Cheshire Motor Inn echoes the heartbreak many of us felt when the Parliament House in Orlando closed – a queer palace of drag, decadence, resilience, and weekend-long romance. The Parliament House wasn’t just a hotel or a bar; much like Cheshire, it was a mythical cultural anchor, a place where generations of gay men learned how to belong to themselves and to each other. These fabled venues were not mere businesses; they were queer universities, erotic cathedrals, social laboratories where shame dissolved and identity was forged. Losing them is not the same as losing any other bar or motel. It is losing a location on the emotional map of queer history.

What disturbs me most is that these closures are not isolated events but part of a larger pattern. In a time when queer visibility is paradoxically at a cultural high and political low – when rainbow capitalism thrives even as extremist rhetoric, anti-LGBTQIA legislation, and creeping fascist ideologies spread – the disappearance of queer spaces is deeply symbolic. It signals both an external and internal erosion: the external pressure of gentrification, over-policing, and moral sanitation, and the internal pressure of a culture increasingly encouraged to tidy itself up, to align with heteronormative relatability rather than daring, erotic self-invention.

Neighborhoods across the country are being “cleaned up,” which often means sanitized of the messy, vibrant, sexually liberated queer culture that actually saved lives. Under the guise of progress, developers flatten the architecture of our history. Places like Cheshire Motor Inn – unglamorous, uncurated, and imperfect is especially vulnerable. Yet they were essential: they gave us privacy when we needed it, visibility when we craved it, danger when it was thrilling, comfort when it was scarce and deserved.

So, when I think about the Cheshire Motor Inn now, I feel both sorrow and gratitude. Sorrow for the physical loss, for the soon to be bulldozed rooms and extinguished neon. But gratitude for what it gave us – for the men who found each other there, for the lives changed by a single night, for the bodies that learned how to want without shame, for the art and memory and laughter that soaked into the drywall and carpet (among other things). These things cannot be torn down. They live on in us.

And this is why we must record them. Celebrate them. Write them into our cultural memory. Because what Cheshire Bridge Road represented cannot be replicated by curated pop-up queer events or corporate Pride floats. It was dirtier, truer, riskier, freer. It was ours.

As the country again flirts with authoritarianism, as queer people are told – subtly or overtly – to behave, assimilate, and quiet down, the erasure of our erotic and communal landmarks is a warning. These places mattered. They shaped us. And their disappearance marks not just the loss of architecture, but the loss of a world where queer freedom felt insurgent and alive. We must be proud.

Farewell, Cheshire Motor Inn. Farewell to your flickering neon sign, your uneven stairwells, your rooms full of stories. You gave shelter to our desires when few places would. And in return, we carry you forward – not as a ruin, but as a forever heartfelt pulse.

You will not be erased. We will not be erased.

Editor’s Note: Located behind The Colonnade restaurant, Cheshire Motor Inn closed in October after more than 70 years in business. The future of the property, owned by development firm Selig Enterprises, is unknown at this time.

The post Cheshire Motor Inn and the vanishing map of queer desire appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta.