wabe: : Sidney Lanier Memorial Back Home in Piedmont Park (2012-02-08)

This past weekend, a long-absent figure made its way home to Piedmont Park. A bust of poet and composer Sidney Lanier was reinstated near the 14th Street entrance to the park. It's where the statue stood since 1914 before a series of vandalizations and eventually, disappearance.
But now the bust has been restored and we invited two of the men responsible in for a conversation about the memorial and Lanier himself: Boyd Coons, the Executive Director of the Atlanta Preservation Center and Richard Guy Wilson, commonwealth professor in architectural history at the University of Virginia and longtime Sidney Lanier scholar. Coons began the conversation by talking about how a statue of a Macon-born poet who is buried in Baltimore came to be erected in Atlanta in the first place...

Hear our full conversation with Dr. Susan Copeland here.

For more info on the restoration, the Atlanta Preservation Center has a page here.