Liquid Death

A proposal for an aquamation facility at a funeral home on Memorial Drive goes down the drain, a victim of local politics, squeamishness around death, and beer.

I live in Pine Lake, and an old friend has been blowing up my inbox for months now to write about a proposed cremation facility nearby. It is a tale of adaptive reuse, and the travails of redeveloping Memorial Drive, and perhaps why every funeral director I’ve ever talked to seems to be as politically wired as an oil lobbyist.

Boston’s Funeral & Cremation Service is at 5644 Memorial Drive, near the end of what used to have the highest concentration of restaurants per mile in the region. The eastern end of Memorial Drive has been sliding downhill since the ‘90s, when white flight drew capital investment into Gwinnett County and out of a community that was increasingly Black.

(Welcome to Black History Month.)

Last year, this funeral home was a brewery. Clarence Boston, a licensed mortician, also owns Hippin’ Hops Brewery in East Atlanta and made the media rounds in 2021 as Georgia’s first Black microbrewery owner.

Boston tried to expand during the pandemic, with a second location on Hosea Williams in East Lake and then on Memorial Drive in the former Piccadilly Restaurant last year. It didn’t go well.

The three pictures below are a literal sign of what that looks like.

Piccadilly Restaurant, 2022

Hippin Hops Brewery, 2023

Boston’s Funeral Service & Crematory, 2024

You’re looking at why site selection matters. Retailers pick a location for lots of reasons, but five are the most important.

Cost. Rent, electricity, gas, insurance, prevailing wages.

Crime. People with money do not shop where they perceive a physical risk.

Traffic count. Higher is better. The more cars that see your business, the more likely it is that someone will stop on their way to or from work to shop there.

Competing and complementary businesses. If a Lowe’s can’t built directly on top of a Home Depot, they’ll build right next to one, because people shopping at Home Depot are likely to grab something they can’t find at Lowe’s, and vice versa. Restaurants and movie theaters. Gyms and athletic equipment shops. Day cares and office parks.

Average household income. This is probably the most determinative: retail stores plant themselves where their customers live. A business that caters to high earners isn’t going to locate in a low-income neighborhood, and vice-versa.

Contemplate this if you are someone agitating for a Starbucks on the corner, or a Trader Joe’s in the neighborhood strip mall. Starbucks, to take an example, usually requires a traffic count of 25,000 cars (or pedestrians) a day, an average income in a two-mile radius in the top two income quintiles — think $85,000 and up right now — low crime and some other draw like a supermarket or entertainment area as site selection criteria. If you don’t have that, Starbucks isn’t coming.

Among the effects of poverty, the traffic count at this end of Memorial Drive has been falling for 20 years, as fewer people use it to commute into Atlanta for work. Fewer people have enough money to own a car.

This is how Memorial Drive’s slide started. Other retailers understand the site selection criteria of big, successful companies like Starbucks and adopt it as their own. Banks also understand these criteria, and generally refuse to lend to entrepreneurs trying to buck the system.

Once the slide starts, it often takes outside intervention — a big, well-planned capital infusion — to reverse it. We’ve seen what that can look like at Atlantic Station, or Madison Yards, or the Assembly in Doraville.

DeKalb leaders have been working on a revitalization plan for the Memorial Drive corridor for about a decade. Little has moved on this front since about 2019, and the pandemic put any real movement on ice. But county planners remain anxious, because Memorial Drive is one of the last patches with redevelopment options that’s also unincorporated. As cities annex commercial real estate to shore up their tax base, the county’s coffers suffer.

Hippin’ Hops was a middle class product in a working class and poor neighborhood. So, Boston did what entrepreneurs do, and shifted. Restaurant success can be site specific. But people die everywhere.

Boston holds a permit for a funeral home on the site of the brewery. When he applied for a special land use permit to open a crematory, some of the neighborhood leaders nearby flipped out.

The stalwarts of Memorial Drive spent years working through the redevelopment plan for the area, attending excruciating stakeholder meetings and conditioning their support for political leaders on their fidelity to the plan. And a crematory was not in the plan.

“He was brewing beer in the same building as the funeral home,” said Jan Dunaway, a prominent neighborhood activist on Memorial Drive. Cremation throws mercury into the air from dental fillings, she said. (The amount of atmospheric mercury released by cremation is typically below reference levels, according to an NIH study.) Dunaway began rallying opposition and found a receptive audience with the Ethiopian-American community nearby.

Opponents leveraged the revitalization plan.

The Memorial Drive plan calls for “smaller scale retail, senior housing, tourist/festival activities, park space, and civic cultural opportunities such as a recreation center, library, or small theatre,” where the funeral home currently sits, said a staff report arguing for denial.

The planning commission voted against granting the permit. The community council voted against granting the permit. The county commission was almost certainly going to vote against the permit.

So Boston shifted again, abandoning a request for a traditional crematory and asking for permission to open up an aquamation facility instead.

Aquamation is alkaline hydrolysis. Instead of burning a dead body, the process dissolves it.

And here, I will disclose my biases, because I am kind of a fan of aquamation. Which is to say, I am a fan of the “Ask a Mortician” YouTube channel, because my wife was goth before goth was a thing and this is what we watch on TV when there’s no new Dune or Star Trek episode.

Aquamation uses water, alkaline chemicals, and heat to accelerate the natural decomposition of the body, leaving behind bone fragments and a sterile liquid. It takes four to six hours to dissolve a body. All that’s left are the minerals from the bones. The liquid can go into wastewater, or used as fertilizer. The bones are powdered and returned to the family in an urn.

Aquamation uses less energy, produces no greenhouse gas emissions and releases no atmospheric mercury. It uses no toxic embalming fluids. It’s sustainable.

Doesn’t matter.

“My neighbors and I are opposed to this use, no matter the form of cremation,” Dunaway wrote. “In DeKalb County, we are under a Federal Consent Decree regarding our sewer system, and adding another three hundred gallons per day of effluent would need to be assessed by watershed and a new application made for this use. … Mr. Boston mentioned the effluent can also be used as fertilizer. Is he planning to use the effluent on his hemp farm in N.C.? Is it legal to move the effluent across State lines? There are too many questions.”

“This use would also impact our property values, both residential and commercial,” she said. Imma call bullshit on that one. The hippies who want their bodies aquamated have money.

But opponents were clearly prepared to make this a war.

Boston told me in a brief conversation that he withdrew his request for a permit a couple of days ago, in the face of public opposition. He had little more to say.

I’ve watched this unfold with two minds. On the one hand, people with the time and energy to invest in developing the community around Memorial Drive have very, very strong views about what they want here: Sandy Springs, south. The interchange at I-285 and Memorial Drive looks like it should be a prime spot for redevelopment, given how little territory with modest real estate prices remains in metro Atlanta. We are finally starting to see bits and pieces of that, like the construction of transit-oriented development near the Indian Creek MARTA station. The scale of that development could carry over to nearby neighborhoods and spark the kind of gentrification that people like me complain about.

But the Memorial Drive revitalization plan looks like people wishing for a Trader Joe’s. To get that, someone is going to have to come in with Assembly-level redevelopment money, and that kind of money usually doesn’t come with a lot of uplift for Black-owned businesses that have been struggling to survive.

Boston is a Black entrepreneur getting creamed in a Black neighborhood, and its hard to cheer that.

A note to readers: I’m getting a lot of notifications that payments aren’t going through because banks aren’t processing the charge. I’ll send some email later to you directly about it if its happened with you. I want your business and need your help. I also understand if this is a burden — that’s why I cut the subscription rate back to $7 a month.

I’m getting swamped right now with insider data from federal employees, and I’m working through it with The Guardian, Rolling Stone and elsewhere — including in one case a direct congressional inquiry. When I can do so without compromising sources, I’ll give you more detail about what I’m hearing from federal agencies. Know that I’m passing what I hear along to the desk at The Guardian, and we’re adding it all up together.

Right now, agencies are digesting the executive order that just came down regarding expected job cuts. A reduction in force order and massive firings are imminent … which will inevitably be followed by action in court to assert civil service protections. This is going to play out over weeks.

Consider this thumbnail math, though. The proposed NIH budget cuts at Emory alone represent about a third of their research budget. Trump asserts that this budget is bloated; it is not. A third of those jobs are going away. Call it 1,500 jobs on $150 million lost, and probably another 1,500 jobs on knock-on economic effects. That’s Emory, alone. There are 9,000 CDC employees in metro Atlanta and something between a third and half are likely to get axed. Managers have been asked to stack rank their staff.

The unemployment rate in DeKalb County in December was at an absurd low of around 3.3 percent. These cuts will raise it to about 4.3 percent overnight.

Now, almost everyone in these jobs is more or less instantly employable. When they speak with me, they are not weeping for their financial prospects. They are weeping for the work going undone. People are going to die because this research isn’t happening. People may already be dying.

DOGE is in charge. I am told that any hiring has to run through the pubescent DOGE staff. I have seen screenshots of questionnaires that amount to ideological purity tests, asking people if they believe January 6 demonstrators should have been prosecuted, for example.

Few enough people are willing to stand up in public and describe what is happening, still. It’s becoming evident that the best way to keep up will be to pair what we see revealed in the lawsuits with what people are willing to leak from inside, for as long as there remain federal employees who are loyal to the Constitution and not the regime.

I’m here. I’m taking it in. And I will report everything I can verify, until someone throws me in a prison cell for doing so.