Fresh Loaf

UPDATE: This article has been expanded with additional reporting.

Little has changed about the Clermont Hotel — or its time-capsule strip club — since Atlanta real estate mogul Jeff Notrica took over the Ponce de Leon Avenue landmark six years ago.

Just as he promised when he bought the 85-year-old building, Notrica resisted the typical developer’s temptation to chop it up into condos or turn it into modern apartments. Downstairs, the storied Clermont Lounge was left untouched and remains its gloriously seedy self.

But it may be that the hands-off approach Notrica, 44, has taken with the Clermont and many of his other properties — a land baron’s acquisitiveness tempered by a collector’s appreciation for each new bauble — has simultaneously helped bring his intown real estate empire crashing down.

Unless a deal is struck between Notrica’s Inman Park Properties and New York-based lender Fairway Capital — or unless a deep-pocketed buyer steps forward — the Clermont Hotel and its lounge will be auctioned off on the courthouse steps July 2.

If that happens, it will be only the latest, if largest, in a long series of foreclosures suffered by Inman Park Properties over the past three months. The company’s apparent meltdown has involved some of the most recognizable and beloved buildings in East Atlanta, Little Five Points, Poncey-Highland and Midtown — causing many residents of those same neighborhoods to cheer the company’s downfall.

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Alabama, home to Space Camp and not much else, lacks the cash to fund plans for a proposed New Orleans-Atlanta high-speed rail line. The proposed route, which could potentially receive federal funds as part of President Barack Obama’s proposed rail network, would be served by trains operating at 110 mph.

From the Birmingham News:

The chairman of the Southern High-Speed Rail Commission says Alabama’s refusal to pay its dues to the organization could cost the Deep South a shot at a high-speed train that would run from New Orleans to Atlanta.

Preliminary work to plan for the line already is complete in Louisiana and Mississippi, Alabama’s partners on the commission, said Chairman Richard Finley of Birmingham. But Alabama – a member of the commission for 26 years – refused to pay dues after 2007, and Finley contends that is standing in the way of the Southeast getting a high-speed corridor.

“The problem is the state of Alabama is blocking us,” Finley said. The state owes $120,000 to the commission for its dues for 2008 and 2009.

That’s depressing, especially since the article says that, if it were funded, the rail line could begin operation in three years. And it looks like Alabama’s not entirely to blame.

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