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Summer/Fall Volume XXVI Number 2-3

The Atlanta Historical Journal

Urban Structure, Atlanta

Timothy J. Crimmins Dana F. White Guest Editor Guest Editor

Ann E. Woodall Editor

Map Design by Brian Randall Richard Rothman & Associates

Volume XXVI, Numbers 2-3 Summer-Fall 1982

Copyright 1982 by Atlanta Historical Society, Inc. Atlanta, Georgia Cover: The 1895 topographical map of Atlanta and vicinity serves as the background on which railroads and suburbs are highlighted. From the original three railroads of the 1840s evolved the configuration of 1895; since that time, suburban expansion and highway development have dramatically altered the landscape. The layering of Atlanta's metropolitan environment is the focus of this issue. (Courtesy of the Sur­ veyor General, Department of Archives and History, State of Georgia)

Funds for this issue were provided by the Research Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alumni Association of Georgia State University, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the University Research Committee of Emory University.

Additional copies of this number may be obtained from the Society at a cost of $7.00 per copy. Please send checks made payable to the Atlanta Historical Society to 3101 Andrews Dr. N.W., Atlanta, Georgia, 30305. TABLE OF CONTENTS Urban Structure, Atlanta: An Introduction By Dana F. White and Timothy J. Crimmins 6 Part I The Atlanta Palimpsest: Stripping Away the Layers of the Past By Timothy J. Crimmins 13 West End: Metamorphosis from Suburban Town to Intown Neighborhood By Timothy J. Crimmins 33 The Other Side of the Tracks: Cabbagetown—A Working- Class Neighborhood in Transition During the Early Twentieth Century By Stephen W. Grable 51 Breaking Out: Streetcars and Suburban Development, 1872-1900 By Don L. Klima 67 Bungalow Suburbs East and West By Timothy J. Crimmins 83 Part II Landscaped Atlanta: The Romantic Tradition in Cemetery, Park, and Suburban Development By Dana F. White 95 From Suburb to Defended Neighborhood: The Evolution of Inman Park and Ansley Park, 1890-1980 By Rick Beard 113 The Ties That Bind: Work and Family Patterns in the Oakdale Road Section of Druid Hills, 1910-1940 By Andrew M. Ambrose 141 Atlanta University's "Northeast Lot": Community Building for Black Atlanta's "Talented Tenth" By Ann D. Byrne and Dana F. White 155 Part III In the Mind's Eye: The Downtown as Visual Metaphor for the Metropolis By Karen Luehrs and Timothy J. Crimmins 177 The Black Sides of Atlanta: A Geography of Expansion and Containment, 1970-1870 By Dana F. White 199 Contributors 226 This special issue is dedicated to Frederick Gutheim, our first coun­ selor in the ways cities work, and to the late Clarence A. Bacote, our local mentor who introduced us to Atlanta. Timothy J. Crimmins Dana F. White Urban Structure Atlanta:

An Introduction

By Dana F. White and Timothy J. Crimmins

v«roncerning Juan Peron's Argentina, V.S. Naipaul wrote, "... there is no art of historical analysis; there is no art of biography. There is legend and antiquarian romance, but no real history. There are only annals, lists of rulers, chronicles of events."1 The same might be said, we have often thought, of much that passes for urban history. On February 14, 1975, we presented a paper on the "Anatomy of Atlanta: Contours of Regional City Growth" for "The Urban South: Virginia Conference on Urban Studies" at Old Dominion University in Norfolk. A year later, an expanded version of this paper was published in the "Urban Themes in the American South" special issue of the Journal of Urban History.2 Its thrust was a radical departure from the Journal — Summer/Fall 7 kind of non-analytical mode decried by Naipaul toward, again in his words, "real history." Here, we present the initial results of that effort.3 In a document entitled "The Past in the Future," the noted urban- ist Frederick Gutheim set forth, as we described it a half-dozen years ago, a "prospectus for a usable" urban history that was "at once, com­ prehensive and simple: first, select for study the service and delivery systems that tie together the separate parts of the city; second, identify and examine a sampling of those smaller communities that together have created the larger metropolis. "The systems half of our study, we continued, would "trace the city's historical development—through maps and photographs—of such city-wide 'systems' as street patterns, the water supply, sanitary facili­ ties, utilities, transportation lines, postal services, the locating of police stations and fire houses, the building of public libraries and schools (to­ gether with the allocation of administrative personnel), the distribution of churches, patterns of various business services, networks of commu­ nications, and the like. The first part of such a study will be devoted, then, to the city's skeleton. "The second part of the construct, the area analyses, will 'flesh out' the bare bones of part one. Its purpose will be to identify and describe selected districts in Atlanta for intensive study—key locales and neigh­ borhoods—to represent significant stages in the development of Metro Atlanta. These individual histories of old and new neighborhoods, busi­ ness districts, and industrial areas will be detailed but varied in their content; together, they will bring life to the Gate City of the South dur­ ing its first 125 years of existence. "Together, the systems studies and area analyses will provide," we concluded, "an organized picture of the physical development of a ma­ jor American city, a regional metropolis which has long outgrown its original frontier boundaries ..." through an analysis of "the central themes of 'Regional City's' past: its evolution as a nineteenth-century railroad center, its fragile balance in the equilibrium of race relations, its nineteenth- and early twentieth-century suburban expansion, and its reliance on transportation as the determinant of physical expansion."4 In the light of what has happened, as well as what has not hap­ pened since the above was written, we recall Daniel H. Burnham's oft- quoted challenge to city planners: "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work . . . ." We recall, too, the previously-mentioned Frederick Gutheim's amendment to Burnham's injunction: "Make no little plans—and beware of grand designs." To­ day, as we reflect upon our own "grand designs" of 1975, especially the wide range of systems studies that we projected, the good sense of Gutheim's warning wins out. Still, Burnham's advice to "aim high in hope and work" also rings true for, as we trust these pages will demon- 8 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY strate, the systems studies and area analyses do indeed begin to provide the "organized picture of the physical development of a major Ameri­ can city, a regional metropolis" that we described in 1975. Although the two-part approach that we projected in 1975 has held up well, it has not remained unchanged; in fact, it has undergone two major adjustments. To begin with, the distinctions between systems studies and area analyses have not been as marked in practice as they seemed, then, in theory; thus, a number of the articles that follow com­ bine the two. Then, too, area has taken precedence over system. In large part, this was due to the increasing attention given, during the past decade, to the local rather than the metropolitan—the renascence of, to update the classic terms, Gemeinschaft over Gesellschaft stud­ ies.6 Because we profess, and believe in, a usable history, we have at­ tempted to draw upon—as it has been called variously—the neighbor­ hood resettlement, community preservation, or gentrification movement as a vital aspect of our analysis. Hence area over system. Our interest in a usable history has also led us to take literally the advice of G. H. Martin, an historian who has studied the changing envi­ ronment of British towns, to treat the city as a document because "it displays its history in its public face, as well as in its archives."6 It is our hope that the articles in this issue of the Journal will help Atlantans to "read" their city in new ways; to use such physical ele­ ments as older Victorian homes, railroad tracks, street configurations, and topography to see patterns in the historical development of the metropolitan area which they have not noticed before. We have taken special care to assist in this process by using maps and photographs with each of the articles so that readers may see Atlanta as it was and in their travels about the city make the necessary connections with the way it is now. In these pages, Atlanta's history has been divided into three cate­ gories: the first two differentiate between the planned and unplanned dimensions of the city's past while the third contrasts the public image of an expanding New South metropolis with the face it hid behind the color line. In Part One, we begin with, as the British urban historian H.J. Dyos described it, "the history of the 'unplanning of towns.' "7 In Part Two, we examine planned aspects of Atlanta's development. When, where, if there were differences between the planned and the unplanned are constant questions throughout. In both parts, of course, we include systems studies and area analyses; in addition, we introduce the concept of urban generation, a theory which suggests that a city's "actual age may sometimes be less important than its generation or stage of development": "that a city's evolution need not be inescapably linear; instead, it may evidence irregular, even abrupt, periods of growth and decline, boom and bust."8 Using the concept of generation in Part Three, we trace the irregular changes in the skyline and the Journal — Summer/Fall 9 racial configurations of Atlanta to sketch two faces of the city—a public one, the downtown, that came to represent the growing metropolis; the other, a segregated city, that lay invisible on the other side of the color line. Part One describes Atlanta as the "unplanned by-product of a ri­ valry between the merchants of two coastal cities"; that^ it developed when and where it did was the result more of such impersonal influ­ ences as railroad location and topography than of conscious and sus­ tained decision-making. Yet despite the absence of creative plans which help to make such cities as Savannah and Charleston so distinctive to­ day, Atlanta has had a number of forces which have stamped individual and recognizable patterns upon its modern fabric. The guiding concept in Part One is that of "impress," a mark on the city caused by a natural or man-made element which remains as a visual record of earlier times. "The Atlanta Palimpsest: Stripping Away the Layers of the Past" is both a systems study and an area analysis. It traces the larger "im­ presses" of transportation, topography, and racial relations to show how they have shaped the larger patterns of the city, and in the pro­ cess, it explains the evolution of the downtown's highly peculiar street arrangement. "West End: Metamorphosis from Suburban Town to In- town Neighborhood" is an area analysis which shows how the shifting configurations of the larger metropolis have shaped and reshaped one of the oldest settlements in the Atlanta area. "The Other Side of the Tracks: Cabbagetown—A Working-Class Neighborhood in Transition During the Early Twentieth Century" continues the area analysis by demonstrating how this urban mill community was less homogeneous and more unplanned than most Atlantans realize. "Breaking Out: Streetcars and Suburban Development, 1872-1900" combines systems and area analysis to show how early developers used intraurban transportation to attract suburban growth to their land holdings. Many of their grand designs were never realized, but the in­ fluence of the initial trolley magnates remains, even in such apparently unplanned neighborhoods as Midtown. Transportation is also the im­ portant element in the concluding article in Part One. "Bungalow Sub­ urbs East and West" looks at comparable developments in two parts of the city, one white, the other black, in the period before and after World War I. As the newly available automobile brought modern subur­ ban life within reach of the middle class, bungalow houses slightly set back on fifty-foot front lots, with nearby amenities such as schools, parks, and convenience stores, created similar environments on either side of the color line. The neighborhoods in Part One have been se­ lected to represent the larger patterns of change in Atlanta in the past century; their descriptions should help readers view in a new light these communities and those that are similar throughout the metropolitan area. 10 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Part Two focuses on the planned environment. "Landscaped At­ lanta: The Romantic Tradition in Cemetery, Park, and Suburban De­ velopment" measures the Romantic tradition of landscape design (a systems study) as it applies to Oakland and Westview cemeteries, Pied­ mont and Washington parks, and Inman Park, Druid Hills, Ansley Park (area analyses) against sociologist T. Lynn Smith's hypothesis that "in historical perspective urbanization in the South seems to parallel rather closely the process in the nation, with a lag of some fifty years."9 Nar­ rowing the focus to two specific areas for analysis, "From Suburb to Defended Neighborhood: The Evolution of Inman Park and Ansley Park, 1890-1980" examines community building and residential persis­ tence in these first- and second-generation planned suburbs. "The Ties that Bind: Work and Family Patterns in the Oakdale Road Section of Druid Hills, 1910-1940" shifts from the "macro" to the "micro" envi­ ronment by concentrating on the next level of social organization, the functioning neighborhood. And "Atlanta University's 'Northeast Lot': Community Building for Black Atlanta's 'Talented Tenth' " carries the analysis of environmental design to its most intimate level by centering upon the Herndon family home as the focus of a unique cultural enclave. Part Three examines the downtown, an area which has received quite a bit of attention in previous histories of the city, and the black side, that portion of Atlanta created by the color line, which until re­ cently has not been the subject of official histories.10 "In the Mind's Eye: The Downtown as Visual Metaphor for the Metropolis" focuses on the changing landscape of the downtown, showing how the rising sky­ line came to represent a succession of modern images which Atlantans identified with progressive growth. "The Black Sides of Atlanta: A Ge­ ography of Expansion and Containment, 1970-1870" traces the complex and involuted history of the color line to reveal what for many Atlantans is the city's hidden history. "Chicago is the known city," novelist Richard Wright observed some forty years ago. "Especially has no other community in America been so intensely studied, has had brought to bear upon it so blinding a scrutiny" as had this, America's Second City.11 Much of this civic knowledge emanated from "Eleven twenty-six," the offices of the Uni­ versity of Chicago's Department of Sociology and from, in particular, the desk of Robert E. Park. In describing the style of this great urban- ist, the historian of the Chicago School wrote: He [Park] was always in a hurry and wanted amounts of organized knowl­ edge greater than one man could gather in a lifetime. He . . . preferred large-scale discovery and ever expanding generalization to intensive re­ search on a narrow subject. This preference disposed him to work in and through other persons and to collaborate with students in a most gener­ ous style in which he supplied ideas at length and allowed students to get much credit for the research achievements that followed.12 Journal — Summer/Fall 11

We have long regarded Park's example as an enviable one and have sought in our own efforts to make Atlanta a "known city" to follow his lead by emulating his style of work. Thus, this collection is less an an­ thology than it is a genuinely collaborative effort. All of the work herein began in courses that we taught individually, together, and/or with other colleagues from Atlanta University, Emory University, Georgia State, and Georgia Tech; therefore, not only are all of these essays original, but they are also part of a wider collaboration than is customarily found in academic research of this kind. An award from the Division of Research Grants, National Endowment for the Hu­ manities in 1977 provided assistance that enabled us to consult with a gia State University, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Arnall T. Connell, who schooled us in maps and graphics and, thereby, educated us to the point at which we were sufficiently "visually literate" so as to be prepared to consult with Richard Rothman and Brian Ran­ dall in the preparation of the stunning maps in these pages. The same A.T. "Pat" Connell and Roy Dickens taught with us, challenged us, and stimulated our ideas. The late CA. Bacote was our first guide to At­ lanta. We honor his memory. We also wish to acknowledge the assistance of Darlene Roth whose critical eye has profitably viewed many of these articles and whose en­ couragement has helped to bring this project to fruition. Other col­ leagues and students who are not contributors to this volume have of­ fered valuable aid: Louis Williams shared his research findings on the Atlanta Wall; Larry Ervin provided useful leads through the biblio­ graphic maze of community studies; and a number of our students from Atlanta University, Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State will find references to their seminar papers in the notes which accompany the articles. Financial assistance for this volume has been provided by the Na­ tional Endowment for the Humanities, the Alumni Association of Geor­ gia State University, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Emory University. In addition, each of us has received valuable re­ search time from our academic institutions and the encouragement of Professors J. O. Baylen and Melvin Ecke at Georgia State and Dean Charles T. Lester at Emory University. Emotional support has been given again and again by our wives, Carolyn (TJC) and Darlene (DFW). Our special thanks to Ann Woodall, Editor of the Atlanta Histori­ cal Journal, whose style pen has helped to clarify much of what follows and on whose shoulders fell the work of photographic selection, layout, and general administration. As editor of the Journal for the last four years, Ann has brought a level of professionalism that other historical societies should seek to emulate. We are proud to have cooperated on this, the last issue of Ann's tenure. 12 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Finally, we must acknowledge our own collaboration and colleague- ship. One of us (TJC) oversaw the first part, the other (DFW) the sec­ ond, and we shared the third, but each—as has long characterized our partnership—read and criticized all. Through a baker's dozen years, we have worked together on many projects, for a variety of reasons, under a multitude of circumstances, and with a plenitude of results. That, af­ ter all these years, our partnership has grown stronger and our friend­ ship warmer is, literally, remarkable and, necessarily, acknowledgeable.

NOTES

1. The Return of Eva Peron . . . (New York, 1981), p. 153. 2. White & Crimmins, "Urban Structure, Atlanta," Journal of Urban History, 2 (Feb. 1976): 231- 52. 3. In "How Atlanta Grew: Cool Heads, Hot Air, and Hard Work," Atlanta Economic Review, 28 (Jan.-Feb. 1978): 7-15, subsequently reprinted in Urban Atlanta: Redefining the Role of the City, edited by Andrew Marshall Hamer (Atlanta, 1980), pp. 25-44, as well as in Olmsted South: Old South Critic/New South Planner, edited by Dana F. White & Victor A. Kramer (Westport, 1979). Part Two, we introduced earlier results of this effort. The first-named publication was commis­ sioned by the Atlanta Historical Society in 1975 to serve as the concept paper for the exhibition "Four Cheers for Atlanta," which opened the Society's McElreath Hall; subsequently, it served as the basis for a film with the same title. 4. White & Crimmins, "Urban Structure," pp. 233-34. 5. The terms, defined by Frederick Toennies during the late nineteenth centry, may be translated into the group in which "relations of sympathy among the members was a primary feature and emphasis was on the value of the group in and for itself" (Gemeinschaft), as opposed to the group in which the "focus is on its purpose, or task; it is more rationally organized to achieve a purpose and shows greater formalization of interaction" (Gesellschaft). Roland L. Warren, The Commu­ nity in America (Chicago, 1963), pp. 55-56. 6. "The Town as Palimpsest" in H. J. Dyos, ed., The Study of Urban History (London, 1968), p. 155. 7. "Agenda for Urban Historians," in H.J. Dyos The Study of Urban History, p. 39. 8. White, "Landscaped Atlanta," below, p. 95. 9. "The Emergence of Cities," in The Urban South, edited by Rupert B. Vance & Nicholas J. Demerath (Chapel Hill, 1954), p. 33. 10. Studies which focus on the downtown include Edward Y. Clarke, Illustrated History of At­ lanta (Atlanta, 1877&1971); Franklin M. Garrett, Yesterday's Atlanta (Miami, 1974); and Kermit B. Marsh, ed., The American Institute of Architects Guide to Atlanta (Atlanta, 1975). especially pp. 24-99. For books on black Atlanta, see E.R. Carter, The Black Side —A Partial History of the Business, Religious and Educational Side of the Negro in Atlanta (Atlanta, 1894); and Dan Durett and Dana F. White, An-Other Atlanta: The Black Heritage (Atlanta, 1975). 11. "Introduction" to Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, by St. Clair Drake & Horace R. Cayton (New York, 1945), pp. xviii-xix. 12. Robert E.L. Faris, Chicago Sociology 1920-1932 (Chicago, 1967 & 1970), p. 39. N. BOULEVARD PARK

DRUID HILLS A

GRANT PARK ATLANTA'S NEIGHBORHOODS: ATLANTA'S NEIGHBORHOODS: THEN AND NOW THEN AND NOW

Figure 1 Figure 1 13 The Atlanta Palimpsest:

Stripping Away the Layers of the Past

By Timothy J. Crimmins

I he growth of a city is a cumulative as well as a cyclical process," argued Homer Hoyt in his influential study of land values in Chicago. Hoyt's summary of the process of urban growth in a large midwestern city provides a framework for viewing the changing environment of any American city: Each successive building, railroad line, street-car line, or park leaves a permanent impress upon the character of the city. A pattern begins to form at the very outset that with the lapse of time acquires a certain rigidity. The railroad or park system once laid down holds its position through great changes. The physical character of the city is altered by the imposition of new elements, but the effect of the early direction of its 14 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

growth and of buildings that have long since vanished is never entirely lost.1

While patterns will vary from city to city, successive developments leave an "impress" which both helps to explain present arrangements and which also remains as a legacy of previous urban conditions. What are Atlanta's impresses? What remains of them? How are we to ferret them out? To answer questions such as these, we can look to G. H. Martin, a British urban historian, who noted that "a town is a document: it displays its history in its public face, as well as in its archives."2 If we are to understand why there is no obvious order in the street patterns near Five Points, for example, we must look to the "public face" of Atlanta. There is, of course, help to be found in such documents as the early maps of the city, but the advantage of examin­ ing physical patterns of growth is that the city itself is an aid. Again, G. H. Martin offers sound advice: The visual evidence which is our concern here is the evidence that presents itself when we look at a town: the patterns of its streets and buildings, the blemishes upon the uniformity of the present that remind us of the past. If we think of what we see as a text, we recognize very soon that it is not a simple one: beneath the characters that we first trace, there are other words and phrases to be read: the town is a palimpsest.3 A palimpsest—a document whose surface writing has been re­ corded over imperfectly erased remnants of earlier texts—is used by classical scholars to reconstruct lost literary works. The city should be viewed as a palimpsest because the impress of each generation, al­ though modified or imperfectly erased by more recent developments, can be discerned and used to reveal an urban form which otherwise would be lost. Historians, then, can utilize the physical patterns of At­ lanta as a resource to examine urban growth, but these impresses are also valuable signposts for inquiring residents and visitors who wish to understand the present configuration of the metropolis. The rim and spoke arrangement of modern Atlanta's interstate highway system—the rim of 1-285 and the spokes of 1-75, 1-85, and 1-20—provides a conve­ nient frame of reference for current residents: inside and outside the perimeter, downtown (at the intersection of the spokes) and suburban (toward and beyond the rim), northside and southside (of 1-20). The late twentieth-century expressway system has created the modern met­ ropolitan form over the earlier streetcar- and railroad-related impresses of a relatively compact city and outlying suburban towns, a form that in turn was laid on top of wagon roads and Indian trails which predated the urban settlement. It is our intention in this special issue of the Atlanta Historical Journal to provide the necessary aids to peel away the layers of the Journal — Summer/Fall 15 city's past and to assist those who wish to travel through historic At­ lanta to see it and its neighborhoods in new ways. The remains of such imperfectly erased impresses as the railroads, streetcars, and earliest residential settlements are signposts that can be read to understand the city's earlier forms as well as its present arrangement.

II The physical remnant of the decision that led to the creation of "the Gate City of the South" is the Zero Mile Post of the Western and Atlantic Railroad, but the decision-makers who were responsible for this and the other railroads in north Georgia lived far from the site of what would become the leading center of trade in the Southeast. In their view, the growth of a city around the Zero Mile Post was an unfor­ tunate accident, the result of insufficient foresight on their parts. Atlanta is not a planned city; it is, in fact, the unplanned by-prod­ uct of a rivalry between the merchants of two coastal cities—Savannah and Charleston—competing in the early 1840s for the trade of a com­ mon hinterland. By using railroads to reach out to new areas of com­ merce, entrepreneurs in these two southern ports initiated construction of a more advanced transportation system which would ultimately break their dominance over the existing river and canal trade in the Southeast, and in the process, produce a rival urban center which would surpass theirs because of its position in the new railroad network. The technology of rail transport made possible the growth of Atlanta on a landlocked location which heretofore would have had almost no city- building potential. Located six miles from a river at an intersection of wagon roads and Indian trials, the site had not even attracted a tavern, the closest one being three miles to the south in what is now the neigh­ borhood of West End. Indeed, after the three original railroads had been joined at the junction around which Atlanta would grow, Stephen H. Long, the Chief Engineer of the Western and Atlantic Railroad, summed up the prevailing wisdom about the prospects for future urban growth at this site: "Terminus will be a good location for one tavern, a blacksmith shop, a grocery store, and nothing else."4 Yet, a town did emerge around the junction, and its potential for growth mushroomed as a regional and national railroad network came into being. In 1845 the arrival of the Georgia Railroad, which ran to Augusta and Charleston, brought a new name and a new optimism about the future to the city which now called itself Atlanta. But, in 1846, when the Macon and Western, with its access to Macon and Sa­ vannah, completed the linking of three pioneer railroads, Atlanta was little more than an intersection on lines designed to open interior mar­ kets in north Georgia and Tennessee to seacoast merchants. (Figure 1, which shows railways in operation in the United States before the 16 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

1850/1861 DESIGN Richard Rothman A ..IMIIIH Br.an Ran. RAILROADS IN THE SOUTHEAST Figure 1

Civil War, depicts the east-west direction of the rail traffic of the fledgling rail system in South Carolina and Georgia in 1850.) However, this early construction was but the beginning of a southeastern rail net­ work which created overland trade routes that ultimately led to the dis­ placement of Charleston and Savannah as the leading commercial cen­ ters of the region. During the 1850s, Atlanta began to be the hub of a rail web in the Southeast. Between 1851 and 1857, rail lines were built linking the Georgia roads first with Knoxville in eastern Tennessee and later with Journal — Summer/Fall 17

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Figure 2. Key to Atlanta, 1926.

Louisville on the Ohio River and Memphis on the Mississippi. In addi­ tion, the Atlanta and West Point Railroad was completed in 1855, opening up a route to Montgomery, to the productive cotton land of central Alabama, and to a Gulf coastal port at Pensacola. Finally, the connection with Knoxville was extended northeast into Virginia to Lynchburg and through other lines to Richmond and the Northeast. The freight that moved along these lines did not flow as the seacoast merchants had anticipated; it was, in effect, intercepted and distributed by the newer breed of merchants who began to cluster in Atlanta and other cities that had good rail connections in all directions5 (Figure 1). Railroad building in the Southeast continued in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, creating a network in which Atlanta was cen­ trally located. In 1895, the "Gate City of the South" sponsored the Cot­ ton States and International Exposition which highlighted the potential for industrial development made possible by the extensive rail system. From this point on, Atlanta's business leaders championed their city's role as distributional center in the maturing economy of the Southeast. The promotional campaigns of the 1920s produced maps that showed 18 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Atlanta was just hours away from important manufacturing and trade centers throughout the entire eastern half of the United States6 (Figure 2). By mid-twentieth century, the American Guide Series described the city as one of the real railroad capitals of the nation, where an average of 110 passenger trains and 164 freight trains of eight major rail sys­ tems moved through town daily.7 (Figure 3 singles out the major rail­ roads of the United States and the cities around which they were or­ ganized at mid-century.)

Ill The railroad tracks were also the key impress around which nine­ teenth-century urban and suburban growth was structured. Here again, it must be remembered that Atlanta was not a planned city. It was orig­ inally called Terminus because it literally was the end of the line of the State-built Western and Atlantic Railroad which was to start on the east side of the Chattahoochee River and run through the mountainous terrain of north Georgia into eastern Tennessee. The site selected as the terminus of the line was six miles from the Chattahoochee River where there was a gradual grade leading from the 750-foot river elevation to a relatively level 1,000-foot ridge which extended from the northeast to the southwest. This ridge provided a convenient junction with the Western and Macon Railroad, which would lead south to Macon and Savannah, and to the Georgia Railroad, which would connect east with Augusta and Charleston. The ridge on which the fledgling city of At­ lanta began to expand was important both to the early direction of growth and to the topography of the region. To the east and south of the ridge, Intrenchment Creek, Sugar Creek, and the South River drained into the Georgia river system connecting to the Atlantic; to the north, west, and south, the waters of Peachtree Creek, Utoy Creek and the Chattahoochee River flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. (Figure 4 shows the sections of the metropolitan area where the elevation is over 1,000 feet, the river bottoms below 800 feet which drain the area, the three original railroads which followed the ridge line, and the present interstate highway system.) In looking for a way to characterize Atlanta at the turn-of-the-cen- tury, W. E. B. Du Bois called it "the City of a Hundred Hills" because residential clusters were already spreading out beyond the relatively level commercial downtown.8 The topography of the river and ridge is an underlying layer of palimpsest, whose modern surface is now covered by suburban development. To the northeast and northwest of the downtown, ridge lines running northeast to southwest poke their fingers of higher elevation (over 1,000 feet) into north DeKalb County, north Fulton County, Gwinnett County, and Cobb County. The Chattahoo- Journal — Summer/Fall 19

DESIGN Richard Rolhman 4 Associates 8nan Randall 1940 MAJOR U.S. RAILROADS Figure 3

chee River and Peachtree Creek cut valleys through this area, creating variations in grade from 750 feet to 1,075 feet and providing the rolling, wooded hills on which the most recent generation of the city's middle and upper-middle classes built their homes. To the southeast, the South River system drains an area of lower elevation (less than 1,000 feet) where the cul-de-sacs of suburban housing have also been im­ planted. But the original development took place on the land immedi­ ately adjacent to the railroad tracks on relatively level land in the heart of what is now downtown Atlanta. The center of the new city of Atlanta was, of course, the rail pas­ senger terminal, called Union Station, which was located in Land Lot 77 on a site given for that purpose by Samuel Mitchell (Figure 5). The growth of the fledgling town around the station can be understood in terms of two impresses: the footpaths and roads along the 1,000-foot ridge which the railroads followed and the land lot system of land divi­ sion which the State of Georgia used to distribute the land of north Georgia that had been ceded by the Indians. Before the railroads chose their right-of-way, Indians and early settlers had followed the paths of least topographical resistance in their travels in the area. The 1,000-foot ridge line was the location of a road connecting Marietta and Decatur; at a point where this ridge cut to the south and extended a finger to the 20 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Land above 1000 ft. mm Land below 800 ft. Original railroads Interstate highways DESIGN Richard Rothman & Associates Bnan Randall 1860-1980 METROPOLITAN ATLANTA Figure 4 Journal — Summer/Fall 21

Figure 5. G.N. Barnard photo of Atlanta's Union Station, September 1864.

north, trails meandered to White Hall (now West End) and what is presently Buckhead. The railroads chose to follow the Decatur Road and the ridge south toward White Hall because this route would permit the relatively weak locomotives of the time to pull a large load, making possible an adequate intersection with the steeper grade leading to the Chattahoochee River. (Figure 6 and 7 show the intersecting roads and the railroad tracks which later followed their course.) Before the railroad-building had placed the triangular impress to the west of the intersection of these roads, the nearest large towns were Decatur and Marietta, while only a tavern was situated to the south at White Hall. Land ownership in the vicinity of this sparsely settled area was divided among those who controlled the land lots that had been distributed in the land lottery of 1821 (Figure 6). Samuel Mitchell of 22 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

1837 LAND LOTS AND WAGON ROADS

1845 DESIGN Richard Rolhman 4 Associates Brian RaodaM LAND LOTS, WAGON ROADS AND RAILROADS

Figures 6 and 7 Journal — Summer/Fall 23

1850 LAND LOTS, WAGON ROADS, RAILROADS AND ORIGINAL GRID

1853 DESIGN: Richard Rothman A Associates. Brian Randall LAND LOTS, WAGON ROADS, RAILROADS ORIGINAL AND TWO ADDITIONAL GRIDS Figures 8 and 9 24 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 10. Vincent Map of Atlanta, 1853.

Zebulon sought to make the most of his ownership of Land Lot 77 by donating to the State five acres of land in the northeast corner of his holding for railroad shops and by deeding an adjacent block to the Ma­ con and Western for a passenger station. Having taken these steps, Mitchell subdivided and sold seventeen lots around land owned by the State and then speculated on the future of the site (and his potential fortune) by laying a gridiron alignment of streets on the rest of the plot. (Figure 8 shows the four land lots around the rail terminal—numbers 77, 78, 51 and 52—and Mitchell's grid plan. Notice that the streets are set on two axes; the first following the railroad tracks, the second, at right angles, paralleling a straightened version of the road south, now Journal — Summer/Fall 25

Figure 11. Union Depot, 1880. (AHS) called Whitehall Street.) Even though Stephen Long had declared the site to be a poor one, the owners of Land Lots 78 and 52 also subdi­ vided their land in the hopes that urban development would take place. The only difficulty for those of us in present-day Atlanta is that the grid arrangement of the streets in these land lots also followed the course of the railroads and the pre-existing wagon roads (Figure 9). The streets in Land Lot 78 are set perpendicular to Marietta Street and abut into Peachtree Street at awkward angles, creating blocks that are smaller than those in the other quadrants of the early city. Land Lot 52 changes course as Decatur Road and the railroad tracks change direc­ tion. Thus, the confusion of the downtown street configuration is the result of three different land lot owners setting up their own conflicting grids which were aligned with the existing roads and railroad tracks, but which lacked transition points where traffic could flow easily from one section to another. The city fathers attempted to solve the early street problems in 1853 by superimposing a north-south, east-west street arrangement of the unplatted portions of Land Lots 51, 52, and 70 and by setting this interconnecting grid for the remainder of the city, which extended to a one-mile radius of the Zero Mile Post near the rail passenger station (Figure 10). In creating a new regularized grid to govern the easy and efficient 26 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

k*-i Jtm, IM.I | n. i *K'I j 11 36

"1' •*•#:

Figure 12. Viaducts from Central to Broad streets, looking west, 1938. (AHS) growth of the city, Atlantans were following in the footsteps of New Yorkers who earlier had sought to rationalize the conflicting street ar­ rangements that paralleled the changing course of the Hudson and the East rivers by superimposing a grid pattern for the remainder of Man­ hattan Island.9 Atlantans, however, were confronted with one remaining problem, the configuration of the railroad tracks. The triangle of tracks to the west of the rail station created a gulch which slowed growth in that direction, while the tracks of the Georgia Railroad cut a barrier between the fast growing areas of the north and the south side of town (Figure 11). In time, of course, those tracks were bridged over, first for foot and wagon traffic in the 1860s, then for the horse-drawn trolleys in the 1870s and 1880s, and in the 1920s for the automobile, creating what is today an underground rail corridor for train and MARTA subway which runs through the heart of the city. In more recent times the Hunter Street Viaduct (now Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive) crossed the triangular gulch of repair shops and switching areas, while the Omni and World Congress Center spawned development plans for projects that may eventually span the gap that continues to divide the down­ town from the west side (Figure 12).

IV The railroad tracks, then, help to explain the early developmental patterns of Atlanta. But so does another element which was related to Journal — Summer/Fall 27

Figure 13. Survey Map of 1895. 28 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 14. Peachtree Street looking northwest from Ellis Street, c. 1895. (AHS) the original placement of the tracks: topography. The 1,000-foot ridge provided a platform on which the city and its early suburbs were built. The 1853 grid of streets which was to set the direction for future growth did just what a good grid should do: it ignored topography. But those who lived in the city who had to walk up hills and who sought out cool breezes in the summertime were still very much aware of changes in elevation. In the 1870s and 1880s those who could afford it lived in Vic­ torian houses in West End, along Washington Street and what became Capitol Avenue to the south of the railroad station, and on the Peach- tree Street ridge which ran to the north. So, too, in the 1890s suburban towns grew around factories along the tracks to the east in such places as Edgewood, Kirkwood, and Clarkston and to the south in East Point and Manchester (later called College Park). All of these residential ar­ eas were located within the 1,000-foot contour line that ran through the city. And these are the neighborhoods we will examine in the city's first stage of growth. (See Figure 13 which shows the topography and urban development of the metropolitan area as depicted on the Geological Survey map of 1895.) Atlanta's earliest identifiable affluent neighborhoods were residen­ tial radial avenues of the Main Street variety that could be found in growing towns and cities of nineteenth-century America.10 The city's expanding population of merchants and professionals built fashionable Victorian houses along avenues that radiated out from the commercial district around the rail terminal in the center of town. With the arrival of a horse-drawn trolley system in the early 1870s, upper-middle- and upper-class Atlantans began to move out beyond a convenient walking Journal — Summer/Fall 29

Figure 15. View along Washington Street, c. 1890. (AHS)

distance of six or eight blocks from their places of business. In the 1880s Peachtree Street, from the Governor's Mansion (which was lo­ cated on the present site of the Peachtree Plaza Hotel) north to Ponce de Leon Avenue, became the prestige residential avenue in the city (Figure 14). But there were other Main Streets as well. Washington Street and Pryor Street to the south of the tracks were important places to live (Figure 15). And the horse-drawn trolleys also opened up residential possibilities in suburban towns such as West End and Deca­ tur (which were already linked to the city by the railroads). The trans­ formation of the crossroads at White Hall tavern into West End, one of Atlanta's earliest commuter suburbs, is described in the following section. Atlanta also had areas which were more working-class in character. In an article that follows, Steve Grable details the development of Cab- bagetown, a neighborhood which grew in the shadow of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, located along the Georgia Railroad a mile east of Union Station. In this vicinity there was room for the construction of mill-owned housing for the workers and even space nearby for entrepre­ neurs to build rental housing for mill hands as well as others of the growing working class of the city. Transportation and topography were, then, two important im­ presses which shaped the early districts of the city. The Union Station by the Zero Mile Post became the center of a growing commercial dis- 30 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY trict, while the railroads and later the streetcars which emanated be­ yond produced affluent clusterings along Main Street radials, commuter suburbs three to six miles from the city, and working-class districts around factories. Don L. Klima explains how real estate developers/ streetcar promoters lured the more affluent to the fringes of the city between 1870 and 1900 and, in the process, established a socio-eco­ nomic division between the north side and the south side which re­ mains in Atlanta today.

One additional factor that influenced the development of neighbor­ hoods in the city was the color line. Atlanta's black population, which ranged from a high of 45 percent in 1870 to a low of 33 percent in 1900, was engaged in its own community building. Although there was more residential "marble-caking" in the nineteenth century than there is to­ day, there were clearly identifiable black areas. On the east side, around Auburn Avenue, a mixed-class community emerged where a majority of the most prosperous of the black businessmen lived and where several important churches and fraternal organizations were established. On the south side, the Summerhill neighborhood, located on the site of the modern-day stadium, was a much less prosperous area. On the west side, another mixed-class neighborhood grew around Atlanta University and Spelman College. Here could be found middle-class educators as well as laborers who worked in the rail yards of the triangle of tracks separating this section from the emerging downtown. The growth of the black side of the city, then, can also be under­ stood in terms of the impresses of transportation and topography and the less physical presence of a color line. In fact, many have sought to point out a relationship between topography and racial settlement pat­ terns by noting that whites occupied the ridges and blacks the hollows. Examples included Buttermilk Bottom—the site of the Civic Center, which was, before it was bulldozed by urban renewal, a black slum nes­ tled below the Peachtree ridge—and Summerhill—the poor black dis­ trict on low ground on the south side of the city near the modern At­ lanta Stadium. Yet, there were also prominent black settlements on high ground in the city. Morris Brown College was first located to the northeast of the downtown along the Boulevard spine on a ridge which paralleled Peachtree Street; Clark College was first set on a finger of the 1,000-foot plateau which jutted out to the southeast of the business dis­ trict; and Atlanta University on the west side was established on one of the highest hills of the city. The symbolic relationship between the ar­ chitecture of these educational institutions and the topography of At­ lanta was not missed by E. R. Carter, the first historian of the black side of the city, who observed: "All around her borders tower, like the Journal — Summer/Fall 31

Figure 16. The former Rose House at 537 Peachtree St.

mighty hosts of Zion, some of the finest colleges, universities, and semi­ naries for the Black Side, in all this southland, regardless of class or kind."11 Carter also noted in a number of places in his narrative that blacks built "on hills," on heights "in the loveliest parts of the city," and in places "overlooking the city of Atlanta."12 The neighborhoods of Atlanta—black and white, rich and poor—have developed in relation to the impresses of the color line, to­ pography, and transportation. Metropolitan Atlanta of the 1980s stretches into fifteen counties and numbers over two million residents, many of whom find themselves living in an area whose jigsaw part they 32 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY do not perceive as fitting into the whole of the city. The following arti­ cles focusing on the development of selected neighborhoods are in­ tended to make more understandable the larger patterns of change in the city, but they may also be used by residents as guides which will help to strip away the layers of Atlanta's past. The city is a palimpsest whose earlier impresses are very much apparent today. Take the MARTA rail line east along the 1,000-foot ridge line which the Georgia Railroad followed into Atlanta; ride a MARTA bus north out Peachtree Street and look for remnants of the Victorian residences which once lined it (Figure 16 shows Elliott's Antiques in the Rose House, the last remaining residence on Peachtree south of Midtown); or travel west out Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive to see the buildings of Atlanta Uni­ versity (now Morris Brown College) around which black Atlantans be­ gan to cluster in the late 1860s. If, as G. H. Martin said, "a town is a document," you may read the past of Atlanta in your daily travels as well as in the essays that follow.

NOTES

1. One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago: The Relationship of Growth of Chicago to the Rise of Its Land Values, 1830-1933 (Chicago, 1933 and 1970), p. 6, italics added. For a more focused study of the impress of street railways in Atlanta, see Don L. Klima, "Land Barons Ride the Rails: Real Estate Speculators and Street Railways in Late Nineteenth Century Atlanta" (Master's thesis, Georgia State University, 1977), pp. i-iii, 70-80. 2. "The Town as Palimpsest" in H. J. Dyos, ed., The Study of Urban History (London, 1968), p. 155. 3. Ibid. 4. Franklin M. Garrett, Atlanta and Environs: A Chronicle of its People and Events (Athens, Ga., 1954 & 1969), I: 173. 5. Ulrich B. Phillips, A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860 (New York, 1908), p. 18. 6. Dana F. White and Timothy J. Crimmins, "How Atlanta Grew: Cool Heads, Hot Air, and Hard Work," in Andrew Marshall Hamer, ed., Urban Atlanta: Redefining the Role of the City (Atlanta, 1980), pp. 25-44. 7. Paul W. Miller, ed., Atlanta, Capital of the South (New York, 1949), p. 55. 8. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Greenwich, Conn., 1903, 1953, & L961), p. 65. 9. John W. Reps, Town Planning in Frontier America (Princeton, N.J., 1969), pp. 196-203. 10. Carole Rifkind, Main Street: The Face of Urban America (New York, 1977), pp. 88-91. 11. Edward R. Carter, The Black Side (New York, 1894 & 1971), p. 22. 12. Ibid., pp. 22, 45. 33

West End: Metamorphosis from

Suburban Town to Intown Neighborhood

By Timothy J. Crimmins

*\r»9

I he potential for rapid urban growth has always intrigued Ameri­ cans because of the opportunity for quick profits which could be found in the development process. After analyzing one hundred years of growth in Chicago, Homer Hoyt commented on this tendency: As deceptive as a mirage in the desert is this vision of new cities that seem to be about to rise on the outskirts of the old city, and many mem­ bers of the community, fascinated by the picture, are filled with a longing to acquire a plot of land that will so speedily rise in value as a result of this population pressure.1 A vision of new cities, or to be more precise, new suburban towns, has excited Atlantans from the earliest years of the city's growth. Those 34 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 1. Tri-fold postcard showing panoramic view of Spelman Seminary, undated. (AHS) who are currently developing Peachtree City, a new town community thirty-five miles south of the city, share the same enthusiasm that a century ago motivated the promoters of West End, a fledgling settle­ ment three miles south of the city. The story of West End, however, is more than that of an instant suburb; it is an account of the gradual metamorphosis of a crossroads community which predated Atlanta into a separate suburban town in the 1870s and 1880s. Then, as Atlanta con­ tinued its outward sprawl, West End was swallowed up and, in 1894, was annexed as the seventh ward of the city. As newer suburbs ap­ peared beyond the nineteenth-century settlements, West End became an inner-city community. In the last generation, West End has been the site of massive changes wrought by urban renewal, expressway con­ struction, and rapid-rail building; by wholesale racial change; and by residential restoration and revitalization. The stages in the growth of West End have left a series of "impresses" which can be found today in the intown community as reminders both of those who had a vision of a new urban environment and of the variety of forms they created. A generation of pioneers had come to what is now the Atlanta area before the arrival of the railroad that made possible large scale urban growth. The early settlements from this period have been dramatically transformed in the last century and a half as the metropolitan exten­ sion of Atlanta has covered them over with new layers of suburban ex­ pansion. Cities such as Decatur and Marietta, which were quite sepa­ rate in their identities before World War II, are now well within the orbit of the Atlanta urban system. Yet the expansion of the city around surrounding communities is a part of the earliest growth of the city. Before the arrival of the railroads at Terminus, the nearest place of commerce was a crossroads two miles to the southwest of the rail termi­ nal around which Atlanta would grow. In 1830 Charner Humphries chose the intersection of roads leading west to the Indian settlement of Sandtown, south to Newnan, and northeast to Decatur and Lawrence- Journal — Summer/Fall 35

ville as the site for an inn and tavern. These roads, which also followed Indian trails and the lines of least topographical resistance, were being used as horse and wagon routes by the early white settlers moving to the area after the Indian cession of 1821. (Figure 2 shows the road con­ figuration where Humphries built his inn.) Humphries's inn, known as "White Hall" because it was white-washed at a time when weather­ board was the rule, served as a stagecoach stop, post office, and reckon­ ing point and gave an identity to the area. The enterprising Humphries also built a race track to provide diversion and excitement for the pio­ neering farmers and itinerant travelers. The circular track which he carved has left a lasting imprint on Atlanta: first a place for recreation, it was later the site of a garrison for the 101st Militia Unit; then, after the Civil War, the location of the McPherson Barracks of the Federal Army; and lastly, beginning in the 1880s, the campus of Spelman Semi­ nary. (The panoramic view in Figure 1 of the Spelman campus early in the century captures the configuration of the earlier race track.) The race track, which was critical to early growth of White Hall, was a spur to the formation of the town of West End. Part of the area was subdi­ vided into streets in the 1880s, but part of the circumference can be seen today in Greensferry Avenue and Humphries Street which form the eastern boundary of Spelman College2 (Figure 3). The prominence of the site around White Hall Tavern was dimin­ ished considerably in the 1840s when the rail-related growth of Termi­ nus spurred the additional commercial and residential development of the fledging city of Atlanta. However, the railroads also benefitted White Hall: the Western and Macon Railroad (later the Central of Georgia) ran just east of the tavern, giving the surrounding area much greater potential for growth. Predictably, Humphries was succeeded af­ ter his death in 1855 by a series of urban speculators who began to purchase large tracts of land in the hopes of cashing in on the rising 36 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

1835 FIVE POINTS AND ROADS SOUTH

1845-1855 DESIGN Ricnard PothmanA Associales Brian Randall ATLANTA, WHITE HALL AND RAILROADS

Figures 2 and 3 Journal — Summer/Fall 37

DESIGN: Richard Rothman 4 Associates Bnan Randail 1865-1875 CITY OF WEST END

MU0 ©ow uwtm ®F

1885-1895 WEST END/ SEVENTH WARD

Figures 4 and 5 38 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY demand for real estate in the hinterland around Atlanta. (Figure 3 shows White Hall in relation to the fledgling town of Atlanta to the north.) George Washington Adair, John Thrasher, and Thomas Alexan­ der all acquired property in land lots around the White Hall Tavern in hopes residential and industrial development would be forthcoming along the railroad right-of-way to the south of Atlanta.3 The Civil War, which spurred Atlanta's growth, also caused an increase in activity in the White Hall area. Humphries's race track, which had been sold to John Thrasher, became important to the war effort: it was converted into a garrison for troops of the state militia and served as the location of a cartridge factory. Destroyed by Sherman's armies in 1864, this site became as important in the post-war growth of the area as it had in the antebellum period.4 After the war, Federal troops were stationed in barracks built on the former militia site, a development which further encouraged settle­ ment in the White Hall area. The soldiers, living in what became the McPherson Barracks, provided an incentive to the saloon business on adjacent property: no fewer than seven taverns sprang up in the area around the army quarters. The Federal presence also encouraged the settlement nearby of newly freed blacks. The army site was probably used as a Negro refugee dispensary center and asylum, attracting the 300 blacks who constituted almost 50 percent of the 1870 population in the district.8

II The post-war rebuilding of Atlanta and the 1867 creation of the McPherson Barracks both provided impetus for growth in the White Hall area. However, property-owners and residents were interested in controlling the future development of what they envisioned as a new town on the outskirts of a growing Atlanta. Their concerns can be seen in the 1868 incorporation of the town of West End, whose original lim­ its encompassed the land to the south of the McPherson Barracks and to the west of the railroad tracks of the Western and Macon (Figure 4). An insider's account of the original planning of West End in a rem­ iniscing letter to the editor in 1908 described the efforts of real estate promoters to bring "wild lands" (undeveloped properties) "under the influence of a progressive spirit."6 In his letter, Henry Capers claimed that he named the streets "for old army comrades" and that George Washington Adair selected the name of the more famous and fashion­ able West End of London for their proposed suburban town. Having selected a name and laid out lots and streets, the promoters went on to auction properties to those who wished to speculate on the future of the site. With the hindsight of 1908, Capers noted: "Many lots then located on streets that existed only on paper were sold at prices that would now Journal — Summer/Fall 39 be considered ridiculously low."7 They were such bargains forty years earlier because those who invested had designed a favorable suburban environment in order to attract others to pay a higher price for their property. Turning West End into an ideal suburban town required careful calculation by Adair and his fellow promoters. First of all, they took steps to create a symbolic distance between their residents and the U.S. troops who were lodged on the northwest side. The McPherson Bar­ racks were not included in the corporate limits of the new town. A more visible action which distanced the town was the naming of its streets. The main north-south street which led from the town center to the bar­ racks was renamed Lee Street, after Gen. Stephen D. Lee, who com­ manded Confederate troops in the Battle of Ezra Church, while the ma­ jor east-west artery was redesignated Gordon Road after Gen. John B. Gordon. In addition, two other streets, Ashby and Lawton, were named after other Confederate leaders of battles in the Atlanta vicinity. The war might have been over, but the scars it left can be seen in the steps taken by West End developers to give a clearly southern identity to a settlement which might have been tainted by its proximity to a Federal encampment. While the Federal fort could be isolated symbolically, it could not be ignored as a source of economic stimulus to many of the businesses that found themselves within the limits of the new town. Consequently, the charter of West End provided for the regulation of off-duty soldiers who patronized saloons in the town limits. Licensing, rather than prohi­ bition, was the mechanism which was used to regulate these lucrative, but potentially disruptive businesses which could give the new subur­ ban town a bad name, and, worse, keep down property values. Indeed, almost immediately after incorporation, taverns were licensed and ordi­ nances were passed prohibiting unruly behavior. Most of the sessions of the early town council were thus concerned not so much with the de­ tails of city building as with law and order. The council served as a municipal court, devoting most of its time to violators of disorderly con­ duct ordinances.8 The developers of the newly incorporated town of West End wanted to create an environment attractive to settlement. By excluding the U.S. Army facility from their limits and renaming their streets, they sought to remove the stigma which McPherson Barracks might bring them in the highly charged atmosphere of post-war reconstruction. In addition, they sought to control drinking by licensing the dispensers and by arresting street revelers. In this way, business would be main­ tained and the town image would not suffer. Image was important in the late 1860s and early 1870s because landowners were organizing pro­ motional schemes to attract additional growth. The most effective pitch 40 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY extolled the potential of the site for suburban residences for business­ men working in Atlanta. On the eve of incorporation, the Daily Intelli­ gencer described West End as a "delightful suburb which boasts an academy and two stores which provide all the necessities."8 The news­ paper also noted that commuter passes were available on the Macon and Western, with a train into Atlanta in the morning, back and forth for lunch at noon, and home to West End in the evening. While these trains hardly constituted a full commuter schedule, they do show that West End was being promoted as a suburban town like those strung out along the tracks leading into most large American cities in the 1860s. The real growth potential of West End, however, was not to be nur­ tured by the railroad but by the efforts of the promoters of the street railways which provided a more effective link between suburb and city. Early settler and investor George Washington Adair was an incorpora­ tor of the Atlanta Street Railway Company. One of its four radial lines stretched from the Terminal Station southwest along Whitehall Street to Adair Street where it ran west to Lee Street, south to Gordon Road, and west to a spring beyond the town limits (Figure 4). (Don L. Klima details the benefits which accrued to Adair from this endeavor in his article elsewhere in this issue.) But the trolley line did more than in­ crease the wealth of Adair, it helped to set the pattern of development of West End. The intersection of Lee and Gordon, the site of the White Hall Tavern, became the commercial node of West End, with choice Victorian residences being built along the streetcar line to the north and west. By the mid-1870s most of the residential development had occurred along Gordon Road, followed closely by Lee Street. Here could be found the owners of local businesses, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other white-collar workers. Interestingly, most of these were employed in West End; only 14 percent of the town's residents commuted to a place of work in Atlanta.10 Indeed, much of the available land in the town remained vacant due to the deep recession in the mid- and late- 1870s; the earlier promoters had to v/ait almost twenty years to see their town go beyond the paper-plan stage (Figure 4, p. 70).

Ill The limited success of the Atlanta Street Railway Company in sell­ ing land along its right-of-way prompted a new generation of developers to build trolley lines to unsettled portions in the northwest section of the town limits when the economy picked up in the mid-1880s. In 1883 the West End and Atlanta Street Railway was incorporated to run from Broad Street southwest through West End along Porter (Lucille) Ave­ nue on a course that was two blocks to the north of the earlier car lines and that eventually ran through the town to the site of the newly cre­ ated West View Cemetery (incorporated in 1884) (Figure 5). Among the Journal — Summer/Fall 41 officers of the West End line, Benjamin H. Broomhead, the treasurer, and Thomas L. Langston, vice-president, each owned property along the right-of-way. There was also a close association between the street railway and West View Cemetery: Langston served as vice-president for both enterprises.11 The development of the West End and Atlanta Street Railway and of West View Cemetery signaled a new phase in growth to the town of West End: it was being overrun by the expansion of its neighboring city to the north and its potential for development was being spearheaded by a third generation of promoters. The Whitehall Street route of the Atlanta Street Railway Company, which created the impress of the gen­ eration of G.W. Adair, had been designed to open up available land in the West End for development and had spurred the growth of a small commercial district and residential avenues nearby. On the other hand, the newer West End and Atlanta Street Railway ran through undevel­ oped land on the north side of town, but it also was part of plans to promote West View Cemetery, a suburban tract for the dead with park­ like amenities designed to make surrounding real estate more attractive to the living. The success of West View Cemetery was clearly the princi­ pal interest of the investors in the newer trolley line. Speaking for the developers, Edgar P. McBurney announced that the land would be "laid out in drives" and that a "fine landscape gardener" would be hired, creating what would be "for years and years" a park. In typical Atlanta fashion, McBurney pointed to the recently constructed Wood- lawn Cemetery in New York City as the model for the local endeavor and then noted that West View "would not be surpassed by any other cemetery."12 London had been the source of West End's name; New York the inspiration for its cemetery. For those who wished to specu­ late in urban lots, the land along the new trolley line offered investors the downtown of a growing city at one end and a fancy lawn cemetery at the other. By the 1880s the two trolley lines and the railroad connection had made West End an attractive commuter suburb. Joel Chandler Harris, author of the Uncle Remus stories, moved to his home on Gordon Road early in the decade; James M. Smith, governor of Georgia from 1872 to 1877, retired there; and Evan P. Howell, owner of the Constitution and mayor of Atlanta (1904-5), lived on a large estate on Gordon Road (part of which is now Howell Park). A description of the community in Howell's Constitution in 1890 emphasized the middle-class character of the suburb: West End is emphatically a residence community. There are no manufac­ tories with soot and dust, no paupers, but a thrifty, well-to-do class of people, who generally own their homes, who have their garden, their flower yards, their horse and cow and fowls, and, who, away from the noise and dust and strife of the great city, live in quiet and comfort.13 42 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

. JR 0? $ V

,,,,,,•,1' * vit • v iiv IMf

Figure 6. H.M. Potts house. (Atlanta Constitution, April 27, 1890)

The full-page description of "one of Atlanta's most charming sub­ urbs" also included etchings of four of the more imposing Victorian West End residences. (Two of these drawings, the homes of H. M. Potts and Evan P. Howell, can be seen in figures 6 and 7.) But the promotional page on West End did more than extol the amenities of a town where prevailing summer winds came "fresh from the mountains, laden with the fragrance of flowers and the musk of fields." It also de­ scribed the more powerful elixir of successes enjoyed by those who had invested in the suburban town: Many persons have made snug fortunes by investments in the town, for the increases in values have been sure, steady and rapid for seven or eight years, during which time the value of property in many isolated instances has been almost incredible.14 For those who settled in West End in the 1880s steps needed to be taken to protect their investment in a suburban environment. It had been enough for the town fathers to license liquor and enforce public drunkeness laws when the town was formed in the late 1860s. But in the 1880s citizens looked for new techniques to ensure the tranquility of their residential environment. The removal of soldiers from the bar­ racks to the present site of Fort McPherson cut down on the demand Journal — Summer/Fall 43

Figure 7. Evan P. Howell house. (Atlanta Constitution, April 27, 1890)

for liquor and the need to police for disorderly conduct. The influx of the middle class brought both a settled family atmosphere and a de­ mand for prohibition of alcohol to keep it that way. Consequently, in 1890 a new city charter prohibited the production or sale of liquor within the city or within two miles of its limits. But the more serious problem facing the City Council was that of city building: taxes were needed to pay for sewers, street pavings, schools, police, fire protection, and other amenities. West Enders enjoyed a property tax which was one-third of what Atlanta residents paid, but without a manufacturing or commercial base to provide additional revenues, the West End gov­ ernment was hard pressed to provide city services.16 The financial problems of West End might have been met had not local and national disasters prompted residents to look to annexation by Atlanta as the solution to their problems, a course of action which also reflected the functional relationship between the city and its com­ muter suburb. A fire that destroyed three residences pointed to the need for better fire protection and a more efficient water system, both of which could be had relatively inexpensively through annexation. But West End's middle class was protective of the control they exercised over their family-oriented environment; annexation might end prohibi­ tion in their suburb. It took the Panic of 1893 to convince residents that they could not afford the costs of city building. The depression of 44 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 8. 1906 photo of Wren's Nest with Joel Chandler Harris by steps. (AHS)

that year eliminated the possibility of a bond referendum that would help to pay for needed services. The clout that West End's prosperous residents had in Atlanta's business community can be seen in the agree­ ment that made annexation possible: such services as water and sewer, schooling, police and fire, and street lighting would be provided; prohi­ bition would remain in effect in and around West End; and the town would become a self-contained ward within the city with its own repre­ sentatives on the City Council and all city boards. In response to these conditions West Enders voted for annexation, which took place Janu­ ary 1, 1894.16 The annexation of West End as the seventh ward of the City of Atlanta was another beginning for the White Hall area. A property ownership map commissioned by the city in 1894 indicates there were still large tracts of land available for development, especially west of Ashby Street along Oak, Lucille (Porter), Grenwich, and Sells (Figure 5.) Apparently the land along the trolley right-of-way to West View Cemetery did not sell overnight.17 In fact, the suburbanization of West End was a slow process. Developers were active in fringe locations around the Atlanta area, with residential lots in West End merely some Journal — Summer/Fall 45

Figure 9. 1982 photo of E.P. Howell residence at Howell Park.

among the many available. The nucleus of stores, churches, and Victo­ rian residences at the intersection of Lee and Gordon created the core around which the pre-annexation community of West End grew; after­ wards, residential blocks to the northwest and southwest filled in with houses of the more modest bungalow style of the early twentieth cen­ tury. Some of the larger "estates" began to be subdivided for middle- class housing, a process which continued into the 1920s. The changes in West End in the opening decade of the twentieth century can be seen in the disposition of two such estates: those of writer Joel Chandler Harris and of Constitution owner Evan P. Howell. After he stepped down as mayor of Atlanta in 1904, Howell announced his intention to subdivide his ten-acre lot, known as "Woodlawn," on the northeast corner of Gordon and Peeples streets.18 Death, however, intervened; and West End residents helped raise $5,000 toward the $15,000 cost to the city of preserving the grounds of Woodlawn as Howell Park, a memorial to a man who had helped to shape the resi­ dential character of the community and to spur the business expansion of the city as a whole.19 Three years later, Joel Chandler Harris, Howell's fellow newspaperman and neighbor down Gordon Street, died. The movement to provide a memorial to Harris was national as well as local. Andrew Carnegie donated a substantial amount and Theodore 46 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Roosevelt contributed proceeds from a lecture for the memorial fund.20 The Harris shrine was to be his residence, "Wren's Nest," a West End landmark which is still maintained as a reminder of Harris and of the suburban environment of late nineteenth-century Atlanta. (Figure 8 shows the Wren's Nest as it appeared at the turn-of-the-century while Figure 9 depicts the present condition of the Howell resi­ dence—compare it with Figure 7.)

IV As newer suburbs began to dot the landscape around Atlanta in the early decades of the twentieth century, West End began to assume a more urban character. By 1915, the intersection of Gordon and Lee streets had grown into a significant commercial node, hosting a bank and a dozen businesses, including a movie house and two pharmacies. The expansion of business in what was becoming a satellite downtown led in 1927 to the creation of the West End Business Men's Association, an organization which would have an effect on the shape of West End as dramatic as the efforts of earlier generations of promoters.21 The expansion of business activities at Gordon and Lee was sup­ ported by a significant increase in the population of West End in the early decades of the twentieth century. Of the 600 West Enders in 1870, half were black, but suburban growth in the ensuing decades changed that distribution. By 1890, of a population of around 1,000, only one third was black. The relatively slow increase of the first generation of West Enders was followed by a more rapid expansion prompted by an increase in the size of Atlanta and by improved accessibility, provided first by additional trollies and later by the automobile. The 1890 popu­ lation of West End showed a seven-fold increase in size by 1910 to 7,132. The west end of the city continued its population growth as va­ cant lots continued to disappear. By 1930, the seventh ward totaled 22,882, double what it had been ten years earlier. This growth was al­ most exclusively white in its composition; in 1930 only 15 percent of the population was black, the majority of whom were located near Spelman College on the northern fringe of the neighborhood.22 The commercial node at Gordon and Lee expanded dramatically to service the growing local population. To the fifty establishments clustered there in 1930 were added new suburban branches of national and regional businesses such as Sears, Woolworth's, Goodyear, Firestone, and Piggly-Wiggly.23 The West End Business Men's Association was instrumental in re­ shaping the community in the 1950s and 1960s with its efforts to make the stores around Gordon and Lee more accessible to shoppers and to stabilize the population of their aging neighborhood. In the mid-1950s the Association championed the widening of Gordon Street to accom­ modate both parking and smooth traffic flow and the construction of I- Journal — Summer/Fall 47

20 along the northern boundary of the community, where the business­ men believed that off-ramps at Lee and Ashby streets would bring droves of shoppers to their satellite business district. The widening of Gordon was a relatively modest change compared to the gulch created by 1-20 that paralleled Park Street and obliterated almost a half dozen blocks of housing on the northern perimeter of the community. Those who advocated the construction of the interstate justified it as a force for stability in West End. Just as the first generation of promoters had tried to distance themselves from the Federal presence on the north side of the community in the 1870s, in the 1940s white West Enders were told that the expressway would serve as a barrier to protect them from the intrusion of blacks who were living around the Atlanta Univer­ sity complex. But no barrier was sufficient to hold back the movement for civil rights in the 1960s. Black Atlantans moved in large numbers into newly accessible housing in West End, quickly shifting the racial balance in the neighborhood. By 1976, 86 percent of West Enders were black.24 The expressway construction and street widenings of the late 1950s were minor changes in West End compared to the upheaval of the 1960s. Spearheaded by the Business Men's Association, a new shopping mall was designed to replace the "unsightly" and "deteriorated" busi­ nesses and residences north and east of Gordon and Lee streets. The principal concession to the pedestrian scale of the intersection was the construction of mall stores along Lee Street and the placement of park­ ing between the mall and the expressway. However, the scale of the change can be seen in the statistics of the Atlanta Housing Authority which administered the project: $14 million (two-thirds of which were Federal monies) were spent to clear 103.1 acres, 83 percent of which were residential and 12 percent commercial.28 Construction of the new mall, begun in 1971 and completed in 1973, provided a new location for approximately forty businesses. Development along Lee Street between the Mall and 1-20 accelerated the disappearance of the nineteenth-cen­ tury residences that had lined the old trolley line. The asphalt of gas stations and fast-food drive-ins soon replaced the lawns of Victorian houses. (Figure 10 shows the one remodeled home whose business facade and residential back represent the transformation of Lee Street in the late twentieth century.) MARTA's West End Station at the southeast corner of Gordon and Lee streets marks the most recent generation of urban development in the community. Like the trolley of the nineteenth century, the rapid rail connection offers West End new potential for commercial and resi­ dential vitality. For the occupants of the mall, their location will be enhanced because of the increase in commuters who will be transferring from bus to rail. In addition, there are significant numbers of young professional families who have moved into renovated homes along 48 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 10. Business in former residence fronting Lee Street.

Peeples and adjacent streets to the west of the Mall. The accessibility of rail transit to the downtown as well as to the rest of Atlanta may attract others of the middle class to a residential area which in the 1960s had been handed down to the poor. While West Enders had averaged a slightly higher income than the rest of Atlanta in 1950, they fell below the city median in 1970.26 This process has been reversed in the last decade as renovation has begun in what is now be­ ing called an "intown" community. Indeed, accounts of this process have the familiar ring of the 1890 promotional article on West End in which the virtues of old houses are extolled and homeowners who bought property five years earlier claim that they have doubled their investment.27 (Figure 11 shows a renovated residence on Peeples Street.) Today in West End there are remnants of all phases of the growth that was shaped by several generations of promoters. While White Hall Tavern is gone, the circular course of Greensferry, Leonard, and Ella marks the outline of Charner Humphries's race track; the tracks of the Central of Georgia are still active; Lee and Gordon streets maintain names selected with the incorporation of West End; Wren's Nest and Howell Park stand as memorials to two of the more prosperous and famous of the inhabitants; and the bungalow houses scattered around the community are the legacy of the middle class who moved to the city's seventh ward in the late teens and early twenties. While the com­ mercial development of West End Mall and the construction of a Journal — Summer/Fall 49

Figure 11. Renovated residence on Peeples Street.

MARTA Station have transformed the intersection of Lee and Gordon, and while 1-20 has cut a gulch through the north side of the original town limits, elements of the Victorian residential town remain. For those who visit the area or for the black and white couples who have purchased houses for renovation along Gordon Street, Peeples Street, and Lawton Street, there is still much evidence of the metamorphosis which has taken place and of the "vision of new cities" that has moti­ vated West Enders to invest in their town for the past century and a half.

NOTES

1. Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (New York, 1933 & 1970), p. 389. 2. Hopkins Atlas, 1878. Atlanta Historical Society Collection. 3. Franklin M. Garrett, Atlanta and Environs: A Chronicle of Its People and Events (Athens, 1954 & 1969), I: 751-52. Cornelis E. Cooper, "History of West End," Atlanta Historical Bulletin, XXXI (January 1947): 65-94. 50 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

4. Ibid. 5. Ann Grovenstein, "Whitehall, West End to Seventh Ward: A Glimpse at the Urbanization Pro­ cess 1830-1894," research paper from History 855, Georgia State University, in possession of au­ thor (Spring, 1979), p. 2. 6. Atlanta Constitution, 15 October, 1908. 7. Ibid. 8. Grovenstein, p. 4. West End City Council Minutes, 1868-1875, Atlanta Historical Society Collection. 9. Atlanta Daily Intelligencer, 23 February 1875. 10. Grovenstein, p. 8. 11. Garrett, II: 71. 12. Atlanta Constitution, 5 August 1884. 13. Atlanta Constitution, 27 April 1890. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid.; Grovenstein, p. 10. 16. Garrett, pp. 283-85. 17. Baylor Plant Atlas, 1894. Atlanta Historical Society Collection. 18. Atlanta Journal, 23 May 1905. 19. City Builder (April, 1929): 22. 20. Garrett, pp. 533-34. 21. West End Business Men's Association, (Atlanta, 1958-1959), pp. 1-19; Sue Palmer, "From White Hall Inn to West End Mall—An Historical Reflection," research paper from CP4105, Geor­ gia Institute of Technology, in possession of author (March, 1982), pp. 8-12. 22. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, Table V, 403. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920, Table 13, 226. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, Table 23, 549. Part of the population increase was due to the expansion of the ward boundaries to West End Cemetery in 1910. Cooper, p. 85. 23. Palmer, pp. 5-7. 24. West End Business Men's Association, pp. 1-19. Howard L. Preston, Automobile Age Atlanta: The Making of a Southern Metropolis, (Athens, 1979), pp. 98-105. 25. Palmer, p. 10. 26. Palmer, p. 13. 27. Lee May, "West End Story" Atlanta Journal Constitution Magazine, 25 June 1978, pp. 17-22. 51

The Other Side of the Tracks: Cabbagetown—A Working-Class Neighborhood in Transition During the Early Twentieth Century

By Stephen W. Grable

Ponce do i oon Avenue

CABBAGETOWN

Look to the East! There on the city's edge, three smokestacks tower above massive buildings; a great wall surrounds them; glass and barbed wire run along its top. Above it one sees a gaunt black bridge; over it goes a group of children as the warning whistle blows; a little girl not over twelve, her pink dress fluttering against the grime, runs through a forbid­ ding door to work. She and they should be at play. Just over the way are those who neither work nor play; they sleep in Oakland Cemetery. Graves of the living are between it and the mill—dreary, drab, monotonously the same, row after row of houses. Be­ hind them, sanitary conditions which are a menace to the city's health. Laborers live here. They have a grievance; underlying it are many complaints. 52 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The foregoing description of an Atlanta neighborhood known as Cabbagetown, published in the Constitution on June 6, 1914, during a local labor dispute, presents a common stereotype of southern cotton mill villages.1 The first object always identified in these written ac­ counts was the immense factory with its red brick smokestacks towering high above the community that lay at its base. It was a massive and begrimed building that was pictured as the dominant physical feature in a setting built and controlled by the company. Next in the descrip­ tion came the monotonous "row after row of houses," the three- and four-room bungalows constructed by the factory owner for his laborers and arranged with little variation along streets forming a rigid gridiron pattern. Also included in the sketch was the company store, which usu­ ally stood on the main thoroughfare leading to the mill. Occasionally a small church, school, and picnic area were mentioned. The effect of the description was to create the image of a poorly landscaped settlement composed of endless rows of houses all painted a uniform white and dominated by the factory and company store, the symbols of corporate control. Presented in this manner, the physical layout of the mill village illustrated the paternalism and regimentation of the factory system it­ self. (Figure 1 shows the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills and some of the mill-built housing from an eastern aerial view.) Yet when used to evoke a description of Cabbagetown, there is a serious problem with the accuracy of this stereotype. At the turn-of- the-century, the community was a working-class neighborhood similar to other lower-income areas in Atlanta, not a paternal mill village. Its physical development can be attributed to an earlier "impress," a pe­ riod of expansion that reordered Atlanta's residential pattern in the late nineteenth century, not to the efforts of a single factory boss. Dur­ ing the 1860s and 1870s, rising real estate and construction costs in the center of town forced working-class residents to the city's fringes. The out-migration did not prevent these individuals from accepting employ­ ment in the downtown area since Atlanta's corporate boundaries were only Wi miles from the central business district, a distance that could be easily walked in about thirty minutes. In the final decade of the nineteenth century—when an expanded streetcar system made it possi­ ble for middle- and upper-income residents to move to newly developed suburbs—working-class families were unable to return downtown be­ cause of the increased commercial specialization that was occurring. The homes vacated by the well-to-do were replaced with office buildings as the business district expanded vertically as well as horizontally. Lower-income residents were forced to find lodging elsewhere.

I One area where working-class persons took up residence was Cab- Journal — Summer/Fall 53

"H * ..-

Figure 1. Aerial view of Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, 1946. (AHS)

bagetown, a neighborhood that later attracted the Fulton Bag and Cot­ ton Mill. Located only a mile from the central business district, the community possessed several important advantages for settlement. First, its property values were lower than the cost of land lots in the city's core. Second, it was conveniently located to the downtown area, which made it possible for laborers and small store owners to walk to work. Third, for those who could afford to ride the streetcars, the At­ lanta Street Railroad Company extended a line along Decatur Street to within a quarter-mile of the neighborhood in 1872 and then filled in the gap by 1894. Furthermore, beginning in 1884 another streetcar line traversed the neighborhood's southern boundary, Fair Street, connect­ ing the community with both the downtown area and the newly devel­ oping subdivision of Grant Park to the south. And fourth, Cabbagetown possessed finite boundaries that gave it a sense of geographic unity. To the north, the tracks of the Georgia Railroad formed a barrier separat­ ing the neighborhood from Decatur Street and the residential areas bor­ dering on this avenue. The city limits were due east where no additional development was occurring, while on the south side was Fair Street, later to become a major east-west thoroughfare. Cabbagetown's west­ ern boundary was the attractively landscaped Oakland Cemetery, which was filled on Sundays with well-dressed Atlantans strolling along curvi­ linear paths. The prominent real estate agent George W. Adair tried to 54 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

capitalize upon the graveyard's popularity in 1878 by suggesting that the city purchase property in the neighborhood and use it to arrange a "park ... in convenient access to Oakland Cemetery."2 The developer was subdividing his land and it appears that his proposal for "Pearl Park" was an attempt to attract middle-income buyers who desired such amenities. Adair failed to attract residents of moderate means because of the area's proximity to the Georgia Railroad lines, which made it a natural site for manufacturing interests. The cars could haul coal and raw materials to the location as well as transport the finished materials to market. In fact, the site had already been used for an industrial pur­ pose, and in 1878—when Adair was advertising its residential quali­ ties—it was in the process of gaining new manufacturing establish­ ments. Before its destruction in 1864 by Union Forces, Atlanta's Rolling Mill—which produced iron plate for the Confederate Army and Navy during the Civil War—had stood on this spot. Moreover, in 1878 the Atlanta and Charlotte Air-line Railway was busy erecting its work­ shops there, and by 1881 construction of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill had begun. By 1887, a third industry, the Atlanta Pianoforte Manfacturing Company, was standing at the intersection of Factory Street and the Georgia Railroad tracks.3 (Figure 2, "The 1892 Bird's Eye View of Atlanta," depicts all three of these establishments.) The area's industrial character discouraged middle-income re­ sidents from building homes for themselves in the neighborhood, al­ though many individuals purchased small lots and constructed modest bungalow dwellings for working-class families. The bulk of the develop­ ment occurred during and following the 1890s, more than a decade after the initial construction of the textile mill in 1881. But even before this factory was built, the land had been partially subdivided and several small, wood-frame dwellings erected. The City Atlas of Atlanta, prepared by G.M. Hopkins in 1878, identifies the original placement of houses and roads. (Figure 3 presents this detailed view of the community's early spatial pattern.) During the 1870s, two dirt streets were laid out parallel to Berean, called Borne (later Factory and now listed as Carroll) and Savannah. A grocer, J.W. Goldsmith, subdivided lots fronting on both of these roads and, as the map indicates, by 1878 several frame dwellings had been erected on the parcels. Unfortunately, no additional information is available regarding the persons who inhabited the structures, since the City Directories did not extend coverage to this area until the 1890s and building permits were not recorded for Atlanta until after 1895. The rudimentary grid street pattern shown on the 1878 map influ­ enced the later physical expansion of the factory. The original buildings were constructed in the northwest portion of the neighborhood, near Journal — Summer/Fall 55

Figure 2. Detail from "1892 Bird's Eye View of Atlanta." (AHS) the railroad tracks and the access roads entering the community, but away from the residential development occurring to the east. When the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill expanded its physical plant, it extended the facility west toward Boulevard, a major north-south artery built after the original factory was erected. (Figure 4 shows that di­ rectly below its industrial buildings, on the triangular lot formed by the intersection of Boulevard and Borne Street, the company built the first cottages for its laborers.) Until well after 1900, the residential settlement occurring to the east of Borne Street was detached from the industrial activities that characterized life in the community's western half. In fact, this physical separation reflected a pattern of social segregation that continued to exist for several decades. It was not until the 1930s that a majority of the residents living to the east of Borne Street were also employees of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill. The later impress is what many Atlantans associate with the past of Cabbagetown. Over a fifty-year period, from 1890 to 1940, Cabbagetown evolved from a working-class neighborhood characterized by occupational diver­ sity to a community dominated by the textile factory and its employees. Most significant, it is possible to trace the changes that occurred by examining three interrelated developments. First, the expansion of the factory's physical plant and its work force created a greater demand for 56 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

VABOWJ

• I V I, I. A N l>

(' K M K T I''. » Y ^ y

Figure 3. Detail from 1878 Hopkins' Atlas of Atlanta. (AHS)

mill housing than could be satisfied by company construction. Second, homes formerly owned and rented by a variety of skilled and unskilled laborers became the residences of factory employees, a transformation that is demonstrated by contrasting the occupancy and building pat­ terns for two of the community's streets—Savannah and Pow­ ell—between 1890 and 1940. At the turn-of-the-century, these two par­ allel roads, although located only two blocks apart, were inhabited by different groups. Savannah Street, which was still a dirt thoroughfare, was closer to the mill and had a high percentage of factory employees living in the narrow, shotgun houses that lined the roadway. (Ray Stan- nard Baker's 1907 photograph in Figure 5, "View of an Atlanta Mill Village Road," strongly resembles Savannah Street and represents the physical characteristics of mill-built housing.) By contrast, Powell Street was one of the few thoroughfares in the community that was paved, which suggests a significant degree of owner occupancy since such improvements were assessed against the value of the land and completed only if the majority of the property owners agreed.4 Not sur­ prisingly, only a small percentage of the residents along this road were millworkers. However, by 1940 Savannah and Powell were mirror images of each other with both streets containing a large number of factory employees. The diversity in residential lifestyles that character­ ized the area in 1890 no longer existed at the end of the Depression. Journal — Summer/Fall 57

-\ **•

Figure 4. Mill cottages in Cabbagetown as seen from Oakland Cemetery, c. 1880. (AHS)

Third, during the period of mill expansion the neighborhood also lost its earlier commercial vitality. Soon after 1900, the community benefitted from the establishment of small, retail businesses, including grocery stores, meat markets, barber shops, and furniture dealers, to name the most numerous. But by the end of the Depression, the num­ ber and diversity of these enterprises had declined significantly due to the economic difficulties experienced during the 1930s.

II The founder of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, Jacob Elsas, was a German Jew who arrived in this country shortly after the beginning of the Civil War.5 He spent his first few years with relatives in Ohio before moving about 1865 to Cartersville, Georgia, where he opened a gen­ eral store. In 1869, he came to Atlanta to begin a "paper, rag, and hide" exchange, but soon altered his plans when he discovered that through­ out the South there was a serious shortage of bags. With the aid of several investors, he organized the Southern Bag Factory, which was located downtown in a warehouse at Pryor and Mitchell streets. In 1881, he and his associates expanded their business by purchasing the charter for a cotton textile mill which they erected on the Georgia Rail­ road line at the spot where the old Rolling Mill had once stood. Within 58 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY a few years, Elsas purchased his partners' stock and brought the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill under his single control. The factory began processing raw cotton in 1881 with approxi­ mately 14,000 spindles, but this number soon increased to 26,500 in 1902 and to more than 100,000 at the time of the owner's death in 1932.6 Expanded productivity called for additional space, and Elsas re­ sponded to the demand by erecting two additional buildings, one in 1895 and the other in 1902. A fire in 1905 destroyed the original factory complex, but it was rebuilt quickly at the same site.7 (The mill's final size and its location to the west of Carroll Street can be seen on the 1928 Topographical Map of Atlanta shown in Figure 6.) In the same year that he opened the factory, Elsas built "several houses for the operatives" which consisted of frame, porchless cottages arranged into three rows directly south of the industrial complex8 (Fig­ ure 4). But sometime before 1892, he demolished the string of single- family residences farthest to the east and replaced it with a double se­ ries of two-story duplex units, which are depicted in the Bird's Eye View of that year (Figure 2). Also pictured are additional two-story duplexes on Boulevard between Factory (hereafter referred to as Car­ roll) and Wyman streets and a tenement house, located just north of the Boulevard duplexes, which provided lodgings for itinerant workers. This compact area soon became known as the Factory Lot. In contrast, during the early twentieth century Elsas constructed only a few houses at other locations in the community. The City of At­ lanta issued building permits to the mill in 1906 to erect fourteen one- story residences on the street car line near Pearl Street, the neighbor­ hood's eastern boundary. In addition, following the 1905 fire on the Factory Lot, several structures were moved from this triangular area to the north end of Carroll Street.9 But clearly the majority of the resi­ dences built by the mill in the early 1900s were erected in the western half of the community, which for many years is where most of the fac­ tory employees in Cabbagetown lived. It should also be noted that at the turn-of-the-century housing was probably never a major problem for the company. Cabbagetown was within walking distance of downtown and of other working-class neigh­ borhoods in east Atlanta. Unlike textile factories located in the coun­ tryside, the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill was not totally dependent upon the adjacent residential settlement to compose its work force. The initial pattern which emerged in Cabbagetown is one of piece­ meal housing expansion. The factory built a few homes east of the in­ dustrial complex, but since the early landowners had already erected dwellings along Carroll, Savannah, and Berean streets, there was little property left for development. Elsas was forced to meet the housing needs of his employees by increasing the residential density of the Fac- Journal — Summer/Fall 59

met v<«* *>".,& '-'*• i ^*. * yj£ "AK*&. *Al?i *,<; < '..-< Figure 5. "View of an Atlanta Mill Village Road" (1907)

tory Lot through the construction of duplex units and a boarding house.

Ill The mill continued to increase its productivity both during and fol­ lowing World War I, creating a need for additional employees and, thus, a greater demand for local housing. As a result, workers at the factory began to compete with other neighborhood residents for rental lodgings. The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill also began purchasing homes located to the east of Carroll Street and making them available to its laborers, although the exact number of houses that it bought has not been determined.10 By examining the occupations recorded in the City Directories for household members residing on Savannah and Powell streets, one can plot the eastward migration of factory workers through the neighbor­ hood. Table I reflects the various percentages of mill employees living on Savannah—the road closest to the industrial complex—at five-year intervals from 1892 to 1937. These figures reveal that the relative pro­ portion of factory workers fluctuated greatly, probably because of three developments. First, within any five-year period a large number of the residents identified in the directories would have moved away from Sa­ vannah Street since it is known that the rate of geographic mobility in 60 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

SKUtnawi CITY OF ATLANTA MtOftffi* - '"" **E3 E3:^G rrfl'' a.-S*1

—- I

JB.

• <$ • T r*i .,»•-. r 'A m ' :'v• "J!•j ^ " ! •hi r" €S3 •

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Figure 6. Plat from 1928 Topographical Map of Atlanta showing Cabbagetown. the area was extremely high.11 Thus, the figures shown in Table I reflect the occupations of a rapidly changing population, not a persistent group. Second, since Savannah Street residents lived in an urban area, they were able to seek a variety of jobs. It is possible that many of them Journal — Summer/Fall 61

CITY OF ATLANTA ••wiss ^ta I \

«C3 Q £ a Pig 1 ,-,„ a[ ; Dt 7fi7

>b ''-«$SL '3D OCT? Or^o- §~ I CD Jr D«+fa O:

-et"> aa' ; B«® S.VV-, ^L. - t= 9-S2.Eo3 EQ.' - €3%*=^ 5a IK' ^oa-am B a 8 -j? --'Vf KP' '<*S'fc !" ' • •' «>-#ts£k:

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30 DB , -,ggWgfr*.t.X^. Mir J5HASEIUJE»2&>

Figure 6

worked in the mill on an irregular basis but listed other occupations in the City Directories. In fact, a northern journalist who visited the city in the early 1890s, Clare de Graffenried, observed that a great number of the textile operatives were actually employed in a variety of pursuits. 62 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

TABLE I

Savannah Street Residents Number of Per Cent of Year Sampl e* Millworkers Millworkers 1892 16 0 0% 1897 17 3 18% 1902 19 8 42% 1907 21 2 10% 1912 24 2 8% 1917 22 5 23% 1922 26 2 8% 1927 23 17 74% 1932 21 10 48% 1937 24 10 41%

*The sample was selected randomly from city directories anc comprises 50 percent of the residents iving on Savannah Street during the years studied. The first year the d irectories included tl is road was 1892.

TABLE II

Powell Street Residents Number of Per Cent of Year Sample * Millworkers Millworkers 1898 15 4 27% 1903 25 1 4% 1908 24 1 4% 1913 25 1 4% 1918 33 1 3% 1923 34 3 9% 1928 30 3 10% 1933 37 16 43% 1938 41 23 56%

*The sample was selected randomly from city directories and comprises 50 per cent of the resi dents living on Powell Street during the years studied. The first year the directories included th is road was 1898.

"Cotton manufacturing being comparatively new in Atlanta," she noted, "the industrial community is a mosaic of elements from distant parts: diversity of occupations appeals strongly to the fickle disposition of the crackers, so that the mills are a less steady source of revenue."1* Journal — Summer/Fall 63

The third development relates to the dispersion of factory employ­ ees throughout the neighborhood. Table II presents the percentages of mill workers who lived on Powell Street during the same general period as reported for Savannah. With the exception of the first year, 1898, the figures indicate that only a small proportion of textile operatives re­ sided along the road until the early 1930s. Their increasing presence after 1930 suggests that the migration of factory workers away from the industrial complex began during the first few years of the Depression. As mill operatives moved further east, the percentage of textile opera­ tives inhabiting structures on Savannah Street began declining.

TABLE III

Powell Street and Savannah Street Builders, 1895-1930 Powell St. Savannah St. Builders No. % of Total No. % of Total 1. Total 21 8 2. Unidentified 7 33.3% 1 12.5% 3. Lived and/or Worked in Cabbagetown 8 38.1% 2 25.0% 4. Lived at Building Permit Address* 6 28.6% 0 0% 5. Neither Worked nor Lived in Cabbagetown 6 28.6% 5 62.5%

*These six individ uals are also included in category 3.

An additional contrast between Powell and Savannah streets emerges when builders are identified for the period between 1895 (the first year building permits were recorded for the City of Atlanta) and 1930. Table III reveals that a much higher percentage of Powell Street developers lived and/or worked in the neighborhood and that nearly 30 percent of them inhabited homes that they had constructed for their own use. By contrast, the data also indicate that Savannah Street had a large share of absentee real estate speculators with 62.5 percent of its builders neither living nor working in Cabbagetown. Of the eight Savannah Street builders, four of them erected more than one house. The largest number of dwellings was constructed by 64 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

T.J. Ash, a community grocer, who between 1897 and 1898 built six one-story frame structures. Each of the other three developers—two small businessmen and a clerk, all of whom lived and worked outside of Cabbagetown—erected three one-story houses between 1903 and 1911. On Powell Street, the individual responsible for the largest number of houses was W. R. Moore, a furniture dealer whose shop was on Deca­ tur Street and who lived with his family at 88 Powell. Between 1900 and 1907 he erected seven one-story frame dwellings, including the home that he constructed for himself. Five other developers, two of whom resided in Cabbagetown, each built two houses. The only other major builder on Powell Street was the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, which in 1930 erected three one-story duplex units and two one-story single family dwellings (not included in Table III). Based upon the evidence presented, it appears that three distinct patterns comprised Cabbagetown's residential development. First, the mill built cottages for its laborers on the Factory Lot during the late nineteenth century. Beginning after 1900, it purchased homes and con­ structed additional dwellings to the east of Carroll Street. Second, the data presented on Savannah Street show that absentee speculators built dwellings for laborers, a great many of whom were mill employees. Third, also present in Cabbagetown were resident developers who con­ structed homes that were either rented or sold to other parties. Tables II and III demonstrate that nearly 40 percent of the builders responsi­ ble for the construction of houses on Powell Street lived and/or worked in the neighborhood and that the majority of the inhabitants who lived in the structures they built were not mill workers until after 1930. Dur­ ing the Depression, when increasing numbers of factory operatives be­ gan occupying homes on Powell and other streets in the eastern portion of the community, the earlier residents moved out of Cabbagetown.

IV The significance of the 1930s in the evolution of the neighborhood can also be seen in the decrease in the number of small businesses oc­ curring during this decade. Before the Depression, Cabbagetown re­ sidents shopped at a variety of grocery stores and other retail establish­ ments located mainly along Carroll Street. In fact, the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill never had to operate a commissary for its operatives, al­ though sometime after 1921 it did authorize a local grocery outlet man­ aged by the L.W. Rogers Company to accept script that the factory redeemed. According to the City Directories, the first businessman to locate in Cabbagetown was T.J. Ash, who was selling food products in the com­ munity no later than the 1890s. After 1900, several other individuals opened retail establishments on Carroll Street. By 1921, the year in Journal — Summer/Fall 65 which Rogers started his chain store, there were five independent food markets on this avenue alone. Also located on this street were three concession stands, one shoe repair shop, a wood dealer, two butchers, one druggist, one general merchandise store, a furniture dealer, one bar­ ber shop, and two dairy markets. Several more grocery stores were lo­ cated on other roads in the community. The majority of these neighborhood businesses closed during the Depression. In 1941, only two independent food markets were still in operation, although by the early 1950s a total of four grocery stores plus the Rogers chain store were serving the needs of community residents. Most of the other retail businesses that had flourished before 1930 never reestablished themselves following the Depression. The only re­ minders of their earlier presence aire the vacant commercial buildings still standing on Carroll Street.13 Descriptions of southern cotton mill villages portray the settle­ ments as homogeneous enclaves populated by illiterate and unskilled rural migrants. Yet the evidence above demonstrates that Cabbagetown prior to 1930 was an exception to this characterization. Before the De­ pression, factory operatives at the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill did not constitute a homogeneous class of laborers, nor were they kept geo­ graphically segregated from other Atlanta residents. The mill's proxim­ ity to middle- and low-income neighborhoods enabled it to draw from a larger, city-wide work force. Equally important, laborers living in Cab­ bagetown were not dependent upon the factory for employment. The neighborhood's reputation as a homogeneous mill village is a product of the transformation that occurred during the 1930s when tex­ tile operatives began to dominate the community. Before that decade, only a small number of factory workers lived east of Carroll Street, and those who did were careful not to socialize with the inhabitants of the Factory Lot. Rosa Lowe, a settlement worker in Cabbagetown during the early twentieth century, was puzzled by the social distinctions that apparently were based upon place of residence within the neighbor­ hood. According to Mary Dickinson, her associate, the operatives who worked side by side from 6 o'clock in the morning until 6 o'clock in the evening might be industrial equals, but from 6 in the evening until 6 the next morning there was a great gulf between them .... Miss Lowe found that a distinction existed between the employees who lived "on the hill" and the employees who lived "on the lot." The church organizations and the mill itself seemed to find difficulty in mixing these two groups.14 The distinction that existed between living on the "lot" and living on the "hill" did not survive past the 1930s. The textile operatives who began moving onto streets in the eastern half of Cabbagetown during the Depression displaced the earlier residents and thereby altered the community's character. The demographic and commercial diversity of 66 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY an earlier impress that had once made Cabbagetown an urban, work­ ing-class neighborhood was replaced by a newer pattern, a more homo­ geneous population composed primarily of mill employees. Today with the mill all but completely shut down, Cabbagetown is undergoing a third transition. Cabbagetown and the mill have become the battleground for groups with conflicting ideas for the future of the neighborhood. The fate of the mill buildings and of the turn-of-the- century housing is still unclear. Both are wearing out and are in need of restoration. Who will do that? Indeed, who and what will shape the future of Cabbagetown?

NOTES

1. For convenience, the name Cabbagetown is used throughout this article, even though it apparently did not come into usage until after 1910. Current neighborhood residents disagree about its exact origin, but most of them remember that it was first coined by outsiders to denigrate the community. One story has it that a truck carrying a load of cabbages broke down in the neighborhood and before the driver could repair the vehicle, a gang of local vandals stole his produce. A related version suggests that the cabbages were salvaged from a train that derailed just north of the community. Another story claims that neighboring residents created the name to describe the poor families who lived in this area and subsisted upon a regular diet of cabbage.

2. Atlanta Constitution, 3 November 1878. 3. Wallace P. Reed, History of Atlanta, Georgia (Syracuse, New York, 1889), p. 465. 4. R.M. Clayton, Map of Atlanta Showing Sidewalks, 1895; Code for the City of Atlanta, 1899, p. 271. 5. Franklin M. Garrett, Atlanta and Environs, Vol. I (New York, 1954), p. 808. 6. Garrett, Atlanta and Environs, I: 809; II: 20; Thomas H. Martin, Atlanta and its Builders, Vol. Ill (Atlanta, 1902), p. 381. 7. Lee Dunagan, "National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination Form: Cabbagetown District" (unpublished survey, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Historic Preservation Section, 1975), pp. 1-2. 8. Atlanta Constitution, 7 July 1881. 9. Dunagan, "National Register," p. 2. 10. It was not possible to tabulate housing purchases by the factory because the mill's present owner, Fabrics America, refused to grant the writer permission to examine the company's records. Following this decision, a detailed deed search was rejected in favor of the following comparison of residents living on Savannah and Powell streets. 11. Francis Kidd, "Cabbagetown: A Work-Residence Pattern" (unpublished research paper, Georgia State University, 1976). 12. Clare de Graffenried, "The Georgia Cracker in the Cotton Mills," The Century Magazine, XLI (February, 1891): 483-98. 13. Current rehabilitation efforts by new, middle-income residents to improve the neighborhood's housing stock may, in turn, spark the revitalization of local businesses. In the event that redevelopment occurs, the community might possibly recapture the commercial diversity that it experienced between 1900 and 1930. 14. The recollection by Mary Dickinson is quoted in Anne Lavinia Branch, "Atlanta and the American Settlement House Movement" (M.A. thesis, Emory University, 1966), p. 51. 67

Breaking Out:

Streetcars and Suburban Development, 1872-1900

By Don L. Klima

MIDTOWN

Georgia Institute of Technology I

INMAN PARK Edgewood

Atlanta's late nineteenth-century neighborhoods immediately sur­ rounding the downtown commercial district have in recent years en­ joyed middle-class appeal and public interest. Once the victims of years of neglect and shortsighted urban renewal policies, these historic sub­ urbs have now been substantially revitalized through private initiative and investment. As one walks or drives through Inman Park, Grant Park, West End, or Midtown, replete with newly restored Victorian homes and relandscaped gardens, an image of Atlanta's nineteenth-cen­ tury suburban ideal emerges. However, hidden from view, like the In­ dian trails which now lie beneath the macadam of modern streets, is the "impress" created by street railway lines—first horse-drawn and later electrically powered—which opened up previously remote areas to resi- 68 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY dential settlement by Atlanta's growing middle class. No less concealed are the real forces that shaped these early neighborhoods: the profit motivated real estate ambitions of Atlanta's first street railway builders who sought to benefit from the sale of their considerable landholdings on the periphery of the city. Two such individuals, active in both Atlanta's early street railway enterprises and real estate, were Richard Peters and George W. Adair. These entrepeneuers used their landhold­ ings and trolley franchises to create a pattern of growth, an impress, that remains visible in the fabric of both revitalized in-city neighbor­ hoods and some of the wealthiest neighborhoods on the city's north side. TT

Perhaps no two individuals better epitomized nineteenth-century Atlanta's image as a city of aggressive and sagacious businessmen than George W. Adair (1823-1899) and Richard Peters (1810-1889). An affili­ ation with the Georgia Railroad brought each to Atlanta shortly after the city's founding. Although both continued to be involved in the rail­ road industry throughout their careers, their energies were consumed by the political, social, and commercial demands of city building.1 The mainstay of Adair's success was his real estate brokerage established just following the Civil War.2 This enterprise, which in the hands of his sons evolved into a local dynasty, enabled Adair not only to forecast but also, to some extent, to direct real estate trading activities. Peters's bus­ iness interests were as diverse as they were extensive, ranging from ex­ perimental livestock breeding to machinery manufacturing. Peters was a man of considerable wealth. Like Adair, Peters's financial security and business success were closely linked to real estate. Adair's and Pe­ ters's common backgrounds in the railroads and mutual interest in real estate led to a natural partnership in the street railway business. Just as Atlanta was recovering from the Civil War, they joined together to acquire and reorganize the Atlanta Street Railroad Company and began work on construction of Atlanta's first horsecar line.3 The routes of the first trolley can be more easily understood if first one examines Peters's and Adair's patterns of owning and trading prop­ erty. Comparisons of their landholdings between 1868 and 1893 can be used to establish a relationship between their property transactions and their transit activities.4 The assessed value of Peters's real estate in 1868 was $109,700. He owned a few scattered parcels downtown, one of which was his place of residence. Land Lots 49 and 80, encompassing 405 acres immediately north of the downtown, were owned in their en­ tirety by Peters.8 Approximately one-third of this property had been brought into the incorporated area of the city when Atlanta's limits were extended in 1866. This property, purchased by Peters for five dol­ lars an acre in the mid-1850s,6 was bisected by Peachtree Street and bordered by North Avenue on the south, Eighth Street on the north, Journal — Summer/Fall 69

George W Adair Richard Peters Atlanta Street Railroad Co.

DESIGN: Richard Rothman 4 Associates/ Brian Randall 1878 LAND OWNERSHIP AND STREETCAR LINES Figure 1 70 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 2. 1874 view of bridge over Clear Creek carrying the horse-drawn trolley of the Atlanta Street Railway. (AHS)

Forth Street on the east, and a line midway between State and Plum streets on the west. Adair's holdings at this time were less substantial: the assessed value of his property, both in his name and that of his company, was $17,750.7 Most of his property was located in Land Lot 108, which lay within Atlanta and the prospering suburban town of West End. Six acres, just south of the McPherson Barracks and north of West Peters Street, were set aside by Adair for his residence. With Peters as president and Adair on the board of directors, the Atlanta Street Railroad Company began construction of a line to West End. From the beginning there was little doubt of Peters's and Adair's willingness to use this new transporation system for the accomplish­ ment of their personal goals. The first line began on the west side of the railroad tracks at Whitehall Street, traveled south, conveniently passing by Peters's residence, and proceeded southwest on Peters Street where Journal — Summer/Fall 71

SB H! : ••• -'^sMijinii'

Figure 3. Harper's Monthly engraving of Ponce de Leon Spring, 1879. (AHS)

it terminated at a point near Adair's residence. The line was later ex­ tended deeper into West End8 (Figure 1). Unable to find support among a skeptical business community, Adair and Peters in 1872 personally subscribed all of the stock neces­ sary to finance the expansion of the system.9 Heading north, iron rails were soon laid along Marietta Street from Five Points to the Rolling Mill, following rather closely the Western and Atlantic Railroad corri­ dor. Midway through the year, the Decatur Street Line was completed to Oakland Cemetery. Returning to the north, the Peachtree Street Line was finished to Pine Street in August 1872. Within two years, this line had been extended to Ponce de Leon Avenue within Peters's north­ ern property and east to Ponce de Leon Springs, a popular picnic and retreat area. (Figures 2 and 3 show the trolley on Ponce de Leon and Ponce de Leon Springs.) The following year brought additional lines into the south and west sectors.10 With these five lines completed (Fig­ ure 2),11 Atlanta Street Railroad Company construction for the most part ended. The skeleton of Atlanta's intra-urban transit network was in place. Much to the surprise of earlier skeptics, the Atlanta Street Rail­ road Company prospered. Even with business failures commonplace 72 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY during the depression of the 1870s, the Atlanta Street Railroad Com­ pany continued to operate at a profit. Its success can be attributed to fortuitous circumstances and conservative management. The company enjoyed a virtual monopoly from 1871 to 1883—an advantage it fought hard to maintain.12 As the first company to offer horsecar service, it was able to capitalize on those routes with population density sufficient to insure profitable ridership levels. Additionally, most of the lines termi­ nated at points within well-established residential, recreational, or em­ ployment areas (e.g. West End, Oakland Cemetery, Ponce de Leon Springs, and the Rolling Mill). The enterprise quickly demonstrated the economic potential of the street railways. It also demonstrated, to the satisfaction of its founders, the lucrative effects street railway lines could have on the marketability and value of contiguous real estate. Ill Street railway ownership proved beneficial to Adair the landowner and Adair the real estate agent. Like the salesman of any commodity, a real estate agent found his success was restricted by the quality of his product and its subsequent desirability. Any number of factors could influence the sale of residential real estate, not the least of which was accessibility. As co-founder and principal director of the Atlanta Street Railroad Company, Adair had a distinct advantage in this regard as evi­ denced by an examination of his activities as a real estate agent from 1868 to 1883.13 Throughout this period, Adair's operations were for the most part confined to property within or immediately adjacent to the city limits. Only in those areas where the street railways left the incor­ porated area did his ventures do likewise. Where possible, Adair con­ sistently utilized the promotional value of the street railways, often of­ fering free horsecar rides to the sales. (Figure 4 is an 1880s Adair advertisement of real estate convenient to the trolley line.) Frequently, advertising ploys and promotional literature lured potential buyers by claiming that lots for sale were "well within less than 600 yards of the Street Railroad" or "very near the Street Car Line," etc.14 Plotting the location of Adair's promotional sales during this period, one finds a close spatial relationship between the volume of sales in specific land lots and the presence or absence of street railways in those lots. Adair was far more active in those lots where street railways were present and quick to emphasize their value to the property.18 His pattern of entre- preneurship can even be seen in his unsuccessful ventures, such as his promotion of Pearl Park (see Steve Grable's "The Other Side of the Tracks" for details). The relationship between the Atlanta Street Rail­ road Company and Adair's activities as a real estate agent was symbi­ otic in nature. The street railways encouraged the sale of the property Adair handled. In turn, after the property was sold by Adair, the subse­ quent improvement of the property with residences and businesses gen- Journal — Summer/Fall 73

G. W. ADAIR, Auctioneer. WEST END PROPERTY. Residence and Business Lots on the Street Car Line IN WEST END, On Wednesday next, the 11th day of July, 1883, Commencing .it •% ©'clock |>. in. W.. wit] ncll ,.„ i!„. premises, ;K Hie ooraer -.1' I ;.ml Gordon Streets, in We«i Kml G Hti»in< » Lets, fronliiiic on Gordon Street, and » beautiful level Residence lot*—one fronting on Lee Street, and eight on Gordon .Street. a* *hown by the following |>lat: 1 .-^^

I SCJ t<..)OL LOT. WEST END

ACADEMY

liJ ft. AM.KY. "J so to P> L» s» 50 I JO i 1 * Sold

2 * 14 12 11 9 1 j 16 l 15 13 io IO ft. Altrn. a-.

•• 1 C -. • 8 ; 6 5 4 I | 1 ,,

c^GORDON:

immediately SotHb ..t "WEST E3STID j^CJ^ttttMrsr, ,; i7li!i.e. n»w under contract, *tid eiHu.iniettun. •••- in tin- '!'•>«• t >f WW Bud, ailssi ranting on the Street Cur Line, and with examine lh«* ift«iiml, .m<\ attend the -..!*• khsnjutelv en its -'if- ••• • I !;,;.( -Mri-el 0*1 M»C ft* >'" Mil] HSttKtl. • o.aieder io noa utd two V.M<. witli H pt r ot > • •• sold G. W. ADAIR, JOHN T. HALL

Figure 4. Notice of auction of lots in West End showing route of streetcar line. (AHS) 74 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY erated more patronage for the street railways. But the success of Adair's land ventures depended also on consumer demand, which, in turn, was affected by both the national economy and the rate of growth of Atlanta. Real estate agents like Adair were among the first to feel the shock wave of the failure of Jay Cooke and Company in New York in 1873 and the subsequent market crash and the commercial collapse that fol­ lowed. The continuing decline of the real estate market played havoc with Adair's fortunes. As a last resort he turned to his real estate in the suburb of West End to stave off insolvency. The West End Line, which was critical to his marketing plans, had already contributed to the growth of the town. (See Crimmins's article on West End elsewhere in this issue.) Hoping to attract additional suburban buyers, Adair subdi­ vided twenty-one acres in the southeastern corner of Land Lot 108 into thirty-nine residential lots and heavily advertised the fact that the lots were "within one hundred yards of the Street Railroad."16 All prospec­ tive buyers were furnished free rides on the street railways to the auc­ tion held on December 12, 1876. The proposed sale of these lots, how­ ever, proved unsuccessful as a review of Adair's landholdings in 1878 illustrates (Figure 1). His financial condition unimproved, Adair was forced to declare bankruptcy on March 28, 1877." It is apparent that the appeal of these lots, even with the street railway line within 100 yards, could not offset the depressed state of the economy. It was only with a return of prosperity in the 1880s that their sale was assured. (A look at Figure 5 reveals that by 1893, all but five of the thirty-nine lots had been sold.18) Adair's transit decisions made years earlier had af­ fixed a solid impress which, even though he was not able to be the principal financial beneficiary, had ensured the eventual success of West End as a residential enclave. IV Seven years before his death in 1889, Peters sold his home and two-acre lot located at the corner of Forsyth and Mitchell streets, real­ izing a large profit, no doubt in part due to the proximity of the land to the West End Line19 (Figure 1). Abandoning the downtown as a place of residence, Peters constructed a palatial mansion on the block bounded by Cypress, Fourth, and Fifth streets and fronting on the Peachtree Street Line within his Land Lot 49 (Figure 6). This was one of several activities calculated to stimulate the residential settlement of Atlanta's elite northward towards his property. Another was construc­ tion of the Peachtree Street Line. To ensure the success of this scheme, Peters quite shrewdly sold his northern property in Land Lot 49 at prices and in quantities that would attract the upper class exclusively. When asked by a reporter in 1884 why he sold some of his northern property cheaply, he replied candidly that: Journal — Summer/Fall 75

^^^B Joel Hurt • Lemuel P. Grant [ George W. Adair la&S Richard Peters AM Joint ownership - Adair & Grant Street railway network [all lines)

DESIGN: Richard Rothman & Associates/ Brian Randall 1893 LAND OWNERSHIP AND STREETCAR LINES Figure 5 76 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

... it has made the rest of my property valuable. I have sold many an acre at $1,000 that is now worth $10,000. But if I hadn't sold a good many acres at that price, the town would have gone in another direction and none of my land would have been valuable. It has always been my policy to sell to good citizens on the best terms. I have never sold less than an acre at a time and have fought the small lot system steadily.20 Peters's tactics proved to be highly successful. Even when selling "cheaply," he had by 1884 made over $272,000 on the sale of eighty acres within Land Lot 49. In addition to the ten acres on which his home was located, Peters still owned at that time 100 acres east of Peachtree Street and north of the increasingly important thoroughfare of Ponce de Leon Avenue, for which, Peters claimed, he had received offers of up to $5,000 an acre.21 (As Figure 5 demonstrates, Peters's development policies in Land Lot 49 continued during the next ten years to meet his objectives. By 1893, additional street railway lines had been added by other companies to augment the service of Peters's original Peachtree Street Line, which by this time traversed the entire length of his property.) Two blocks to the west, a line had been built on West Peachtree Street. Two blocks to the east of Peachtree, another line now proceeded along Piedmont Avenue. By 1893, the cumulative effect of these three lines prompted the sale of a large area of Peters's property contiguous to the lines. Land not sold had been extensively subdivided with alleys and service streets in anticipation of sale. The importance of the street railways in facilitating the urban development of Peters's Land Lot 49 is unquestionable. The street railways, com­ bined with the marketing genius of Peters, established a pattern of north side clustering of wealthy whites which is still visible today.22 During the 1880s Peters must have been made increasingly aware of the extent to which his earlier transit decisions were influencing plans for his northern property. Land Lot 49, with rail service, was flourishing while Land Lot 80, lacking direct rail services, remained in­ accessible to a migrating population increasingly accustomed to street railway service. (Figure 5 presents a clear picture of the disparity be­ tween the two land lots in 1893.) Under the conservative management of the 1870s, the Atlanta Street Railroad Company failed to project a street railway into this area. Perhaps Peters felt the influence of the Peachtree Street Line would extend through both his land lots. If so, the evidence for 1893 would indicate a miscalculation. Peters appar­ ently recognized the need*for an east-west line through this area which would spur development, but it was never constructed. However, the lack of street railways in Land Lot 80 jeopardized development schemes formulated during the 1880s when real estate prices were more promising. The first large-scale endeavor by Peters to attempt a planned sub­ urb provides clear illustration. The ambitiousness of the project was Journal — Summer/Fall 77

"H

Figure 6. The Richard Peters residence, 652 Peachtree Street, in the 1890s. (AHS)

equalled only by its lack of success. Peters, Adair, and the controversial developer and entrepreneur H.I. Kimball organized the Peters Park Im­ provement Company for the purpose of developing a 180-acre subdivi­ sion in Land Lot 80. For capital, $300,000 in stock was issued. Peters received $180,000 for the land, or $1,000 an acre, and, as the largest stockholder, retained control over the company. Reflecting on his deci­ sion to develop the property, Peters commented to a reporter from the Constitution: I have always had in my mind to do something of this sort. I have felt that the city demands something of the sort, and the pressure on me to sell has been so great that I determined to sell in bulk and try and do something more with the land than merely parcelling [sic] it out to single buyers. No land is better for this purpose. It is flanked on either side by leading street car lines (for it reached nearly to Marietta)—either of which can be turned directly into the new purchase.23 By 1884 financial arrangements and layout were complete, and Adair and Kimball initiated a full-scale promotion campaign directed at both the city's elite and its speculators. The subdivision, to be called Peters Park, was designed to appeal to the luxuriant Victorian tastes of 78 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

ENTRANCE TO PETERS PARK.

Figure 7

PBTERS PARK Figure 7 (top), 8 (above), and 9 (next page) illustrate details from Peters Park pro­ motional plats. (AHS) Journal — Summer/Fall 79

Figure 9

the time. Adair proclaimed in his advertising blitz that Peters Park would be "the most Extensive, Exclusively Park and Residence Prop­ erty in the World."24 (Figures 7, 8, and 9 from the site plan circulated by Adair picture curvilinear street patterns, lakes, formal and natu­ ral gardens, and athletic facilities, as well as a variety of model homes to select from, all designed by Kimball's architectural firm.) The first prospectus advertised the availability of thirty-eight lots within four blocks carved out of the area bounded roughly by Fifth Street on the north, Second Street (to be renamed Kimball Street) on the south, Quinn Street on the west, and West Peachtree (to be renamed Park Avenue) on the east. Much of this area was to be occu­ pied by the Grand Boulevard and accompanying features shown in Fig­ ure 8. Corner lots were to sell for $4,500 and inside lots for $3,500, with 25 percent down and the balance in equal increments over the next three years at 7 percent interest. Financial incentives were offered those who bought and began construction immediately. For a variety of reasons, the grand design never got beyond the drawing boards. At a time of prosperity when wealthy Atlantans might have been expected to migrate to a new exclusive enclave, not enough made the move to ensure the success of the venture. With competition from Joel Hurt's Inman Park on the city's east side and the already established settlement along Peachtree Street, Peters Park languished. 80 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 10. Peachtree Street from Fifth Street, 1897. (AHS)

In part, the fate of the enterprise had been sealed by transit decisions Peters and Adair made the preceding decade. The impress established by the Atlanta Street Railroad Company which directed northern de­ velopment—the Peachtree Street and Marietta Street lines—had been in place for over ten years. The Marietta Street Line, in conjunction with the mills, pulled working-class settlements to the northwest, while the Peachtree Street Line was instrumental in establishing this thor­ oughfare as the northern corridor for residential development by At­ lanta's upper class. Exclusive residential plans for Peters Park con­ flicted with the impress already imposed by the street railroads: its route of accessibility was either by the Marietta Street Line or a long walk by the Peachtree Line, either option being less than attractive for the affluent who might purchase lots. The cross-connector street railway line alluded to by Peters was never built, leaving this area to be ser­ viced only by the Peachtree Street Line, which at the time of the inti- tial sale of Peters Park lots did not extend beyond Ponce de Leon Ave­ nue, some four to eight blocks away. This level of transit service would hardly appeal to those who could afford the other amenities the subdi­ vision proposed to offer. (Figure 5 illustrates that the only property sold in the Peters Park area by 1893 was that contiguous with the West Peachtree Street Line-, which was not built until years after Pe­ ters Park was first proposed.) As the first successful operators of street railway service in Atlanta, Adair and Peters had a twofold influence on Atlanta's late nineteenth- century suburban development. Transit decisions made by Adair and Peters to further their real estate interests gave direction to the city's N. BOULEVARD PARK

DRUID HILLS

WESTVIEW CEMETERY

WEST END Atlanta Railway & Power Co. ~~" Atlanta Rapid Transit Co. "— Original railroads DESIGN: Richard Roth man & Associates/ Brian Randall

SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENT AND STREETCAR LINES SURBURBAN DEVELOPMENT AND SURBURBAN DEVELOPMENT AND STREETCAR LINES—1902 STREETCAR LINES—1902

Figure 11 Figure 11 Journal — Summer/Fall 81 suburban movement. (Figure 10 shows Peachtree at Fourth Street at the turn of the century when this area was the city's northernmost suburb. The newly built residences here were made accessible by the trolleys.) As demonstrated, historical documents bear witness to Adair's and Peters's influence in this regard. The current revival of the historic neighborhoods of West End and Midtown offers perhaps more tangible and persuasive evidence and supports the advice given historians by G. H. Martin that "a town is a document: it displays its history in it public face, as well as in its archives."25 The second, and perhaps more important, influence Peters and Adair had was in demonstrating to other speculators just how essential the street railways were to real es­ tate ventures. The desire of the upper and middle class to move away from the congested city center created a demand for peripheral prop­ erty. The problem for landholders and developers was how to direct this movement to their property. Common sense suggested that the flow of people away from the city center would, like the flow of water, follow the course of least resistance. Just as water could be directed by modi­ fying the terrain, so, too, as Adair and Peters demonstrated, could the flow of suburban development be channeled to a desired location by use of the street railways. Land developers such as Lemuel P. Grant and Joel Hurt then followed in the more favorable economic geography of the 1880s and the early 1890s and profited from Adair's and Peters's examples.26 (Figure 11 includes the property ownership patterns of Grant and Hurt and demonstrates that the Edgewood trolley to In­ man Park and the street railway line to Grant Park clearly served the development purposes of other land barons.) By linking the street rail­ ways to their own speculative land ventures, these and other developers left upon the shape of the city their own permanent impress.

NOTES

1. Thomas H. Martin, Atlanta and Its Builders, 2 vols. (Atlanta, 1902), II: 622-28, 688-90; Wallace P. Reed, History of Atlanta, Georgia, 2 vols. (Syracuse, 1899), II. For additional information on Peters, see Helen Kilpatrick Lyon, "Richard Peters: Atlanta Pioneer—Georgia Builder," Atlanta Historical Bulletin (December, 1957); 21-42. 2. E.Y. Clarke, History of Atlanta Illustrated (Atlanta, 1881), pp. 69-70. 3. Organized in 1866, the first venture of the Atlanta Street Railroad Company met with failure in part because of restrictive conditions imposed by the City Council. In January 1869, the City Council removed some of the more objectionable restrictions and also provided tax exemption incentives, thereby creating a far more favorable climate for Peters's and Adair's reorganized company. For a thorough study of the city's early intra-urban transporation network, see David L. Williams, "The Development and Consolidation of Atlanta's Street Railways, 1866-1891" (Master's thesis, Georgia State University, 1975); also Jean Martin, "Mule to MARTA," Atlanta Historical Bulletin, XVIX (September, 1975). 82 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

4. To assist in plotting these changes, contemporary city atlases for the years 1868, 1878, and 1893 were used. These atlases, which indicated the property owners for all lands within the city limits, made it possible to determine which properties were disposed of by Peters and Adair and roughly at what time during this twenty-five year period. 5. James F. Cooper, Map of Atlanta, 1868; traced from the original, July 1898, by Eugene Mitchell. 6. This land was originally acquired for its abundant timber to be used to fuel the furnaces of a flour mill Peters constructed in 1856. After two separate starts, Peters shortly closed the mill, a victim of cheaper competition. Nellie Peters Black (ed.), Richard Peters: His Ancestors and Descendants, 1810-1889 (Atlanta, 1904), p. 27. 7. Fulton County Tax Digest (1868). 8. Wade W. Wright, History of the Georgia Power Company (Atlanta, 1957), pp. 4-5. 9. Ibid. 10. For further information on routes and line construction, see Martin, "Mule to MARTA," pp. 4-10; Williams, "The Development and Consolidation of Atlanta's Street Railways, 1866-1891," pp. 20-25; and Wade H. Wright, "Georgia Power Company and Its Predecessors as Factors in the Establishment, Growth, and Development of the Electrical Industry in Georgia," Atlanta Historical Bulletin, II (July, 1938): 198-99. 11. G. M. Hopkins, City Atlas of Atlanta, Georgia from Actual Surveys and Records, 1878. 12. For further information on the struggle by Peters and Adair to maintain control of the city's street railroads, see Williams, pp. 13-23. 13. The analysis of Adair's real estate agent activities was assisted by the Adair Realty Company Plat Books (ARCPB), a fifteen-volume collection located at the Atlanta Historical Society. For a detailed discussion of the nature and use of these records, see Don L. Klima, "Land Barons Ride the Rails: Real Estate Speculators and Street Railways in Late Nineteenth Century Atlanta" (Master's thesis, Georgia State University, 1977), pp. vi-viii. 14. ARCPB. 15. A sampling of 242 Adair Realty Company public notices was examined for the years 1868 to 1883, inclusively. For a discussion of this analysis and a detailed look at the results, see Klima, pp. 29-38. 16. ARCPB. 17. Atlanta Constitution, 28 March 1877. Forced to liquidate his assets, Adair sold his stock in the Atlanta Street Railroad Company to Peters. This brought the value of Peters's holdings to $300,000 and gave him control of four-fifths of all the company's outstanding stock. Martin, "Mule to MARTA," p. 10. 18. E. B. Latham and H. B. Baylor, Atlas of Atlanta, Georgia, 1893. 19. Black, Richard Peters, His Ancestors and Descendants, 1810-1889, p. 26. 20. Atlanta Constitution, 30 March 1884. 21. Ibid. 22. For a closer look at how this northern settlement pattern was later reinforced, see Howard L. Preston, Automobile Age Atlanta (Athens, Georgia, 1979), pp. 79-99. 23. Atlanta Constitution, 30 March 1884. 24. Peters Park Plat, ARCPB. 25. "The Town as Palimpsest" in H. J. Dyos, ed., The Study of Urban History (London, 1968), p. 155. 26. Grant, with other investors, organized the Metropolitan Street Railroad Company, the principal purpose of which was to attract the middle class to his substantial and, up until that time, inaccessible landholdings in the southeast. Hurt, Atlanta's first modern developer, introduced electric streetcar service and perfected the use of the street railways for real estate development in his eastern suburban development, Inman Park. For further information, see Klima, pp. 54-78. 83

Bungalow Suburbs: East and West

By Timothy J. Crimmins

$ih mN. BOULEVARD PARK WASHINGTON R&RK PIEDMONT PARK

I hose acquainted with the South know that there is no one 'South,' but many diverse 'Souths.' M1 This introductory statement in a report by the U.S. Commission on Race and Housing sets the frame­ work for a comparative study of Atlanta and Birmingham by pointing out that there are a variety of living experiences in the South. The same is true for southern cities. Indeed, there is no one Atlanta; rather, as the articles in this issue demonstrate, the city is a mosaic of neighborhoods whose differing colorations create a whole. "An-Other Atlanta," a title which has been selected for a series of walking tours, uses wordplay to make the same point: there are many facets of the city's history.2 This essay will picture two distinct, yet similar neighborhoods which devel­ oped in the period after World War I in order to illustrate that there are many diverse Atlantas, even within an apparently homogeneous, middle-class environment. 84 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

One of the quite evident "impresses" of the 1920s suburban expan­ sion of the city is the ring of bungalow-style houses that surrounds At­ lanta in a perimeter two to five miles from downtown. The one-story structures, called simply bungalows and recognized by variations in their gabled roof lines, usually contain five to eight rooms and are built on modest lots of fifty-foot frontage with a twenty to twenty-five-foot setback from the street.3 (See Figure 1 and Figure 7.) This housing style predominates in neighborhoods from Home Park and Virginia- Highland on the north, Candler Park/Edgewood on the east, Sylvan Hills and West End on the south, and Washington Park on the west.4 For the visitor in the city in the mid-1920s, a walk around the bungalow neighborhoods on the east and west sides of town would have revealed the marked similarities in housing style, the location nearby of gram­ mar and high schools, and the close proximity of public parks. Yet, not apparent in the physical environment of these districts was a visible difference in the residents and their lifestyles: on the east side they were white, on the west they were black. An account of the develop­ ment of two bungalow neighborhoods—North Boulevard Park and Washington Park—reveals how the color line created separate and "other" Atlantas.

I On August 14, 1914, the Atlanta city limits were extended to in­ clude the areas just south of Piedmont Park whose southern boundary was Tenth Street; five days later, to the north, the North Boulevard Park Corporation purchased slightly over sixty-four acres of undevel­ oped land that bordered the east side of Piedmont Park. The subdivi­ sion planned for this site was delayed by the outbreak of the war in Europe and, in 1917, American involvement in it, but the developers proceeded to prepare the land so that it could be sold at a good price.6 The North Boulevard Park Corporation first offered its land to the public in 1916, two years after its incorporation, during which time the Park Drive Bridge was constructed to link the subdivision with Pied­ mont Park, streets were graded, and utilities provided. The newly an­ nounced subdivision was then in a position to take advantage of its de­ sirable location close to fashionable Ansley Park to the west; the Piedmont Driving Club, which lay within the recently landscaped Pied­ mont Park; and the older Victorian neighborhood (now called Midtown) to the south of the park. The 1916 plat of the land for sale showed North Boulevard (now Monroe Drive) and Park Drive to be the center of a neighborhood which extended west to the park, east to Virginia Avenue, south to Tenth Street, and north to Orme Circle. After the three-year hiatus caused by the war-related real estate drought, the subdivision was readvertised in June of 1919, and within two years 85 Journal — Summer/Fall 85

Figure 1. Bungalows along Park Drive. per cent of the lots were sold and over half were occupied by houses. (The bungalow houses built during this period are represented by the Park Drive structures in Figure 1.) The following year the subdivision was expanded to the northeast to include land around Orme Park, in­ creasing the number of lots in the area by 50 percent.6 For the white middle-class Atlantans who moved to North Boulevard Park in the early 1920s there were many amenities that could be enjoyed because of the surge in the production of relatively inexpensive consumer goods. Most of the houses had garages to house their automobiles, which, as Howard L. Preston's Automobile Age At­ lanta has demonstrated, city residents were acquiring in increasingly greater numbers. Motor vehicle registration in Fulton County multi­ plied sevenfold from 6,301 in 1916 to 47,433 in 1925.7 The business workers in sales, insurance, management, and related white-collar em­ ployment in North Boulevard Park were beginning to use their mod­ estly priced automobiles to get to and from work as well as for pleasure cruises in the countryside.8 But there was another transportation net­ work that brought conveniences to the housewives who remained at home. Electrical and telephone lines, water and sewer pipes, and gas mains brought gas stoves, electric sewing machines, phonographs and lights, and a controlled environment in which the time required for housekeeping was dramatically reduced.9 Additionally, nearby trolleys 86 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 2. View of Boys' High and Tech High from Atlanta Constitution, January 31, 1932. made it possible for black domestic workers to commute daily to assist in household chores. The job ceiling of the color line that made it neces­ sary for many black women to do domestic work to make ends meet provided an inexpensive labor force, even in such a modest middle-class neighborhood. The transformation of North Boulevard Park from a subdivision with lots for sale into a neighborhood of residents with similar purposes was not long in developing. The first clear sign of neighboring was the formation of the North Boulevard Park Civic League, which was organ­ ized to help bring additional urban amenities to its members. Of first importance was schooling, which, as a special report by consultants George Strayer and Nicholas Engelhardt noted in 1922, was an area in which Atlanta was woefully lacking. In summarizing the results of the survey, the report concluded that its findings "should awaken all At­ lanta's citizens and parents to the realization that the lives of their school children are in danger, and their health is being menaced and that a reasonable degree of comfort is being denied them while attend­ ing school."10 The Strayer-Engelhardt Report was a survey taken to help determine where $4,000,000 from a 1921 bond issue would be spent; thus, funds were immediately available to provide improved fa­ cilities. For the residents of North Boulevard Park, the benefits were enormous. Samuel Inman Elementary School was constructed in 1923 Journal — Summer/Fall 87

%• Figure 3. Entrance to Piedmont Park from Park Drive Bridge. at the corner of Park Drive and Virginia Avenue on the eastern bound­ ary of the neighborhood, and Boys' High and Tech High (now com­ bined as Grady High School and shown in Figure 2 as they appeared in 1932) were constructed in 1924 just off Boulevard (now Monroe) south of Piedmont Park.11 The new schools were not the only civic benefits that the neighbor­ hood was able to obtain. When the Orme Park extension was added to the subdivision, the civic league successfully lobbied for the City to maintain the park and to build the Elkmont Drive bridge to cross the ravine which ran through the area. In addition, the league was instru­ mental in having the City approve the zoning for a gas station at the corner of Boulevard and Cooledge on the southern edge of the tract.12 Residents then had a place to service their automobiles near a cluster of convenience stores that were also in easy walking distance of their homes. The league worked for neighborhood beautification, urging the planting of dogwoods (which still line many streets) and improvements to Piedmont Park, the romantically landscaped retreat where the white residents of the area could stroll around a man-made lake, send their children to play, or take family picnics in the woods.13 At the behest of residents, the City channeled Clear Creek through the park, built new entrance ways at Park Drive and Tenth Street, and, in 1926, undertook 88 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY a major building program for the construction of facilities for swim­ ming, arts and crafts, and golf.14 (Figure 3 shows Piedmont Park across the Park Drive Bridge, the entrance for North Boulevard Park residents.) The Atlanta experienced by residents of North Boulevard Park was like that of the new, middle-American suburb described by Sinclair Lewis in his novel of the era, Babbitt. The lifestyle they enjoyed was made possible by the new, inexpensively manufactured consumer goods. In his description of the bungalow neighborhood of Floral Heights, Lewis noted that the bedroom of the Babbitt house "was a masterpiece among bedrooms, right out of Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium In­ comes."18 And of the house he said:

It had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laud­ able architecture, and the latest conveniences. Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and slatternly hearth fires .... In the halls were plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-dining room plugs for the piano lamp, for the electric fan. The trim dining room . . . had plugs which supplied the electric percolator and the electric toaster.16

North Boulevard Park was one of Atlanta's "Floral Heights," one of the ring of modest bungalow neighborhoods that brought the physical and social advantages of suburban living to those with "medium incomes." To its tract houses, the Civic League brought neighborhood improve­ ment projects, women's clubs, and a Boy Scout troop and, in the pro­ cess, built a middle-class environment which could be found on the fringe of American cities in the 1920s.17 Yet the suburbs of the period were not quite as homogenous as that of the imaginary Floral Heights, especially in Atlanta where the physical environment of North Boulevard Park was mirrored on the west side in a neighborhood that was separated from its eastside counterpart by the color line.

II In January 1924, the subdivision of West View Park, a four-block tract south of Simpson Street and west of Ashby Street, was announced for development on Atlanta's west side. Although the promotional ma­ terial did not state who the prospective buyers would be, it did carry enough information to indicate that the target audience was the city's black middle class.18 (Figure 4, the map that accompanied the listing of lots, shows three nearby educational institutions—Atlanta Univer­ sity, Booker T. Washington High School, and a grammar school [with the designation that it was "colored"]—and Washington Park, the newly created, and only, public park for blacks in Atlanta.) For those who checked the zoning of this area, there was the additional informa- Journal — Summer/Fall 89

ST

© © © © s © i © © © © i ® | © @ @ @

0-mor or WEST SIDE PfiPK LAND i-OT HS-ldT*DISr#tCT- rvuroM courv TY aro&G/a a^ ^^Hp JC-9i.r i '* CO -MM.ftU T'

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Figure 4. Plat of West View Park. (Fulton County Records Department)

tion that it was a residential location and, another special classification of the 1922 Zoning Ordinance, that it was for occupation by blacks only. What, then, were the forces that helped to focus the growth of an-other Atlanta, another side of the many-faceted face of the South, on the west side of the city? The neighborhood which developed around Wash­ ington Park in the 1920s was shaped in most respects by the same forces that formed North Boulevard Park; the primary difference was that this area was one of the few places middle-class black Atlantans could find the advantages of suburban life. It had not always been apparent that the western suburbs would be open to blacks. In 1910, the area bounded by Ashby Street on the east, Hunter Street (now Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive) on the south, the L & N Railroad on the west, and Simpson Street on the north was an- 90 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY other undeveloped tract on the fringe of a growing city. In that year the Board of Education built the Ashby Street School at the intersection of Lena and Ashby streets for the children of white families who were liv­ ing in or would be moving to the area.19 In 1912 the southern portion of this tract just below the new school was subdivided as Sunset Park, and in 1914 the area just to the north of the school along Mayson Turner Road was opened for settlement as City View Park.20 In the period before World War I, this westside district was an area where land was being subdivided so that white Atlantans could enjoy the benefits of suburban life. Until that time Ashby Street served as a boundary, limit­ ing the expansion of the black community which had grown around At­ lanta University four blocks to the east. Dana White cites the breaking of the color line on the west side in the 1920s as the critical element in the opening of the suburbs for black Atlantans in his article, "The Black Sides of Atlanta," elsewhere in this issue. The crossroad for this struggle was Ashby Street; the land which was opened for settlement lay between Ashby Street and the L & N Railroad. The subdivisions for whites planned for this land immediately before World War I were not successful, even though there were the conveniences of water, sewer, electricity, and a school within walking distance. It must have been apparent to many potential buyers that the demand for new housing by blacks was sufficiently strong to preclude Ashby Street from containing the westward push from Atlanta Univer­ sity. In fact, by 1918 black families were living in new bungalow houses along Ashby Street.21 And by 1919 there were enough black residents in the area for the Board of Education to designate Ashby Street School as colored. In the following three years, the Service Realty Company, a black-owned subsidiary of the Standard Life Insurance Company, solid­ ified the claim to this land for black residential development by purchasing 300 acres between Ashby and the L & N tracks, with por­ tions stretching as far north as Simpson and as far south as Greensferry.22 The principal actor who made possible black suburbanization on the west side was Heman Perry, founder of the Service Realty Com­ pany and a dozen related corporations that purchased, subdivided, and sold undeveloped land, provided financing for homeowners, and con­ structed the modest bungalows found in west Atlanta today.23 Perry did not sit back and wait for his land to sell, rather he actively sought com­ mitments from the City to add improvements that would make his holdings even more attractive. In 1922 Perry sold land in the center of his tract, just south of M. L. King, Jr. Drive, to the Atlanta Board of Education. As on the east side, the residents of the subdivisions that Perry planned would benefit from the Strayer-Englehardt Report rec­ ommending the construction of a junior and a senior high school for black children.24 Since blacks had helped to pass the 1921 bond referen- Journal — Summer/Fall 91

>*f***t**4t*t*****t*+*»tf fill ii

i sfiQl

Figure 5. Booker T. Washington High School. (Atlanta University Collection, AHS)

dum, part of the bond was designated for the improvement of their schools. The brand-new Booker T. Washington Junior-Senior High School was built (by Perry's construction company) in a location that increased the attractiveness of his real estate holdings for middle-class blacks. (Figure 5 pictures Washington High School, which, like its white counterparts of the 1920s, was constructed in a suburban envi­ ronment on one of the extremities of the city.) The next amenity which Perry attracted to his area was Washing­ ton Park, the first public park for blacks in the city and the feature which gives the present-day neighborhood its name. (Figure 6 shows the park as it appears today.) At the same time the new high school was under construction, plans were being made to develop the park, just three blocks to the north.25 Meanwhile, Perry's Service Realty was subdividing nearby lots, and his Service Engineering and Construction Company was designing and building houses for those who bought them. (The bungalow houses in Figure 7 are the type Perry's firms designed and constructed in the Washington Park neighborhood in the early 1920s.) Black Atlantans could afford to move to this suburban environment because Perry also used his Standard Life Insurance Com­ pany to underwrite the home mortgages. The 1924 announcement of West View Park (Figure 4) marked the culmination of Perry's efforts to lay the foundation for a middle-class black suburb on the western 92 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 6. Washington Park. boundary of the city. Unfortunately, Perry, who overextended himself in these efforts, gave up control of his operations in 1925 and left town without seeing the fruits of his energy.26 Who were the black middle class in the Washington Park neighbor­ hood of the 1920s? How did they compare to their white counterparts in the eastside bungalow districts? A sample analysis of those along Ashby Street indicates that the black occupants were more likely than not white-collar or skilled workers and property owners.27 Given the difficulty of getting ahead caused by the color line, this was a remark­ able concentration. In addition, a number of residents owned automobiles, washing machines, and vacuum sweepers, goods that indi­ cated that blacks, too, were taking advantage of the new laborsaving devices that simplified household chores. Yet overall, the Washington Park area was less homogeneous than a similar white neighborhood: in the mid-1980s less than 12 percent of the Ashby Street homeowners had automobiles and few invested more than $200 on household fur­ nishings.28 In addition, blacks in this westside suburb were isolated in an all-black enclave, the nature of which has been the subject of much discussion. E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie sought to explore some of the dimensions of middle-class life three decades later by intro­ ducing a central dilemma: affluent blacks were continually thwarted in their attempts to distance themselves from the Negro masses by the Journal — Summer/Fall 93

Figure 7. Bungalows along Ashby Circle.

color line, which, no matter what their achievement, joined them with the poorest of their brethren.29 What remains today is the "impress" of the ring of bungalow houses around Atlanta. The community building efforts that created them and the social life that existed in them have long since disap­ peared. Both Washington Park and North Boulevard Park have main­ tained their middle-class character because the amenities of housing, parks, and schools continue to make the neighborhoods attractive to those who desire what is now called "in-city" living. The legacy of the color line lingers in the racial make-up of these areas, but its disman­ tling has begun to lessen the differences among Atlanta's middle-class neighborhoods. What remains are physical environments in which new communities and new societies are being formed.

NOTES

1. Robert A. Thompson, Hylan Lewis, and Davis McEntire, "Atlanta and Birmingham: A Compar­ ative Study in Negro Housing," in Nathan Glazer and Davis McEntire, Studies in Housing and Minority Groups (Berkeley, 1960), p. 13. 94 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

2. Dan Durett and Dana F. White, An-Other Atlanta: The Black Heritage (Atlanta, 1975). This was the first of a projected four-part series which was to be published by the Atlanta Bicentennial Commission. The remaining three—An-Other Atlanta: The Turn-of-the-Century Suburbs; An- Other Atlanta: A Woman's Place; and An-Other Atlanta: Urban Spaces/People Places: Under­ standing Downtown—were not published due to a cutback in funds. 3. Marcus Whitten, American Architecture Since 1780: A Guide to the Styles (Cambridge, Mass., 1969 and 1981), pp. 217-21. 4. Atlanta Historic Resources Workbook (Atlanta, 1981), pp. 23, 150, 214, 208, 233. 5. Franklin Garrett, Atlanta and Environs (Athens, Georgia, 1954 and 1969), II: 632. 6. Fulton County Plat Book, Vol. 7 (1916), pp. 6-7; Vol. 7 (1919), p. 151; Vol. 8 (1921), p. 89. 7. Howard L. Preston, Automobile Age Atlanta: The Making of A Southern Metropolis, 1900- 1935 (Athens, Georgia, 1979), p. 51. 8. Atlanta City Directory, 1924-1925. 9. David P. Handlin, The American Home: Architecture and Society, 1815-1915 (Boston, 1979), p. 452. 10. George D. Strayer and Nicholas L. Engelhardt, Report of the Survey of the Public School System of Atlanta, Georgia (New York, 1922), I: 129. 11. Melvin W. Ecke, From Ivy Street to Kennedy Center: Centennial History of the Atlanta Pub­ lic School System (Atlanta, 1972), p. 196. 12. Minutes of the North Boulevard Park Civic League, 1923-1930, in the possession of the Vir­ ginia-Highland Civic Association. 13. See Dana F. White, "Landscaped Atlanta: The Romantic Tradition in Cemetery, Park, and Suburban Development," p. 102 in this volume. 14. City building records are incomplete for this period; however, the buildings themselves have plaques which record their dates. Minutes of the North Boulevard Park Civic League. 15. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York, 1922 and 1950), p. 14. 16. Ibid. 17. Minutes of the North Boulevard Park Civic League. 18. Fulton County Plat Book, 10 (1924), p. 39. City of Atlanta Zoning Ordinance, 1922, map appendix. 19. Mildred Warner, Community Building: The History of Atlanta University Neighborhoods (Atlanta, 1978), pp. 8-9. 20. Ecke, From Ivy Street to Kennedy Center, p. 78. 21. Warner, Community Building, p. 8. Karla Jeanne Spurlock, "Black Residential Development in Atlanta, Georgia: Ashby Street, 1910-1937," seminar paper in possession of author, p. 6. Eleanor Hoytt, et al., "Washington Park Neighborhood Study: Progress Report," seminar paper in posses­ sion of author, p. 4. 22. Preston, Automobile Age Atlanta, pp. 103-5. 23. Ibid. Thompson, et al., "Atlanta and Birmingham," p. 19. 24. Ecke, From Ivy Street to Kennedy Center, p. 160. 25. City of Atlanta Zoning Ordinance, 1922, map appendix. 26. Preston, Automobile Age Atlanta, pp. 105-9. 27. Spurlock, "Black Residential Development," pp. 9, 13. 28. Ibid., p. 15. 29. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of A New Middle Class in the United States (New York, 1957), pp. 176-91. 95

Landscaped Atlanta:

The Romantic Tradition in Cemetery, Park, and Suburban Development

By Dana F. White

DRUID HILLS

IN. OAKLAND CEMETERY PIEDMONT PARK

.•••••••v

\ a>5 *V

WESTVIEW CEMETERY §f «r

GRANT PARK

Urbanization in the South seems to be progressing in much the same manner as in the United States as a whole," sociologist T. Lynn Smith suggested more than a quarter-century ago in his now classic in­ terpretation of "The Emergence of Cities," "except that it has lagged by about fifty years."1 Implied in Smith's formulation is the idea that time may have multiple meanings for a city's history; thus, in terms of a particular municipality's biography, we may speculate that its actual age may sometimes be less important than its generation or stage of development. What is more, by following this same line of reasoning, we may infer that a city's evolution need not be inescapably linear; instead, it may evidence irregular, even abrupt, periods of growth and decline, boom and bust. The influence of the Romantic tradition on landscape 96 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY design in Atlanta, as seen against the backdrop of the totality of Ameri­ can urban history, provides a convenient illustration and test of Smith's challenging hypothesis that "in historical perspective urbanization in the South seems to parallel rather closely the process in the nation, with a lag of some fifty years."2 This design tradition constitutes, it will be shown, a ready test for the concept of generation.

I The Romantic tradition of landscape design was a vital part of what historian Walter L. Creese has labeled the Anglo-American "search for environment."3 It encompassed nothing less than a con­ stant, but always spontaneous, national response to the changes wrought by urbanization and industrialization. Even more, it was an attempt to open up for city dwellers a new manner of living—at once more civilized, humane, and urbane. A major component in Victorian America's search for environment was the "sanitary idea" or "gospel of public health." Put simply, city living was itself a health hazard; indeed, not until the twentieth century would the urban birthrate exceed its deathrate. The problem was only too clear for mid-century city dwellers who had witnessed a succession of virulent epidemics ravage their numbers with a deadly impartiality; and in 1865, after four years of bloody warfare, indications were that diseases would decimate American cities as never before. For the Amer­ ican Civil War had not only been a major struggle in military terms, but it had also affected the civilian populations directly in its propagation of disease on a nationwide basis. Although the major engagements of the war had been fought mainly in the South, the entire eastern half of the country had participated fully in the war effort; mobilization of armed forces had taken place in the major municipalities; the leading ports and rail centers had served as embarkation points; massive armies had been stationed in and around large cities; and the sick and wounded had been treated in municipal hospitals. Urban America, then, had functioned as a staging ground for a total war that had re­ sulted in Union losses alone of 44,238 soldiers dead in combat, 49,205 from wounds, and 186,216 from disease.4 Pestilences spread by war, it seemed clear, would decimate postwar urban populations to an even greater extent that had antebellum epidemics.5 Then, in 1866, the third great cholera scourge of the century swept urban America. Atlanta's Scott's Magazine published regular reports on its progress, north and south, and noted that new cases appeared most frequently on Mondays and Tuesdays. "Physicians," this journal explained, "attributed the fact to the prevailing drunkenness of Saturday night and Sunday."" Once more, as they had during antebellum epidemics, many contemporary observers turned to moralistic theories of divine retribution and human Journal — Summer/Fall 97 depravity in their examination of the health and welfare of urban America. The postwar epidemic killed thousands of city dwellers across the nation; however, in New York, the urban center generally regarded as being most susceptible to the spread of contagious diseases, deaths from cholera dropped from an 1849 high of 5,017 to 591 in 1866.7 This 900 percent drop in the mortality rate was directly attributable to the ad­ ministration of sanitary regulations by the newly instituted Metropoli­ tan Board of Health. Its success in New York, together with the previ­ ous achievements of the wartime United States Sanitary Commission, guaranteed the future of sanitary science in the nation's cities. "For the first time," a historian of the movement has pointed out, "an American community had successfully organized itself to conquer an epidemic. The tools and concepts of an urban industrial society were beginning to be used in solving this new society's problems."8 Imitated by towns and cities across the continent, the institution of the powerful municipal board of health held out the hope that urban America could rid itself for good of major epidemics. By the early 1870s the sanitary idea, or gospel of public health, had become so generally accepted that writers on urban affairs were pre­ pared to argue that the city was more conducive to good health than was the country. One contemporary medical expert, with the very mem­ orable name of Francis Bacon, rejected the idea that city dwelling was injurious to the health of the citizen of the "modern city." The "ancient city," it was true, "like one of those microscopic monsters whose only function seems to be to swallow what is next to it, took in everything, and gave out nothing."9 And it was clear also that for "almost every considerable modern town" there came "a critical and dangerous pe­ riod": "It has ceased to be a rural community, its population has be­ come close, perhaps even crowded; but those public works, and that strict police, and that sense of individual responsibility in the people which are indispensable conditions of civic welfare, have not yet been established."10 During this transition period, Bacon argued, debate over specific sanitary conditions would be clouded with "much idle and delu­ sive talk about natural and unnatural modes of life." Fact had to re­ place fancy and create, in the process, a new social ideal. In the new urban order, a new frame of reference was required. With great Ameri­ can cities well past their transition stages, the ideal of the "modern city" had come of age and the future seemed to offer infinitely more—sanitary communities with heretofore undreamed of amenities: These cities of the future, with sunlight and fresh air and pure water coming to every citizen; with no man standing in his neighbor's way; with no noisome or pernicious occupation suffered within their limits; with all rain-fall and waterwaste carried quickly away to the unharmed river, 98 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

while all other refuse, at once more dangerous and valuable, goes with due dispatch to the hungry soil; with order and cleanliness and beauty in all the streets; with preventable diseases prevented; and with inevitable ones skillfully cared for; with the vigilant government that does not stand apart and look coldly at ruthless greed and needy ignorance, and utter only an indifferent "caveat emptor," but says to the butcher, "This trichi- nous pork, this pathological beef, goes to the renderingvat, and not into the mouths of my children"; and to the brewer, "Burn this cocculus in- dicus and lobelia, and let me see no bitter but hops hereafter"; and to the apothecary, "Successor of Herod, you shall not poison my infants at wholesale with your narcotic 'southing syrups' "; and to the water com­ pany, "Your reservoir shows foulness this week to my microscope and my test-tube: let it continue at your own peril"—these cities of the minimum deathrate, shall they not be our cities?

The answer, of course, was yes. Protestations over the "impractable costliness" of these improvements missed the major point. As Bacon concluded, "nothing is so cheap as health; it is the truest economy; it is cheaper—than dirt."11 Throughout the second half of the century, then, point by point, evidence was amassed to demonstrate that the quality of life—no longer mere survival—was the major concern of the resident of the "modern city." Individual writers would continue to complain of dirt and disease in a single city at a particular time, but the problems that they raised were those of degree, not kind. That urban America could be made a healthy place was no longer a matter for serious dispute: the record of the immediate postwar years was proof of that. The question that re­ mained to be answered was whether it would. Even after the question of improving the city's physical health had been answered satisfactorily, there still remained doubts as to its moral health. The postwar era was, after all, but one generation removed from the Romantic movement in literature and the arts which had so influ­ enced life and ideas on both sides of the Atlantic earlier in the century; moreover, the finest writers of America's Golden Day were, for the most part, still alive—physically, if not always artistically. Their simple dichotomy between a beneficent Nature and a destructive Civilization had become by 1865 a part of the conventional wisdom. That nature (that is, the non-urban) exerted a strong emotional "pull" on the city- dweller during the decades after the war remains certain; that there ex­ isted a compelling anti-city tradition seems doubtful. Throughout the entire period, much was written of the joys of country-style living, but this style of life was to be found in the landscaped city and its suburban towns, not on its farms. The benefits of a rural residence were fully recognized, but agricultural life was seldom endorsed. To the sophisti­ cated urbanite, there was no necessary dichotomy between city and country: the two, he believed, could and should be experienced and en- Journal — Summer/Fall 99 joyed together for the attainment of a balanced mode of urban living.12 In turn-of-the-century England, this balance would be achieved in the garden city, where, its first proponent claimed, the "unholy, unnat­ ural separation of society and nature" would be ended. "Town and country must be married," Ebenezer Howard continued, "and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civiliza­ tion."13 In the United States, however, this new balance would be at­ tained not in the garden city or new town, but through the landscaped cemetery, park, and suburb.

II While facing its own unique challenge during the era of Recon­ struction, the literal "reconstruction" of its physical fabric following the destruction visited by Sherman, Atlanta was generally regarded, to adopt Dr. Francis Bacon's terms, as a "considerable modern town" in "a critical and dangerous period" of transition. "To observers," histo­ rian Paul H. Buck has pointed out, "there seemed little of the Old South about it. Many described it as a Southern Chicago. But the model city which all Atlantans hoped to pattern after was New York."14 That Atlantans consistently recognized the challenge and strove might­ ily to achieve the highest levels of emulation is, by now, a readily demonstrated historical truism.15 When and under what circumstances these efforts were made are the historical questions. And here the Ro­ mantic tradition of landscape design provides a convenient measure. "Cemeteries, Parks, and Suburbs: Picturesque Planning in the Ro­ mantic Style" is both a chapter heading in John Reps's influential sur­ vey of American city planning and a ready outline of the national pat­ tern of urban development.16 This landscape triad, according to Reps's interpretation, was sequential. Its first stage was dominated by "rural cemeteries": Boston's Mount Auburn in 1831, Philadelphia's Laurel Hill in 1836, and New York City's Greenwood Cemetery in 1838. The second stage, that of the municipal public park, was epitomized in New York's Central Park—"the Central Park" to contemporaries—the land for which was acquired by the city in 1856 and the plan for which was determined in 1857. The third and final stage, the landscaped or town suburb, straddled the American Civil War with the opening of such pro­ totype suburbs of Llewelyn Park in New Jersey and Lake Forest in Chi­ cago during the decade of increasing sectional discord, in 1853 and 1856-57, respectively, and, shortly after the war, in 1869, with the devel­ opment of Garden City, on New York's Long Island, and of Riverside, just outside of Chicago. Antebellum Atlanta, with a population of under 10,000 in the year preceding the outbreak of the war, had neither the size nor the wealth to participate in "Picturesque Planning in the Ro­ mantic Style." It was not until Reconstruction that Atlanta joined the 100 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 1. Oakland Cemetery, 1895. (AHS) nationwide movement with the development of its own prototypes for the landscape triad—Oakland Cemetery, Piedmont Park, and the sub­ urb of Inman Park. Rural cemeteries—"cemeteries for the living" in John Reps's par­ lance—had become such vital parts of established urban centers that, by mid-century, they functioned as key public recreation areas. Andrew Jackson Downing, the leading landscape proponent of the period, esti­ mated that from April to December of 1848 over 30,000 round-trip vis­ its had been made to Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia and that twice that number of excursions had probably been made to New York's Greenwood and Cambridge's Mount Auburn cemeteries during a comparable time span. So well-frequented were these "cemetery parks" that special tours were arranged and guidebooks prepared; indeed, it became necessary to post regulations against picnicking and bird-shoot­ ing in Mount Auburn.17 So popular had the "fashionable drive" through the cemetery become, in fact, that the best-selling author Donald G. Mitchell warned against its become a "voyant, inviting chance-comers, offering views of sea or environs, cheating one into the belief that he is in a well-kept garden and not among graves, lured thither by views or prettinesses of landscape design and not by the memories or the senti­ ment of the place—that is awkward."18 The essential awkwardness, in truth, was that burgeoning municipalities were cramped for open space and that the dwellers therein were space-starved. Little wonder, then, at the mid-century fascination with "The City of the Silent": "A vast Journal — Summer/Fall 101

Figure 2. View of Westview Cemetery, c. 1890. (AHS) necropolis, a city under ground/Concealed and dark below, but beauti­ ful above."19 Nineteen years after the opening of Boston's Mount Auburn Cem­ etery, Atlanta invested in its first necropolis with the purchase in 1850 of a six-acre tract east of the city, which was called the "City Ceme­ tery" and known as such until 1876 when it was renamed Oakland Cemetery. During the next quarter-century, it expanded to the point that it approximated, to a degree, the earlier and more ambitious rural cemeteries of larger cities: an additional four acres were added in 1857; exhumed remains from the city's old burial grounds near Peachtree and Baker were removed to Oakland in 1850; additional acreage was pur­ chased during the Civil War; and important internal improvements—a sexton's office-cum-chapel, perimeter and plot fencing, and overall landscaping—were in place by the mid-1870s.2° (Again, by its silver an­ niversary, Oakland seemed to approximate the Mount Auburns, Lau­ rel Hills, and Greenwoods as Figure 1 demonstrates.) That this resem­ blance was more apparent than real would be demonstrated, in terms of stage of development or generation, by the opening of its successor cemeteries—Westview in 1884, Southview in 1885. By the mid-1880s, Oakland Cemetery stood as a ready demonstra­ tion of T. Lynn Smith's dictum that "in historical perspective urbaniza­ tion in the South seems to parallel rather closely the process in the nation, with a lag of some fifty years."21 For Oakland was not a rural 102 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY cemetery, a la Mount Auburn, et al.; rather, it grew to resemble one.22 Thus, Oakland was municipally owned and operated; modest in scale, vide its six-acre extent; and unplanned or, at best, planned by incre­ ments. Mount Auburn, by contrast, was privately organized and main­ tained, a spacious seventy-two acres, and possessed of a comprehensive scheme for development. In making any comparisons between the two, one should recognize that appearances can be deceiving and that, in this instance, there is less there than meets the eye.23 Atlanta's successor cemeteries reflect more accurately the city's generation in terms of the landscape movement, nationally, and the ra­ cial climate, regionally. Westview Cemetery was privately owned and operated; covered an initial 577 acres; and favored postwar tastes in its imitation not of the "rural" but of the "lawn" cemetery—not Boston's Mount Auburn, but New York's Woodlawn24 (Figure 2). It thus re­ flected the city's increasing wealth with its demonstration of the avail­ ability of private capital for quasi-public development; its growing pop­ ulation in the spaciousness of the grounds, as well as in their distance from the municipal center; and, finally, the au courant quality of At­ lanta's taste by the mid-1880s with the choice of the popular lawn over the, by then, passe rural design concept. In a much different sense, Southview Cemetery mirrored the changing racial climate of the region. Prior to Southview's founding in 1885, most black Atlantans, prosper­ ous and poor alike, had been buried alongside their white fellow citizens in Oakland.25 From this point on, increasing racial separation would be­ come the order of the day—for the dead as for the living—and Southview quickly, and for generations to come, came to.be the city's "colored cemetery." Thus do Westview and Southview provide minia­ ture representations of Atlanta life during the 1880s—increasing pros­ perity on the one side, the sharpening of the color line on the other—constituting, together, ready measures for the city's generation. The municipal park, the second component in the landscape triad nationally, also appeared in Atlanta after "a lag of some fifty years." Although the city had once maintained a small patch of open space downtown (subsequently built over during the postwar years) and still boasts of Grant Park (a significant amenity that gave the name to the southside suburb), Piedmont Park, which was laid out in 1910 by the Olmsted Brothers firm, was unquestionably the city's first landscaped open space in the design tradition of the Central Park, which had been planned by the Olmsted, Frederick Law, in 185728 (Figure 3). Both re­ flected similar landscape styles and features; both were situated in ar­ eas for future development rather than in zones of heavy population concentration; and both appealed to basic American democratic values. For in the great municipal parks, the founding Olmsted taught: . . . you will find a body of Christians coming together, ... all classes Journal — Summer/Fall 103

PIEDMONT PARK ATLANTA-GA PRELIMINARY PLAN

Figure 3. Olmsted Brothers' plan for Piedmont Park. (Courtesy of Robert G. Stew­ art, used with permission of National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmstead Na­ tional Historic Site)

largely represented, with a common purpose, not at all intellectual, com­ petitive with none, disposing to jealousy and spiritual or intellectual pride toward none, each individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of all others, all helping to the greater happiness of each. You may thus often see vast numbers of persons brought together, poor and rich, young and old, Jew and Gentile.27 104 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

mm ..11:>^

SI 1«>I\ ISKIN (*' I'ltOIUd'V II) UE KNOWN AS DRl 11) 1 III I ,s BELONGING TO KIKKWOOH I.AND COMP ANY ATLANTA, GA. Scutes

Figure 4. Olmsted design for Druid Hills. (Courtesy of National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site)

But certainly not, for the Atlanta of 1910, it must be added, "black and white," for a "color line" had been drawn immediately around Pied­ mont Park; indeed, not until after World War I, with the development of Washington Park on the city's west side, an area of increasing Afro- American concentration, would a municipal open space be laid out and designated "colored." Thus, again, as with the city's cemeteries, land­ scape design and racial distance were obvious measures of Atlanta's ur­ ban generation. The "town" or "park" suburb was the logical culminating stage in the evolution of the landscape triad.28 To begin with, cemetery-parks had, unexpectedly, attracted large numbers of sojourning urbanites to become, in the process, "cemeteries for the living"; next, municipal parks had been introduced to serve, consciously, the active and the con­ templative or, in Olmsted's terms, the "exertive" and "receptive" needs of city dwellers;29 and finally, the planned landscaped suburbs located people—more precisely, families—in parklike settings. Inman Park, At­ lanta's first totally-planned suburb, is in this tradition. Promoted by developer Joel Hurt upon its opening in 1887 as "the perfect place of Journal — Summer/Fall 105

Wf U

residence," Inman Park declined by 1911 into "Hurt's Deserted Vil­ lage."30 Atlanta possessed neither the wealth nor the drive to create a landscaped suburb in the tradition of Llewelyn Park (1853) and River­ side (1868-69) or on the scale of the contemporaneous Roland Park (1891) in Baltimore or Bronxville (1892) in New York until after the beginning of the new century. Thus, Ansley Park, the development of which began in 1904, and Druid Hills (1908) were Atlanta's first suc­ cessful suburbs in the landscape tradition (Figure 4). Once again, in applying the measure of national urban development, we find that At­ lanta "lagged by about fifty years."

Ill The key words in T. Lynn Smith's dictum concerning urban devel­ opment in the South are not "fifty years" but are, instead, "about" and "some." Thus, while the fifty-year "lag" in the development of the landscape triad seems to hold up well enough for Atlanta, the exact number of years between the initial appearance of a prototype design 106 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY nationally and its introduction regionally is less significant than the fact that there existed some measurable expanse of time between the build­ ing of the original and of its copy. In sum, the fact of generation is more important than its exact measurement. Concerning the application of the concept of generation to the At­ lanta record of landscape design, a number of conclusions seem likely. One set suggests that national developmental patterns are often not readily applicable to all regions at any one time. Thus, as a case in point, merely because Oakland Cemetery might have come to resemble Mount Auburn by the 1870s—or seemed to, during the 1970s, when its 125th anniversary was celebrated—it does not necessarily follow that it was of the same genus; in fact, to make such a connection on the basis of mere semblance serves to determine rather than explain history. Similarly, the historian must take special care in examining the testi­ monies of his witnesses. Thus, while the promoters of Atlanta's ceme­ teries, parks, and suburbs may have likened their creations to those of New York or Chicago, these claims must be viewed in the context of the city's booster tradition. Elsewhere I have described what may be called "the Atlanta equation." It reads: "Adjust for the Atlantan perception of reality by reducing each statement of fact by fifty-to-sixty per cent. The resulting facts and figures will then begin to approximate reality."31 In sum, what are often advertising claims must be seen as such, especially in so self-conscious a city as Atlanta, the "Gate City to the South," the "City Too Busy to Hate," the "World's Next Great City," the "New International City," "Atlanta: Enjoy It and Talk It Up!" Caveat emptor! A second and more tentative set of conclusions regarding genera­ tion revolves around the standard historical questions of what and when, as well as the more elusive one of why. Why were the components of the landscape triad in Atlanta developed as they were and when they were? Concerning cemeteries: It was probably not until the mid-1880s that sufficient investment capital became available in Atlanta for the building of an up-to-date—hence "lawn" and not "rural"—cemetery. During this same period, moreover, race relations were approaching the point at which a "color line" was being drawn and increasing distance between the races was being legitimized as public and private policy. That Westview (white) and Southview (black) cemeteries were devel­ oped at this stage, within a year of each other, may have been coinci­ dental; nevertheless, the likelihood is that racial tensions were a deter­ mining factor in the development of the race-identified cemeteries. Concerning parks: Whereas municipal open spaces appeared in many northern cities soon after rural cemeteries and well before planned suburbs, such was not the case in Atlanta, where the first mu­ nicipal park opened more than three decades after the first landscaped Journal — Summer/Fall 107 suburb. There are two likely explanations for this singular "lag." First, despite their often strident claims to the contrary, Atlanta's early civic leaders were slow in developing a record of municipal achievement in the provision of public amenities; in essence, "privatism," not "civi­ cism," prevailed in nineteenth-century Atlanta.32 Then, too, the New South doctrine of "separate-but-equal" ran counter to the democratic principles embodied in the national municipal park movement. Olm­ sted's vision of "a body of Christians coming together [in parks], all classes largely represented, with a common purpose, ... all helping to the greater happiness of each" spoke directly both to the ideals and to the self-interest of civic leaders outside the South. It addressed the great challenge of the age, the development of approaches that would provide for the lessening of tensions between business and labor, native Americans and the foreign born, the rulers and the ruled. Municipal parks provided, their proponents urged, a meeting place—an updated village common—where social interaction and the education and "up­ lift" of the masses would be accomplished.33 In the New South, where increasing segregation was the order of the day, uplift of the black masses, the major urban underclass, was not perceived as the issue; keeping them "in their place" was. (Figure 5, the "colored entrance" to the Fox Theater, was one of many reminders to black Atlantans of their place.) In the New South, the reform impulse of the national parkite crusade held little or no relevance; hence, another factor in the "lag." Concerning suburbs: The efforts of entrepreneur Joel Hurt to pro­ vide Atlanta with a "perfect place of residence" reflect, in miniature, the city's changing economic condition. Because he lacked the funds necessary for carrying out the original plan of Inman Park, Hurt was forced to subdivide much of its open space, thereby reducing its most significant amenity. Because he was unable to accumulate the capital required for the development of what would become Druid Hills, Hurt had to sell his holdings in 1908—thus accounting for the city's largest real-estate transaction to that point—to "a syndicate composed of Coca-Cola magnate Asa G. Candler, Georgia Railway and Power Com­ pany executive Preston S. Arkwright, and realtors Forrest and George Adair."34 Together, the formation of the resulting Druid Hills Corpora­ tion and the concurrent efforts of Edwin P. Ansley in developing his park suburb mark the coming of age of monied Atlanta—the "take-off" stage, to adopt W.W. Rostow's terms, in the city's "drive for economic maturity."36 That it took place in the private and not the public sector is, of course, consistent with the pattern traced throughout this exami­ nation of the landscape triad. The town or park suburb, the culmination of "Picturesque Plan­ ning in the Romantic Style" nationally, is also a convenient measure of economic inequalities between the races regionally, inasmuch as the 108 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

lOLOKtD rNTRANff

.

Figure 5. Side entrance of Fox Theatre, c. 1940. (Southern Labor Archives, Georgia State University) planned suburb was, in many ways, the ultimate in community build­ ing, the brick-and-mortar/cum arboreal realization of the American Dream of Home. Thus, while the suburbanization of Black Atlanta, be­ ginning in the 1920s, gave rise to new neighborhoods such as that of Washington Park (1924-29), adjacent to the west-side "Negro" munici­ pal park of the same name, it is unlikely that investment capital be­ came available for a true park suburb for blacks much before the Journal — Summer/Fall 109

A City Without Limits

Figure 6. Promotional material of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.

1960s.36 Again, then, as in the cases of cemeteries and parks, the "lag" between landscaped amenities for blacks, as compared with whites, was a ready measure of generation, specifically as it applied to economic inequalities. The application of the concept of generation to Atlanta's distinc­ tive "search for environment" should serve, finally, as a corrective against mono-causal historical explanations for the city's recent spec­ tacular growth along such lines as "Atlanta has always been blessed with progressive leadership"; "Atlanta, after all, isn't really a southern city"; "Atlanta, somehow, has always been different." There is historical validity in none of these thoughts. The historical reality is that more has changed in and about the city during the past quarter-century than during its first century-and-a-quarter of growth, and that from the per­ spective of that transition point during the mid-1950s, Atlanta's future seemed other than that of a "world-class" city. As was explained by Rudolf Heberle, T. Lynn Smith's fellow contributor to the classic study of The Urban South in 1954, 110 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

. . . urbanization in the South occurred during those centuries of western history which saw the rise and highest bloom of modern capitalism. . . . The South, however, has not been a heartland of modern capitalism; rather it was one of the frontier provinces of the Euro-American economic system. In this hemisphere, the South had an economic (not political!) function resembling that of the Balkan and eastern European region in the other hemisphere. The similarities are striking: agricultural surplus production concentrated on large estates or plantations; crop specializa­ tion for export in vast areas (as in Roumania or Hungary); late develop­ ment of secondary industries .... Furthermore, in the South as in east­ ern Europe, until recently, one observes a predominance of low wage industries producing low grade consumer goods (the textile industry in the Piedmont and in Poland). In both regions the result has been a spar- sity of large cities [and] a predominance of small market towns .... It is enough for the present to realize that the so-called "colonial" character of the South's economy has retarded the urbanization of the region . . . .S7 A sobering mood this, especially when compared to the rising binge of optimism that would give birth to such slogans as "Atlanta, a City Without Limits" and "Atlanta, the New International City" during the 1970s (Figure 6). The Atlanta of the day before yesterday, while still self-conscious, was certainly less self-assured than the Atlanta of today. International pretensions were hardly appropriate for the municipality that Floyd Hunter dubbed and delimited as "Regional City" in his notable socio­ logical account, Community Power Structure (1953); nor did expecta­ tions for racial harmony, as embodied in the present-day slogans of "Black Mecca" and "Lovely Atlanta," quite fit a place described in 1948 by the Negro Digest as one of "America's 10 Worst Cities for Ne­ groes."38 The point is, of course, that the Atlanta of the post-World War II era was of a different generation than the Atlanta of the post- Vietnam era; and, as this analysis of its particular search for environ­ ment has attempted to demonstrate, urban generation can prove crucial in measuring accurately a city's true stage of development.

NOTES

1. In Rupert B. Vance & Nicholas J. Demerath, eds., The Urban South (Chapel Hill, 1954), p. 32; italics added. 2. Ibid., p. 33. 3. The Search for Environment: The Garden City, Before and After (New Haven and London, 1966). Journal — Summer/Fall 111

4. These figures are taken from Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History. . . (New York, 1935 & 1967), p. 222. 5. This interpretation and much that follows is based upon Charles E. Rosenberg's The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849/and 1866 (Chicago, 1962). 6. "Monthly Gleanings," Scott's Monthly Magazine, II (Nov. 1866): 868. Cholera cases were reported in New Orleans (ibid., I [May]: 433); in New York City (ibid., II [Aug.]: 649; [Nov.]: 867); in Vicksburg (ibid., [Sept.]: 722); and in St. Louis (ibid., [Nov.]: 866. 7. Rosenberg, pp. 114, 209. 8. Ibid., p. 193. 9. "Civilization and Health," Journal of Social Science, III (1871): 67-68. 10. Ibid., p. 70. 11. Ibid., pp. 76-77. 12. These generalizations, which run counter to conventional textbook wisdom, are based on my dissertation, "The Self-Conscious City: A Survey and Bibliographical Summary of Periodical Literature on American Urban Themes, 1865-1900" (George Washington University, 1969), which covered nearly 6,000 articles from thirty-seven professional and popular periodicals published during the last thirty-five years of the nineteenth century. 13. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, edited, with a preface by F.J. Osborn; with an introductory essay by Lewis Mumford (Cambridge, Mass., 1902 & 1965), p. 48. 14. The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900 (Boston, 1937), p. 194. 15. Dana F. White & Timothy J. Crimmins, "How Atlanta Grew: Cool Heads, Hot Air, and Hard Work," in Andrew Marshall Hamer, ed., Urban Atlanta: Redefining the Role of the City (Atlanta, 1980), pp. 25-44. 16. John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton, 1965), pp. 325-48. 17. Ibid., pp. 325-26. 18. "Parks, Gardens, and Graves," Hours At Home, IV (April 1867): 543. 19. Absalom Peters, "The City of the Silent," /Yours At Home, III (May 1866): 81. 20. Kent Moore, "Atlanta's Pride and Problem," Atlanta Historical Bulletin, XX (Summer 1976): 19-28. 21. See notes 1 & 2 above. 22. Stanley French, "The Cemetery as Cultural Institution: The Establishment of Mount Auburn and the 'Rural Cemetery' Movement," American Quarterly, XXVI (March 1974): 44-45. 23. For a conflicting interpretation, see Diana Williams Combs, "All That Live Must Hear," Atlanta Historical Bulletin, XX (Summer 1976): 61-96. 24. Franklin M. Garrett, Atlanta and Environs: A Chronicle of Its People and Events (Athens, 1954 & 1969), II: 71-72; French, p. 52. 25. Alexa Benson Henderson, "Paupers, Pastors and Politicians: Reflections Upon Afro-Americans Buried in Oakland Cemetery," Atlanta Historical Bulletin, XX (Summer 1976): 42-60; Moore, pp. 29, 33. 26. Elizabeth A. Lyon, "Frederick Law Olmsted and Joel Hurt: Planning for Atlanta," in Dana F. White & Victor A. Kramer, eds., Olmsted South: Old South Critic/New South Planner (Westport, Conn., 1979), pp. 182-86, 188-89. 27. Frederick Law Olmsted, Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns (Cambridge, Mass., 1870), pp. 18-19. 28. "The Anglo-American Suburb," a special issue of Architectural Design 51 (10/11J-1981), edited by Robert A.M. Stern and John Montague Massengale, is a recent and very provocative survey of suburban design. 29. Olmsted, pp. 13-15. 30. "Hurt's Deserted Village: Atlanta's Inman Park, 1885-1911," in White & Kramer, eds., 112 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Olmsted South, pp. 195-221. The complexities of this decline have been fully and irrefutably detailed by Rick Beard in this seminal work on the topic and need not be rehearsed here. 31. "Atlanta as Laboratory: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Urban History," paper read before the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, Atlanta, April 9, 1977. 32. Beard, pp. 215-18; Howard L. Preston, "Parkways, Parks, and 'New South' Progressivism, Planning Practice in Atlanta, 1880-1917," in White & Kramer, pp. 223-25, 236. 33. See, for example, Michael P. McCarthy, "Politics and the Parks: Chicago Businessmen and the Recreation Movement," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, LXV (Summer 1972): 158-72. 34. Lyon, p. 180. 35. W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, 1961). 36. Dan Durett & Dana F. White, An-Other Atlanta: The Black Heritage (Atlanta, 1975), Parts II & III; Mildred Warner, Community Building: The History of Atlanta University Neighborhoods (Atlanta, 1978). 37. "The Mainsprings of Southern Urbanization," in Vance and Demerath, eds., The Urban South, pp. 8-9. 38. Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers (Chapel Hill, N.C, 1953); Ollie Stewart, "America's 10 Worst Cities for Negroes," Negro Digest (March 1948): 44-49, reprinted in Hollis R. Lynch, The Black Urban Condition: A Documentary History, 1866-1971 (New York, 1973). 113

From Suburb to Defended Neighborhood: The Evolution of Inman Park and Ansley Park, 1890-1980

By Rick Beard

ANSLEY PARK

hJ&k PIEDMONT PARK

Edgewood Avenue INMAN PARK

For more than seventy-five years Inman Park and Ansley Park, two of the earliest suburban developments in Atlanta, have undergone a process of development which has created for each a distinctive place in the city's residential fabric. The evolution of these two suburbs has been shaped by a variety of factors which has made each a viable resi­ dential enclave within a larger urban setting. When Inman Park and Ansley Park were first developed, they were situated on the edge of a city just beginning to stretch beyond the pedestrian parameters which defined an essentially pre-industrial urban form. In turn-of-the-century Atlanta, many of the most prominent citizens still lived within walking distance of Five Points, the heart of the city's central business district. 114 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

First Inman Park, in 1889, and then Ansley Park, fifteen years later, represented bold departures from Atlanta's previous residential pat­ tern. They were the first evidences in Atlanta of the suburban phenom­ enon which had already recast the urban fabric of New York, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and a host of other older, more established north­ ern cities. Although both suburbs were soon joined by a host of residen­ tial imitators (and competitors), each was able to retain a distinctive aura as one of the earliest suburban ventures in the city.1 During recent years Ansley Park and, to a greater extent, Inman; Park have been at the forefront in the establishment of new residential: patterns in Atlanta. Both have been among the first close-in residential; areas to undergo reexamination and rejuvenation as plausible urban al­ ternatives to contemporary suburban life. The extraordinary success that has marked this rejuvenation, particularly in Inman Park, should! not blur the differences between the two neighborhoods, which are andi always have been considerable. The ability of both suburbs to avoid the blight and clearance that: have befallen many neighborhoods on the fringes of the central city re­ sulted from the workings of the interrelated concepts of privatism and: design determinism. Privatism has received its most interesting and thorough elaboration in the writings of urban historian Sam Bass Warner, Jr., who maintains that for many Americans the ownership of: property, especially land, confers the right to use that property as the owner sees fit, with little regard for immediate neighbors or for the larger society. This attitude is best illustrated in the fee simple system of land ownership and in the view which interprets housing as a com­ modity to be bought and sold rather than as a basic human necessity and right. Privatism on the social level, continues Warner, is the belief that "the individual should see his first loyalty as his immediate family, and that a community should be a union of such money-making, ac­ cumulating families." The widespread acceptance of this attitude has meant that "the physical forms of American cities, their lots, houses, factories, and streets have been the outcome of a real estate market of: profit-seeking builders, land speculators, and large investors."2 Privat­ ism is an internally held cultural belief system which manifests itself: through the decisions invididuals make about their social priorities and, perhaps more importantly, about the uses of their property. It has re­ peatedly colored the history of Inman Park and Ansley Park, and the evolution of each suburb might well be viewed in relation to the extent to which the attitude held sway at any given time. Design determinism, a concept which I am introducing here, refers to a chain of events initiated by the original design of a residential sub­ urb and is basically an external factor. The design of a suburb is set early in the planning process and is rarely changed, or at least improved: upon, once development has begun. The quality and maintenance of a Journal — Summer/Fall 115 suburb's design bear the primary responsibility for attracting invest­ ment in land and housing. The more amenities a design includes, the more likely it is that large amounts of money will be spent to live there. The level of investment in turn plays a role in determining the charac­ ter of those who will live in the particular suburb, because residents who can afford to pay high prices for housing generally belong to the middle or upper economic and social strata. Just as they can afford to pay the initial high prices for ownership, they can also afford to main­ tain their property. Consistent maintenance enhances a residential area's attractiveness and reinforces the original design's quality. In the same fashion in which a good suburban design is self-rein­ forcing due to the cycle of investment and ownership it triggers, a bad design is ultimately self-destructive. An ill-conceived, unattractive sub­ urb is less likely to draw substantial amounts of investment and, thus, is less likely to become the home of well-to-do property owners. Re­ sidents with fewer financial resources will often be unable to provide proper maintenance for their homes, the gradual deterioration of which will diminish whatever attractive features the suburb originally possessed. Although privatism and design determinism have been described here as distinct concepts, their interrelatedness should not be over­ looked. The chain of events triggered by the character of a suburb's design results in large measure from the view of land and housing as commodities that privatism encourages. As is the case with the purchase or sale of any other commodity, people pay more for that to which the market has assigned the higher value and in the process of so doing reconfirm the market's initial evaluation. The higher the price that is paid for lots in a particular suburb, the greater the investment they represent and the greater the motivation there is to protect that investment. At the same time, such an area is appealing to speculators in land and housing, for whom profits are the first consideration. Fre­ quently the tension between these antithetical aims exists within indi­ vidual property owners. The manner in which residents resolve these tensions has a cumulative effect and helps to preserve or undermine the amenities of a suburb's design. When describing the suburbanization process in the United States, historian Joel Schwartz captured the essence of this tension between design determinism and privatism:

The suburbanite sought a pastoral retreat which was paved, electrified, and serviced by trained professionals. He dreamed of a garden spot. . . . The homeowner sought to preserve his beloved ground . . . but found that community solidarity crumbled when offered tempting real estate profits. Because of this vulnerability, the suburbanization of America has meant more than physical removal beyond the built-up portions of the 116 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

city; it has also included a pervasive yearning often frustrated by an indi­ vidualistic ethos, for some sense of attachment to a covenanted com­ munity.' In Schwartz's opinion, the "individualistic ethos" was often at odds with the desires for a "pastoral retreat" and ultimately worked to frus­ trate the existence of "some sense of attachment to a covenanted community." The creation of community attachments was, in the view of Freder­ ick Law Olmsted, the preeminent landscape architect of late nine­ teenth-century America, the ultimate aim of suburban planning. Such developments should create what Olmsted called "the idea of habita­ tion." In his proposal for Riverside, Illinois, in 1868 he wrote: There are two aspects of suburban habitation that need to be considered to ensure success: first, that of the domiciliation of men by families, each family being well provided for in regard to its domestic indoor and out­ door private life: second, that of the harmonious association and coopera­ tion of men in a community, and the intimate relationship and constant intercourse and interdependence between families. Each has its charm, and the charm of both should be aided and acknowledged by all means in the general plan of every suburb.4 Olmsted's basic intention was to create a residential environment which would encourage the development of unity within and among families. He set for his planning efforts no less a goal than that of fostering com­ munity, an elusive, nearly immeasurable ambition. If Olmsted's belief in the primacy of community is not misplaced, then the extent to which Ansley Park and Inman Park offer an environ­ ment in which a sense of community is created or enhanced provides the truest test of their success as residential developments. To evaluate their achievement in these terms properly, it is necessary to review the manner in which both Atlanta suburbs evolved and the factors which shaped their evolution. This review is facilitated by examining the fol­ lowing four questions:

(1) What were the original intentions of Joel Hurt and Edwin Ansley, and did they shift in response to changing circumstances? (2) What factors have had the greatest effect on the development of In­ man Park and Ansley Park, and why have the two suburbs evolved in such a different manner? (3) Are Inman Park and Ansley Park successful residential communities? (4) What is the future of each suburb?

Any attempt at answering this first question must begin with what both men did rather than with what they said in order to determine precisely what they hoped to achieve. Their public statements were for Journal — Summer/Fall 117

Figure 1. Car barn for Atlanta & Edgewood Street Railway Co. at Edgewood and Hart streets, 1889. (AHS) the most part hyperbolic exercises in salesmanship. Hurt spoke of In­ man Park as the "perfect place of residence," while Ansley was certain that his suburb was the site for "the handsomest homes in all Atlanta or the South."* Fortunately, the actual plans of the two developers were somewhat more revealing than their public utterances. Within the limi­ tations imposed by the physical site and his financial resources, each man sought to create a suburban community based on many of the ideas that Frederick Law Olmsted set forth as guidelines for successful residential planning. Whether through ignorance or choice, neither At­ lanta developer incorporated all the elements of the Olmstedian canon. Joel Hurt's omissions, however, proved to be of greater significance for Inman Park than Edwin Ansley's were for Ansley Park. Joel Hurt initially conceived of Inman Park as part of a larger ur­ ban system which also included Edgewood Avenue, an electric street railway, and the Equitable Building. Residents of the suburb were to enjoy life in homes along tree-lined streets which were only minutes from the workplaces of the central city. First a hotel and then a conven­ tion hall were to be constructed on the Mesa, the triangle of land bounded by Springvale Park and Euclid and Edgewood avenues. These facilities, neither of which was built, were intended to lend Inman Park a cosmopolitan air and elevate the suburb to regional importance. (The 118 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY trolley line, which was built, can be seen as it appeared at the Edge- wood Avenue Car Barn in the late 1880s in Figure 2.) Joel Hurt's vi­ sion, although it was conceived on a decidedly more modest scale, owed a good deal to Frederick Law Olmsted's plan for Riverside. The Chicago suburb had its rail link to the downtown just as Inman Park had its streetcar line. The business block that Olmsted included was to be mimicked in the Atlanta suburb on the Mesa, first by the hotel and then by a convention hall. Hurt fell short in his attempt to match Olmsted's achievement in those areas of the development which were most closely related to de­ sign. Inman Park lacked a curvilinear street system and never possessed the amount of residential land necessary to allow sufficient setbacks for housing. The landscaping, while not unattractive, lacked any real imagi­ nation: without the hundreds of trees that Hurt had planted in lock- step fashion along each street, Inman Park would prove to be a rather flat, uninteresting arrangement of residential lots. Like his illustrious contemporary, Joel Hurt seems to have possessed a sense of how a sub­ urban development might be integrated into a larger urban setting; however, he lacked Olmsted's genius for exploiting and manipulating the landscape. It was in precisely these areas of design that Edwin Ansley met with success in his planning efforts. Guided by the thinking of Solon Ruff, who had earlier worked with Olmsted on the development of Druid Hills, Ansley set out to incorporate more of the landscape fea­ tures of a Riverside in Ansley Park than Hurt ever did in Inman Park. Throughout Ansley Park far greater attention was paid to the landscap­ ing of residential lots, parks, and open space. Large setbacks were man­ dated by deed restrictions, and a ten-mile system of curved streets of­ fered a wide array of suburban vistas. Although Ruff initially denuded considerable portions of the suburb's landscape (seen during the grad­ ing of streets in Figure 2), he displayed an imaginative flair for replant­ ing which had eluded Hurt. Ansley seemed content to concentrate his planning energies on cre­ ating residential amenity within the suburb and thus paid seemingly little attention to Ansley Park's ties to the rest of Atlanta. His lone attempt to vary the residential pattern of the suburb proved unsuccess­ ful when the Piedmont Driving Club refused his offer of a new club­ house site on The Prado. Although Ansley tried to lure the street rail­ ways to and through the suburb, he was never successful in establishing the transit link with the central city that Hurt believed to be of such significance. No doubt the advent of the automobile, which coincided with the early years of Ansley Park's growth, made ready access to pub­ lic transit a less pressing issue than it had seemed ten or fifteen years earlier. At the same time, the desirability of linking his development with the rest of the city seems to have enjoyed a low priority in Edwin Journal — Summer/Fall 119

Figure 2. Ansley Park, 1905. (AHS)

Ansley's eyes. To a certain extent he chose to treat Ansley Park as an entity removed from the rest of Atlanta. The original intention of Joel Hurt and Edwin Ansley was to make money by creating and nurturing a successful suburb. Mindful of the fact that to a certain extent their success depended on the quality of their product, each man incorporated elements of the suburban theories of Frederick Law Olmsted. The design deficiencies evident in Joel Hurt's development of Inman Park, however, ultimately proved to be more detrimental than did Edwin Ansley's disinterestedness in linking Ansley Park more closely with its urban surroundings. Ansley remained committed to creating an amenable residential life in his suburb and consistently refused to compromise the basic design. His practice of gradually developing new portions of Ansley Park enabled him to re­ spond to changes in clientele without altering the underlying concepts that guided his planning. To a large degree his interest in and commit­ ment to the residential quality of his suburb prevented him from falling prey to the more mercenary implications of privatism. Joel Hurt's commitment to the maintenance of Inman Park's resi­ dential features was not nearly so strong. His conception of the suburb as only one part of an urban system eventually led him to discard his 120 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY original intention of making Inman Park the "perfect place of resi­ dence." When Hurt and his partners in the East Atlanta Land Com­ pany found themselves financially overextended after the nationwide panic of 1893, he hesitated hardly at all before altering the physical design of Inman Park to create additional residential lots to sell. Hurt's willingness to sacrifice the open spaces that had lent the suburb some distinction may have been bolstered by his involvement with the initial planning for Druid Hills, which showed promise of becoming a much more successful venture. Whatever its cause, his decision to turn here­ tofore undivided land into quick profits put an end to his initial hope of creating an exclusive, cosmopolitan neighborhood.6 The search for profits in both suburbs translated into speculation in real estate, which was prevalent throughout the early years of Inman Park and Ansley Park. Consideration of its role in shaping their initial periods of growth offers a point of departure for answering the ques­ tions of what factors had the greatest effect on the development of the two suburbs and why the two evolved so differently. Speculation's ma­ jor impact was on the rates at which lots were sold and houses con­ structed. The majority of lots—68 percent in Inman Park and 81 per­ cent in Ansley Park—were sold at public auctions. This sales method was particularly conducive to land speculation because it created a quasi-competitive atmosphere in which a skillful auctioneer could in­ flate prices and convince reluctant participants to take the gamble that their purchases could later be resold for a profit. (Figure 3 shows a crowd of interested buyers in Ansley Park when land was being auc­ tioned off.) Many of those who bought lots at auction never intended to live on them. Of those lots deeded to auction-goers, 59 percent in In­ man Park and 44 percent in Ansley Park were resold before they were ever put to use.7 The speculative process slowed the rate of home construction con­ siderably in both suburbs. In Inman Park, an average of fourteen years passed between the date on which a lot was first deeded and the one on which a building permit was issued for a house on the site. Two-thirds of the lots in the suburb were first occupied by a second deedholder. Less than nine years passed from the first deed to the building permit in Ansley Park, where 72.6 percent of the lots were first put to use by their second owners.8 The degree to which land speculators profited in the two suburbs was inversely related to the time which passed between the issuance of a land deed and the building permit. The average lot sold in 1892 in Inman Park was not resold for residential use until 1906, a full ten years after Hurt had begun to subdivide the open space in the suburb and thereby reduce its appeal. In Ansley Park, on the other hand, the speculator who had bought property in 1904 was able to resell it by 1913, at which point residential construction was just gathering momen- Journal — Summer/Fall 121

Figure 3. Prospective buyers gathering for land sale in Ansley Park, 1905. (AHS)

turn. The impact of speculation was less severe in Ansley Park precisely because investment in that suburb's property offered a faster return: speculators had to wait a much shorter time before selling their lots at a profit to invididuals planning to build homes. Within fifteen years of the first auction sale in Ansley Park, 67 percent of the houses built before 1930 in the suburb were standing. The same amount of time in Inman Park saw construction of only 31 percent of that area's pre-1930 total completed. Although speculation was a preeminent force in shaping the early growth of each suburb, it was not the only factor at work. The design choices made by Hurt and Ansley, as suggested earlier, played a key role in determining each suburb's attractiveness to the public. By incor­ porating many elements of Olmsted's suburban design canon, Ansley and Ruff fashioned a more spacious residential landscape than Hurt even attempted to create. The purchasers of lots in Ansley Park re­ sponded to these amenities enthusiastically. Specifically, in the north- side suburb property prices were directly reflected in construction costs; conversely, in Inman Park, this relationship failed to develop. On the basis of an "amenities scale," it was determined that 35 percent of the blocks in Ansley Park ranked in the top two-fifths of median prices for 122 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

TABLE 1 Relative Land and Housing Values* Inman Park Ranking 1/5 2/5 3/5 4/5 5 Land 3 11 4 2 0 Housing 8 6 1 2 3 Possible matches 3 6 1 2 0 Matching blocks 2 2 0 0 0 Ansley Park Ranking 1/5 2/5 3/5 4/5 5 Land 10 6 6 11 1 Housing 6 10 5 7 6 Possible matches 6 6 5 7 1 Matching blocks 4 3' 4 5 0 Source: Fulton County Deed Books and Atlanta Building Permits *The relative values for land and housing were calculated in the following manner. Data gathered from building permits and land deeds were used to ascertain the median value of the residential lot and the house at the initial point of sale or construction for each block. The difference between the highest and the lowest median value was calculated and divided into equal fifths, and each block was ranked according to the relative value of its lots and houses. building lots, whereas only 10 percent of the blocks in Inman Park were similarly ranked (Table 1). Design decisions and property-owner responses to them were, of course, significant; however, other outside forces were also at work. Inman Park enjoyed the advantage, despite its less ambitious de­ sign, of being the first suburban neighborhood in Atlanta and might therefore have attracted more residents sooner on the strength of its novelty alone. Hurt's development plans, however, suffered from unfor­ tunate timing. Four years after the initial lots were sold, the Panic of 1893 created economic uncertainties which affected the Atlanta real es­ tate market for years thereafter and drastically slowed residential de­ velopment. By the time the local economy had fully recovered, there were other suburbs seeking to attract new residents. Ansley Park was one of them, and its timing proved to be much more fortuitous than Inman Park's had been. Between 1880 and 1920, Atlanta's population grew from 37,409 to 200,616 people, an increase of 163,207. Forty per­ cent of that increase took place during the first decade of Ansley Park's existence, from 1900 to 1910. From 1890 and 1900, Inman Park's first decade, only 15 percent of the increase occurred; thus, Joel Hurt had a much smaller pool of new home-seekers from which to attract residents than did Edwin Ansley. Journal — Summer/Fall 123

Ansley Park also enjoyed several other advantages in its rivalry with Inman Park. It was more fashionably located, astride Peachtree Street and adjacent to the city's largest public park. It benefitted from Richard Peters's residential development efforts which helped to cluster the city's social elite immediately to the south along Peachtree just a few trolley stops away. (See Don Klima's treatment of the Peters Park development elsewhere in this issue.) As the first northside suburb, Ansley Park was located directly in the path of Atlanta's future resi­ dential growth. The importance of this location in determining who lived in the suburb should not be underestimated. Ansley Park has con­ tinuously attracted socially prestigious residents. In his 1953 study of Atlanta's power structure, Floyd Hunter mapped the residential areas occupied by "power and professional personnel."9 With very few excep­ tions these individuals were located in the northside neighborhoods, one of which was Ansley Park. Ansley's suburb was not only more propitiously located, it was also bigger. The intial purchase of 202 Vt acres in 1904 was supplemented during the next ten years by additional purchases of more than 125 acres. When completed, Inman Park contained only 189 acres. Size alone permitted Ansley to incorporate a spaciousness of street and lot design that Joel Hurt could not afford. Unlike Inman Park, which was closed in by its proximity to such noxious elements as the railroad lines paralleling DeKalb Avenue, Ansley Park was insulated by its size. Speculation, design, timing, location, and size all played formative roles in the early development of Inman Park and Ansley Park. Some of these elements, most particularly design, resulted directly from deci­ sions made by Joel Hurt or Edwin Ansley. Others were beyond the con­ trol of either man and were instead the outcome of events or forces beyond the boundaries of the individual suburbs. As the two neighbor­ hoods matured, the factors which had the greatest effect on their char­ acter were increasingly impersonal manifestations of interactions among physical, social, and economic elements. The single most obvious and compelling fact about both suburbs was the manner in which their for­ tunes diverged with the passage of time. By 1970 Inman Park and Ans­ ley Park were poles apart in nearly all the areas under consideration. Inman Park was caught in a seemingly irreversible spiral of physical deterioration that threatened the neighborhood with clearance. The same elements which worked to the detriment of Inman Park were si­ multaneously interacting in a different way to guarantee the stability of Ansley Park. There is considerable evidence of the gap between the physical re­ alities of the two suburbs. Property (land and housing) in Ansley Park which had originally been worth 1.6 times as much as property in In­ man Park was by 1970 worth 3.3 times as much. This growing disparity in property values was reflected in the condition of housing. In 1940 the 124 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

TABLE 2 Housing Characteristics by Census Tracts 1940-1970

Type of Structure 1940 1950 Ansley Inman Ansley Inman Park Park Park Park One-family unit—% 41% 31% 36% 27% Two-family unit—% 8% 28% 9% 27% 3-4 family unit—% 5% 20% 10% 22% 5+ family unit—•% 46% 20% 45% 26%

Total Units 2516 1517 2882 1495

1960 1970 Ansley Inman Ansley Inman Park Park Park Park 35% 26% 35% 23% 10% 23% 8% 16% 8% 19% 7% 14% 46% 32% 51% 47%

2824 1612 2823 1276

Source: United States Census of Population: Census Tract Statistics. 1940, 1950, 1960, and 1970. Journal — Summer/Fall 125 percentage of homes in Inman Park in need of major structural repair was four times as large as Ansley Park's percentage. Thirty years later it was eight times as large.10 The physical maintenance of a neighborhood depends on several elements: the area's original design; the presence, capability, and will­ ingness of property owners to protect their investment; and the willing­ ness of the governing authority to provide vital municipal services. In each of these instances, Ansley Park fared far better than Inman Park. The design for the former suburb, as suggested earlier, was a more spa­ ciously conceived one which did not respond in every instance to the necessities of speculation and profit-making. Although serviceable, the design for Inman Park was often bastardized in response to the devel­ oper's desire for a rapid return on the initial investment. The physical qualities of each suburb, in short, provided a backdrop for a number of other elements which had a significant impact on the character of the two neighborhoods. The interaction of these elements, in turn, affected the manner in which Inman Park and Ansley Park changed physically. Owner occupancy of housing neatly illustrates this type of interac­ tion. The percentage of dwelling units occupied by their owners was consistently lower for Inman Park than for Ansley Park: in 1938, Ansley Park's percentage was 1.8 times larger than Inman Park's. By 1970 the difference had grown to 2.9.11 This disparity stemmed from the more attractive housing that was to be found in Ansley Park. At the same time, it meant that Inman Park had a larger percentage of renters among its residents. While tenants are no less concerned with their physical surroundings than owners are, they are more likely to be reluc­ tant to invest any substantial amount of money in upkeep for property they do not own. As one planner has written: "The axiom has it that because owning represents freedom from the onerous and unequal con­ tract inherent in renting, this freedom will raise the owner's sense of personal pride and, by extension, greater interest in maintaining the family's property."12 This axiom, however, fails to consider the particu­ lar and, in the case of Inman Park, pervasive role of the absentee owner who has little motivation to maintain a house in which he does not live, rarely sees, very likely purchased at a minimal price, has subdivided into small apartments, and views largely as a tax write-off. The role of such absentee owners was a key one in fueling a process of deterioration which became self-perpetuating and defied resistance by residents of Inman Park. The suburb more and more became a ha­ ven for renters forced by personal economic circumstances to live in apartments in subdivided single-family structures. From 1940 through 1970, an average of 42 percent of Inman Park's dwelling units were lo­ cated in structures which housed from two to four families, a clear indi­ cation of the extent of subdivided housing present. The incentive to maintain such property was at best minimal (Table 2). 126 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Furthermore, homeowners in this suburb, whatever their incentive, frequently lacked the means to maintain their property. The median income of a family in Inman Park in 1960 was $4,153, a figure scarcely more than half that for an Ansley Park family and nearly $1,800 less than the amount earned by the average Atlanta family.13 Those who could afford proper upkeep for their homes often faced a loss of equity growing from the general physical decline of the area and were forced eventually to leave it. As planner Constance Perin has noted, "no mat­ ter how much pride or pleasure each individual household takes in maintaining its property, the sale price will depend on what the neigh­ bors have done and how attentive to the public plan the city depart­ ments have been."14 In the case of Inman Park, the City and its agencies contributed to the suburb's physical deterioration through both abuse and neglect. The streets, sidewalks, and public spaces seem simply to have been overlooked and permitted to fall into disrepair. At the same time, the bisection of Springvale Park, the suburb's only large open space, by Eu­ clid Avenue in 1961 created a major traffic artery through the middle of the neighborhood.18 Although the City's neglectful and destructive im­ pulses manifested themselves in a physical manner, they may well have been nurtured by the political impotence of the suburb's residents stemming from a combination of social and economic factors. The area's population shrank with the passage of time and became increas­ ingly transient. In 1970 Inman Park's population was 39 percent smaller than it had been in 1940 and only 30 percent of the suburb's addresses had the same occupant who had lived there five years ear­ lier.16 Few of the residents enjoyed a substantial income, and an ever- decreasing percentage of them lived in dwellings that they owned. The generally accepted principle that a resident's right to a voice regarding his physical surroundings was often directly linked to the ownership of property probably made it particularly easy for City officials to ignore Inman Park's constituency. Renters were viewed as individuals with no stake in the community. In Ansley Park, the social and economic characteristics which com­ bined to have such a deleterious effect on the physical features in In­ man Park were either lacking or of a different dimension. The rate of owner occupancy, for instance, was consistently higher, while the rate of residential turnover was always lower. Between 1938 and 1970, an aver­ age of 62 percent of the addresses in Ansley Park were owner-occu­ pied.17 In 1970, 17 percent of the suburb's addresses had had the same occupant for almost thirty years; 20 percent for twenty-five years; 32 percent for fifteen years; and 45 percent for ten years (Table 3). Rent­ ers in Ansley Park were more apt to live in apartment buildings than in subdivided single-family dwellings. Residential structures housing five or more families contained an average of 47 percent of the suburb's 128 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY dwelling units from 1940 through 1970. Units located in buildings hous­ ing two to four families averaged only 16 percent of Ansley Park's total during these years (Table 2). The prevalence of apartment houses meant that their owners had made a considerable investment by prop­ erly maintaining their buildings. Individual homeowners, many of whom held white-collar or professional positions and thus enjoyed a considerably greater income than did their Inman Park counterparts, were far better able to maintain their property. A number of elements, in short, coalesced to forestall the sort of physical deterioration in Ans­ ley Park that afflicted Inman Park. The City was a positive factor in this amalgam for reasons exactly opposite to those that shaped its stance toward Inman Park. The pres­ ence of a large number of homeowners with ample financial resources created a constituency able to exert political pressure on behalf of the suburb. Their influence was very likely amplified by the fact that until 1967 Ansley Park was the site of the Georgia Governor's Mansion. Mu­ nicipal services were never permitted to decline to the extent that they did in Inman Park. Streets and sidewalks were kept in good repair and the numerous parks and open spaces were well-maintained. These ser­ vices combined with the original design to help preserve the attractive physical qualities of the suburb and to guarantee that Ansley Park re­ mained a more appealing residential area than Inman Park. Although the physical, social, and economic factors which had the greatest impact on Inman Park and Ansley Park were to a large extent confined to each suburb, external events also influenced the develop­ ment of the two Atlanta neighborhoods. The importance of the Panic of 1893 in shaping the early history of Inman Park has already been noted. The economic and societal dislocations that accompanied the Great Depression and World War II also played an important part in the evolution of the housing in the two suburbs. Both suburbs were called on to absorb Atlanta's growing population at a time when no new housing was being built. The response in both cases was the same—the subdivision of existing single-family housing—but it had a different ef­ fect on each suburb. In Ansley Park the creation of several dwelling units within a single home was an aberrant event: it had not happened previously to any great degree and it was not in keeping with the gen­ eral residential tenor of the suburb. Although a number of the subdi­ vided homes continued to exist as boarding houses long after the hous­ ing market had revived, they were always looked upon with disfavor by a majority of Ansley Park residents and were a primary target for revi­ talized civic associations. In Inman Park subdivision of a single-family homes for multi-fam­ ily use was by no means a new phenomenon at the outset of the Depres­ sion. As early as 1930, 20 percent of the residential units in the suburb Journal — Summer/Fall 129

TABLE 4 Housing Characteristics 1930 Category Tract Ansley Park % Inman Park % Types of buildings - number 1080 888 Commercial 46 4 99 11 Residential 1034 96 789 89 One family 860 83 610 77 Two family 81 8 113 14 Three or more 7 1 30 3 Apartment 44 4 22 3

Source: A Report on Permanent Census Tracts for Metropolitan Atlanta. were in structures housing two or more families and that percentage grew steadily over the succeeding forty years despite the absence of any apartment house construction (Table 4). When the restoration process began in Inman Park during the early 1970s, it was not unusual for new owners to find as many as eight families living in a single house. The subdivision of existing housing occasioned by the Depression and World War II, although more extensive in Inman Park, had an ef­ fect on both suburbs. The effects of planned highway construction, on the other hand, were limited to Inman Park. During the late 1960s state transportation planners plotted the route of Interstate 485 along the eastern boundary of the suburb. Clearance for the project eliminated nearly sixty houses in the most well-preserved portion of the neighbor­ hood and created a wide expanse of vacant land. The proposed express­ way and interchange constituted still another threat to a neighborhood already afflicted by physical deterioration and municipal inattention. The eventual decision to forego construction of 1-485, while a legitimate victory for the residents of Inman Park, did not entirely eliminate the problem, for the use of the cleared land has yet to be determined. The solution to this dilemma poses one of the most significant questions still confronting the suburb. How it is answered has the potential to be a significant factor in the continued success of the restoration effort. The fight against the expressway in Inman Park illustrates the emergence in recent years of yet another element that has played a sig­ nificant part in each suburb's development. Since the creation of the Ansley Park Civic Association during the early 1960s and Inman Park Restoration in 1970, both suburbs have benefitted from the active pres­ ence of neighborhood organizations. With the exception of the original 130 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY design (and perhaps the expressway), the elements thus far discussed as having played an important part in the growth in Inman Park and Ans­ ley Park have been largely impersonal results of the interaction among physical, social, and economic forces; however, the organization of the Ansley Park Civic Association and the Inman Park Restoration Associa­ tion reestablished an element of collective (yet personal) decision-mak­ ing at the very moment when the Atlanta political climate was becom­ ing attuned to neighborhood issues. In Ansley Park the effort of the Civic Association was aimed largely at undoing the harmful effects of housing subdivision and at reversing demographic trends that were cre­ ating an increasingly aged population. Inman Park Restoration faced (and still faces) a much greater challenge as it attempted to reverse a spiral of physical deterioration. Inman Park and Ansley Park developed differently because a set of interrelated elements played itself out in two very different settings. The design, location, and size of each suburb; the social and economic characteristics of their populations; and external events on both the lo­ cal and national level have all played a part in shaping the two suburbs. Underlying this mosaic of elements, however, are the twin themes of privatism and design determinism. The initial design and the extent to which it was implemented set the tone for what evolved in each suburb. Ansley Park was from the outset the more amenable residential area. Although it presented ample opportunities for profit by land specula­ tors, it offered equally strong enticements to residents interested in homes. By and large, the tension between the wish for a stable residen­ tial environment and the temptation to seize the profits that such an area generates was resolved in favor of the former in Ansley Park. This tension was resolved in precisely the opposite fashion in In­ man Park. Beginning with Joel Hurt and his partners and extending to the absentee landlords of the 1950s and 1960s, residential amenity took second place to individuals' desires to profit from their holdings. This set of priorities both encouraged and benefitted from the suburb's in­ ability to attract and hold a sizeable group of residents interested in and capable of owning and maintaining homes. It has only been within the last decade that these priorities have been reversed, due almost en­ tirely to the influx of a new generation of owners committed to creating and sustaining a stable residential community. This commitment, which has always been present in Ansley Park, has only recently been made in Inman Park. In order to answer the question of how successful Inman Park and Ansley Park are as residential communities, it is necessary to point out that the answer would vary according to when the question were asked. The question of timing is not an idle one. One of the most prominent characteristics of both suburbs has been the extent to which they have changed over the years. The importance of change has at no time been Journal — Summer/Fall 131 better illustrated than during the past ten years. Were Inman Park to have been evaluated in 1971 rather than a decade later, the conclusions would have been considerably different. The physical and social rejuve­ nation experienced by the suburb has transformed it from a slum to a viable residential neighborhood. To have judged each suburb at the outset of its development would have been to consider no more than design and to ignore the impact of economic and social factors on each area's character. An evaluation of Inman Park and Ansley Park as they were in 1980 has the advantage of focusing on the mature suburbs after a decade in which political and social circumstances in Atlanta com­ bined to encourage each area to achieve its fullest potential. To a great extent, Inman Park and Ansley Park were more fully realized suburbs in 1980 than at any other time in their past. It has been pointed out that there are a number of elements which should be included when assessing how successful each suburb has been. Several of these have already been discussed at some length: the relative merits of the original designs determined the appeal of each development to both speculators and residents; the more amenable the suburb, the more it attracted homeowners who could afford to live there and to maintain their property; proper maintenance, in turn, preserved the basic physical characteristics of the suburb; bad design, on the other hand, tended to be self-destructive. Suburban planning, however, involves more than the ability to cre­ ate a residential design that will attract investment by property owners who can afford to maintain their homes. For Inman Park and Ansley Park design elements such as curvilinear streets, public parks, and large building lots were only means to a more significant end. As expressed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the ultimate test of a suburb's success was the extent to which it promoted unity among and within families and fostered a "harmonious association and cooperation of men in a com­ munity."18 Olmsted perceived community on the level of personal inter­ action among people living within a defined geographical area. Although his perception is somewhat limited, it remains most useful when evalu­ ating the role community has played in the suburbs in question. The concept of community has engendered considerable debate and little agreement as to how best to define and to evaluate it. In Keywords, critic Raymond Williams locates the origins of the word in the fourteenth century and traces its meanings to the nineteenth cen­ tury when it assumed the present connotations of immediacy, locality, and directness which distinguish it from such terms as "state" or "soci­ ety." As Williams notes, "community" is a term which "seems never to be used unfavorably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishable term."19 There have been innumerable attempts by so­ cial scientists and, to a lesser extent, humanists to develop typologies with which to describe communities. Function, role, location, size, and 132 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY degree of autonomy have all been used at various times in different ways to attempt to distinguish one type of community from another. Unfortunately, there are no comparable studies of communities such as Inman Park or Ansley Park, perhaps because they occupy a new middle ground between post-World War II suburbs and central cities, both of which have been studied ad nauseum. When analyzing the two Atlanta suburbs, a useful theoretical base is created by borrowing elements from the work of Roland Warren. In The Community in America, Warren argues that community is best defined as "that combination of social units and systems which perform the major social functions having locality relevance." Of the five functions which Warren identifies, four of them have particular rel­ evance to this analysis of Inman Park and Ansley Park. He describes them as follows: (1) socialization—the process by which social values and behavior patterns are transmitted; (2) social control—the process through which a group influences individual behavior toward conform­ ity with accepted norms; (3) social participation—the provision of so­ cial outlets such as churches, clubs, or public service groups; and (4) mutual support—the provision of care in time of illness, exchange of labor, or economic assistance.20 In Warren's scheme, these community functions can be evaluated within the framework of several considera­ tions, one of which—local autonomy—relates to this discussion. This refers to the degree to which each of the four functions is provided for within the community itself.21 This theoretical framework offers a measure with which to explore the degrees of dependence and independence that have characterized the fulfillment of community functions in Inman Park and Ansley Park. The process of socialization is generally assigned to the American edu­ cational system, particularly the public elementary and secondary schools. Neither Atlanta suburb has ever enjoyed any significant degree of autonomy in the matter of educating its children. Although there have been frequent calls for construction of an elementary school within the suburb, Ansley Park has always had to rely on schools be­ yond its immediate boundaries. Inman Park initially had an elementary school, immediately west of Waddell Street on the south side of Edge- wood Avenue, but it has been closed for more than two decades. Con­ cern for public education is especially strong in Inman Park among many of the newer residents with young children. Their attention has focused on Moreland Elementary and Bass High School to the east of the suburb; however, Moreland Elementary was closed at the end of the 1982 school year and Bass High School draws from an area in which Inman Park is only a small part. To this point, then, socialization has not been a community function that either suburb has performed with any autonomy. The degree of social control exercised within Inman Park and Ans- Journal — Summer/Fall 133 ley Park has varied over time and has obviously been related to the particular type of behavior being controlled. Despite recent alarms about increases in crime in both suburbs, criminal behavior seems never to have been prevalent. Crimes against property have been most com­ mon and have been addressed in different ways. For two years during the mid-1970s, Ansley Park residents hired the Pinkerton Agency to provide security by scheduled patrols. When this approach proved to be too expensive for the minority of residents who felt it was effective, a neighborhood crime watch was organized for each block. In Inman Park residents have in large measure relied on the Atlanta Police Depart­ ment and have encouraged police cooperation by buying bullet-proof vests for officers in the local precinct. While crime is the most extreme instance in which social control must be exercised, lesser problems such as land use or zoning have often called for a degree of social control. The Ansley Park Civic Association and Inman Park Restoration have both frequently exercised a form of social control over the worst abuses of privatism. The civic organization in each suburb has also been the major source of both social participation and mutual support in recent years. Ansley Park has always possessed more opportunities for social partici­ pation than Inman Park. Built in 1913, the Ansley Park Golf Club, while largely a male preserve, provided a focus for social activity that was situated wholly within the suburb. The large numbers of women living in the suburb who held leadership positions in the United Daugh­ ters of the Confederacy or the Daughters of the American Revolution, each of which had a chapter in or immediately adjacent to Ansley Park, suggests a good deal of social interaction among female family mem­ bers.22 Although its membership was city-wide, the nearby Piedmont Driving Club also played an active role in the suburb's social life. In­ man Park never developed the extensive social infrastructure that Ans­ ley Park did. Initially, the Inman Park Methodist Church provided some social focus for the suburb, but its role was apparently limited to Joel Hurt's lifetime. The churches in Ansley Park seem never to have played a similar role within the suburb itself. The most formidable vehicle for social participation in either sub­ urb, however, has proved to be the civic organization. In Ansley Park, the Civic Association worked hard to revive and preserve a stable, set­ tled neighborhood of well-maintained homes, pleasant vistas, and open parklands. In achieving its successes, the group eliminated its initial reasons for existence and transformed itself from a combative, political organization to a relatively passive, social one. The house tours, com­ munity newspaper, and general neighborhood activities sponsored by the Ansley Park Civic Association probably provide the only social op­ portunity the majority of the suburb's residents have to interact with one another. 134 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Inman Park Restoration has been even more important to its neighborhood, because it has been the focus for so many different activ­ ities. It has served as the neighborhood spokesman, a clearinghouse for restoration information, and an organizing force for social and political activity. Inman Park's physical survival has in large measure resulted directly from the energies of this organization. Within the suburb itself, the restoration process called forth a degree of mutual support among new homeowners. According to many residents, however, these relation­ ships have not been institutionalized and have not survived the early years of the suburb's rejuvenation. Nonetheless, there remains in Inman Park a strain of activism, a degree of political vigilance largely absent in Ansley Park. The neighborhood's residents have come a long way in reclaiming Inman Park from an advanced state of physical decay. (Evi­ dence of this reclamation can be seen in the house on Edgewood Ave­ nue at the suburb's western extremity pictured in Figure 4.) They still have a considerable distance to travel, however, before they can assume that their neighborhood enjoys the same degree of security that Ansley Park enjoys. The singular roles that the Ansley Park Civic Association and In­ man Park Restoration have played in fulfilling such social functions as social participation or mutual support as well as the "survival" pur­ poses for which they were created underscore the fact that these two organizations have been largely responsible for creating a sense of com­ munity within each suburb. According to Roland Warren's definition, they have been and are the sole social unit or system performing the "major social functions having locality relevance." The role of the civic organizations as the focus for social interaction among each suburb's residents recalls Frederick Law Olmsted's perception of community as personal interaction among people living within a defined geographical area. Each organization has not only played a role in encouraging this interaction but has also helped to define each suburb geographically. The fact that Inman Park and Ansley Park exist as physical entities is the result of a long process of growth that has resulted from the inter­ action of a number of physical, social, and economic factors. The public awareness and perception of each suburb, however, results from the ac­ tivities of its civic organization. By 1980 Inman Park and Ansley Park could properly be considered successful residential communities. Each suburb retained or restored its physical integrity and seemed secure from major threats to its exis­ tence. Both possessed social systems, namely their civic organizations, which provided them with the social functions necessary on a local level. Both also had a legitimacy within their wider urban context that guaranteed them a fair share of municipal resources. The activities of their civic associations combined with the wider political and social em­ phasis on neighborhood planning throughout Atlanta to make each sub- Journal — Summer/Fall 135

Figure 4. Restored residence on Edgewood Avenue.

urb a viable residential enclave in a larger urban world. Today Inman Park and Ansley Park might properly be identified as what sociologist Gerald Suttles has labeled the "defended neighborhood." It is also as defended neighborhoods that the futures of Inman Park and Ansley Park are best considered. Such a neighborhood, in Suttles's terms, is "the smallest area possessing a corporate identity known both to members and outsiders." The defended neighborhood has distinct boundaries, a ready-made name, a particular image and identity and is culturally homogeneous.23 The continued survival of both Atlanta areas as successful residential communities will depend in large part on their ability to retain or discover creative alternatives for each of these characteristics. Maintaining the boundaries of each neigh­ borhood, for example, is particularly important because it prevents en­ croachment by non-residential uses and thereby protects the basic physical integrity of each area. (Figures 5 and 6 show the markers to­ day's residents of these defended neighborhoods have erected to en­ hance their identity.) Ansley Park has always had well-defined bounda­ ries. The presence of Piedmont Park to the east and the golf course to the north insulates Ansley Park from any future incursions of incom­ patible land use. The southern and western boundaries, although less well-insulated, seem no less secure. The commercial development along Peachtree Street to the west and the Colony Square complex of stores, hotel, and condominiums to the south provide anchors and visual defi- 136 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 6 nition for the neighborhood's boundary. (Figure 7 provides a view of Peachtree Circle residences with Colony Square in the background.) Journal — Summer/Fall 137

Figure 7. View along Peachtree Circle in Ansley Park.

Inman Park's boundaries are less clearly defined than those of Ans­ ley Park. From the very outset Hurt's suburb relied less on natural fea­ tures or streets than on map-drawn lines to define its edges. The resto­ ration movement has sought to redefine the neighborhood by extending its northern and eastern edges to more recognizable landmarks. The rapid transit system now provides a formidable barrier to the south. (In Figure 8 the MARTA wall forms an impenetrable buffer for the neigh­ borhood.) To the east a major traffic artery now forms a sharp bound­ ary, and a cleared expressway corridor defines the neighborhood's northern boundary. Both Inman Park and Ansley Park are now "ready- made names," recognizable throughout the Atlanta area both by repu­ tation and by appearance. Ansley Park and Inman Park have endured for almost ninety years. In that time their position within the city has shifted from that of sub­ urbs on the urban fringe to inner-city residential enclaves that have, at one time or another, survived threats to their physical existence. Within the last twenty years, each "defended neighborhood" has benefitted from a new sense of community fostered by an active civic assocation. The residents of Inman Park find themselves in the forefront of a movement which is as yet untested as to its ultimate meaning. The scope of their achievement is of an obviously different magnitude than that of Ansley Park residents. At the same time, the future of a neigh­ borhood like Inman Park poses nearly as many questions as its past answers. The extraordinary amounts of energy, time, and commitment expended by groups such as Inman Park Restoration raise the issue of what will happen once the battles are won. The ramifications of such an 138 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 8. Inman Park as seen from the MARTA station serving the neighborhood.

issue have been skillfully summarized by Shirley Bradway Laska and Daphne Spain in their introduction to their volume on the back-to-the- city movement: What will become of neighborhood organizations formed in the 1970s to promote community identity and to direct the nature of change as the neighborhoods were revitalizing? Will most organizations, having gener­ ally accomplished these goals, decline into inactive associations? Will the renovators' enthusiasm turn out to have been functionally necessary to accomplish renovation rather than a sign of a new trend of on-going resi­ dent commitment to neighborhood and community involvement?24

There are no answers to this series of questions, but the experiences in Inman Park and, to a lesser extent, Ansley Park provide some basis for limited speculation. The transformation of the Ansley Park Civic Association described earlier suggests that neighborhood organizations, having accomplished their aims, may well tend to lapse into an inactive status. Although In­ man Park Restoration has yet to reach all of its goals, longtime mem­ bers have noticed disquieting evidence that new members do not share the same enthusiasm for the active political involvement that produced the initial neighborhood successes. This attitude of seeming indiffer­ ence, however, may simply indicate a growing perception that activism Journal — Summer/Fall 139

is no longer necessary or productive. What might appear to be decline into inaction may actually be a response to a realistic reassessment of a particular neighborhood's needs. Residents may follow much the same path as the organizations they create. Even the hardiest home renovator eventually wearies of the process and seeks no more than enjoyment of his or her labors. "Let's face it," replied one Inman Park homeowner when asked her feelings regarding the process, "most of us have better things in life to do than work on our houses. . . ."28 Although individuals may grow tired of be­ ing on the front lines in the battle to restore their neighborhood, it seems unlikely that they will lose their basic commitment to what they have accomplished. In addition to its psychological value, a successfully renovated home in a rejuvenated neighborhood like Inman Park repre­ sents a considerable financial investment. There is no small irony in the fact that privatism, the factor which played a significant role in Inman Park's deterioration, may seventy years later help in its revival. Self- interest, when combined with the American view of land ownership as a right with minimal infringements, may yet prove to be as constructive as it has been destructive in the past. When joined with a well-con­ ceived, spacious suburban design, as was the case in Ansley Park, it provides a strong guarantee of long-term residential amenity.

NOTES

1. A complete developmental history of both suburbs will be found in my dissertation, "From Suburb to Defended Neighborhood: Change in Atlanta's Inman Park and Ansley Park, 1890-1980" (Emory University, 1981), which scholars should consult for further detail and fuller documenta­ tion. Here the focus is upon my general findings within a comparative framework. 2. Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Phila­ delphia, 1968), pp. 3-4. 3. Joel Schwartz, "The Evolution of the Suburbs," in Philip C. Dolce, ed., Suburbia (Garden City, 1976), pp. 2-3. 4. Frederick Law Olmsted, "Preliminary Report upon the Proposed Suburban Village at Riverside, near Chicago," in S.B. Sutton, ed., Civilizing American Cities: A Selection of Frederick Law Olm­ sted's Writings on City Landscapes (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 300. 5. Atlanta Constitution, 26 February 1890, p. 5; 28 April 1905, p. 7. 6. Rick Beard, "Hurt's Deserted Village: Atlanta's Inman Park, 1885-1911," in Dana F. White & Victor A. Kramer, eds., Olmsted South: Old South Critic I New South Planner (Westport, Ct., 1979), pp. 195-221. 7. The figures that make up this summary will be found in my dissertation, Table 2.1 "Inman Park Auction Sales, 1889-1907," p. 58; Table 3.1 "Ansley Park Auction Sales, 1904-1920," p. 118. 140 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

8. Ibid., Table 4.2 "Time Elapsed Between Dates for Land Deeds and for Building Permit." 9. Floyd Hunter, Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers (Chapel Hill, 1953), p. 18. 10. Beard dissertation, Table 4.10 "Housing Deterioration by Census Tracts, 1940-1970," p. 246. 11. Ibid., Table 4.11a "Owner Occupancy by Suburb, 1938-1970," p. 248. 12. Constance Perin, Everything In Its Place: Social Order and Land Use in America (Princeton, 1978), p. 72. 13. Beard dissertation, Table 5.14 "Median Income by Census Tracts, 1960-1970," p. 298. 14. Perin, p. 161. 15. It should be noted that the original deed that transferred Springvale Park to the City con­ tained a provision reserving a 50-foot wide strip of property for the possible extension of Euclid Avenue. There are in existence plans for a bridge across the park; the fact that a land bridge was used instead only adds to the impression that the suburb was not given much consideration by the City. (Fulton County Deedbook N4, p. 791). 16. Beard dissertation, Table 5.2 "Population Characteristics by Census Tracts, 1940-1970," p. 280. 17. Ibid., Table 4.11a "Owner Occupancy by Suburb, 1938-1970," p. 248. 18. "Preliminary Report," Civilizing American Cities, p. 303. 19. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York, 1976), pp. 66-67. 20. Roland L. Warren, The Community in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1972), pp. 9 and 10-11. 21. Ibid., p. 13. 22. Darlene R. Roth, "In Their 'Proper Place' — At Home: Residential Patterns of Organization Women, 1890-1940," Chapter 5 of "Matronage: Patterns of Female Organization in Atlanta, Geor­ gia, 1890-1940" (Ph. D. dissertation, George Washington University, 1977). 23. Gerald Suttles, 77ie Social Construction of Communities (Chicago, 1972), pp. 57 and 41-42. 24. Laska and Spain, eds., Back to the City: Issues in Neighborhood Renovation (New York, 1980), p. xx. 25. Interview with Holly Mull, 25 September 1980. 141

The Ties That Bind:

Work and Family Patterns in the Oakdale Road Section of Druid Hills, 1910-1940

By Andrew M. Ambrose

DRUID HILLS

I n 1870 at the outset of a brilliant career in landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted opined, "Probably the advantages of civiliza­ tion can be found illustrated and demonstrated under no other circum­ stances so completely as in some suburban neighborhoods where each family abode stands fifty or one hundred feet or more apart from all others, and at some distance from the public road."1 Olmsted did not introduce the concept of the residential suburb to America. The first planned American suburb, Llewellyn Park in Orange, New Jersey, ap­ peared more than a decade before Olmsted began his work in 1868 in the Riverside suburb near Chicago. Neither did he design the first afflu­ ent suburb. What Olmsted did introduce to the American consciousness in his work at Riverside and elsewhere, however, was the ideal of a spa- 142 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY cious community specifically designed to complement and enhance the surrounding landscape and natural environment. Surburbanization in the South developed at a much slower rate than in the North, due largely to the agrarian nature of the South and the region's late industrialization. Olmsted's influence, however, was not unfelt in the region, particularly in "New South" cities like Atlanta. During the 1880s and 1890s, Atlanta became a city hungry for growth and intent on establishing itself as a regional cultural, industrial, and financial center, and its model for growth was the northern city, partic­ ularly New York and Chicago. Thus, in the process of emulating its northern cousins, Atlanta in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found itself eagerly embracing the Olmstedian ideal of the model suburb. Atlanta's first planned suburb, Inman Park, which was started dur­ ing the late 1880s by Joel Hurt, resembled Olmsted's Riverside in many ways. Hurt, a trained civil engineer who had come to Atlanta in 1875, had developed an interest, like Olmsted, in landscape design and a con­ cern for the construction of healthful residential environments. From 1885 to 1889, Hurt surveyed, laid out streets, graded lots, and planted more than 700 trees on a 190-acre tract of land which lay about two miles east of downtown Atlanta. As Rick Beard has demonstrated in a recent comparative analysis, like the Riverside community, which Hurt had had occasion to visit while on a business trip to Chicago, Inman Park featured curvilinear streets, open spaces, parks, a commercial center, and a transportation corridor linking the suburb to the city.2 So confident was Hurt of Atlanta's suburban future that he announced in 1890 that Inman Park was "an assured success" and that "all that art and money can do has been done to make it a perfect place of residence."3 Despite Hurt's optimistic announcement, Inman Park failed to develop into the stable, affluent suburb its founder had envi­ sioned. During the period from 1891 to 1896, for example, a national business panic (which struck in 1893) and the involvement of Hurt's East Atlanta Land Company in other projects combined to curtail in­ vestment and building in the suburb. Furthermore, as planned suburbs go, Inman Park was relatively small—less than one-eighth the size of Riverside—and in the years after 1896, lot sales declined sharply as available space diminished. (From 1896 to 1911, for example, on the average only three lots were sold a year.) As the prices of these lots lost value, more had to be sold to realize a profit and, as a result, more open spaces, especially parks, were subdivided, creating a crowded environ­ ment that proved unattractive to the elite of Atlanta. During the same period, the costs of housing also declined as new homes were built in­ creasingly by speculative builders who tended to construct similar, if not identical, dwellings crowded close together. And finally, the decline Journal — Summer/Fall 143 of Inman Park as an affluent residential community was further has­ tened by the East Atlanta Land Company's inability to keep streets repaired and property up to standard/ In the meantime, shortly after the first lots in Inman Park had been sold on the market, Joel Hurt became involved in another and, in the long run, much more successful "ideal residential community"— Druid Hills. In 1890 the Kirkwood Land Company, Hurt's newest real estate organization, was capitalized at $10,000, and during the next three years this company managed to acquire 1,492 acres of land north­ east of Atlanta—over 1,300 more acres than the whole of Inman Park.6 To design this model suburb, Hurt commissioned the founder of landscape architecture himself, Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted's di­ rect involvement in the planning and design of Druid Hills ended with his retirement in 1895; nevertheless, his influence in the overall devel­ opment of the area was considerable. Hurt, for example, had originally intended to develop only 400 to 600 acres of the area in lots of one to ten acres. The Olmsted firm, however, convinced him that it was neces­ sary to create a well-defined plan for the entire tract before any land was opened for development—a decision which no doubt contributed to the continued stability of the area as a residential community.8 The re­ sulting preliminary design for Druid Hills drawn up by the aging Olm­ sted called for a gently curved main avenue (now Ponce de Leon Ave­ nue) running alongside landscaped parks and intersecting parkways. As in his earlier development in Riverside, Olmsted emphasized here the importance of residential space through numerous parks and unusually large house lots. This parklike setting appealed to Atlantans and, in fact, many newpapers referred to Druid Hills as a residential park.7 Before Hurt could get started on the project, however, the depres­ sion of 1893 plunged the Kirkwood Land Company into financial dis­ tress. Hurt was not able to refocus his attention on Druid Hills until the first decade of the twentieth century and by that time Frederick Law Olmsted was dead. However, Olmsted's firm under the direction of his sons continued the work, and in 1905 the final plans for development were completed. Between 1905 and 1907 the Kirkwood Land Company graded Ponce de Leon, landscaped along the avenue, and laid out resi­ dential lots in the western sector. Financial problems continued to plague Hurt's efforts, and in May 1908 he sold his entire landownings to "a syndicate composed of Coca- Cola magnate Asa Candler, Georgia Railway and Power Company presi­ dent Preston Arkwright, and realtors Forrest and George Adair" for half a million dollars.8 The new owners, who became the Druid Hills Land Company, continued the development of the entire tract between 1910 and 1935, retaining most of the features of the Olmsted Brothers' plan in the ninety-acre western section of the suburb where work had already begun, but making some changes and modifications in other ar- 144 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY eas of the tract. For example, neither of the proposed lakes was built, and the size of individual building lots was reduced somewhat as the project progressed. Clearly, the takeover by the Druid Hills Land Com­ pany insured not only that many of the important features of Olmsted's plan would be followed, but also that the emerging affluent residential community would be more successful in the long run than Inman Park. Unlike Inman Park's East Atlanta Land Company, the Druid Hills Land Company had the financial security to withstand the temptation to sacrifice the orderly development of the community for a quick profit. In his earlier work at Riverside, Olmsted had emphasized the im­ portance of the development of family and community unity. In "A Preliminary Report Upon the Proposed Suburban Village at Riverside near Chicago," he had written: There are two aspects of suburban habitation that need to be considered to ensure success; first, that of the domiciliation of men by families, each family being well provided for in regard to its domestic indoor and out­ door private life; second, that of the harmonious association and coopera­ tion of men in a community, and the intimate relationship and constant intercourse and interdependence between families. Each has its charm, and the charm of both should be aided and acknowledged by all means in the general plan of every suburb.*

Some sixty years later, in 1932, an observer reported that due largely to Olmsted's design Riverside remained a stable, affluent com­ munity retaining much of its original character and identity.10 But what about Olmsted's southern experiment, Druid Hills? How successful was this suburban community in promoting individual privacy, on the one hand, and, on the other, community interaction and cooperation? In an attempt to answer these questions, this study will examine thirty-seven houses on the first block of Oakdale Road (a residential street in Druid Hills) and the families who owned these homes between 1910 and 1940.n This particular street and block were selected because informa­ tion on family size and structure is more readily available and because this block of Oakdale is largely contained within one of Atlanta's metro­ politan census tracts. The relatively small size of the study sample (sev­ enty-nine families) also makes it possible to examine in some detail the family and work relationships present within the community in order to determine—again in Olmsted's words—their "domiciliation" and "interdependence." As the homes on the first block of Oakdale Road clearly reveal, Druid Hills's development between 1910 and 1940 was characterized by an orderliness and stability that contrasted sharply with that of Inman Park. The average estimated cost of construction for nineteen Oakdale homes built between 1911 and 1925 was $11,894, and the average cost Journal — Summer/Fall 145

TABLE 1 Estimated Construction Costs (Based on Building Permits) Year No. Built Total Cost Average Price Per House 1911 3 $28,500 $9,500 1913 1 $8,000 $8,000 1914 4 $49,000 $12,250 1915 $10,000 $10,000 1916 $8,000 $8,000 1919 $17,000 $17,000 1920 $15,000 $15,000 1921 $20,000 $20,000 1922 $12,500 $12,500 1923 $8,000 $8,000 1924 2 $24,000 $12,000 1925 2 $26,000 $13,000 per year was never lower than $8,000 (Table 1). By 1940, owner-occu­ pied homes in the census tract in which Oakdale Road lay had an aver­ age value of $12,278—almost $9,000 more than the average value of owner-occupied homes citywide.12 In Inman Park, on the other hand, only three houses built between 1895 and 1911 cost over $10,000 and only sixteen cost more than $5,000; in fact, the average cost of all con­ struction in the earlier suburb between 1895 and 1910 was only $4,104 per house. And by the period 1907-10, the average cost for a two-story brick house (the most expensive home built in Inman Park) had fallen to $4,412.1S Even allowing for inflation and changes in currency value over time, the difference in housing costs between Druid Hills and In­ man Park is striking. A similar contrast is evident in lot prices. Between 1909 and 1923, the cost of lots on Oakdale Road averaged $4,564 and in no year did they fall below $3,000. In Inman Park, however, the average lot price during development was only $2,197, and by 1896 the average had dip­ ped to $1,463 (Table 2). The size of lots on Oakdale Road also remained large and uniform, and, unlike Inman Park, there is no evidence that lots or park spaces were subdivided. As the prices for houses and lots fell in Inman Park, the types of homes built there also changed. Before 1896, according to Rick Beard, the architectural style that characterized most of the homes in the sub­ urb was that of Queen Anne Revival, a design featuring a hodgepodge of materials and ornate details and frequently marked by irregular 146 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

TABLE 2 A Comparison of Oakdale Road and Inman Park Lot Prices

Oakdale Road*

Year Lots Sold Total Income Average Price Per Lot 1909 4 $17,050 $4,262 1910 6 $26,800 $4,466 1911 6 $21,075 $3,512 1912 6 $26,975 $4,495 1913 2 $6,375 $3,187 1914 2 $12,250 $6,125 1919 2 $11,000 $5,500 1921 1 $4,500 $4,500 1922 2 $11,500 $5,750 1923 2 $13,100 $6,550

"Figures compiled from Druid Hills Land Company Records, 1908-1923 (Atlanta Historical Society)

Inman Parkf Auction Year Lots Sold Total Income Average Price Per Lot 1889 10 $ 19,430 $1,943 1890 29 $ 68,835 $2,373 1891 49 $138,180 $2,820 1896 45 $ 65,860 $1,463

tFigures from "Hurt's Deserted Village,' p. 208. massing, gables, and round or polygonal shingled turrets.14 Queen Anne Re vi vial homes, Gwendolyn Wright observes in her perceptive study of the "metaphors" of domestic architecture, featured interior spaces where "irregularly shaped rooms" filled with bay windows, inglenooks, and alcoves were focused around a "massive fireplace" or a "handsome open staircase."18 (Figure 1 shows how architect W. T. Downing, adapted these elements in his own home.) After 1896, however, two new architectural styles began to be represented in Inman Park. The- first to appear was the bungalow—a one-story, primarily frame dwelling featuring a gabled porch set off from the body of the house, which was itself usually gable-shaped. Next to appear, largely after 1906, were homes in the Georgian Revival style. In sharp contrast to the irregular Journal — Summer/Fall 147

Figure 1. The 1897 residence of W. T. Downing at 457 N. Jackson. (AHS) shape and ornate design of the Queen Anne homes, the Georgian Revi­ val homes presented a symmetrical, balanced look, achieved through the use of a rectangular base plan, a classical facade, and regularly placed chimneys and windows. The net effect of the presence of these three competing architectural designs in Inman Park was a neighbor­ hood characterized by a jumble of closely crowded structures of varying size, ornamentation, and cost.16 (Figure 2 depicts this variety on Edge- wood Avenue.) The homes built between 1910 and 1940 on the first block of Oak­ dale Road, while not completely uniform in style and architecture, were, for the most part, of nearly equivalent cost and size. All but one of the thirty-seven houses built on the first block of Oakdale Road were two stories in height, and all were situated well back from the road on large, spacious, landscaped lots. All of these dwellings were of consider­ able size, averaging over nine rooms per house.17 (Figure 3 shows a handsome home on Oakdale Road.) And, while no two houses built on Oakdale Road were identical, the design and construction of three homes on this block by the famous Georgia architect, Neel Reid (who also designed homes elsewhere in Druid Hills), and of two homes by architect Walter T. Downing (who lived on Oakdale) contributed to a pleasing blend of housing styles which apparently proved far more at­ tractive to wealthy home-buyers than did the housing that character­ ized Inman Park. 148 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 2. Edgewood Avenue residences in Inman Park, c. 1895. (AHS)

Figure 3. Residence on Oakdale Road.

The design and location of these Oakdale Road homes affected more than just the visual homogeneity of the community; their posi­ tioning, detail, and size also encouraged the isolation and protected the Journal — Summer/Fall 149 privacy of individual families. Set a good distance back from the road and separated from neighboring houses by sizeable landscaped lawns, Oakdale dwellings with their many rooms allowed the individual fami­ lies within to conduct their domestic business free from the prying eyes of passersby or next-door neighbors. The inevitable presence of porches in these homes—made necessary by the southern weather (and the ab­ sence of air-conditioners) and encouraged by the widespread acceptance of the germ theory of disease—intruded upon this privacy and isolation to some degree;18 however, unlike the majority of homes in Inman Park which appear to have featured front porches, the homes on Oakdale Road generally featured porches built on the side or in back of the house (Figures 4a and 4b). This is not to suggest, as has Richard Sen- nett in his often overly provocative account of the predominantly mid­ dle-class suburb of Union Park in Chicago, that the majority of these suburban families were isolated little islands in the community, intent upon sacrificing social interaction as part of their attempt to insure do­ mestic privacy.19 In fact, as an examination of seventy-nine families on Oakdale reveals, the lives of Druid Hills residents were linked not only by shared characteristics of background, age, race, and socio-economic and occupational status, but by important work and family ties as well. The vast majority of the Oakdale families examined in this study appear to have remained stable, financially secure, and close-knit throughout the thirty-year period. Heads of households were almost without exception established and successful, middle-aged (average age when moving to Oakdale Road—45.5) businessmen, executives, and professionals. Over 86 percent of them had lived in Atlanta prior to their move to Oakdale, and most tended to remain in the same or a closely related occupation throughout their residence in Druid Hills.20 A good number of these families were socially prominent; in fact, al­ most 58 percent of the seventy-nine families examined in this study were listed at one time or another in Atlanta social registers.21 As older, established members of the business and social hierarchy, these residents may have felt less pressure to move on to a new commu­ nity or city in order to advance their fortunes or social position—a sup­ position clearly suggested by the high average length of residence per family on Oakdale Road (13.8 years). In decided contrast to Inman Park, where only one person (Joel Hurt) lived in the community throughout the period 1889-1911 and where only seven of the houses built by 1900 were occupied by the same resident eleven years later,22 the first block of Oakdale Road featured four families who had built in the 1910s and were still residing in the same home in 1940, as well as twenty-one families (or 26.5 percent of the total number of families ex­ amined) who continued to live on the street for twenty years or longer.23 A similar indicator of the continued stability of family and commu- 150 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

r II ^ii^t A / VO /' r°f.c.H Y. 51iTi rAM.**. 2

Figure 4 a

nity life on Oakdale Road is the low incidence of leasing or renting on the street. Only nine of the thirty-seven homes built on this section of Oakdale were ever leased or rented (for an average of 4.4 years per house) from 1910 to 1940. And in all but two of these cases, renting or leasing occurred only during the financially troubled decade of the 1930s.24 The average size of household on Oakdale Road (including all kin and visitors who lived in the homes for a year or more during the thirty-year period investigated, but excluding domestic servants) was 4.5. In the majority of cases these households were nuclear in structure, that is composed of a husband, wife, and offspring. In over 27 percent of the seventy-nine families examined in this study, however, relatives outside the conjugal unit were also present in the home. In some cases, Journal — Summer/Fall 151

XC717 riw PL A n Figure 4b

these additional relatives were parents of the wife or husband or, more frequently, a widowed mother. In almost two-thirds of those families with an extended household structure, additions to the household re­ sulted from married children coming to live with the parents (usually the wife's parents)—a clear indication of the continued strength of fam­ ily ties." (For a more detailed breakdown of household structure by decade, see Table 3.) Family ties and kinship networks were not restricted to individual households; in fact, fourteen of the families living on the first block of Oakdale Road between 1910 and 1940 had relatives living close by in Druid Hills or, in the case of nine families, on the same street. Sigmund Montag; his son, Harold; Sigmund's brother Adolph; and Adolph's son, Louis, all bought and lived in homes on Oakdale Road.** Extended fam­ ily networks could also be created and strengthened by the marriage of neighbors, as when Lucile Butler of 821 Oakdale married James C. Dunlap of 927 Oakdale. However they developed, extended family rela- 152 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

TABLE 3 Extended Households on Oakdale Road by Decade Number of Families* Number of Extended Percentage of Extended Time Period Living on Oakdale Households Households 1910-1919 21 3 14.2 1920-1929 54 8 14.8 1930-1939 48 14 29.1

•Does not include families renting or leasing tionships served to heighten the degree of interaction and interdepen­ dence between community families. Business ties and relationships also played an important role in in­ creasing interaction among Druid Hills families. In sixteen of the fami­ lies examined, the head of the household had direct business ties with another Oakdale Road or Druid Hills resident; in most cases, these men either worked in the same office or were employed by the same com­ pany. William B. Spann of 798 Oakdale Road, Henry Lane Young at 866, Thomas C. Erwin at 883, and John Goddard at 893 Oakdale, for instance, were all executives of the Citizens and Southern National Bank and worked in the same office building. Family ties could also play a prominent part in business relationships among Druid Hills res­ idents. In fact, in almost two-thirds of the fourteen extended families discussed earlier, family members (like the Montags) not only lived within a short distance of each other, but worked together in family- owned or family-run businesses. Even those neighbors who were not employed in the same office or by the same company were likely to work in close proximity to one another in downtown Atlanta.27 Thus, while heads of household may have worked at some distance from their homes in Druid Hills, community ties nevertheless remained strong and were probably reinforced through daily contact with neighbors and kin in the market place. Community and kin relationships also played an important part in the lives of women in Druid Hills. In her analysis of 145 "economic elite households" in Atlanta in an earlier era (1880 to 1920), Ruth Klopper indicates that in wealthy Atlanta families of the late nineteenth century the mother-daughter relationship was more dominant than the mother- son relationship.28 This tendency towards matrilaterality in kin ties also was evident in Oakdale Road families from 1910 to 1940. As noted ear­ lier, over 70 percent of all married children who came to live with par­ ents on Oakdale Road lived with the wives' parents.29 What is more, these strong kinship and community ties appear to have carried over Journal — Summer/Fall 153 into the activities of Druid Hills women outside the home sphere. In­ deed, Darlene Roth's study of women's organizations in Atlanta from 1890 to 1940 has demonstrated not only that organizational member­ ships often followed kinship lines, but that they were also linked spa­ tially to the development of new Atlanta suburbs.80 The image of Druid Hills emerging from this study of homes and families on Oakdale Road from 1910 to 1940 is, on one hand, that of a sheltered, isolated, and exceedingly private suburban community. Large homes set well back from the road on spacious, landscaped lots located some distance from downtown Atlanta insured Druid Hills residents a high degree of privacy. The continued high cost of lots and houses in Druid Hills, coupled with hardening patterns of racial segregation, ap­ pears to have effectively restricted the suburb to well-to-do, white, na­ tive Americans. (In 1930, for example, the census tract in which Oak­ dale Road lay was 99.9 percent white.31 Ten years later, native whites comprised 90.1 percent of the area's population and foreign-born whites another 3.3 per cent.32) In spite of these restrictions and the apparent isolation of individual families—perhaps because of these factors—the record of these seventy-nine Oakdale Road families suggests that the Druid Hills community developed through a rich network of family and business relationships a high degree of community cooperation, interac­ tion, and interdependence—precisely those qualities which Olmsted had considered so essential to his vision of the model suburb. As with his Riverside, Olmsted's Druid Hills encouraged "domiciliation" and "interdependence." Both seemed the Olmstedian ideal become reality.

NOTES

1. Frederick Law Olmsted, Public Parks and the Enlargement of l^owns (Cambridge, Mass., 1870), p. 9. 2. Rick Beard, "Hurt's Deserted Village: Atlanta's Inman Park, 1885-1911," in Dana F. White and Victor A. Kramer, eds., Olmsted South: Old South Critic/New South Planner (Westport, 1970), p. 195. 3. Atlanta Constitution, 26 February 1890, p. 5. 4. Beard, pp. 195-221. 5. The History Group, Inc., "Atlanta Suburban Tour" (file copy, 1975), p. 4. 6. Elizabeth A. Lyon, "Frederick Law Olmsted and Joel Hurt: Planning for Atlanta," in White and Kramer, eds., Olmsted South, p. 171. 7. Ibid., p. 178. 8. Ibid., p. 180. 154 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

9. "Preliminary Report upon the Proposed Suburban Village at Riverside near Chicago," in S. B. Sutton, ed., Civilizing American Cities: A Selection of Frederick Law Olmsted's Writings on City Landscapes (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 303. 10. Herbert U. Bassman, ed., Riverside Then and Now, revised edition (Chicago, 1958), p. 106. 11. In the 1940s original deed and property restrictions for Druid Hills lapsed; hence the cut-off date. 12. "Population and Housing Statistics for Census Tracts Atlanta, Ga., and Adjacent Area," Sixth Census of the United States, 1940 (Washington, 1942), p. 46. 13. Beard, pp. 213-15. 14. Ibid., p. 211. 15. Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Cofiict in Chicago, 1873-1913 (Chicago, 1980), p. 64. 16. Beard, p. 211. 17. Druid Hills Building Permits, 1910-1940, Atlanta Historical Society. 18. The public acceptance of this theory, according to Gwendolyn Wright, had a tremendous effect on domestic architecture, resulting in the construction of sleeping porches, sun rooms, white interi­ ors, and the disappearance of cornices, irregular corners, draperies, bric-a-brac, and other Victo­ rian housing features which were thought to be hiding places for germs. Wright, p. 119. 19. Richard Sennett, Families Against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872- 1890 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970). 20. Atlanta City Directories, 1910-1940. 21. Allen, G. B. The Blue Book: A Social Register of Atlanta, Georgia, 1930, 1931, and 1934. 22. Beard, p. 199. 23. Based on City Directories, 1910-1940, and Antoinette Johnson Matthews, Oakdale Road, At­ lanta, Georgia, DeKalb County: Its History and Its People (Atlanta, 1972). 1972). 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. Based on a plotting of the place of employment for ten of the first fifteen heads of house­ hold who resided on Oakdale Road. 28. Ruth Klopper, "The Family's Use of Urban Space, Elements of Family Structure and Function among Economic Elites: Atlanta, Georgia 1880-1920,"(Ph.D. disaertion, Emory University, 1977) p. 81. 29. City Directories, 1910-1940, and Matthews, Oakdale Road. 30. Darlene Roth, "Matronage: Patterns in Women's Organizations, Atlanta, 1890-1940," (Ph.D. dissertation, George Washington University, 1978). 31. "A Report on Permanent Census Tracts for Metropolitan Atlanta," 1936, p. 92. 32. "Population and Housing Statistics," p. 4. 155

Atlanta University's "Northeast Lot"

Community Building for Black Atlanta's "Talented Tenth"

By Ann DeRosa Byrne and Dana F. White

by 1910 the "Northeast Lot" of Atlanta University was a 9V2-acre cluster of three important homes: those of President Horace Bumstead, Professor George A. Towns, and insurance magnate Alonzo F. Herndon.1 While this enclave constitutes, in itself, an important chap­ ter in the history of Black Atlanta's material culture and social change, it also possesses a larger national significance. The Northeast Lot might be considered a bridge spanning the gap between two important histori­ cal black experiences in architecture: the rural farm and plantation, on che one hand, the urban district and "ghetto" on the other. The formal anguage of architectural styles and landscape in this turn-of-the-cen- ;ury enclave indicates that, at least in its early years, here was a model community, an upper-class haven for Atlanta's early black elite. (The 156 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 1. The Northeast Lot showing the Bumstead Cottage in the foreground and the Herndon Mansion. (Courtesy of the Alonzo F. and Norris Bumstead Herndon Foundation) only extant view of two of the key buildings of the Northeast Lot, c. 1910, can be seen in Figure 1.) The star of the Northeast Lot, of specific concern here, is the Alonzo Herndon residence, built for the founder of the Atlanta Life In­ surance Company, which for some fifty years was the largest privately- held, black-owned corporation in the country (Figure 2).2 The Beaux Arts Classicist manse was celebrated by W.E.B. Du Bois in his Negro American Family as the "finest Negro residence in the South."3 In that pioneering study, Du Bois considered the Herndon Mansion, as it is called locally, an archetypical model of black cultural, moral, and eco­ nomic achievement, placing it, in his photographic presentation of the evolution of black housing, at the end of a progression that began with African huts. As it stands today, the Herndon residence remains a pow­ erful symbol of black cultural and economic achievement; nevertheless, it is unoccupied, the nearby Towns home is empty, and the "Bumstead Cottage" (the president's home) no longer exists. Nor has history treated the enclave kindly. In the Atlanta University Center National Register District nomination, as well as in a City of Atlanta Planning Department report, Community Building: The History of Atlanta Uni­ versity Neighborhoods, the Northeast Lot is not considered an histori­ cally distinctive residential entity. Although it began, like the "endur­ ing affluent suburb" model proposed by Elizabeth K. Burns, with a "cluster of estates" and some planning, the Northeast Lot failed to Journal — Summer/Fall 157

Figure 2. The Herndon Mansion. (Herndon Foundation) maintain, as did Ansley Park and Druid Hills, the original primacy in­ tended for it by its "planners"—the University and its residents, the academic and business elite.4 Still, it provides an important measure for that segment of African-American society designated by Du Bois as its "talented tenth." As Du Bois speculated, perhaps there has never before been a race concerning which so many opinions have been written and yet of whose best life we are so ignorant. If "high­ est is the measure of man," we know the highest of the . . . Negro when we know the homes of the the best of his race. . . . [A]nd their homes are increasing and are an honor to the commonwealth.11 The Herndon Mansion, the pride of Black Atlanta, was certainly among the "highest."

Before the turn of the century, the University had built a handful of impressive brick buildings: North Hall designed by William H. Par­ kins in 1869, South Hall (1870), and Stone Hall designed by Gott­ fried L. Norrman in 1882 were uniformly four stories in height and fea­ tured High Victorian massing and detailing.6 (Figure 3 shows how these buildings appeared in 1895.) The University had also acquired suffi­ cient land for future expansion, and it began to play an active role in 158 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

the development of middle-income neighborhoods along its periphery, thus further encouraging the precepts of family welfare taught within.7 Its land purchases were carefully screened and restricted to buyers will­ ing to erect residences only. As other subdivisions, mainly working-class neighborhoods, grew around the University, a dense, architecturally re­ lated pattern of late-Victorian and early twentieth-century frame hous­ ing was established. Beaver Slide, an infamous shantytown, existed alongside the more settled Vine City directly north of the University. Ashview Heights and other bungalow-style subdivisions began develop­ ing, after the turn of the century, to the west. This setting, along with the buildings of Atlanta University, "the most extensive concentration of nineteenth-century public and institutional buildings extant in At­ lanta," formed the architectural context for the Herndon home.8 Just prior to the Herndons' arrival, most housing related to Atlanta University existed within the confines of the campus. Homes were built on the peripheral streets: Walnut, University Place, Hunter (now Mar­ tin Luther King, Jr. Drive), Beckwith, Parsons, and Chestnut. Before the construction of two-story faculty duplexes along Beckwith Street in the 1930s and 1940s, there existed brick and frame faculty residences with notable Victorian woodwork similar to the 1 Vi -story Yancy house, west of the Knowles Building. During these years and into the first half of the twentieth century, black faculty and staff as well as most white professors either lived on campus in South Hall or resided in outlying areas nearby. The unique exception to this pattern of modest working-class hous­ ing and middle-class faculty homes occurred along the ridge of a gentle promontory in the University-designated Northeast Lot on its property. E. M. Cravath and President Edward Twitched Ware purchased the lot from John Collier in 1870 for $2,700.9 Held jointly by the American Missionary Association and the University for many years, the property was nearly the subject of a law suit deriving from the A.M.A.'s reluc­ tance to transfer its ownership to the University. The lot originally comprised 9V2 acres situated directed east of the Cyrus W. Francis lot where Furber Cottage (c. 1899) and North Hall were built.10 The Furber Cottage is a Georgian Revival, brick, residential-scale classroom build­ ing with gambrel roof designed by Boston architect William C. Richard­ son. Across Vine Stree from Furber Cottage on the Northeast Lot, three prestigious residences related in scale and expression to Furber were built between approximately 1888 and 1910. A comfortable, rambling Shingle Style house, Bumstead Cottage, was built for President Horace Bumstead in the late 1880s11 (Figure 1). Later, between approximately 1907 and 1920, President Ware resided there, and, until the house was razed in the 1930s, professors with families lived in apartments created by subdividing the house.12 Two families, those of Professor George A. Towns and Alonzo Franklin Herndon, who could afford to erect simi- Journal — Summer/Fall 159

Figure 3. Atlanta University campus showing (l-r) South Hall, Stone Hall, and North Hall, c. 1895. (AHS)

larly elegant homes there, sought titles from the University for building sites. A. F. Herndon purchased his lot for $2,800 from the University in 1916, although the house had been completed six years earlier.13 Acting as a real estate control agent before the incorporation of zoning codes into municipal law, the University closely monitored the development of its land sales. Indeed, the discrepancy of time between the construc­ tion of the Herndon house and purchase of its land suggests the Univer­ sity at first may have donated the property to entice a desirable resi­ dent to build there. According to the oral record, construction on the Herndon house began in 1905 and took five years to complete. An account in the Octo­ ber 1908 Bulletin of Atlanta University briefly describes the progress of both the Herndon and Towns homes: There are two new houses building at the northeastern extremity of the campus, near the president's house. These are to be the homes of Mr. and Mrs. A. F. Herndon and Prof, and Mrs. George A. Towns. Prof. Towns has little more than dug his cellar, but Mr. Herndon's house is nearing completion, and, with its beautiful front elevation facing the campus, promises to be a great addition to the beauty of our surroundings.14 The Towns residence is an American four-square Classic Box, an early 160 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY twentieth-century speculative type of house. Brick exterior, Neo­ classical porch details, and Victorian window treatments enhance the house's architectural significance; however, in terms of size, the elabo­ rateness of materials, design, and detailing, it is not comparable to the Herndon house. After the removal of Bumstead Cottage in the 1930s, the Northeast Lot quickly lost its original cohesive character. (It was replaced with the modest, brick, "Colonial" residence built for John H. Lewis, presi­ dent of Morris Brown College, depicted in Figure 4 with the Herndon Mansion in the background. Compare to Figure 1.) A large two-story brick dormitory was built across the street for women students; later burned, it now stands vacant, surrounded by a chain link fence. In 1950 the Atlanta architectural firm of Alexander & Rothschild designed a modern-styled home for Grace Hamilton, daughter of George Towns, just east of her now-vacant family home. All of these later structures create a discordant mix of mid-twentieth-century architectural scale and character, which is in stark contrast to the original setting, that of an affluent suburban streetscape. While in the early developmental pat­ terns of University-related housing, Furber Cottage, Bumstead Cottage, and the Towns home provided a suitable context for the Herndon Man­ sion, architecturally it stood apart.

A sharpening of the "color line" coincided with the decision of the Herndons to build their dream house. At the turn of the century, Jim Crow legislation proliferated until nearly all phases of public life were defined by some form of legal separation of the races. Moreover, a Jim Crow mentality reinforced the problems of overcrowding and its conse­ quent pressures citywide by imposing, literally, sharp "lines" around black communities. Prosperous blacks seeking a better life outside the traditional boundaries of these contained environments constantly en­ countered hostility when they relocated beyond these enclaves.18 For example, in 1906 Atlanta experienced severe race riots, which were re­ lated to perceived encroachments upon the color line and which sig­ naled that even prosperous blacks were safer in "black districts." Culture, wealth, education, and all the refinements possessed by the Herndon family did not remove the majority-perceived stigma of their black heritage, and they would have faced similar hostilities had they attempted to move outside their own racial boundaries. Because the Northeast Lot represented a haven for the Herndons, the Townses, and later faculty families, it became a self-contained oasis within the University and its surrounding black working-class community—a small, but powerful bastion of black wealth and educated elite. Yet, this "Camelot" built by these families flourished, then faded after "one bright shining moment." The ideal of a special and "enduring affluent suburb" in black Atlanta was shattered against the continuing reality of Journal — Summer/Fall 161

Figure 4. The Northeast Lot as it looks today.

racial barriers which prevented the progress of black community build­ ing. In the end, the Herndon Mansion stood very much alone.

Ill As the great American architect (and contemporary of the Herndons) Louis Sullivan described the process of architectural semiotics, throughout this steam of human life, and thought, and activity . . . men have ever felt the need to build; and from the need arose the power to build; for strange as it may seem, they could build in no other way. As they built, they made, used and left behind them records of their think­ ing. . . .Whatever the character of the thinking, just so was the character of the building.18

In other words, a full understanding of a culture, a people, comes from comprehending both social conditions and material artifacts. A rare op­ portunity for such an analysis is provided by the Herndon Mansion. Nearly all of the contents from its seventy-odd years remain undis­ turbed, including furnishings from several stages of the house's develop­ ment; objects and art collections; thousands of family, business, and le­ gal documents; diaries and social correspondence; photographs; costumes and clothing. Thus, the past is uniquely present within its walls. A.F. Herndon identified with the "mulatto aristocracy of old At- 162 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY lanta (circa 1890-1910)" as described by August Meier and David Lewis in their study of the city's black "upper class."17 According to their analysis, the city's elite developed along different lines from those of older cities, such as Savannah and Augusta, where an antebellum free black clique prevailed. In Atlanta, by contrast, a significant propor­ tion of the "mulatto aristocracy" maintained close ties with the white side as the freedmen availed themselves of every opportunity to "pull themselves up by their own boot straps," a progression not as readily available to the field-laborer group.18 Although Herndon's direct rela­ tionship to his white father is not known, a lengthy letter (dated March 30, 1969) from Mrs. Emory S. Herndon, then eighty-nine, to Norris Herndon suggests that his father's family had owned considerable prop­ erty in Walton County and had followed with interest Alonzo's rise in the business world.19 Indeed, from uneducated field worker to barber­ shop magnate, from his marriage to Adrienne McNeil, the most beauti­ ful and articulate star of the mulatto aristocracy, to the construction of a magnificent residence and a multi-million dollar insurance company, Herndon's dramatic story is so compelling that it evokes admiration from those who come to know it. Born into slavery on June 26, 1858, Alonzo Herndon spent his early years as a field laborer outside Social Circle, Georgia.20 As a youth he experienced utter deprivation, occupying a one-room cabin with his mother, brother, and four other families. He earned less than $100 for three years of work in his former master's (possibly father's) employ. When he left that dead-end work for Senoia (in Coweta County), he could only find farm labor which he supplemented with Saturday after­ noon barbering in the black section of town. Three months later he opened his first barber shop in Jonesboro. Late in 1882 Herndon ar­ rived in Atlanta and within six months had purchased half interest in the shop where he had apprenticed. His barber shop career culminated twenty years later with the opening of the famous Herndon Barbershop, 66 Peachtree Street, on December 13, 1902, the same year that the tax digests proved him the wealthiest black man in the city. Twenty-five chairs, eighteen baths, twenty-three cutters, and eight porters were among the shop's attractions listed in local advertisements.21 (Figures 5 and 6 show the Herndon Shop at 35 Marietta Street in the late 'teens.) Resolved that his business be the finest in the world, Herndon traveled extensively in the United States and Europe to pick up ideas and, as well, elaborate crystal chandeliers, gold mirrors, and fine fittings for the shop. (Figures 7 and 8 capture the two interiors.) Despite his remarkable business achievements, Herndon's greatest accomplishment was perhaps his successful courting of Adrienne Mc­ Neil, a product of the Augusta and Savannah mulatto aristocracies. Born in Augusta on July 22, 1869, to A. J. and Massie Cummings Mc­ Neil, Adrienne is remembered in interviews as a woman of incompara- Journal — Summer/Fall 163

ble beaty and poise.22 Helen Martin, an octogenarian with close ties to the Herndon family, relates the story of Adrienne's courtship at the home of Helen's grandmother, where Adrienne rented a room in her years as a student at Atlanta University.23 According to Mrs. Martin, Adrienne agreed to the marriage on the condition that she be allowed to finish her dramatic studies in New York and Boston. Alonzo accepted the terms and the two were married on Halloween, 1893.24 During the time that Adrienne was to spend in New England pursuing her career, their son Norris Bumstead Herndon was cared for in the home of Presi­ dent Horace Bumstead, further strengthening the close ties between the Herndons and the Bumsteads, one of the white "Yankee" families so influential in the development of Atlanta University.26 A year after her marriage, Adrienne received an appointment to teach elocution and expression at Atlanta University. She held the posi­ tion until February 1910, two months before her death from Addison's disease.26 Prior to her tragically early death, she led an intensely pro­ ductive life. Favorable reviews and honors bestowed in Boston and New York where she studied and performed presaged a successful stage career for Adrienne McNeil Herndon. However, instead, she committed herself to the development of the dramatic arts at Atlanta University.27 Taking leaves of absence from her teaching post, Adrienne spent several years studying at the Boston School of Expression and at the School of Dra­ matic Art in New York. In Boston, taking the stage name Ann DuBignon, she was an overnight sensation. Reciting Shakespeare's en­ tire Antony and Cleopatra, acting out all twenty-two parts, DuBignon was roundly acclaimed in Boston newspapers, which compared her to Sarah Bernhardt. Although she had enrolled several months late in the New York program, she finished by winning the School of Dramatic Art's gold medal for expression. On her way to certain success, Ad­ rienne dropped her acting career to return to her family and introduce Shakespeare to Atlanta University, where she helped develop a strong drama department that would eventually gain a national reputation for excellence. (Figure 9 shows Adrienne in one of her stage costumes.) While Adrienne was busy with her professional career, Alonzo in 1905 purchased for $140 the Atlanta Benevolent and Protective Associ­ ation, a burial society founded at the Wheat Street Baptist Church. Under his direction, the association developed into the largest pri­ vately-held, black-owned company in the nation and is today one of the largest black-owned insurance enterprises in the country.28 At the time of Herndon's death in 1927, the company had assets of $1,100,000. With the guidance of vice-president E. M. Martin, Norris Herndon, only twenty-eight years old at the time of his father's death, assumed control of the firm and continued to seek expansion into other states despite oppressive laws that had been enacted to curtail the 164 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Figure 5. (Herndon Foundation)

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Figure 8. (Herndon Foundation) 166 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

growth of black-owned companies. At his death in 1977 at age seventy- nine, Norris Herndon and the foundation that bore his and his father's name possessed over 90 percent of the stock in Atlanta Life, with assets totaling more than $100,000,000. (The Alonzo F. and Norris Bumstead Herndon Foundation, created by a special Act of Congress, was in­ tended to prevent the ownership of Atlanta Life Insurance from passing out of black control. At Norris's death, the family home, its contents, and all of the Herndon wealth was transferred to the Foundation.) In 1980, under Jesse Hill, Jr.'s presidency, the officers of the company con­ tinued to report gains in all areas of business, including assets of over $107,000,000, insurance in force worth $980,507,000, and 1,027 employ­ ees serving twelve states. Each of the Herndons sought and achieved high goals: Adrienne in the arts, Alonzo in business. It was only fitting that their home should reflect this same blending of culture and wealth.

IV In a very real sense, it can be said that Adrienne Herndon designed the Herndon Mansion. Oral tradition, evidence in the house, and re­ search all support the concept. In the words of Atlanta University presi­ dent Edward T. Ware, who delivered her eulogy, "no architect drew the plan. She [Adrienne] was the decorator. I believe there is not in this great city a home more beautiful."29 There was a good deal of truth in Ware's hyperbole. The most convincing evidence of the owner's concern for her house are the mail-order catalogues, photographs, samples, and postcards among the private papers of the family. Among the documents that ap­ pear to have influenced the design of the house are Max L. Keith's Beautiful Interiors (c. 1905); a Sherwin-Williams folder of paint, wall­ paper, and cloth samples for each room in the house; a catalogue from the Rookwood Pottery Company; and a catalogue of classical statuary from the American Art Marble Company of Philadelphia. The Keith publication, which includes photographs of interior living spaces exe­ cuted in Neoclassical, Arts and Crafts, Rococo, and eclectic styles, is reflected in many of the rooms on the first floor. The idea for the frieze in the living room is specifically taken from the book; next to a photograph of a living room which is obviously the prototype for the Herndons', a penciled note judged to be in Adrienne's handwriting indi­ cates her choice. The Sherwin-Williams decorator samples appear to have been cho­ sen expressly for the house. Paint analysis and early photographs reveal that the Sherwin-Williams recommendations were carried out for the first-floor rooms, but the original treatments have been obscured by Journal — Summer/Fall 167

Figure 9. Adrienne McNeil Herndon. (Herndon Foundation) 168 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 10. Carroll Payne residence on the southwest corner of Peachtree and Fourth.

Norris's later efforts at redecorating. Several fireplace surrounds pic­ tured in the Rookwood catalogue were built in the house; the inglenook, the living room, and the dining room all feature Rookwood designs. Un­ fortunately, there are no other catalogues relating specifically to the de­ signs of the house in the Herndon collection. Oral tradition and evidence in the house further indicate that the style and design concept for the house were the products of both A. F. and Adrienne's backgrounds and tastes. In newspaper articles as in in­ terviews, the house is often described as a plantation "Big House" or a "Tara."30 In the National Register nomination for the Atlanta Univer­ sity Center District, the house is referred to as "a monumental Beaux Arts classical home."31 Both comparisons appear to be valid in light of the Herndons' architectural tastes. Oral tradition presents the house as a symbol of Alonzo's success in overcoming meager beginnings and attaining the affluent ideal set for him on the plantations of his youth. He referred to the house as "Old Glory"; and in Edward Ware's description of the living room mural, the house is presented in that image—a hard-won, lifelong goal, finally achieved: First a small boy with his mother in the foreground and a country cabin in the background. This represents the childhood of her [Adrienne's] hus­ band. Next he is pictured in the field resting on his hoe. A vision in his Journal — Summer/Fall 169

Figure 11. Herndon Mansion. (Herndon Foundation)

mind is represented on the next panel. This is the picture of their home as it stands there now on the brow of the hill.32 Herndon's rise from slave to millionaire is a mythic dream-come-true, and his house is an impressive symbol of his determination and vision. More immediate influences on the design of the house were Ad- rienne's tastes and her desire to build a house that would complement the adjacent university. The Northeast Lot was ideally suited to the construction of a monumental structure: it not only afforded a sweeping view of the city and the University, it also was located in a prestigious spot directly east of the president's house. According to Eloise Miller, the rooftop terrace of the mansion was designed to accommodate theat­ rical performances, and the reception rooms of the first floor were in­ tended for musicales, socials, and other University-related functions. Whatever the intent for the use of the house, its design and interior decoration equalled in quality the finest contemporary residences of Peachtree Street, Druid Hills, and Ansley Park. Similar Neoclassical and Beaux Arts residences of the time included 105 Inman Circle in Ansley Park (1911); the King residence on Ponce de Leon (1911); the Carroll Payne residence on Peachtree, now razed (a photograph of which, Figure 10, was found in the Herndon Collection); and a number of houses along Peachtree Street, now destroyed. The Herndon Mansion is a south-facing, two-story, symmetrically 170 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

detailed, squarish structure with wrapping side verandahs (shown in Figure 11 at the time of its completion). The house contains fifteen rooms on the two main floors and a full basement with a safe room and a small apartment. A classical balustrade borders a roof-top terrace. This balustrade and the colossal entrance bay portico with its paired, fluted columns classify the house as a Neoclassical Revival house with strong eclectic and Beaux Arts influences. Neither strictly academic in its borrowings nor inaccurate in its details, the house is the epitome of the early twentieth-century eclectic house. It is conservative, chaste, yet stylish within the bounds of good taste. The prominent columns on the house are actually replacements (1963) for the original Corinthian columns which stood on brick pedes­ tals. The newer corn husk capitaled columns, the metal balustrades that line side verandahs, and the portico balcony are improvements un­ dertaken by Norris in the 1960s for his then deteriorating residence. Contractors Barge and Thompson carried out the work, including the replacement of polychromatic, octagonal ceramic tile terraces with flag­ stone.33 The entrance and the first floor windows remain in situ, capped by basket, handle-arched transoms and lighted by leaded and etched, beveled-edge glass. Interior details of the house are equally rich and reflect the tastes of both generations of Herndons. The vestibule, paneled to its full height in mahogany, retains its original tile floor. The spacious recep­ tion hall focuses on a picturesque inglenook with built-in seating and a Rookwood Pottery fireplace surround. The inglenook, made popular by the Shingle Style beach estates of Victorian New England, contrasts uncomfortably with the formal Renaissance Revival finishes of the re­ ception hall. However, this juxtaposition of various styles, one room to the next, typifies the eclectic movement and characterizes all of the main rooms of the Herndon Mansion. In contrast to the inglenook, the reception hall features flat pilas­ ters with Ionic mouldings and gaping lions' heads centered in the capitals. Framing window and door opening, these pilasters were once part of a cream-and-Rookwood green color scheme which Norris up­ dated to a pale gray-green popular in the 1950s. The late nineteenth- century Queen Anne reproductions in this room were refinished from their original dark mahogany to a light maple color in the 1960s at Nor- ris's request by Trinity Furniture Shops, Inc., a prominent Atlanta fur­ niture establishment.34 Norris's redecorating efforts are also visible in the music room, a Louis XVI-styled parlor featuring a coved, gilt plasterwork ceiling and rococo plastered panels in the walls. Norris replaced the original eight­ eenth-century Sheraton furniture in this room with expensive, French rococo style furniture of the 1960s. The grand piano in the room was refinished several times by Trinity to match Norris's white and gilt fur- Journal — Summer/Fall 171

Figure 12. Interior view of Herndon Mansion. (Herndon Foundation)

niture. Typical of the Victorian residues present in the house, the music room is decorated in a decidedly feminine manner and was intended for use as an entertaining parlor for the woman of the house. With its elab­ orate crystal chandelier, rococo chimneypiece, and French doors leading to a verandah, it is one of the more finely decorated rooms in the house. Norris, appreciating that fact, later purchased for this room a fine pair of eighteenth-century English portraits by Allen Ramsey, a well-known painter of the period. Other spaces radiating off the reception hall are an impressive, two-story squarish stairwell and the living room, gained, as is the music room, by paneled, pocket doors. The stairwell continues the Renais­ sance Revival theme of the hall, reproducing elements of the Medici Palazzo interior courtyard with early Renaissance quatrefoils and a co­ lumnar arcade at the second level. A French rococo gilt chandelier sus­ pended from the center of the ceiling is one of the finest fixtures in the house. The lion's head newel post (Figure 12) is a detail similar to stair carvings executed by Willis F. Denny in Rhodes Hall (c. 1905). Nestled below the curve of the balcony on the stair landing is a full-size replica in Italian marble of the Venus di Medici. Commissioned by Norris dur- 172 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY ing a 1956 visit to Europe, the statue symbolizes his attempts to create the house his mother would have wanted.36 The living room, directly east of the stairwell, uses dado-height ma­ hogany paneling, built-in cabinets, window seat, chimneypiece, and ex­ posed mahogany beams to create a cozy, medieval effect popularized by the Arts and Crafts movement in vogue at the time the house was built. The original furniture for this room, in storage in the Herndon base­ ment, was of a complementary Arts and Crafts style. The frieze depict­ ing themes and events from Herndon's life was "restored" by Dwoskin at Norris's request in the 1960s. Originally a fine example of muralist art, it was repainted in more intense hues, with some details obliter­ ated. From the same redecorating campaign came more expensive French rococo furniture and reproduction French Second Empire snake head chandeliers. Norris's penchant for things French paralleled his mother's collection of French art; however, it seems Norris carried the motif beyond the original architectural limits of the rooms, which, ex­ cept for the music room, are not in the least French. Nevertheless, these furnishings and the original finishes of the room are of the highest qual­ ity. The latter are mail-order catalogue works of the same caliber as those found in the finest homes of white Atlantans. The last major first-floor room, the dining room, continues the theme of dark mahogany paneling, built-in window seat, and beamed ceiling. The elaborate mahogany chimneypiece and the built-in side­ board feature Mannerist details such as grotesques, garlands, and late- Renaissance mouldings. An early photograph of this room shows its original furniture, simple but heavy mahogany, and the sideboard and china cabinet loaded with cut glass, china, and silver (Figure 13).3e Still displayed in the room are Venetian crystal, ornate maroon china from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, a rare collection of silver services from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with fine candelabra from the same period. Silver and Venetian glass were two of Norris's favorite purchases. Rose Palmer recalls that in Venice Norris commis­ sioned the pink and lavender glass that replaced the original dining- room fixtures.37 They very nearly resemble the original pendant grape cluster fixtures except for a slightly flatter profile. All of the persons interviewed in the course of research for this es­ say agreed that Norris Herndon's decorating was far less effective than his mother's original scheme for the house. Although Norris was well- traveled—and indeed in the course of these travels he purchased such fine pieces as ancient Greek red ware; Syrian, Egyptian, and Roman glass; ancient Chinese bodisattva; eighteenth-century English portrai­ ture and silver—he lacked the confidence in shaping his private world that his mother had possessed. Some of his attempts at redecorating were ill-advised, and his selection of reproductions, however elaborate, instead of original pieces was inconsistent if not enigmatic. Perhaps if Journal — Summer/Fall 173

Figure 13. Dining room of the Herndon Mansion. (Herndon Foundation) he had enjoyed the influence of social peers or artistic companions, the outcome of the house might have been more true to its original intent. As it stands now, the Herndon Mansion is the physical representation of an eager but retiring individual's attempts to recreate an earlier time, a time vaguely remembered, intensely desired, but never recaptured.

From 1920 to 1977, architecturally and socially, the Herndon Man­ sion had no equal in Black Atlanta, but found instead peers in the homes of the city's affluent white suburbs—Ansley Park, Druid Hills, and the traditional Peachtree Street corridor. If the racial climate had been different, it had the potential for becoming the anchor of a model neighborhood of affluent blacks and of black and white intellectuals. As it was, the Herndons remained isolated socially from their white coun­ terparts and culturally from the majority of their own race. Over time, beginning with Adrienne's death and continuing with the encroaching development of the University Center, the enhancing physical and so­ cial relationship between family and school diminished, although Norris continued to support the school with his contributions.38 Gradually, the 174 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY family's main source of cultural nourishment was lost; interchange with white society became increasingly distant. In his own day, Norris Herndon never fully assumed the public and social responsibilities afforded one of the wealthiest black men in the country. Indeed, during his later years as Atlanta's black elite extended its base around the Atlanta University Center and along Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, where many Atlanta Life executives have lived, Norris was unable to relate to this changing and growing new order, preferring instead the company of the dwindling mulatto aristocracy of his father's era. Thus, the house and its occupant ended as anachronisms, the last emblems of a small but vibrant, turn-of-the-century elite identified with the old Atlanta University. An oasis within an oasis, the Herndon home, for all its elegance, faded before it really established itself, mir­ roring Adrienne Herndon's lament, "We have only just begun to live and now I must die."39 Five years after Norris Herndon's death, the house stood empty with a team of consultants—museum curator, appraiser, archivist, ar­ chitect, architectural historian, and historian—variously attempting to determine its future. That seventy-five years after it had been built this stately edifice was no longer the home of a special family but merely a monument to their dream reveals the rocky societal shoals upon which the dream foundered. Today, the handsome restoration of the house and the curatorial and archival conservation of its contents are nearing completion. By so preserving the mansion, the Herndon Foundation has rekindled the Herndons' dream and restored one of "the highest" symbols of black achievement and community building in the country. In its re­ stored state as an archives and museum, the house supercedes its origi­ nal purpose as the home of an exceptional family. It is a physical mem­ ory, yes, but once again, and more importantly, a paragon.

NOTES

1. Myron W. Adams refers to the Northeast Lot and discusses its early tenants in A History of Atlanta University (Atlanta, 1930), pp. 77-81. It has been capitalized in these pages so as to em­ phasize its distinctiveness. 2. Information on Herndon and his firm has been drawn from the following works by Alexa B. Henderson: her dissertation, "A Twentieth Century Black Enterprise: The Atlanta Life Insurance Company, 1905-1975" (Georgia State University, 1975); the company-authorized A Quest fur Eco­ nomic Dignity: The Story of Atlanta Life, 1905-1980 (Atlanta, 1980); and "Alonzo F. Herndon and Black Insurance in Atlanta, 1904-15," Atlanta Historical Bulletin, XXI (Spring 1977): 34-37. 3. W.E.B. Du Bois. ed., The Negro American Family (Cambridge. Mass.. 1970; orig. ed., 1908), p. 88f. Journal — Summer/Fall 175

4. Elizabeth K. Burns, "The Enduring Affluent Suburb," Landscape, 24, No. 1 (1980): 33-41. 5. Du Bois, p. 134. 6. Georgia State Historic Preservation Section, "National Register of Historic Places Inventory- Nomination Form for Atlanta University Center District" (Atlanta, 1973), pp. 4-5. 7. Dan Durett, "The Role of Atlanta University as Land User," paper presented at National His­ tory of Education Society and Southern History of Education Society Joint Meeting, Atlanta, Nov­ ember 14, 1974. 8. National Register Nomination, p. 5; Mildred Warner, Community Building: The History of At­ lanta University Neighborhoods (City of Atlanta, Department of Budget and Planning, 1978), p. 8. 9. Adams, p. 139. 10. Plans for Furber Cottage, signed and dated, Atlanta University Special Collections, Robert W. Woodruff Library. 11. Photographs from the 1880s in the Herndon Collection depict the newly-constructed Bum­ stead Cottage. 12. Adams, p. 78. 13. Deed Records, Fulton County Book 461, p. 173. 14. Anon., "Homes of the Teachers," Bulletin of Atlanta University (Oct. 1908): 2. 15. Jerry John Thornbery, "The Development of Black Atlanta, 1865-1885" (Ph.D dissertation, University of Maryland, 1977), esp. chap. VII. 16. Quoted in William H. Pierson, Jr., American Buildings and Their Architects: The Colonial and Neo-Classical Styles (New York, 1976), p. 1. 17. August Meier and David Lewis, "History of the Negro Upper Class in Atlanta, Georgia, 1890- 1958," Journal of Negro Education, 28 (Spring 1959): 130. 18. Ibid. 19. Mrs. Emory S. Herndon to Norris Herndon, 30 March 1969, Herndon Collection. 20. Biographical details drawn from Henderson, "A Twentieth Century Black Enterprise," passim. 21. See "Herndon's Crystal Palace Barber Shop," advertisement in Official Souvenir Guide Impe­ rial Council Ancient Arabic Order Nobles of the Mystic Shrine for North America, May 10-16, 1914, p. 135, Herndon Collection. 22. Death Certificate of Adrienne McNeil Herndon, Herndon Collection. 23. Interviews by Alexa B. Henderson and Ann DeRosa Byrne, 27 May 1981, with Helen Martin and Eloise Miller at the Herndon Mansion. 24. Henderson, "A Twentieth Century Black Enterprise," p. 27. 25. Atlanta University Special Collections, Vertical Files, Norris Herndon. Photographs in the Herndon Collection showing Adrienne and Norris at the Bumstead house (c. 1905) support ac­ counts that the Herndons resided there while their own house was under construction. The close ties between the two families is further evidenced by Norris Bumstead Herndon being named for the Atlanta University president. 26. Eulogy for Adrienne McNeil Herndon, Bulletin of Atlanta University (April 6, 1910); Death Certificate, Herndon Collection. 27. The synopsis of A.M. Herndon's dramatic career is based upon "Anne DuBignon," professional brochure, n.d., Herndon Collection, and Clarence A. Bacote, The Story of Atlanta University: A Century of Service (Atlanta, 1969), pp. 128-30. 28. Henderson, "A Twentieth Century Black Enterprise," passim. 29. Herndon eulogy. The builder employed by the Herndons was Will Campbell, a local black contractor. 30. Interviews by Alexa B. Henderson and and Ann DeRosa Bryne, 27 May 1981, with Grace Hamilton at the Herndon Mansion. 31. National Register Nomination. 176 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

33. Telephone interview by Ann DeRosa Byrne, 3 September 1981, with Otis Alvin Barge, Jr. 34. "Trinity receipts," Herndon Collection. 35. "Venus di Medici receipts," Herndon Collection. 36. Helen Martin, whose advice Norris Herndon often sought in his decorating, relates the story of discovering both the sideboard and china cabinet bare of the costly cut glass. When asked what he had done with the glass, Norris replied, "I'll tell you later," but he never did. Martin interview. 37. Interview by Alexa B. Henderson and Ann DeRosa Byrne, 27 May 1981, with Rose Palmer at the Herndon Mansion. 38. Norris, on several occasions, sought to buy Bumstead Cottage, as well as the Towns House, in his efforts to preserve the enclave; however, time and the expansion of the Atlanta University Center worked against him. 39. Herndon eulogy. 177

In the Mind's Eye:

The Downtown as Visual Metaphor for the Metropolis

By Karen Luehrs and Timothy J. Crimmins

The downtown [in the early twentieth century] was the most pow­ erful and widely recognized symbol of the American metropolis," ob­ served Sam Bass Warner in his path-breaking study of Philadelphia, The Private City. "Indeed, in ordinary conversation or in everyday journalism, the downtown passed as an acceptable metaphor for the metropolis itself."1 The process by which the city center came to rep­ resent the urban environment as a whole is complex; however, it has a great deal to do with the advances in technology which led to the clus­ tering of high-rise office buildings, hotels, theaters, and retail stores which, in turn, drew citizens together in a place where some worked, but many more shopped and relaxed. Here, too, visitors were quartered, making the downtown the vantage point from which the host city was viewed and remembered. 178 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The physical pattern of a city's downtown—its streets, buildings, and, most importantly, its skyline—became a symbol, a kind of meta­ phor, for the complexity of the urban environment for city-dwellers and visitors alike. This process of metaphor-making can be seen in etchings and photographs in magazines and newspapers that showed what a particular city looked like and in postcard illustrations that con­ veyed an image of what civic leaders wanted their city to be. Atlanta is a useful example of an urban area that defined its downtown image early in its history and used that image both to satisfy civic pride and to promote national attention. The rise of Atlanta after the Civil War into a major urban center was the result of a strategic location in a regional railroad network, an enthusiastic populace, and northern investment. Although its popula­ tion was small compared to northern cities and its appearance not pre­ possessing, Atlanta promoted its virtues with the fervor of civic piety which characterized the New South of the late nineteenth century.2 The sign of its progress, however, was the smoke of locomotives more than factories, for the railroads brought commercial vitality rather than in­ dustrial expansion. In fact, the earliest official seal proudly presented the locomotive as the symbol of the city's potential for commercial growth. From after the Civil War until the 1930s, Atlanta was a railroad town, building both its fortune and its physical environment around the rails which reached out to cities across the country. However, by as early as 1900 the physical center of the town had begun to shift away from the railroad corridor that divided the emerging business district. As new office buildings were built changing the city's small-town ap­ pearance, city leaders attempted to create an image that was more cos­ mopolitan, more sophisticated than the locomotive. They wanted their city to be viewed as more than the rail hub of the Southeast; indeed, they wanted Atlanta to be seen as the "New York of the South" or, at least, the "Chicago of the South." New York was an obvious and compelling model for every would-be metropolis. Physically and commercially diverse, it was the mecca of the country, perhaps of the world. All other aggressive American cities watched and followed the lead of the premier city of prestige and power. For Victorians, the image of New York's Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline stood for all that a great city should be: daring, innovative, successful. Chicago, too, represented great potential for fu­ ture development. A small town on Lake Michigan in 1840, it had grown to a metropolis of over a million some fifty years later when its Columbian World's Fair attracted international attention. The developers who shaped the image of the city of Atlanta pur­ posefully emulated the rapid growth and modernity of New York and Chicago. Atlanta's business leaders saw the city's future inextricably Journal — Summer/Fall 179 linked to an urban network in which there was great potential for the growth of regional offices of far-flung corporations.3 Thus, from the pro­ motion of the two Atlanta expositions (the second of which—the Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895—consciously imitated the Chicago World's Fair of 1893) and through the Forward Atlanta Cam­ paign of the 1920s, the image of a cosmopolitan, progressive, commer­ cially vibrant city was continually highlighted. Downplayed was At­ lanta's southernness in other than purely nostalgic terms; instead, its affinity for northern work ideals was stressed. Gradually, the Victorian town of two- and three-story mercantile structures gave way to the high-rise buildings prominent in other major urban areas. Long before Peachtree Center came to represent Atlanta in the 1960s, the visual symbol of the city centered on the clustering of sky­ scrapers built around Five Points. New York and Chicago pioneered the high-rise in the closing decades of the nineteenth century; Atlanta quickly followed suit. The phoenix logo of Atlanta Resurgens, a city rising from the ashes of the Civil War, also appropriately reflected the skyscraper metropolis rising above the smoke of the nineteenth-century railroad town. Between 1880 and 1930, a visual and metaphorical re­ alignment took place. While Peachtree Street and the "golden triangle," the major business area north of the railroad terminals, were increas­ ingly projected as appropriate images of the city, the other side of downtown was relegated to a secondary level of recognition and care. In truth, Atlanta was both sides of the tracks: a Victorian town to the south and a city of modern skyscrapers to the north. In order to look more closely at Atlanta's Victorian roots in relation to the development of its modern image, it is useful to recreate details of the city's built environment. The evolving images that downtown At­ lanta has projected can be discerned through an evaluation of major buildings constructed within a defined area over time. Through a quan­ titative analysis of the building patterns in the city's central commer­ cial area from 1880 through 1930, downtown Atlanta's changing visual character, as well as its increasing specialization, can be documented. (See Appendix for methodology.)

In a physical as well as psychological sense, after the Civil War At­ lanta was the phoenix rising from the ashes. In the Reconstruction era, Atlanta was a small city of stores and groceries, offices, hotels, ware­ houses, churches, schools, residences, and a few factories. Business largely centered around Whitehall and Alabama streets to the south of the railroad tracks. Broad Street was the main marketing and shopping district.4 Many of the larger buildings were either built or occupied by wholesale establishments, and generally none of the buildings was over 180 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 1. 1866 view of Peachtree Street north showing destruction of Federal troops. (AHS) three stories high. (Figure 1 shows Peachtree Street in 1865 with both ruins from Civil War destruction and rebuilt commercial buildings of a reviving city.) A far cry from a glamorous big city, Atlanta was indistin­ guishable image was one of newness and rapid, yet modest growth. With dirt roads crossing the at-grade rail lines at major intersections and a streetscape of Victorian mercantile establishments punctuated by an occasional classic Greek facade or church spire, Atlanta's only distin­ guishable image was one of newness and of rapid, yet modest growth. Only the railroad, the lasting legacy of Terminus, provided a focus for business and aspirations. (Atlanta, the early railroad town, was closer to the wild West than to Fifth Avenue as Figure 2, Whitehall Street in 1875, indicates.) Through the 1880s Atlanta's civic image continued to be character­ ized by the railroad. The town's aspirations to elegance and urbanity kept pace with the growth of its rail network. The station itself and Atlanta's new hotels, such as the Kimball House and the Markham House, both within steps of the railroad, gave the visitor an instant im­ pression of urban elegance. These major public spaces also gave Atlanta an early image of a promised, but not yet realized gentility. (An 1880 woodcut in Harper's Magazine in Figure 3 depicts the station, hotels, and commercial buildings generated by rail activities.) At this time, little else about Atlanta was visually memorable. The trappings of local government—the State Capitol at Marietta and For­ syth, in a former commercial building, and City Hall, in its isolated Journal — Summer/Fall 181

Figure 2. View of Whitehall Street looking south from Hunter Street, 1875. (AHS)

splendor at Washington and Hunter (now Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive)—did not provide a natural focus. Rather, it was the Union De­ pot and the Georgia Freight Depot, straddling the railroad tracks, that brought both sides of the city together and served as the true center of activity (Figure 3). By the end of the 1880s, Atlanta was beginning to be recognized as a significant city on the threshold of extraordinary growth. The city grew with a noticeable air of self-assurance, developing quickly into a service center for the region and the nation. Its building patterns re­ flected this emphasis; major offices, hotels, and government buildings were steadily added. (See Appendix for figures of building by decade of construction.) 182 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Figure 3. 1880 engraving of Car-Shed. (AHS)

For the most part, the office buildings of this decade were multi­ purpose structures. Owners typically rented space to shopkeepers, pro­ fessionals, or banks on the ground floor of their buildings. Examples of this pattern include an organ company/office building, a factory/office, a literary society/office.5 All buildings constructed in this decade were lo­ cally owned, and only one, the Chamber of Commerce Building, was owned by a group rather than by individuals. The genesis of several Atlanta business fortunes can be traced to the 1880s or earlier: Rich's, established in 1867; Haverty's, 1885; Davison-Paxon Company, in the 1870s. In the 1880s, Atlanta was a small, service-oriented urban area, limited in scope and modest in image. The variety of businesses housed in the downtown reflected the needs of the local populace and inhabi­ tants of communities along the rail network. (Figure 4 depicts the church spires and residential roof lines that stretched beyond the commercial concentration in the town's center.) Only one of the six office buildings dating from this decade cost in excess of $100,000. All were locally designed. Skyscrapers, which were beginning to be built in major cities by nationally known architects, were beyond the means and the needs of Atlantans. At seven stories the Gould Building was the city's tallest structure. Major buildings contin­ ued to be concentrated within an established geographic perimeter of a Journal — Summer/Fall 183

Figure 4. Corner of Walton and Forsyth streets, 1882. (AHS) three-block radius of the terminal. Although in this period Henry W. Grady was articulating Atlanta's claims of great potential, the reality of the city was quite modest: the railroad, not the skyscraper, still symbol­ ized the city. With the building of the State Capitol in 1889, the first truly grand public building was completed. Located on a knoll adjacent to the bustling rail and commercial scene, the capitol provided a focal point which dominated the city's skyline but which misrepresented the continued locus of the city's vitality—the railroad corridor. If turn-of-the century Atlanta builders were content to remain in the established downtown district, they were, nonetheless, willing to take other business risks. The amount of northern investment in the city at this time is difficult to estimate, but the majority of risk seems to have fallen on local investors. C. Vann Woodward concludes that most evidence indicates that until after the depression of 1893, invest­ ment initiative was local.6 This seems to be borne out in Atlanta's com­ mercial building pattern. Investments of from $50,000 to over $200,000 reveal that Atlanta residents were quite optimistic about the future of their city. A landmark of the era, the 1882 Kimball House Hotel, sym­ bolized the faith as well as the hopes of Atlanta investors. Designed by a New York architect and financed by a local entrepreneur who had migrated from Chicago, the hotel was the most expensive building of its 184 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Figure 5. English-American Building during construction. (AHS) Journal — Summer/Fall 185 time, purported to cost in excess of $300,000. It included the city's first public elevator and was the first hotel to have indoor plumbing. An­ other elegant public building was DeGive's Opera House, rebuilt after a fire at a cost of $200,000. Both buildings were designed in the grandest Victorian excesses of the day. Thus, by effecting a mix of moderate- sized office buildings and elegant public spaces, the city developed a public image later modified but never changed: Atlanta was first-class. The rawness of the young town was hidden behind an expanding cos­ mopolitan facade. The focus of the public image, however, was still the railroad, the 1871 Union Passenger Depot, and the major buildings that surrounded it.

II The decade of the 1890s in many ways represented an expansion of the previous ten years, highlighted by an acceleration of the building of public structures such as hotels and offices. As a result of the panic and depression in 1893, the major indication of hard times locally was the dearth of construction of other types of edifices. There were also begin­ ning to be signs of a major shift in growth away from the railroad. The first major skyscrapers were erected beyond the rail terminals, signaling an end to the city's tight-knit, small-town appearance. By 1900, a new city pattern had been established: separate areas of work, recreation, and living began to shape Atlanta into a modern metropolis. By 1900 there were, in effect, two towns divided by a gulch: the older, two-to- four-story, red-brick, commercial concentration to the south and the newer office skyscrapers rising above the church spires to the north. The influence of national investment in the Atlanta building boom that began in earnest in the 1890s also helped to shape the city's image. The city's first skyscrapers, the Equitable Building (1892) and the En­ glish-American Building (1897), were financed by the Mutual Building Company of New York. The Equitable Building, the product of the en- treprenurial skills of local developer Joel Hurt, broke new ground in many ways. Built at the corner of Edgewood and Pryor to the east rather than to the north or west of the tracks, the building actually faced away from the railroad. The Equitable was not only important for Atlanta, it was a major national building. Designed by Burnham and Root of Chicago, it was daringly modern, bringing to the city an office address that remained fashionable for many years. The English-American Building, financed in part by Atlantan James English, was a more modest venture in terms of architecture and cost. (Shown in Figure 5 while under construction in 1897, this struc­ ture is the oldest standing skyscraper in the city today.) It typified the expansion of the city's financial center northward. However, the core of the commercial city still centered around the railroad as the hub: sev- 186 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

eral new rail lines were added to the rail network, and the consolidation of ten radiating lines, including five divisions of the Southern Railway, further enhanced Atlanta's dominant position as the eastern rail center. Construction of the Terminal sStation in 1905 served to reinforce this position. Even as the city grew northward, the continued dominance of the railroad and the adjacent business area focused national attention on the city's role in transportation rather than in business. As the new century dawned, Atlanta's progress, as in most major American cities of the late Victorian Age, found its greatest expression in building. As Henry James confessed in his American journals after having left New York for a number of years, on his return to the city he could hardly find his way around in the formerly familiar neighbor­ hoods. Major landmarks fell without a protest from the populace and often with applause for the progress thus heralded. The Atlanta Con­ stitution expressed the prevailing public philosophy in this fashion: "There is no more certain indication of progress than the extent of de­ struction. The city which has ceased to grow and improve is satisfied with the old, and sees no need for tearing down to make way for the new."7 The expansion of the city's core was facilitated by the concurrent residential migration to new trolley neighborhoods on the periphery, which left those residences close to the downtown vulnerable to replace­ ment by commercial buildings. By 1900 Atlanta had a distinct down­ town. (Figure 6 shows the extent of the growth north of the railroad in 1903: the Fourth National Bank building is under construction at Five Points, but several skyscrapers already dominate the northern skyline.) While only seventeen buildings were constructed between 1901 and 1910, a decade of slow economic growth, these new structures helped to create a new image of a city of office towers and high-rise hotels. Thir­ teen of these buildings were financed locally and three by combined lo­ cal and national efforts. Five buildings cost more than $1,000,000 to build, breaking previous cost levels. Of the latter, three were office buildings, one a hotel, and one a theater/office. Construction of the Ter­ minal Station in 1905 began a modest hotel building boom in the rail­ road area, but by far the most opulent and daring edifice constructed in this decade was the Candler Building built by Asa Candler in 1906 in an area far to the north of earlier commercial buildings. Construction was financed through loans from The Coca-Cola Company, which was owned by Candler. It was the most expensive speculative office building financed by one individual in Atlanta. Located at Peachtree and Hous­ ton streets, it was constructed with its back to the railroad. While there was some hesitation on the part of other businessmen to move so far from the center of the commercial area, it is clear that the Candler Building served to encourage the gradual movement of business north- Journal — Summer/Fall 187

/< .nim» um • «ii •SIB' ra • *.*W*F*t H Nil ii in MiH]

Figure 6. 1903 view of Peachtree north from point above the railroad. Five Points is at right center. (AHS)

ward on Peachtree. Its development represented a brilliant stroke by a far-sighted entrepreneur. Between 1911 and 1920 the Candler Building served as a magnet pulling high-rise growth up Peachtree and forcing, in turn, the move­ ment of affluent residents even farther north, by 1920 commercial buildings extended six blocks up Peachtree Street, doubling the three- block district of 1900. In many respects, the decade between 1911 and 1920 resembles 1880-90 in terms of activity and variety of investments. However, this was only a prelude to the boom of the 1920s. The investment in the nine office buildings of the 1911-20 period totalled over $5,000,000, but a greater per building investment was made in stores and hotels. The Davison-Paxon Department Store (1912) was built at a cost of over $1,000,000, the largest amount to be spent on a retail building to that point. Located within the Whitehall Street shopping area adjacent to Rich's, it further solidified the original shopping corridor. The most in­ teresting aspect of these business developments, however, is that within fifteen years Davison's sold this building and built new, larger quarters on Peachtree at three times the cost. Atlanta inched up Peachtree with service and entertainment facili­ ties, as opposed to business buildings, breaking into previously residen­ tial areas. Conforming to the residential quality of the neighborhood, 188 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

five of the new buildings were elegant hotels, one a theater. Hotels, such as the Georgian Terrace and the Farlinger, provided luxury bachelor apartments. But the construction of larger new buildings on Peach- tree—four between 1901 and 1910, eight between 1911 and 1920, and fourteen between 1921 and 1931—helped to solidify the modern image of a high-rise downtown. From the 1890s onward, a relatively small group of commercially competitive business leaders shared a common vision. They saw Atlanta as a commercial/office center, relying on its railroad connections but ex­ panding its role as a regional node. They changed the image of Atlanta from just another railroad junction to that of a big city comparable (in some ways) to New York or Chicago. For these leaders, it was impor­ tant to do more than merely create a new skyline; they saw the need to promote the symbol of that skyline to emphasize how different Atlanta was from its southern cousins. Postcards of Atlanta from this period clearly demonstrate how the downtown was used as a symbol of the modern city. (Figure 7 shows a 1911 Bird's Eye View of the city that was used on postcards. The tall buildings surrounding the rounded top of the Union Station in the center of the picture overwhelm the railroad buildings, leading the viewer to focus on the skyscrapers that dominate the near north side of the city.)

Ill Office buildings and hotels, the major and most expensive building ventures of the 1920s, are representative of what Atlanta was becoming: a big business and trade center for the Southeast and the nation. One- third of the buildings in this survey were built during this decade. The floodgates opened quietly, with only four buildings constructed in the period 1921-22. Thirty-three more were built before the Depression ended Atlanta's building spurt for the next two decades. Growth came not only as a result of internal expansion, but also because Atlanta's downtown was discovered to be a lucrative place for northern investment. The economic boom of the 1920s produced a glut of major office buildings—seventeen in this survey—putting Atlanta well on the way to being seriously overbuilt in office space based on the actual needs of the business population. During the early Depression years of the 1930s, vacancy rates of 25-30 percent were common, and some office buildings stood half empty.8 The offices of the 1920s were generally not as archi­ tecturally elaborate as those of previous decades. More than half were built as speculative real estate ventures by realty companies and con­ sortiums. By the end of this decade, office building had become an in­ vestment of national/local consortiums, more than a product of specula- Journal — Summer/Fall 189

Figure 7. Bird's Eye View of Atlanta, 1911. (Courtesy Kenneth H. Thomas, Jr.)

tive individual initiative or of need. In a sense, the small-time individ­ ual owner had been priced out of the major building market. This pattern did not hold true, however, for stores, hotels, and other types of buildings. Stores were created in Atlanta during Recon­ struction as individual endeavors and grew mostly as demand war­ ranted. Rich's and Davison's each rebuilt three times from 1870 to 1930; their investment in building seemed modest compared to the financing of office buildings. As noted above, the earliest stores were clustered in the Whitehall and Hunter shopping district. In the 1920s, major retail­ ers followed the building patterns along Peachtree, and the shopping area remained split between the two sections with Rich's continuing to anchor Broad Street. In 1927, the Davison-Paxon Company affiliated with Macy's of New York, the first local retailer to combine with a na­ tional concern. With their financial assistance, a $3,000,000, stylish de­ partment store was built on Peachtree Street. By 1930, Peachtree could be considered more a theater and shopping area than a business dis­ trict. Major office buildings continued to be closer to Five Points than the Peachtree corridor, a condition that accentuated the crowded urban condition of the older downtown areas. (Figure 8 shows the commercial cluster along Peachtree Street in 1943. Davison's is flanked on the right by the Henry Grady Hotel and the Roxy Theater and on the left, off Peachtree, by the Atlanta Athletic Club.) Physical problems of the downtown area, combined with the new 190 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY freedom in transportation epitomized by the automobile, contributed to the restructuring of the street patterns as well as the continued decen­ tralization of office and retail buildings. Initially, the city's growth pat­ tern was similar to other railroad towns. The early town straddled the railroad tracks with access between the two sides of town hindered by rail traffic. Three major crossing points (Whitehall, Broad, and Forsyth) provided the only passage over the tracks above grade until the comple­ tion of the Courtland Street viaduct in 1906, the Spring Street viaduct in 1923, and the Central Avenue and Pryor Street viaducts in 1929. The condition of the roads, even in the best of times, was never ideal.9 The subsequent raising of the street level in front of older buildings south of the tracks caused by the completion of the viaducts served to "down­ grade" the older section of town to the south of the tracks. Social activi­ ties—theaters, shops, hotels, restaurants—rapidly spread into nearby, more pleasant and accessible residential areas. The automobile began to supplement the extensive trolley network and, in turn, placed greater demands on space for parking. The congested area of the central city was left to the commercial skyscrapers and the newly built garages. In 1926, a national chain store, Sears, built its $4,000,000 retail facility on Ponce de Leon Avenue, over a mile beyond the central city. The ten- story Biltmore Hotel (1924) also took shape outside the city limits, away from the main rail terminals. Located on West Peachtree Street between Fifth and Sixth, it signified an expansion of the downtown to the north. Soon other services moved beyond the core city; parking ga­ rages, automobile sales rooms, and movie theaters became part of the extended townscape. Postcard views of the 1920s register this dramatic shift in the im­ age of the city. (Figure 9, a Chamber of Commerce production, used the high-rise skyline to represent "The Metropolis of the New South." Not to be seen are the railroad influences, for the city had risen above its origins.) In fact, for many travelers in the downtown the creation of the viaduct system that placed the railroad tracks below grade made the train far less visible. Trolleys and automobiles bringing workers and shoppers through the downtown were the vehicles from which most Atlantans viewed their city. What they saw, and wanted others to see, was a modern city of skyscrapers which stood in testimony to the en­ ergy of its citizens. Yet in 1930 Atlanta was a city of great contrasts. It was a small town in the sense that business building ownership was diverse and yet primarily local. A handful of individuals or groups owned significant chunks of real estate. Buildings were locally owned in 77 percent of the cases in this study; only 14 percent were nationally owned. Although 29 percent of the buildings studied were located on Peachtree or West Peachtree, half of these were not begun until the 1920s. The area bounded by Alabama, Williams, Broad, and Spring streets accounted Journal — Summer/Fall 191

Figure 8. Davison's Department Store, looking north, c. 1943. (AHS)

for 55 percent of the total buildings, creating a concentrated high-rise district. No longer were the rail terminals the focus of the city, yet the rail areas continued to be essential to its transportation and commercial success. The downtown was divided by an extensive network of viaducts which obscured much rail activity. The modern business buildings at sixteen to twenty-one stories peaked high above the rail valley from which the city had grown. Despite the number of skyscrapers that caught the eye, the major­ ity of business buildings were still quite modest. The building height that appeared most frequently was only five stories; 81 percent of the construction was for buildings under ten floors, 59 percent for buildings under seven. Most buildings constructed prior to 1900 did not follow modern architectural trends but instead incorporated older, standard styles such as Renaissance, Romanesque, or Gothic. Although many buildings retained their original function, owners often modernized their original edifices with new first-story facades. Atlanta remained a mid-level regional city, changing with the nation and, as a result, be­ coming more urbanized and service-oriented. Atlanta building patterns remained remarkably consistent over five decades. Over time, the per- 192 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY centage of hotels experienced a significant increase, with more hotels being built in the last two decades (9) than in the previous three (8), indicating that Atlanta was attracting business travelers in increasing numbers. Betwen 1880 and 1931, the majority of business buildings were lo­ cally financed; only in the last decade was there a shift in this pattern when 43 percent of new structures were owned, at least in part, by na­ tional corporations. Ten of the fifteen buildings owned by national or combined interests were constructed in 1921-31; only two were built prior to 1900. This raises some questions about the success of the early New South advocates: northern investment in the South prior to 1900 did not finance the downtown development of rival urban centers. In­ vestment in railroads, textiles, and steel helped to continue northern industrial dominance; industry, not city-building, was the magnet for outside capital.10 When northern capital was invested in southern cities, it influenced the style of architecture selected for a given building. Of the five na­ tionally owned and constructed buildings in Atlanta from 1893 to 1927, four were designed by outside architects (generally from the company's home office). Of the locally-owned buildings in this study, 84 percent were designed by Atlantans. Although there were no Atlanta builders of national stature in this period, local architects were well-known and respected regionally and were responsible for the design of a significant number of buildings throughout the South. Visually, Atlanta had few distinctive buildings. No single building made the kind of impression on the city's image that Peachtree Center did in the 1960s. Each decade of building seems to have favored certain styles: Victorian and Gothic in the 1880s, a transitional style such as Renaissance Revival through the early 1900s, and a modern or eclectic design which dominated the decades from 1911 to 1930. There seemed to be little variance in this trend among national and local owners or national or local architects. As styles changed, Atlanta followed. There was a time lag in the acceptance of architectural changes in Atlanta, possibly because only Burnham and Root (architects of the Equitable Building) among the first rank of national architects built here. It took time for outside influences to filter in: elements of a Sullivanesque in­ fluence in the Southern Bell Building (1893), the Norcross Building (1893), and the Hurt Building (1913) were brought to Atlanta by outside architects—G. L. Norrman from Sweden and New York and J. E. R. Tullant Carpenter of New York. Some attempt at Art Deco and Beaux Arts modernism was made by local architects in the 1920s, the most successful being the Rhodes-Haverty Building (1929), located at Peachtree and James, which was executed by Pringle and Smith. Journal — Summer/Fall 193

Figure 9. Chamber of Commerce postcard depicting Atlanta skyline. (Courtesy Ken­ neth H. Thomas, Jr.)

IV In his guide to understanding the changing landscape of the Ameri­ can city, Grady Clay noted, "Most of us still look outward from rigidly conditioned points of view. Our visual gyroscopes, set spinning centu­ ries ago, cause us to swerve, pause before familiar scenes, and resist the new and unfamiliar."11 (For Atlantans in the nineteenth century, Union Station and the surrounding hotels and retail buldings created a visual metaphor representing a growing city, a perspective that is captured in the popular 1887 view of Atlanta in Figure 10.) Since, as Grady Clay noted, most city dwellers were conditioned to see their town from that vantage point, how did the new and unfamiliar skyline of the twentieth century come to represent Atlanta in the mind's eye of its residents? The new image of Atlanta was created by successive decades of building which, first, raised a skyline of office towers clustered around Five Points and along the Peachtree Street ridge and, second, bridged over the railroad tracks at the center of town, obscuring the original railroad configuration. The new skyscrapers represented for Atlantans the progress being made in leading northern cities. (Figure 11 shows the skyscrapers rising at Five Points in 1930; the perspective empha­ sizes the high-rise character of the heart of the city.) The Chamber of 194 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 10. Harper's illust raton showing the passenger station in center with the tur- reted Kimball House Hotel to the left, 1887. (AHS)

Commerce did not lose an opportunity to promote this new vantage point and the idea of progress that it conveyed. Postcards highlighting the vertical dimension of early twentieth-century Atlanta abounded and carried throughout the United States the city's new look. By 1930 Atlanta's skyline had been raised even higher by the infu­ sion of northern capital in a significant number of new high-rise build­ ings. Atlantans saw their city as a progressive center where office towers symbolized vitality and distinguished their town from other railroad junctions in the South. (Figure 12 presents an air view of the city in 1930 in which the observer's eyes are drawn from the railroad tracks at the bottom center to the large office buidings in the upper portion of the photograph.) The railroad still carried visitors to the city, but when they emerged at street level from the below-grade tracks, their vision was captured by the magnetism of the skyscrapers. Accordingly, the Chamber of Commerce used the skyline in the promotional ads it pub­ lished in the Saturday Evening Post in the mid-1920s.12 The vertical dimension of the downtown represented Atlanta's link to the national economy: the design of the skyscrapers as well as their financing was beginning to come from outside the region. This image of Atlanta's downtown has changed in the past and will evolve in the future. The 1930 skyscraper cluster around Five Points that represented the city through the 1950s has been eclipsed somewhat in the last generation as linear high-rise development has spread up the Journal — Summer/Fall 195

Figure 11. Five Points looking west past the newly constructed William-Oliver Building, 1930. (AHS)

Peachtree Street ridge. The creation of the linear skyline, which now includes buildings as far north as Buckhead and the perimeter high­ way, symbolizes the burgeoning metropolitan region. A quick glance at 196 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Figure 12. Aerial view of downtown Atlanta, c. 1930. Taken from a point over Mitchell Street west of Terminal Station looking northeast. (AHS)

the postcard racks will reveal that this current image is being used to represent Atlanta. Indeed, this skyline, like those that have preceded it, serves anew as "an acceptable metaphor for the metropolis itself."

APPENDIX

Quantitative Methodology The study undertaken was a quantitative analysis of the building patterns in the city's central commercial area (within certain parameters) from 1880 to 1930. Data on a number of factors for over 100 commercial or public buildings were gathered from a number of sources, the most useful being Dr. Elizabeth A. Lyon's "Business Buildings in Atlanta: A Study in Urban Growth and Form." Completed at Emory University in 1971, this dissertation is a remarkable assemblage of information on Atlanta's building history from an architectural standpoint. Also useful were Franklin Garrett's Atlanta Journal — Summer/Fall 197 and Its Environs and contemporary city building records on file at Atlanta City Hall. To be included within the data base, a building had to have been at least two stories in height and traceable through a majority of the following categories: year built, location, architect, owner, height, cost, and use. The program used was SPSS, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. Buildings were categorized into four types: offices, stores, hotels and other. The other category represented a large spectrum of buildings from parking garages and automobile dealerships to theaters and public buildings. Industrial buildings, by themselves, were not included in this sampling. Although there were many variables according to a broad range of cross tabulations, the following statistics are most pertinent for the purposes of this essay:

Decade Built Offices Stores Hotels Other 1880-1890 6 3 15 1891-1900 9 5 4 0 1901-1910 6 4 3 4 1911-1920 9 3 4 3 1921-1930 17 7 5 8

Buildings Known Standing in Buildings Known Demolished 1930 in 1930 Offices 46 5 Stores 22 2 Hotels 15 2 Other 15 1 198 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY NOTES

1. Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Phila­ delphia, 1968), p. 187. 2. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1887-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), p. 133. 3. Dana F. White and Timothy J. Crimmins, "How Atlanta Grew: Cool Heads, Hot Air, and Hard Work," in Andrew M. Hamer, ed., Urban Atlanta: Redefining the Role of the City (Atlanta, 1980), p. 28. 4. John R. Hornaday, Atlanta Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Atlanta, 1922), p. 101. 5. Atlanta City Directories, 1885-1920. Building Permit Volumes on file with the City of Atlanta. 6. Woodward, Origins of the New South, p. 135. 7. Atlanta Constitution, 2 July 1923. 8. Paul W. Miller, ed., Atlanta: Capital of the South (New York, 1949), p. 215. 9. Howard L. Preston, Automobile Age Atlanta: The Making of a Southern Metropolis, 1900-1935 (Athens, Georgia, 1979), p. 26. 10. David R. Goldfield, "The Urban South: A Regional Framework," The American Historical Review 86 (December 1981): 1014-18. 11. Grady Clay, Close-Up: How to Read the American City (Chicago, 1973), p. 23. 12. Saturday Evening Post (June 26, 1926): 186. 199

The Black Sides of Atlanta:

A Geography of Expansion and Containment, 1970-1870

By Dana F. White

WASHINGTON PARK fa

...•••••v

WESTVIEW 5 CEMETERY

Diracial is the qualifier that best describes the history and geogra­ phy of Atlanta. There have always been, and there exist today, two Atlantas—one white, the other black. The multiple relationships be­ tween the two, most often expressed in the antithetical pairing of inte­ gration/segregation, will be analyzed here in terms of a "racial pattern­ ing" that has resulted in an expanding "racial distance" over time. Selected demographic profiles or caricatures of the two Atlantas over the near-century since E.R. Carter first chronicled "the Black Side" in­ dicate patterns of change and continuity and suggest areas for further study, analysis, and consideration.1 Contemporary Atlanta may be viewed from a variety of perspec- 200 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Predominantly Black I Mixed 1 1 Predominantly White I 1 1970 OCSIGN R.cr>«

Figure 1 Journal — Summer/Fall 201

AS\ n

City Limits

Predominantly Black BB Mixed • Predominantly White | | 1970 DESIGN' Richard Rothman A Auoc.atM/ Brian Randall BLACK POPULATION

Figure 2 202 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

City Limits

30% or more Increase WM 30% or more Decrease 1x7:1

DESIGN R.cnaid RoinmanA 'IHXIIH Bum Randall 1960-70 MAJOR POPULATION CHANGE

Figure 3 Journal — Summer/Fall 203 fives. In comparative international terms, then-Ambassador to the United Nations and now-Mayor Andrew Young offered the opinion that "if they had a chance to get what we have in Atlanta, I think all Afri­ cans would buy it"; limiting its comparison to the national scene, the New York Times dubbed the city the "Capital of black-is-bountiful"; and, moving on down to a regional focus, Ebony termed it the "Black Mecca of the South."2 Other views—from parts of rural Georgia, for example, where a sinful, money-grubbing, Yankeefied, race-mixing, god­ less Atlanta has long seemed a sister-city to the capital of Hell—would be far less positive and optimistic; still, all would agree that Atlanta is Black. From one local perspective, that from "outside the perimeter," At­ lanta is Black. When, in fact, census enumerations according to race are mapped out metro-wide, the character of Atlanta's racial composition is immediately apparent (Figure 1). From a different local stand­ point, that from "inside the perimeter," the view is decidedly different. Thus, when the same data are represented citywide, the two Atlantas—one black, the other white: Southside, Northside—stand out clearly (Figure 2).3 These two contrasting perspectives, from within and without the perimeter, reveal a great deal about the racial patterns of Atlanta today: graphically, as has been illustrated in maps 1 and 2, they mirror, each its its own way, an element of reality; statistically, they are supported by the results of the 1980 census which indicated that nearly three-quarters (74.3 percent) of Atlanta suburban­ ites are white, whereas almost two-thirds (66.6 percent) of the city's residents are black;4 culturally, intellectually, and even ideologically, they reflect the latest phase in that historic dichotomy which began with urban versus rural, evolved into city versus suburb, and stands to­ day as urban versus exurban. What these often competing, even con­ flicting viewpoints do not reveal are the what, how, and why of racial change in an historical context. What has been happening within the city itself is suggested by the patterns of population change over time. Thus, two of the fastest grow­ ing sectors in Atlanta between 1960 and 1970, its West and South sides, were predominantly black, while a third booming area, its Northside, was largely white (Figure 3); in sum, blacks were moving west and south, whites north; the result, increasing racial distance. How this pat­ tern took shape may be seen by tracing the changes in black population concentration in Atlanta back through time: from 1950 to 1960 (Figure 4); from 1940 to 1950 (Figure 5); to 1930 (Figure 6). Again, the move­ ments west and south are evident. Why this happened may be an­ swered simply or, better still, simplistically, by ready reference to an undifferentiated process of "ghettoization"; thus, one might point to the expansion of Black Chicago in the half-century after World War I (Fig­ ure 7) and argue that the same processes were at work in Atlanta and 204 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

City Limits

Established Black Areas Growing Black Population Declining Black Population fv?j 1950-60 DESIGN Richard Rothman I Aaaociataa, Brian Randall CHANGE IN BLACK POPULATION

City Limits

Established Black Areas H Growing Black Population [ I Declining Black Population [vjx] 1940-50 DESIGN R>cha'd Rodman! A ttoo at n B'>an Randall CHANGE IN BLACK POPULATION Figures 4 and 5 Journal — Summer/Fall 205

City Limits

Predominantly Black mm Mixed • Predominantly White £

DESIGN Richard Rolrn lies Brian Randall

BLACK POPULATION

Figure 6 produced the same results. There is some truth in such a comparison. There is also much that is misleading. A justifiable standard for comparison with Atlanta's "Black Side" is Chicago's "Black Metropolis" as mapped out in T.J. Woofter's classic 1928 account, Negro Problems in Cities.6 Here (Figure 8), the limits of Chicago's "Bronzeville" or "Black Belt" in 19256—between Halstead Street and the Lake, from 22nd to 63rd streets—are much more sharply demarcated than were those in Black Atlanta during the same approxi­ mate period (Figure 6). Indeed, as Woofter himself demonstrated in his chapter on "Racial Separation," there was no one standard ordering of the races in American cities.7 There were, instead, three readily identifi­ able patterns of separation: a Northern modern-industrial/commercial, as in Chicago; a New South modern-industrial/commercial, as in At­ lanta; and an Old South preindustrial-commercial, as in Charleston.8

"It is well known that tradition has given Negroes a relatively fixed spatial position in the cities of the South. Documents show," wrote the contributor of "Urbanism and Race Relations" to that now standard 206 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

LAKE MICHIGAN

City Li mi ts -

25% or more Black in 1920 mi Added by 1940 Hi Added by 1960 • Added by 1965 fZZl DESIGN Richard Rothman I Aitoculai d^ndinom 1920-65 CHICAGO: GROWTH OF BLACK POPULATION Figure 7 Journal — Summer/Fall 207

EACIAL SEPARATION

MAI' Il-Ii. CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.

Figure 8

1954 treatise, The Urban South, "that the first Negroes to settle in southern cities secured a foothold under very rigid codes of interracial relations."9 Nowhere were such codes more rigidly adhered to than in that premier city of the Lower South, Charleston, South Carolina. Woofter's rendering of Charleston (Figure 9), in which the black popu­ lation is represented as having been scattered widely throughout the 208 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY peninsular city, stands in sharp contrast to the tight pattern that he described for Chicago (Figure 8); indeed, it would be difficult to portray a sharper contrast between the Northern modern-industrial/commercial city and its Old South preindustrial-commercial counterpart.10 Charleston was a Slave City. Its commerce in human chattel made it an early market center for the region's "peculiar institution": it served, in essence, as a cruel parody of Ellis Island for the slave system. Its civic order, often described by visitors as approximating that of an armed camp, seemed more West Indian than North American: its major public works—vide its citadel constructed in reaction to the Denmark Vesey slave uprising of 1822—were "defensive" in character, aimed at the control of a restless enemy within. Its population was, for much of its history, majority black and largely slave; thus, for the census years from 1820 to 1850, blacks—slave and free together—outnumbered whites.11 So numerous were black residents and so vital were they to the functioning of antebellum Charleston, in fact, that they lived every­ where in the city. This "light scattering" of blacks citywide, often termed "marble-caking" or the "back-yard residence pattern," is a dis­ tinctive mark of the Old South preindustrial-commercial city.12 Atlanta, as an urban parvenu, never developed the racial configura­ tion common to established cities in the antebellum South. To begin with, its slave population, although distributed fairly evenly throughout the city, was small in comparison with those of older population cen­ ters; thus, in 1860, of Atlanta's total population of 9,554 only 20.3 per­ cent was black—1,914 slave and a mere twenty-five free.13 What is more, the garrisoning and subsequent siege and destruction of the city during the Civil War so altered Atlanta that a virtual reordering of its residential structure took place during Reconstruction. Instead of the "back-yard residence pattern" of Old South cities, blacks in Atlanta formed what sociologist Charles S. Johnson later described as "urban clusters."14 An innovative historical geographer suggests, the Negro communities that took shape after the war formed at the pe­ riphery of the city, where land was inexpensive and available in large tracts. This contrasts markedly with the situation thirty to forty years later in the North [Chicago, as drawn by Woofter, Figure 8] where a revolution in intracity transportation [cheap public transit] inverted the residential structure so that inexpensive housing could be procured only in the central area.10 Thus the "situation" in Atlanta differed from that in Chicago not only according to region but also, as with Charleston, according to age, stage of development, or urban generation.16 In postwar Atlanta, in which the antebellum population more than doubled (from 9,554 in 1860 to 21,079 in 1880) and in which blacks had more than doubled their prewar proportion of the population (from 20.3 Journal — Summer/Fall 209

RACIAL SEPARATION

MAP VIII-B. CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA. Figure 9

percent of the total in 1860, to 45.6 percent in 1870, to 43.7 percent in 1880), the settling of the eastern, southeastern, southwestern, and west­ ern peripheries of the city (Figure 10) established the outlines for sub­ sequent currents of expansion and consequent forces of containment. In place by 1880 (Figure 11), this configuration would pass through three periods of notable change during the century to follow: first, of expul­ sion and redirection at the turn of the century; second, of breaking the color line during the 1920s; and third, of crashing segregation barriers during the 1960s.

Expulsion and redirection characterized the first stage in Atlanta's 210 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

SUMMER HILL m

DESIGN Richard Rothman A Associates Brian Randall 1870 BLACK SETTLEMENTS Figure 10 Journal — Summer I Fall 211

Black churches •

DESIGN: Richard Rothman j Associates/ Brian Randall 1880 BLACK NEIGHBORHOODS Figure 11 212 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY changing morphology. Between 1880 and 1910, the city's population quadrupled, from 37,400 to 154,800; during the same period, its black population more than tripled, from 16,300 to 51,900.17 A population boom of this magnitude inevitably created pressures that were both centrifugal and centripetal in effect: outwardly, by leading to successive expansions of municipal boundaries through annexation; and inwardly, by engendering competition for the limited space at the city's core. Pressures other than those of land use were also at work in turn-of- the-century Atlanta. During this period, which has been dubbed "The Nadir" for Black Americans by the distinguished historian Rayford W. Logan, the forces of racial hostility grew nationwide, but most espe­ cially in the South.18 "Jim Crow"—the term that summarized the polit­ ical disfranchisement, economic injustices, and interracial violence of the age—reached its logical culmination in the self-proclaimed Gate City of the South with the infamous Atlanta Race Riot of 1906. The instances and analyses of subsequent "civil disorders" in American cit­ ies stand as warnings against any mono-causal explanations of such complex mass actions;19 nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the 1906 riot had obvious historical roots.20 Its effects were even more read­ ily evident (Figure 12). Between 1880 and 1910 blacks, who had been, according to the most thorough quantitative analysis of the period, "just as mobile residentially as most of the whites," "usually moved to the growing black section on the eastern fringe of downtown or to the black area on the west side between downtown and Atlanta Univer­ sity."21 After 1906, according to the findings of two later studies, the movement out accelerated immediately and over time: in the first in­ stance, with the mass exodus of black shops and businesses from the city's center during the next two years;22 and in the second, with the long-term evolution of an EBD or Eastern Business District—bounded on the east by Courtland, on the west by Boulevard, to the south by the railroad, and to the north by Forrest (now Ralph McGill)—which repli­ cated, in miniature, Atlanta's CBD or Central Business District.23 Thus, there developed Jim Crow, Atlanta-style, according the conviction voiced by Constitution editor Henry W. Grady that "the whites and blacks must walk in separate paths .... As near as may be, these paths should be made equal—but separate they must be now and al­ ways."24 Thus, by the opening of the new century, the dynamics of pop­ ulation change between 1930 and 1970 (Figures 6, 5, 4, and 2) had already been set in motion during this initial stage of population reor­ dering according to race. "This segregation is growing," historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote at the close of this first period, "and its growth involves two things true in all evolution processes, namely, greater differentiation and greater integration. Greater differentiation from the white group in, for instance, the schools of the city which it inhabits, the interests Journal — Summer/Fall 213

.•—City Limits

Predominantly Black Hi Mixed • Predominantly White [

DESIGN Richard Rolhman & As:

BLACK POPULATION

Figure 12 which attract it; the ideals which inspire it and the traditions which it inherits. On the other hand greater integration in the sense of stronger self-consciousness, more harmonious working together with a broader field for such cooperation. . . . Now to illustrate just what I mean by the integral life ... let me point to the possibilities of a black man in a city like Atlanta to-day. He may arise in the morning in a house which a. black man built and which he himself owns, it has been painted and papered by black men; the furniture was probably bought at a white store, but not necessarily, and if it was it was brought to the house by a colored drayman; the soap with which he washes might have been bought from a colored drug store; his provisions are bought at a Negro grocery; for the most part his morn­ ing paper is delivered by a colored boy; he starts to work walking to the car with a colored neighbor and sitting in a part of the car surrounded by colored people; in most cases he works for white men but not in all; he may work for a colored man or a colored family; even when he works for a white man his fellow workmen with whom he comes in contact are all colored; with them he eats his dinner and returns home at night; once a week he reads a colored paper; he is insured in a colored insurance com­ pany; he patronizes a colored school with colored teachers, and a colored 214 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

church with a colored preacher; he gets his amusements at places fre­ quented and usually run by colored people; he is buried by a colored un­ dertaker in a colored grave yard. In his section of the city few or no white people live, consequently his children grow up with colored companions; in his home a white person seldom if ever enters; all the family meals, amusements and ceremonies are among his own people. Now such a situa­ tion means more than mere separation from white people; it means, as I have intimated before, not simply separation but organized provision for the service of this colored group. The group must see to it that religion, education, amusements, etc., are furnished its members, and while some of these things are left to chance more and more such groups are consci­ entiously exerting themselves to provide for themselves in these ways and this is what I mean by integration.28 Not then the integration of the races of the city, but intregation within Black Atlanta was Du Bois's theme. It not only described the times, it also presaged the immediate future.

Breaking the color line was the challenge for Black Atlanta during its next stage of development. Between 1910 and 1960, the city's popu­ lation more than tripled, from 154,800 to 487,400; for the same period, its black population grew by better than 3V2 times, from 51,900 to 186,800. Again, as during the preceding stage, the pressures of popula­ tion growth were to prove significant: outwardly, annexation served, in part, as a device for maintaining a white majority; and inwardly, con­ tainment of the traditionally black clusters that had been shaped dur­ ing Reconstruction was increasingly at issue. Atlanta during the 1920s, a Constitution article toward the close of that decade proclaimed, had experienced a major "transformation . . . from the 'main street' classification of minor municipalities into a met­ ropolitan center with a well proportioned business area."*6 Nationally during this same decade, observed Christopher Tunnard and Henry Hope Reed in their classic American Skyline, the turn-of-the-century ideal of the City Beautiful was transformed into that of the City Effi­ cient: planning and zoning boards, bureaus of municipal research and unified budget systems, highway construction and street widenings, parkways and regional parks, public authorities and city commissions/ councils/managers—all were part of the movement; never before had American cities witnessed so many studies, plans, reorganizations, and reshapings.27 Atlanta during the 1920s commissioned George Strayer and Nicholas L. Engelhart, experts on education from the Teachers College of Columbia University, to develop a comprehensive plan for its public school system (1921-22); obtained the services of Robert H. Whitten, a planning consultant from Cleveland, to draw up a municipal Journal — Summer/Fall 215 zoning ordinance (1922); and endorsed the Georgia Railway and Power Company sponsored report of John A. Beeler, a consulting engineer with a national reputation, that systematized the city's traffic networks (1924).28 At the same time, Atlanta also began construction of viaducts over Spring Street (1921) and Pryor Street and Central Avenue (1928), creating, in the process, a "two-level city with its old core area as the first floor and its new automotive 'skyways' the second"; purchased a race track to its south and converted it into an airport—Candler Field (1929), precursor to the present behemoth, Hartsfield International; and cooperated with its Chamber of Commerce in sponsoring Forward Atlanta (1925), a million-dollar advertising campaign aimed at at­ tracting new businesses to the city, promoting the expansion of local commerce, and supporting many extant proposals for civic better­ ment.29 In all of this stew of propaganda and projects, Black Atlanta was a significant factor. "There is little thinking in the South," Charles S. Johnson later observed, "which the Negro does not in some way in­ fluence."30 Concerning the multiple efforts at transforming Atlanta into the City Efficient, this was certainly the case. The progressive mood of this movement toward municipal effi­ ciency was not without regressive influences from the region's past; thus, Jim Crow carried on mightily in a changing Atlanta. Designated the Imperial City of the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been reconstituted in Atlanta during late December 1915 (coinci­ dental with the local premiere of "Birth of a Nation") and chartered by Fulton County in mid-1916, its Nathan Bedford Forrest Klan No. 1 chapter claimed in 1923 a membership of some 15,000 Atlantans, in­ cluding notables from government, business, education, and the churches.31 Jim Crow also carried over into the law, as housing segrega­ tion ordinances were passed in 1913 and 1917; each, in turn, was to be declared unconstitutional.32 Other forces were also at work in intensify­ ing competition between the races for limited living space in the bur­ geoning metropolis; most notably, Atlanta was faced with a housing cri­ sis. Between 1915 and 1920, largely owing to a decline in the regional economy caused by a sharp drop in cotton prices at the outbreak of war in Europe, the city suffered a decrease in housing starts that was so severe that it was "sometimes referred to by the local news media as a 'famine.' "33 In 1917, moreover, a natural disaster compounded the problem when a fire ravaged Atlanta's east side and leveled seventy- three city blocks, most of them residential, many of them black-occu­ pied.34 By the early 1920s, then, it was clear that residential expansion had to be a necessary concomitant in building the City Efficient. For Black Atlanta the question was, in which direction? That Black Atlanta would indeed have a voice in the determination of which direction it would expand was demonstrated forcefully on two occasions in 1919 when black voters effectively defeated, by means of a 216 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

coordinated boycott, two referenda in support of tax increases earmarked primarily for educational expansion. A third referendum in 1921 succeeded, this time with the full support of the black leadership. In return for its cooperation, Black Atlanta was guaranteed that it would receive a proportionate share of the new funds (approximately one-third), that two new grammar schools for blacks (E.A. Ware and Orme Street) would be built, that several previously white elementary schools would be converted to black use, and that the first public high school for blacks in the fifty-year history of the Atlanta school system (Booker T. Washington) would be constructed.35 Most significantly, for present purposes, the containment policies of the majority population, which had held the minority in the clusters established during Recon­ struction, were adjusted significantly: specifically, the "color line" at Ashby Street on the city's West Side (Figure 12) was broken. The rec­ ommendations of the Strayer and Engelhart study on education, the projections of the Beeler plan for transportation, and the very place­ ment of Booker T. Washington High School on the "other" side of the color line were evidence of the new situation. This is in no way to sug­ gest, however, that any true integration of the races was being contem­ plated; indeed, the opposite was the case. Controlled segregation was the accommodation arrived at. Thus, in Whitten's zoning ordinance of 1922 will be found districts—in addition to the standard ones for use, area, and height—defined according to race: "RI or White District," "R2 or Colored District," and "R3 or Undetermined."36 As had been the case with the housing segregation ordinances of 1913 and 1917, this zon­ ing legislation was declared unconstitutional; nevertheless, the "R" dis­ tricts survived in practice, if not in law—de facto, if not de jure. Until the 1960s, Atlanta maintained circumscribed race districts. The color line had been broken, but the segregation barriers remained in place. The Black Sides of the City Efficient, Atlanta-style, were described by Emmet John Hughes for Fortune toward the close of this second stage of racial reordering. "Atlanta is unique in the life of the American Negro," Hughes began. " 'We hope,' observes the head of a Negro insur­ ance company in Atlanta, 'that Atlanta will be the model for all the South.' The reason for such a hope is that Atlanta witnesses the out­ standing Negro economic achievement within the rules and restrictions of a segregated society." Anchoring its East Side was the street known as "Sweet Auburn." Auburn Avenue in Atlanta lays claim to being the richest Negro street in the world. It is not a pretentious sight, most of its low buildings housing the familiar, drab Negro taverns, barbershops, groceries. But scattered among them there stand: the Atlanta Life Insurance Co., whose $40 mil­ lion in assets qualifies it as the largest Negro stock company in the U.S.; the Citizens Trust Co., with assets of $7 million, the Negro bank belong­ ing to the Federal Reserve System; the Atlanta World, the nation's only Journal — Summer/Fall 217

Predominantly Black •• Mixed • Predominantly White | I 1920 DESIGN Richard Rolhrnan & Associates. Brian Randall BLACK POPULATION

Figure 13

Negro daily; the Mutual Federal Savings & Loan Association of Atlanta, with assets of $11 million, the largest such institution south of Washing­ ton. These institutions (their resources matched by Negroes nowhere in the U.S., with the possible exception of Durham, North Carolina) give the key to the relative well-being of Atlanta's 185,000 Negroes. That key is a credit supply. And it is a golden key: across town, on Atlanta's residential west side, Negroes in the postwar years have been able to buy more new homes than the Negroes of any other U.S. city.37

Credit supply, the "golden key," Hughes concluded, suggested that the African-American in the final days of legal segregation was, "in effect, acquiring his freedom in a most ancient way: he is buying it."38

Gathering the momentum for an assault on the segregation barriers that had established race districts, the third and final stage in racial patterning, meant a long-term effort. It began in Atlanta, as elsewhere, with the arrival of "the specialized real estate agent." "The instigating force in real estate development" from the late-nineteenth century on, 218 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY urban geographer John Kellogg has noted recently, "was the indepen­ dent land speculator, who might be a lawyer, merchant, or industrialist. The speculators both purchased and developed and set the prices and restrictions (if any) on its sale. Their restrictions and advertising strat­ egy determined," Kellogg concluded, "whether blacks were to be al­ lowed or encouraged to purchase lots in a development."39 In turn-of- the-century Atlanta, such "specialized real estate agents" as Joel Hurt, Edwin P. Ansley, and the Adairs set their restrictions and advertised for whites only;40 in a Roaring Twenties Atlanta, a black counterpart erupted upon the scene to build for blacks. In 1922, in what geographer Michael J. O'Connor has described as "the most significant event of the decade," Heman E. Perry, through the agency of his Service Realty Company, purchased over 300 acres of land west of Ashby Street.41 Throughout the mid-1920s, his affiliated Service Engineering and Con­ struction Company, operating under the motto, "No House or Building too Large, nor None too Small to Erect," designed and constructed new and substantial homes and neighborhoods for blacks on the city's West Side.42 Although the dynamic Perry's overextended business empire col­ lapsed later in the same decade, his pioneering efforts blazed a trail for the subsequent westward expansion of Black Atlanta (Figures 6, 5, 4, 2, and 1, and Crimmins, "Bungalow Atlanta" elsewhere in this issue.) For the next four decades, the Black West Side developed steadily. Even the twin cataclysms of the Great Depression, which brought building to a near halt nationwide during the early 1930s, and World War II, which absorbed nearly all of the country's economic resources through the mid 1940s, did not altogether halt the drive west. In fact, the West Side came gradually to rival, and then to surpass, Auburn Avenue as the focus for Afro-American life and culture in the city: with the formation of the Atlanta University Center in 1929-30, which drew together all of the city's black colleges into one district to make itself thereby the largest consortium of predominantly black institutions of higher learning in the country; with the opening of University Homes in 1937, the first "Negro" project in both the city and the nation (the ear­ lier Techwood Homes having been designated "White"), which pro­ vided sorely-needed housing for lower- and even middle-income re­ sidents of the AU Center area; and with the development during the 1940s of the Hunter Street corridor (Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive since 1976), along which the completion of twenty new buildings (three- quarters of them commercial) gave Black Atlanta its second major ave­ nue of business.43 With these institutional anchors in place and with a vigorous housing market created by the insured loan system of the Fed­ eral Housing Administration, the drive west meant, as Emmet John Hughes put it, that "on Atlanta's residential west side, Negroes in the postwar years have been able to buy more new homes than the Negroes of any other U.S. city" (Figure 14). Again, in his words, the "credit Journal — Summer/Fall 219

Relative Height Denotes Percentage of [|%k Total Black Population ^i Predominantly Black Hi Mixed • Predominantly White [ 1940 DESIGN Richard Rolhman A Associates/ Brian Randall BLACK POPULATION: SUBURBAN ATLANTA Figure 14 220 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY supply" was crucial; all the same, there still remained locks which this "golden key" could not open.44 The real key to opening these locks, it had become ever more ap­ parent, was a direct assault upon the system of segregation itself (the pervasiveness of which is illustrated in Figure 15). The series of landmark court cases, sit-ins, marches, boycotts, voter registration drives, and mass confrontations organized to destroy the system during the postwar decades manifested itself forcefully in Atlanta with the publication in local newspapers on March 9, 1960, of a full-page decla­ ration sponsored by a committee of Atlanta University Center student representatives proclaiming that this city was joining the Civil Rights movement. "An Appeal to Human Rights," written in the spirit and tone of Jefferson and Tom Paine, Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed itself to both universal and particular abuses of the segrega­ tion system. Its third topic concerning the latter was labeled "Housing":

While Negroes constitute 32% of the population of Atlanta, they are forced to live within 16% of the area of the city. Statistics also show that the bulk of the Negro population is still: a. locked into the more undesirable and overcrowded areas of the city; b. paying a proportionally higher percentage of income for rental and purchase of generally lower quality property; c. blocked by political and direct or indirect racial restrictions in its effort to secure better housing.48

The solution was self-evident: segregation barriers had to fall, the race district abolished. The forces of change in postwar Atlanta had already stretched the boundaries of race districts. Inexorably, in a city with both a growing population and a scarcity of vacant land, competition between the races for living space intensified. In 1952, for example, at the end of a long running dispute over black expansion into Mozley Park/West End, the Empire Real Estate Board (an association of black realtors) agreed to recognize the north side of West View Drive as the upper edge for black development in this sector, explaining that "while this Board is not set­ ting up any property boundary line or zoning area for Negro expansion, in the spirit of good will and public relations, in cooperation with the people of West End, this agreement is being made for the time being."4' In 1962 the time was up. In that year, as blacks moved into the new white-only subdivision of Peyton Forest, the City reacted by erecting barricades at its entrances. The resulting controversy, in which the na­ tional press likened this so-called "Atlanta Wall" to the infamous Cold War monument of the "Berlin Wall," hastened change. "Prior to the Peyton Forest incident," as O'Connor points out in his careful analysis Journal — Summer/Fall 221

THIS PART OF BUS FOR WHITE PEOPLE

Figure 15 (Southern Labor Archives, Georgia State University)

of "racial residential barriers" in Atlanta, "a segregated housing market was accepted without question and overt manipulations to maintain it flourished. After the incident, acceptance of the Negro's right to hous­ ing on an equal opportunity basis was commonplace and attempts to deny blacks that right were performed more discreetly."47 Segregation practices would continue in other forms—blockbusting, solicitation, "gentlemen's agreements," discriminatory loan and mortgage policies; nonetheless, the historic race district was no more.48 Black Atlanta had entered its third and present stage of development. As de jure segregation came under attack, incidences of de facto segregation increased; thus Atlanta's "segregation index"—that is, "a 222 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY number along the scale from 0 to 100 that represents the average degree of territorial separation between white and black residents"—rose in the city from 87 in 1940, to 92 in 1950, on to a high of 94 in I960.49 Between 1960 and 1970, moreover, the city's minority black population (38 percent) became the majority (51 percent). This transformation, the subject of an outpouring of often lugubrious and sometimes panicky ar­ ticles and editorials in the local press throughout the 1960s, was re­ flected clearly in the record of home ownership: in 1970, for example, whites owned 40,098 homes in the city, blacks only 26,583; in 1980, by contrast, blacks owned 35,252 homes, whites just 31.537.80 In the half- century since Heman Perry had broken the color line on the West Side, such solid middle- and upper-middle-class communities as Venetian Hills, Audubon Forest, and Collier Heights had come to embody the American Dream of homeownership and family stability.81

Any macro-spatial analysis of racial patterning in Atlanta, such as the stages of clustering suggested in these pages, is only a first step, one which needs to be followed with both community-level and comparative studies. Micro-spatial analysis of the racial configurations of Black At­ lanta, for example, would help clarify the processes of "marble-caking" described by Charles S. Johnson: "... in many cities of the South Negroes have preceded white populations in sites desired as new devel­ opments and, owning property, have remained as these sites devel­ oped."82 In Atlanta, Bagley Park, Williston, Lynwood Park, Piney Grove, and Johnsontown—all black enclaves adjacent to white dis­ tricts—are examples of this marble-caking process.83 Comparative stud­ ies, especially those aimed at establishing national and regional norms and typologies, have their own special value;84 in particular, Albert Hunter's examination of persistence and change between 1930 and 1960 in Chicago's defined communities suggests applications to Atlanta.88 Micro-spatial analysis, comparative study, or whatever the approach, the study of the city's racial morphology is a challenging task. As W.E.B. Du Bois, at that point a new faculty member at Atlanta Univer­ sity, cautioned toward the close of his monumental Philadelphia Negro: There is always a strong tendency on the part of the community to con­ sider the Negroes as composing one practically homogeneous mass. This view has of course a certain justification: the people of Negro descent in this land have had a common history, suffer to-day common disabilities, and contribute to one general set of social problems. And yet if the fore­ going statistics have emphasized any one fact it is that wide variations in antecedents, wealth, intelligence and general efficiency have already been differentiated within this group; . . . and there is no surer way of misun­ derstanding the Negro or being misunderstood by him than by ignoring Journal — Summer/Fall 223

manifest differences of condition and power in the 40,000 black people of Philadelphia.86 Du Bois's words echo for Black Atlanta today: the "wide variations" in its patterns of growth from nearly 10,000 in 1870 to some 300,000 in 1980; the "manifest differences of condition and power" of its constitu­ ent neighborhoods; its role in the changing dichotomy from urban ver­ sus rural, city versus suburb, and urban versus exurban—all have been vital elements in Atlanta's changing morphology.

NOTES

1. E.R. Carter, The Black Side—A Partial History of the Business, Religious and Educational Side of the Negro in Atlanta, Georgia (Atlanta, 1894). 2. Quoted in Newsweek (Nov. 20, 1978), p. 124; Peter Ross Range, "Making it in Atlanta: Capital of black-is-bountiful," New York Times Magazine (April 7, 1974), pp. 21-29, 68-78; and Phyl Gar­ land, "Atlanta: Black Mecca of the South," Ebony (Aug. 1971), pp. 152-57. 3. The Symap program employed to produce these maps and its utilization city- and metro-wide are explained in Malcolm A. Murray, Atlas of Atlanta: The 1970's and Atlas of Metro-Atlanta: The 1970's (University, Ala., 1974; 1975), pp. v & ix-xii; vi-viii. 4. Tom Walker, "Atlanta census a call to action," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 7 March 1982. 5. T.J. Woofter, Jr., Negro Problems in Cities: A Study Made Under the Direction of T.J. Woof- ter, Jr. (New York, 1928 & 1969). 6. These contemporary designations for the area are taken from St. Clair Drake & Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, with an Introduction by Richard Wright (New York, 1945), pp. 176ff, 383. 7. Woofter, Negro Problems, pp. 37-77. 8. The contrast here between the terms "preindustrial" and "modern" is intended to be neither literal nor absolute; rather, it is meant to convey a marked degree of difference in stage of develop­ ment. The basic work on the contrast between the terms is Gideon Sjoberg's The Preindustrial City: Past and Present (New York, 1960). There has yet to develop any scholarly consensus on a typology for the separation of the races in cities: the terms and types outlined above represent my own attempt at synthesis; further varia­ tions in terminology and typology will be introduced below. 9. Henry Allen Bullock, "Urbanism and Race Relations," in Rupert B. Vance and Nicholas J. Demerath, eds., The Urban South (Chapel Hill, 1954), p. 211. Bullock also suggests a four-part typology on "racial concentration" in the region that includes Atlanta (p. 222). 10. The pattern outlined in Woofter's rendering, which is based on 1910 data, is remarkably simi­ lar to the "slave houses" map for 1860 in John P. Radford's "Race, Residence, and Ideology: Charleston, South Carolina in the mid-Nineteenth Century," Journal of Historical Geography, 2 (1976): 336. Charleston, Radford maintains, was not "a 'typical' Southern city; indeed, the evi­ dence suggests," he claims, "that mid-nineteenth century Charleston epitomized rather than typi­ fied contemporary Southern society" (p. 346). The same might, in truth, be suggested for Chicago as a representation of the industrial city of the North. Thus, in both cases, we are dealing with admittedly—and conveniently—extreme examples. 224 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

11. Of a total population of 24,780 in 1820, 12,652 were slaves and 1,475 were free blacks; of 30,289 in 1830, the same groups numbered 15,354 and 2,107, respectively; of 29,261 in 1840, 14,673 and 1,558; and of 42,985 in 1850, 19,532 and 3,441. Not until 1860, when the total population numbered 40,522, did a white majority emerge; still, 13,909 slaves and 3,237 free blacks were resident in Charleston on the eve of the Civil War. The figures above are from Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 (New York, 1964), p. 326; for an account of earlier and similar patterns, see Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974). 12. Nicholas J. Demerath and Harlan W. Gilmore, "The Ecology of Southern Cities," in Vance and Demerath, The Urban South, p. 157. 13. These data, as well as the basis for much that follows on Reconstruction Atlanta, are from Jerry Thornbery's authoritative dissertation on "The Development of Black Atlanta" (University of Maryland, 1977), p. 3. 14. Charles S. Johnson, "Spatial and Institutional Forms of Racial Segregation," Patterns of Ne­ gro Segregation (New York, 1943), pp. 3-25. Johnson also discusses "four types of segregation ordinances," including Atlanta (pp. 174-75). 15. John Kellogg, "The Formation of Black Residential Areas in Lexington, Kentucky, 1865-1885," Journal of Southern History, 48 (Feb. 1982): 25. 16. See my "Landscaped Atlanta: The Romantic Tradition in Cemetery, Park, and Suburban De­ velopment," Part 2 above, for elaboration on the concept of urban generation. 17. Population figures from the U.S. Census have been rounded off here and hereafter in the interests of clarity and brevity. 18. Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901 (New York, 1954); later updated and expanded to The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York, 1965). 19. Anthony M. Piatt, The Politics of Riot Commissions, 1917-1970: A Collection of Official Re­ ports and Critical Essays (New York, 1971). 20. Dana F. White, "... the old South under new conditions," in White and Victor A. Kramer, eds., Olmsted South: Old South Critic I New South Planner (Westport, Conn., 1979), pp. 155-64. 21. Richard J. Hopkins, "Status, Mobility, and the Dimensions of Change in a Southern City: Atlanta, 1870-1910," in Kenneth T. Jackson and Stanley K. Schultz, eds., Cities in American His­ tory (New York, 1972), p. 227. 22. Dwight Fennel, "A Demographic study of Black business, 1905-1908 with respect to the race riot of 1906" (Master's thesis, Atlanta University, 1977). 23. Michael L. Porter, "Black Atlanta: An Interdisciplinary Study of Blacks on the East Side of Atlanta, 1890-1930" (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1974). 24. White, "... the old South," p. 161 (emphasis added). 25. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Social Evolution of the Black South (Washington, 1911), pp. 6-9, as reprinted in John H. Bracey, Jr., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, eds., The Rise of the Ghetto (Belmont, Calif., 1971), pp. 167-68. 26. "Twin Viaducts," Atlanta Constitution (23 December 1928), pp. 1 & 14, as quoted in Howard L. Preston, Automobile Age Atlanta: The Making of a Southern Metropolis, 1900-1935 (Athens, Ga., 1979), p. 183, n. 41. Preston's excellent study, supplemented by his dissertation, "A New Kind of Horizontal City: Automobility in Atlanta, 1900-1930" (Emory University, 1974), proved to be of special value for the period. 27. Christopher Tunnard and Henry Hope Reed, American Skyline: The Growth and Form of Our Cities and Towns (New York, 1955), pp. 170-73. 28. For the Strayer and Engelhart plan, see E. Bernard West, "Black Atlanta—Struggle for Devel­ opment, 1915-1925" (Master's thesis, Atlanta University, 1976), pp. 25-28; for Whitten, see West, pp. 28-34, and Preston, Automobile Age Atlanta, pp. 96-103; and on Beeler, see Preston, pp. 53-56. 29. Dana F. White and Timothy J. Crimmins, "How Atlanta Grew: Cool Heads, Hot Air, and Hard Work," in Andrew Marshall Hamer, ed., Urban Atlanta: Redefining the Pole of the City (Atlanta, 1980), pp. 32-35. Journal — Summer/Fall 225

30. Johnson, Patterns, p. xx. 31. Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (New York, 1967), pp. 3-44; "The Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta," Living Atlanta: Atlanta Life from World War I through World War II, a 50-part documentary produced'by WRFG (Atlanta, 1979-80). 32. West, "Black Atlanta," pp. 31-32. 33. Preston, Automobile Age Atlanta, p. 90. 34. White and Crimmins, "How Atlanta Grew," p. 32; "The Great Fire of 1917," Liuing Atlanta. 35. For an account of the intricacies of the referenda campaigns, see West, "Black Atlanta," pp. 12-24. 36. Ibid., pp. 28-34 and 41-50, where Whitten's Tentative Zoning Ordinance for Atlanta, Georgia (Revised Praft) is included. 37. Emmet John Hughes, "The Negro's New Economic Life," Fortune, 54 (Sept. 1956), pp. 248, 251. 38. Ibid., p. 260. 39. Kellogg, "Formation of Black Residential Areas," p. 42. 40. White, "Landscaped Atlanta." 41. Michael J. O'Connor, "The Measurement and Significance of Racial Residential Barriers in Atlanta, 1890-1970" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Georgia, 1977), p. 33. 42. Preston, Automobile Age Atlanta, pp. 103-10. 43. Dan Durett and Dana F. White, An-Other Atlanta: The Black Heritage (Atlanta, 1975), pp. 30-42, 36-37, 26. 44. On the impact of FHA loans, see Bullock, "Urbanism and Race Relations," pp. 212-13; Hughes, "Negro's New Economic Life," p. 260. 45. "An Appeal to Human Rights," Atlanta Constitution, 9 March 1960. 46. Margaret Warner, Community Building: The History of Atlanta University Neighborhoods (Atlanta, 1978), p. 10; O'Connor, "Measurement and Significance," pp. 103-5, for such incidents in the area dating back to 1937. 47. Ibid., p. 111. 48. Ibid., pp. 113-17. 49. Karl E. Taeuber, "Residential Segregation in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area," in Hamer, Ur­ ban Atlanta, pp. 156-57. In 1970, according to Taeuber, this figure declined to 92, probably indi­ cating the movement of blacks into previously defined all-white districts: See also Karl E. Taeuber and Alma F. Taeuber, Negroes in Cities: Residential Segregation and Neighborhood Change (New York, 1969), esp. pp. 189-94, on regional differences and typologies. 50. Hank Ezell, "Traditional Family Life Exception in Atlanta, Census Finds," Atlanta Journal- Constitution, 11 April 1982, p. A-l. 51. Ibid., p. A-12, for a comparison which demonstrates that the so-called traditional family style is more likely to be encountered in the Cascade Road area than in Inman Park. See also "Leading Black Neighborhoods," Black Enterprise (Dec, 1974), pp. 25-33, 61. 52. Johnson, Patterns, p. 10. 53. The History Group, Inc., "A Community History of the Johnsontown Neighborhood," pre­ pared for the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (May 1981). 54. Paul A. Groves and Edward K. Muller, "The Evolution of Black Residential Areas in Late Nineteenth-Century Cities," Journal of Historical Geography, 1 (1975): 169-91. 55. Albert Hunter, Symbolic Communities: The Persistence and Change of Chicago's Local Com­ munities (Chicago, 1974), esp. pp. 39-46, for the evolution of Black Chicago neighborhoods. 56. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (New York, 1899 & 1967), pp. 309- 10. 226 ATLANTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY CONTRIBUTORS Timothy J. Crimmins is Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University where he teaches American urban history, Atlanta his­ tory, and historic preservation. A native of Pittsburgh, Crimmins first journeyed south in 1970 to complete a doctoral program in American Studies at Emory University. His articles on southern urbanization have appeared in the Journal of Urban History, Urban Education, The Georgia Historical Quarterly, and South Atlantic Quarterly. He is a member and past chairman of the Atlanta Urban Design Commission. Don L. Klima is Chief, Eastern Division of Project Review, for the President's Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. He completed his B.A. in history at Emory University and his M.A. at Georgia State University. He has served as Historian for Environmental Review for the Historic Preservation Section of the State of Georgia. In addition to writing and editing numerous reports in the field of historic preserva­ tion, Klima has contributed to several published volumes on the subject. Steven W. Grable is Research Associate for Carter and Associates in Atlanta. A candidate for a Ph.D. in American Studies at Emory Univer­ sity, he is completing his dissertation on the work of Atlanta developer and New Deal administrator Charles F. Palmer. Formerly with the His­ tory Group, Grable has conducted numerous studies of urban develop­ ment in Atlanta and throughout the Southeast and has published arti­ cles in the Public Historian and Phylon. Andrew Ambrose is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Em­ ory University and a research historian for the National Park Service in the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site. Ann DeRosa Byrne, a native Atlantan, has an M.S. in architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology. A free-lance consultant, she is studying historical styles in towns and cities around the Southeast. Formerly with the History Group, Byrne has conducted architectural surveys for the City of Gainesville, Florida, and for numerous neighbor­ hoods throughout the Atlanta metropolitan area. Karen A. Luehrs is currently Grants Administrator for the Historic Preservation Section of the State of Georgia where she has worked over the last five years. A native of Minneapolis, Leuhrs came to Atlanta in 1973 to pursue a Ph.D. in American Studies at Emory University. She is currently at work on her dissertation on textile mill planning in the South, a subject which has taken her to towns and cities throughout the state. Rick Beard is Associate Director of the Hudson River Museum in Journal — Summer/Fall 221

Yonkers, New York. He was formerly Coordinator of the Center for American Art and Material Culture at Yale University and a research historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. Beard, who has published articles on urban topics as well as a number of exhibition reviews, completed his doctorate in American Studies at Emory University. Dana F. White is Associate Professor of Urban Studies at Atlanta University and Emory University. He has also taught at George Wash­ ington University and the State University of New York at Buffalo and was a post-doctoral research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. His articles have appeared in American Studies, Museum News, South Atlantic Quarterly, Technology and Culture, Urban Education, Jour­ nal of Urban History, and other scholarly journals. His book, Olmsted South: Old South Critic/New South Planner, ties together topics that he is still pursuing: the South, Olmsted, and Atlanta.

The Atlanta Historical Society

OFFICERS

Stephens Mitchell Tom Watson Brown Chairman Emeritus Secretary Beverly M. DuBose, Jr. Dr. Harvey H. Jackson Chairman Assistant Secretary Dr. John B. Hardman Julian J. Barfield Vice Chairman Treasurer Jack J. Spalding Edward C. Harris President Assistant Treasurer Henry L. Howell First Vice-President

TRUSTEES Cecil A. Alexander William L. Pressly Mrs. Ivan Allen, Jr. H. English Robinson Dr. Crawford F. Barnett, Jr. Mrs. Robert Shaw Thomas Hal Clarke Mrs. Roff Sims George S. Craft Mrs. John E. Smith, II Archie H. Davis Mrs. David Stewart F. Tradewell Davis John A. Wallace Franklin M. Garrett Mrs. Thomas R. Williams Mrs. William W. Griffin Bradley W. Hale Honorary George Missbach The Hon. Anne Cox Chambers Mrs. John Mobley Mrs. Richard W. Courts, Jr. Virlyn B. Moore, Jr. Robert W. Woodruff William A. Parker, Jr. Allen W. Post, Jr.

EDITORIAL REVIEW BOARD Dr. Gary M. Fink Dr. Robert C. McMath, Jr. Georgia State University Georgia Institute of Technology Dr. Jane Herndon Dr. Bradley R. Rice DeKalb Community College Clayton Junior College Dr. Harvey H. Jackson Dr. S. Fred Roach Clayton Junior College Kennesaw College Dr. George R. Lamplugh Dr. Philip Secrist The Westminster Schools Southern Technical Institute Franklin M. Garrett Editor Emeritus 33 ft £2 "a o to 2 ft 5 &-. I w '

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