How Marthasville grew up
Marthasville has changed more than her name over the years. Once a little railroad village, she has become modern Atlanta, a great city with a growing international reputation. She is now a center for transportation, communication and finance. A big city but one with a down-home feel to those who know her best.
But for the moment, let's look back at her past. Like in . . .
1843 - The southern terminus of the Western & Atlantic Railroad was incorporated as the town of Marthasville under a commission form of government.
1845 - The town charter was amended so as to change the name from Marthasville to Atlanta on Dec. 26. The population was 2,000.
1854 - A combination City Hall and Fulton County Courthouse was erected on the resent site of the state Capitol. The first successful daily newspaper, The Intelligencer, was established.
1855 - The Atlanta Gas Light Co. was established and the city was first lighted by gas on Dec. 25.
1864 - The Battle of Atlanta began on July 22. The last of Atlanta's four railroads was cut and the city surrendered on Sept. 2. On Nov. 14, Atlanta was burned as the federal armies departed the city for Savannah on the march to the sea.
1867 - The reconstruction period began. Atlanta University was established, marking the birth of Atlanta's role as a leading center in the country for higher education for blacks.
1868 - The state capital is moved to Atlanta from Milledgeville, and The Atlanta Constitution newspaper is founded.
1872 - Atlanta Public School System opened.
1889 - The present state Capitol building was completed and opened. The first electric street car line was put into operation between downtown and Inman Park.
1904 - Piedmont Park was purchased by the city and the city limits were extended to include the park.
1911 - The air age opened modestly with an air meet at a speedway near Hapeville.
1922 - The radio era opened with the establishment in March of stations WSB and WGST.
1929 - Delta Air Lines was formed and Atlanta's million-dollar City Hall was completed.
1936 - Margaret Mitchell's book, "Gone With The Wind," was published and would later become one of the most acclaimed movies of all time.
1938 - A program for public housing was inaugurated in Atlanta.
1948 - The television age opened in Atlanta with the dedication of WSB-TV Sept.29.
1952 - A plan of improvement added 118 square miles to Atlanta and approximately 100,000 in population, raising the city from 32nd to 23rd in the U.S.
1964 - Atlanta's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize. King, who later was assassinated, was the civil rights movement' s most respected leader.
1964 - Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. broke ground for the Atlanta Stadium.
1966 - The Milwaukee Braves baseball team moved to Atlanta. Later, thanks to Ted Turner and his cable television empire, the team would become one of the most widely-watched in the nation.
1971 - Residents of Fulton and DeKalb counties approved the construction of the rapid transit system and MARTA was later formed.
1972 - The Omni was completed and the Hawks moved there from Georgia Tech's Alexander Memorial Coliseum.
1973 - Maynard Jackson became the first black to be elected mayor of Atlanta.
1976 - The World Congress Center is the scene of a victory party for former Gov. Jimmy Carter, who defeated Gerald Ford and was elected president of the United States.
1979 - MARTA opened the east and west rapid transit rail lines.
1980 - The 1980 census figures showed Atlanta's population to be 455,022. The population of the metropolitan area was 1,508.533.
1982 - Former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young was inaugurated as mayor with a pledge to make Atlanta an "international city."
Atlanta at 150: New voices rise to make Atlanta Sun Belt capital
In 1954, the American South was preparing to break the bonds of its peculiar regionalism and merge into an entity that would be the "Sun Belt."
Not every city in the region would profit equally; or, in scriptural terms, many might be called, but few would be chosen.
Atlanta was prepared to join the elect. Securing Atlanta's place in the Sunbelt was seen as the responsibility of a particular leadership group - a so-called "power structure."
Whether a narrow group exercised control has been questioned. However, many Atlantans believed it existed and in fact found comfort in the thought that benevolent paternalists were really "in charge, " and have longed for a return to these Good Old Days.
The power structure era in Atlanta, from the end of World War II through the late 1960s, survives in the memory of many of its citizens as the city's Golden Day - a kind of cracker Camelot.
The city's postwar commercial-civic elite did, in fact, exert considerable power in their effort to promote change and development. The beginning point was a "Plan of Improvement," which went into effect on January 1, 1952, that annexed large tracts of land and numbers of people to the city proper.
The city's physical area tripled from 37 to 118 square miles; and its population swelled with an additional 100,000 suburbanites baptized overnight as "Atlantans."
The next step was transportation. From the early 1950s, plans were formulated and expanded upon to create the complex rim-and-spoke freeway system that connected major national highways running north and south (I- 75 and I-85), as well as east and west (I-20), with metropolitan street patterns by means of a circumferential roadway or "perimeter" (I-285).
As early as 1929, what is more, with the purchase of Candler Field to serve as the city's airport, Atlanta promoters had recognized the potential of air traffic for future economic development.
Expanded and renamed Atlanta Municipal Airport, the facility eventually mushroomed into Hartsfield International Airport, one of the busiest transportation nodes in the world.
Thus did the highway and airway networks build upon the city's well- established role as transportation hub; in the process, it extended Atlanta's reach beyond the region to include the nation and the world.
As always, the Atlanta Spirit manifested itself with its customary verve and vigor. During 1960-61, a second Forward Atlanta campaign was launched, with a kitty of some $1.6 million to advertise to national corporations the standard regional advantages that included a salubrious climate, a hard-working labor force, and a business-oriented government. This time, however, a new claim was made for Atlanta: it was now " A City Too Busy to Hate."
The landmark Supreme Court decision of 1954 that had outlawed segregation in the public schools provided the legal impetus for the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. In Atlanta, token progress had already been made during the immediate postwar years: directly, through the appointment in 1948 of eight blacks to the previously lily-white police force; indirectly, through the overturning during the same year of the statewide Democratic White Primary, which had effectively disenfranchised blacks in one-party Georgia.
In 1947, with the formation of the Atlanta Negro Voters League, a power base began to take shape as the numbers and proportions of black registered voters rose from 3,000 (4 percent of the total registration citywide) in 1946, to 41,000 (28.6 percent) in 1961, to 93,000 (44.8 percent) in 1969.
As cities throughout the South - Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, Oxford, New Orleans, and others - disgraced themselves with their violent, sometimes murderous reactions to the extension of civil rights to blacks, Atlanta seemed a model of racial harmony.
On Aug. 31, 1961, President John F. Kennedy opened his news conference by noting "the responsible law-abiding manner" in which the city had integrated its schools and counseled "all communities which face this difficult transition . . . to look closely at what Atlanta has done."
In 1963, Ivan Allen was the only mayor from the region to testify before Congress in behalf of the pending Civil Rights Bill and in 1968, Herbert Jenkins became the only police chief to serve on the so-called Kerner Commission, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.
This "city too busy to hate," Atlanta Magazine declared in 1967, stood as "sort of the national hero of the '60s."
Posturing or progress? The city's heroic posturing drew steady, if muted criticism. In 1948, the Negro Digest placed Atlanta among "America's 10 Worst Cities for Negroes."
In 1966, a black contributor to Atlanta Magazine argued that "Atlanta's image only looks good when compared to Mississippi."
And in 1968, the black-owned Atlanta Inquirer, while confirming its pride in the city, cautioned: "Blacks enjoy Atlanta, but they don't like it as it is."
One of the things that some black Atlantans didn't like about the city was the paternalism of its white leadership, which took the major share of the credit for the relatively smooth transition out of legal segregation while largely overlooking the day-to-day efforts of their black counterparts in maintaining civic order. The honors and kudos, it seemed, were reserved for white moderates; significantly, the most honored Atlantan, Martin Luther King Jr., received his award neither from his nation nor his city, but from an international committee conferring the Nobel Peace Prize, and even then, Atlanta's power elite debated whether or not to recognize King's achievement publicly.
The meaning of their moderation has, subsequently, been called into question recently by historian James C. Cobb in "The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936- 1980." Cobb charges that the moderates' motivation was based on gain, not justice; at the same time, he acknowledged that their stance was "preferable to the tragic silence of the economic elite in Birmingham or New Orleans."
Essentially, for all their self-interested good will, Atlanta' s great white fathers anticipated remaining in control of a white- majority city. Their Atlanta was white Atlanta, and black Atlanta was destined to remain a subcommunity. By the early 1970s, a new black leadership, with some support from the old, would reject this vision, and the power structure era of the postwar decades would come to an end.
Before the Cracker Camelot crumbled, however, it witnessed a wondrous apotheosis of its physical container. For as the office building and landscape suburb had shaped the modern city, the city-within-a- city commercial center would reshape the entire metropolis. Its most dramatic and influential manifestation was in the work of architect- developer John Portman.
Peachtree Center, Portman's downtown development, has demonstrated its energizing powers for a quarter-century. With the first two structures - the Merchandise Mart and the Georgia Power Building - notice was served not only that the inner city was undergoing revitalization, but also that downtown was gravitating uptown.
Other centers and megastructures, most notably Colony Square and The Omni complex, were constructed along the periphery of the Central Business District. Farther out, and even more dramatic in their impact upon future development, shopping malls, as well as office and industrial parks, proliferated. Atlanta had joined what the magazine New Times would describe as "The Malling of America."
As the automobile had influenced the way the city worked from the 1920s to the Great Depression and its aftermath, it also would determine how the metropolis conducted its business during the postwar years.
As early as 1939, in fact, a harbinger of the automotive future had been built at the eastern approach to Druid Hills with Briarcliff Plaza, the first local shopping center to provide off-street parking.
Twenty years later and almost eight miles due north of downtown, the region's bellwether mall, Lenox Square, opened. Within a decade Lenox and Phipps Plaza would promote themselves as the "New Downtown."
Lenox was the first of countless shopping malls, office parks, industrial parks and surburban developments that were stretching out along the rim and spokes of the freeway system to expand the metropolitan limits ever outward. Along the way, the city adopted still another new slogan: "Atlanta, A City Without Limits."
Inside or outside I-285; In the process, it also devised a new nomenclature: "Inside" or "Outside" the Perimeter. This convenient classification provided a ready measure for physical distance, accessibility, style of life, class, and race. It defined the boundaries and challenges of today' s and tomorrow's Atlanta.
Outside the Perimeter, specifically beyond its northern borders, there has developed a new community form and lifestyle - the exurban. In contrast with older, closer in, more traditional suburbs that were extensions of the city proper, these new exurbs exist within themselves alone.
Inside the Perimeter seems almost the mirror-image opposite of Outside. Outside is the area of most dramatic growth where some of the nation's fastest growing counties, Gwinnett and Cobb among them, are situated.
Inside are large pockets of stagnation and decay. Outside, according to the 1980 Census, the population is three-quarters white. Inside, it is two-thirds black. Outside is a new Atlanta. Inside, the old - but not the same.
Much has changed in the historic center since the early 1970s. Much has been gained: A building boom, interrupted only spasmodically, transformed the old downtown and totally reshaped Midtown; a comprehensive rapid rail system, with connecting bus lines, was constructed; and an effort to complete the major metro highway system, "freeing the freeways," was initiated.
Much has been lost: Several historic structures were demolished; homes were destroyed in the name of progress.
The power structure era came to a visible end in 1974 when Maynard Jackson was inaugurated mayor.
Not only was he the first black Atlantan to gain the city's highest office, but his administration was also the first to operate under a new City Charter that aimed at decentralizing power by lessening at-large and increasing neighborhood representation.
A new power configuration was taking shape. To the established power elite, its character seemed sometimes threatening. The city had a black majority population, and they feared the city might become "another Newark."
The pro-business sympathies of the new administration frequently were questioned. The established cliques - or "crowds" as their members had described themselves - of like-minded and self-proclaimed "leaders" were confronted by new faces in the political arena -white as well as black, female as well as male.
What is more, some of these newcomers voiced opposition to the progress-at-any-price credo that infused the Atlanta Spirit. Not only did these vocal critics band together to oppose the demolition of buildings, the violation of neighborhoods, and the incursions of freeways but, significantly, they sometimes won.
In a city that had appeared to speak with one voice, new, insistent - sometimes shrill - voices were raised. Articulating a new consensus and achieving a new balance of power became the challenge of the 1980s and will likely remain at the top of Atlanta's agenda during the forseeable future.
Whether Atlanta can continue to hold its own against potential urban rivals in the region; how the city can reassert its centrality to its suburban and exurban rings, and not degenerate into the black hole in the white doughnut; whether downtown can be revitalized, so that it lives at night, as well as by day; how the disadvantaged can be integrated humanely into a prosperous metropolitan civilization; whether it can become a livable city for all its citizens: These are the challenges that face tomorrow's Atlanta.
Hartsfield `father of Atlanta Airport': Leader wanted city to be aviation center of South
By Julie K. Miller
When William Berry Hartsfield died Feb. 22, 1971, one week before his 81st birthday, a new identity for the Atlanta Airport was born.
The minute Atlanta Mayor Sam Massell heard Hartsfield had died, he wanted to honor "the father of the Atlanta Airport" by renaming the complex.
"There probably isn't a more correctly named facility anywhere, " said the commissioner of the Department of Industry and Trade, George Berry, who was Massell's assistant at the time. "For 35 years that airport was his pride and joy - his baby."
From the time Hartsfield took office as an alderman in 1923 at the age of 33 to the moment he stepped down as Atlanta's mayor in 1961, Hartsfield pushed for the city to become the commercial aviation center of the Southeast.
In an era when aviation was an upstart in the transportation business, Hartsfield alone seemed to have a vision of the future.
He was the one who picked Candler Racetrack as the perfect spot for an airport and offered the resolution authorizing the purchase of the land to the City Council.
With his overpowering personality and political astuteness, Hartsfield influenced federal officials to make Atlanta the center of airline routes in the South before any of the other major cities caught on.
Described in newspapers as irascible, arrogant and irrepressible, Hartsfield was all those things and much more, according to Berry, who served as Commissioner of Aviation from 1978 to 1983 and frequently lunched with the former mayor.
"He was a man of great presence," Berry said. "And he was known for his wit."
For a promotional gimmick, some movie people brought a horse to City Hall and into Mayor Hartsfield's office. "It was the first time I ever had a whole horse in my office, " he quipped. Hartsfield was mayor when the premiere of "Gone With the Wind" was held in 1939. He was Atlanta's chief executive officer when public schools were integrated about 20 years later. And he was still leading the city when John F. Kennedy took office as president. An outspoken Southern politician who coined the phrase "a city too busy to hate," Hartsfield turned away from traditional politics and faced up to the school desegregation process when others wouldn't. According to an Atlanta Constitution editorial, stories about Hartsfield's love-hate relationship with the media were legion. An avid reader of newspapers, Hartsfield would storm into the editorial offices and launch into a tirade if he read something he didn't like. But the colorful curmudgeon also loved the limelight and liked being photographed with famous people. He was once quoted as saying, "I can hear a camera shutter click a mile away."
Full of strength and vitality, Hartsfield promoted the city during his 23 years as mayor with a style that attracted growth and development like a magnet. And after he officially retired from politics, Hartsfield continued to promote the area as head of the Southeastern Fair Association. But if Hartsfield couldn't woo someone with charm, the two-time Georgia congressman could intimidate and overwhelm. "He would win his fights, not by force of logic but by sheer force. He would move up on his opponent, leaning over him if the opponent was shorter," Atlanta Journal editorialist Jack Spalding once wrote. "The big blue eyes would bulge and shine. The index finger would admonish. The words were torrential." Hartsfield fought to reorganize city government in the 1930s and to put Atlanta on sound financial footing. He also implemented the "plan of improvement" in the early 1950s, nearly tripling the size of Atlanta. He led the city to build Hurt Park, the first downtown park, and he lobbied for the construction of Buford Dam to assure Atlanta's water supply. When asked by a newspaper reporter to write his own obituary, Hartsfield said, "You can start by saying, `He pulled Atlanta kicking and screaming into the mid-20th Century.' " Hartsfield successfully thwarted most efforts to name public facilities in his honor. A baby gorilla was named Willie B., and an incinerator also bears Hartsfield's name. He was adamant about the Atlanta Airport keeping its name.