Atlanta at 150: As the suburbs spread, the downtown grew higher
By Dana F. White and Timothy Crimmins
In 1895, the eyes of America afforded Atlanta scarcely a glance. Its Cotton States and International Exposition seemed little more than a financial failure. Still, the building of modern Atlanta did start here.
It began with ambition, the self-confident assertiveness that would come to be celebrated locally as the "Atlanta Spirit." That this attitude antedated the Cotton States Exposition is evident, for example, in a popular 1879 guide to the city.
In his "Illustrated History of Atlanta," E.Y. Clarke makes repeated comparisons between the Gate City to the South and the Empire City of the Western Hemisphere.
"As New York is famous for the splendor and magnificence of its retail stores," Clarke claims, "so is Atlanta," comparing a local two- story shop with A.T. Stewart's multistory, block-filling behemoth in Manhattan. "Indeed no city, not excepting New York itself," Clark enthuses, "offers a more inviting retail market the the purchasers of family or individual supplies," a situation, he instructs, that "is the outcome of the growing metropolitan proportions of the city."
That the population of Atlanta and its "immediate suburbs" was approaching 40,000 in 1879, Clarke notes accurately enough. That the population of metropolitan New York was close to 1,750,000, he neglects to mention.
Such effusive exaggerations account for the jibe directed from settled Savannah to upstart Atlanta: "If it could suck as hard as it can blow, it could bring the ocean to it and become a seaport."
Its comic excesses notwithstanding, the "Atlanta Spirit" opened the city to outside ideas, movements, and forces for change. From Chicago, there came, two "building blocks" that would guide urban development in Atlanta for the next half-century: one vertical, the modern office building; and the other horizontal, the picturesque or landscape suburb. Both, significantly, were promoted initially by a single Atlantan.
While office buildings and suburbs both had been introduced locally before developer Joel Hurt's efforts here, his projects possessed a special character.
They represented not only the state of the art in urban America, but each also boasted a distinctive cachet - the signature of the leading design firm in its field. Hurt's eight-story Equitable Building, which opened in 1892, was not only the city's first skyscraper, it was also the work of Burnham and Root, Chicago's - and soon the nation' s - premier architectural firm.
Hurt's 1,400-acre tract that soon would become Druid Hills, designed during the early 1890s, was not only the area's most ambitious suburban development, but it also bore the signature of Frederick Law Olmsted, founder and theoretician of landscape architecture in America. From development models, then, the city drew upon the best. That Atlanta Spirit demanded nothing less.
The skyscraper represented a new vision of the city, a structure constructed on a smallish lot appealing to to specialized renters. With the advent of this modern building type, a new commercial configuration came onto being: the "downtown." Not only would the city's skyline change dramatically, tripling and even quadrupling its reach into the sky, but so also would its style of living. Increasingly, inexorably, "downtown" meant the business district - for business, only.
The planned suburban development, the second building block of the modern city, represented a model for urban growth outward into what had been previously an undifferentiated hinterland. As the downtown would contain businesses, the suburb would house families. Nationally, suburbanization got under way as early as the 1850s; locally, suburbs dated from the 1870s and boomed over the next two decades. The transformation of suburban Atlanta took place as Joel Hurt guided the development of his Kirkwood Land Company into the suburban community of Druid Hills.
A new generation suburb
In 1890, Hurt invited Olmsted to Atlanta, upon the advice of Burnham and Root, and thereby began the reshaping of its cityscape. Olmsted, already approaching the end of his professional career, had been building suburbs nationally since the late 1860s. Early on, the Olmstedian surburb was a relatively self-contained village along a rail line that stretched out from a city center. For Atlanta, he designed a new generation suburb: one both astride and nestled along a major transportation artery, a "park- way," as he dubbed the form that he first created for Brooklyn during the late 1860s - his picturesque boulevard, Ponce de Leon Avenue.
Whereas earlier suburbs, nationally and locally, tended to be dominated by architecture - the home situated therein - Olmsted's Druid Hills subsumed individual buildings into the totality of a landscape experience - that of the richly forested Georgia Piedmont.
The plan, contours, and ambiance of Druid Hills projected a " City in a Forest," and the Olmstedian style would become the exemplar for Atlanta, but not during the 1890s. Atlanta simply could not afford an Olmsted, not quite yet.
The first demonstration of that came in 1894 when the Exposition Company, which managed the 1895 fair, failed to live up to its preliminary agreement to engage Olmsted to provide a master plan for the project, thus forcing him to withdraw in favor of a local (and far less skilled) engineer-builder.
Trapped in the aftermath of the Panic of 1893, the most devastating in a series of late-century financial reversals, the Cotton States Exposition barely managed to survive its allotted 100 days. Not only was the financial climate nationally a factor mitigating against grandiose schemes, but the economic situation locally was self-limiting.
Essentially, Atlanta's boosters and promoters were overextending themselves and their city. The municipality had neither the financial base nor the requisite population balance to build in the grand manner envisaged by the Atlanta Spirit.
Thus Joel Hurt, who started developing his first suburb of Inman Park during the late 1880s, began subdividing and selling off acreage initially designed for interior parks by the late 1890s, in his effort to keep his various business ventures afloat.
His financial manipulations notwithstanding, Hurt was forced to put off the development of Druid Hills until early in the next century and, even at that late date, had to relinquish the project to others.
Not for another decade would Atlanta accomplish its takeoff into economic maturity. When that time came, the overgrown town at the foot of the Georgia Piedmont had both the will and the way to face the developmental challenges and grasp the economic opportunities of a new century.
Old South, new conditions
The challenge of racial harmony was addressed less vigorously. Although he would claim in 1885 that "nowhere on earth is there kindlier feeling, closer sympathy, or less friction between two classes of society than between the whites and the blacks of the south today, " New South spokesman Henry W. Grady was quick to explain that his vision of the region was one of an "old South under new conditions."
To the delight of the press, regional and national alike, these sentiments seemed to be reaffirmed a decade later at the Cotton States Exposition by another New South spokesman purporting to represent the Black South.
"In all things purely social," Booker T. Washington advised, "we can be as separate as the fingers, yet as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."
That "the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly" and "that the Negro . . . begiven a man's chance in the commercial world" were the bases of what became known as the Sage of Tuskegee's "Atlanta Compromise."
Essentially, it reaffirmed the New South's "separate, but equal" rationale for racial harmony.
Understandably, not all agreed that Washington's approach constituted, in fact, a compromise; to some, it bordered on a surrender of the ideals of Reconstruction.
From Atlanta University came the call for less talk and more study of the race issue. In 1895, President Horace Bunstead proposed a "systematic and thorough investigation of the conditions of living among the Negro population of cities" through the agency of a series of annual conferences.
The first two, 1896 and 1897, were limited successes; however, with the arrival of W.E.B. Du Bois at the university in 1897, the conferences took on a new direction.
Over the next 1 1/2 decades, the brilliant young social scientist directed the annual meetings, expanded their scope, and oversaw the production of 16 of the 20 volumes published as the "Atlanta University Publications."
In the process, Du Bois accomplished two things for the city: he made Atlanta the center for the study of race in the United States; and, with his rejection of the excesses of New South materialism - "Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the touchstone of all success," he warned - W.E.B. Du Bois offered a new vision of racial harmony, one inspired by justice. "South of the North, yet north of the South," he wrote, "lies the City of a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future." The study of race at Atlanta University could, he believed, help shape that promise.
During the first quarter of the new century, success seemed synonymous with Atlanta. As its population exploded from some 75,000 in 1895 to about a quarter-million by 1925, Atlanta grew ever upward and outward.
North of the confluence of railroad tracks that defined the town once called Terminus, a new downtown developed at the street intersection called Five Points. By 1915, the low-lying, two-to three-story skyline of turn-of-the-century Atlanta, punctuated as it was by the occasional church steeple or office tower, mushroomed to a level approaching 20 stories.
Clustered about such skyscrapers as the 16-story Healey and the 18- story Candler and Hurt buildings, moreover were increasingly numerous multistory hotels, office buildings, and other commercial structures. Not only, then, had the city's center achieved a dramatically new verticality, but it had also developed an impressive horizontal thickness. Downtown Atlanta, all at once, seemed to surge up and spread out.
Commerce energized the new downtown. Banks, sales offices, insurance companies, retail establishments and, most important for the city' s economic future, branch offices of national and regional firms crowded Five Points and environs.
The comings and goings of downtown employees and their customers quickly clogged an overburdened street system. With the expansion of trolley lines and the introduction of automotive transportation early in the century, it became obvious that the railroad-dominated street pattern could no longer support the increasing levels of traffic.
Starting in the 1920s, therefore, Atlanta began its transformation into a multilayered city. With elevated roadways - or viaducts, as they were known locally - rising several stories above ground level, leading to the abandonment, in the process of entire sections of old Terminus/Marthasville to neglect, decay, and the potential for redevelopment.
The drive to modernize
Modernization became an Atlanta mindset, as the commercial-civic elite sought to emulate the national ideal of the City Efficient. After several abortive efforts, a City Planning Commission was established in 1920 by the state Legislature. During the next few years, contracts were let by the City of Atlanta to the Olmsted Brothers of Boston for a city plan (1921); to George Strayer and Nicholas L. Engelhard from Columbia University's Teachers College for a reorganization of the public school system (1921-22); to Robert H. Hitten of Cleveland for a municipal zoning ordinance (1922); and to John A. Beeler, under the auspices of the Georgia Railway and Power Company, for a comprehensive traffic plan (1924). The city had to be reorganized efficiently, it must have seemed, since so many forces were pulling it apart.
Automobility represented one of the most divisive forces operative in modern America. In Atlanta, "Automobile Week" was celebrated Nov. 6- 13, 1909, with the first national auto show to be held outside New York or Chicago.
By 1916, there were more than 6,000 motor vehicles registered in Fulton County and, 15 years later, better than ten times that number.
The magnitude of change wrought by automobility was of similar proportions: the technological revolution that it represented both accelerated existing patterns of development and introduced others as yet unanticipated.
The building blocks that had provided for an urban specialization of function, with work downtown and home in the suburbs, were immediately reinforced by automobility. Downtown real estate became both scarcer and more valuable, as transportation preference and availability shifted from the public to the private.
Automobility hastened the process of suburbanization. During the early 1900s, the prototypical Olmstedian suburbs of Druid Hills and Ansley Park opened. By 1930, some three dozen planned suburbs, all but a handful north of downtown, were in place - bearing such gardenesque monickers as Shadow Lawn, Peachtree Hills, Garden Hills, and Spring Lake.
Specialization of function, with work downtown and home in the suburbs, applied in a special manner, as did almost everything else in the New South, to the separation of the races. Neither Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta Compromise" nor W.E.B. Du Bois' "City of a Hundred Hills" - "south of the North, yet North of the South" - anticipated the racial violence of the early 20th century.
However, when white mobs attacked black homes and shops in Atlanta during September 1906, Henry Grady's reminder that his ideal South was the "old South under new conditions" took on renewed significance.
The Race Riot of 1906, as it came to be called, was one of the first and among the bloodiest of the racist rampages in American cities, North and South alike, that marred the progress of urbanization during the early decades of the new century.
Its motivating force was expulsion, the driving out of black people from areas to be designated "white only" and their subsequent containment elsewhere. Two such proscribed places for black Atlantans were the developing downtown and the expanding suburbs.
Black offices and businesses, which had dotted the city's commercial core during the late 19th century, moved east along Auburn Avenue, which rapidly developed into the separate, but never equal, downtown for Black Atlanta. Although Fortune Magazine would describe "Sweet Auburn" by mid- century as "the richest Negro street in the world, " it had sharply circumscribed limits imposed on it.
Power still in white hands
For power in Atlanta remained a perogative for whites only: officially, the city's commercial-civil elite controlled government and business; extralegally, forces such as the resurrected Ku Klux Klan, which was chartered in Fulton County in 1916 and then proclaimed Atlanta the Imperial City of the Invisible Empire, vigilantly guarded the color line.
"The problem of the twentieth century," wrote Du Bois at its opening, "is the problem of the color line." Throughout the New South, the color line meant a complex, variable, and often unwritten set of regulations - an "etiquette of race relations," as it has been called - governing the interactions of the races in almost every conceivable situation. In Atlanta, the color line was also a physical and legal entity: for the 1922 zoning ordinance defined it precisely by including, in addition to the standard use and height districts, "Race Districts, " a limited number of which were classified as "Colored" or "R2" districts.
The customary expectation of the city's commercial-civic elite, as was the case throughout the region, was that African-Americans, whom the white leadership regarded as the service sector of the population, would be contained within the traditional areas of black concentration - the Summerhill, Auburn Avenue, and Atlanta University districts - and that the surrounding suburbs would be reserved for white only.
Atlanta's black leadership, however, recognized the need to break out of these close-in neighborhoods and open up a portion of the suburbs to the expanding black population. Through hard bargaining and organized voting efforts during the early 1920s, the color line was finally broken at Ashby Street on the city's west side, allowing a modicum of suburbanization for Black Atlanta.
A quiet revolution was under way. This organized venture into suburbanization marked the real beginning for what would become recognized a half-century later as the black Atlanta lifestyle. Breaking the color line meant change: the familial, social and financial advantages of home ownership in new and decent neighborhoods; community facilities, such as a public high school and a park, hitherto provided only for whites; and a demonstration that concerted group effort could effect change.
On all sides of town, the 1920s marked a high point for Atlanta, but the two decades following crushed even the soaring Atlanta Spirit. Throughout the 1930s, the Great Depression questioned the viability of the economy. During the 1940s, the Second World War and its aftermath threatened the very survival of an urban civilization.
The quiet after the crash
With the stock market crash of October 1929, the building of urban America ceased. For the next two decades, cities were uncertain places. In downtown Atlanta, no major office buildings would be constructed until the mid-1950s, and a new building boom would await the early 1960s.
The Great Depression was experienced worldwide, but among industrialized nations, its impact was strongest and longest-lasting in the United States, and the region that suffered the most was the American South. Atlanta Boosters, predictably, would later boast about how well the city had weathered the storm: that there were no bank closings nor any major business failures in Atlanta. There were also no public programs nor a trained bureaucracy to meet the needs of the impoverished. Businesses may have weathered the Crash, but ordinary Atlantans were lucky to survive the Depression.
Housing was crucial to survival, and the Atlanta record here had been an abysmal one. The areas between its glittering downtown and verdant suburbs were filled with wooden shacks, close-built along crowded streets, with a minimum of public services and sanitation.
Local realtor Charles F. Palmer tapped new federal monies to ensure the demolition of some of the worst of these slums and the erection in their place of tw o of the earliest public housing projects in the nation - Techwood Homes, for whites, in 1935 and University Hones, for blacks, in 1937.
Under Palmer's direction, the city's first and longest-surviving major public service agency, the Atlanta Housing Authority, was organized to direct a comprehensive program for public housing citywide.
Tapping into federal funding during the New Deal era, it became increasingly apparent, was vital to a municipality's survival.
The Washington bureaucracy of the New Deal days, in effect, rebuilt urban America.
The outbreak of war in 1939 brought the promise of economic recovery. First, as the self-proclaimed Arsenal of Democracy and later, after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, as the acknowledged military leader of the Allied Powers, the United States spent and built its way out of the Depression.
As money was invested and workers employed in the all-out war effort, the nation's economy boomed once again.
Many anticipated that peace would throw the nation's economy back into a depressed condition. Others, especially blacks, worried that an end to the war would bring a repeat of the urban racial violence that followed World War I.
EXTRA: DECISION '88: FROM TARA TO TOMORROW: A VISITOR'S GUIDE TO THE PREMIER CITY OF THE SOUTH: FAMOUS DATES IN ATLANTA HISTORY
1821 - Treaty with Creek Indians transfers ownership of site of present-day Atlanta to white settlers.
1837 - Town of Terminus is founded at southern end of Western & Atlantic Railroad.
1843 - Terminus is renamed Marthasville, after Gov. Wilson Lumpkin' s daughter, Martha.
1845 - Marthasville is renamed Atlanta; railroad people had complained the name Marthasville was too long.
1864 - The city falls to Union troops after the Battle of Atlanta.
1868 - Atlanta becomes state capital; it had been Milledgeville.
1886 - Coca-Cola is born. Legend has it that John S. Pemberton made the first batch in his backyard.
1906 - One of the first and bloodiest of America's race riots occurs. White mobs attacked black homes and shops in Atlanta to drive blacks out of areas to be designated "white only."
1915 - Leo Frank is lynched. Frank, a Jewish supervisor at an Atlanta pencil factory, was tried and convicted of the murder of 13- year- old Mary Phagan, an employee at the factory. Gov. John Slaton commuted Frank's sentence to life, but a mob abducted Frank from prison and hanged him.
1917 - Fire destroys 2,000 buildings in Atlanta; 73 city blocks were scorched.
1939 - The film premiere of "Gone With the Wind" is held at Loew' s Grand theater, where the Georgia-Pacific building now stands.
1962 - A plane chartered by Atlantans as part of an art tour crashes at Orly Airport outside Paris, killing 122 art patrons.
1963 - The county unit system falls before the U.S. Supreme Court' s "one-man, one-vote" doctrine. In the case, Gray v. Sanders, the court declared the Georgia county unit system unconstitutional because of the disparity in legislative representation between the urban and rural areas.
1964 - Three blacks attempt to enter the Pickrick restaurant but are blocked by the armed owner, Lester Maddox. Incident helped vault him to the governor's office.
1973 - Atlanta's first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, is elected, defeating the white incumbent by more than 20,000 votes.
1979-1981 - At least 28 young blacks, most of them children, are slain in a serial murder case that captured the attention of the world. Wayne B. Williams, an aspiring promoter of young singers, was convicted of two murders and blamed for most of the rest.
1981 - Blacks gain a majority on the City Council.