An Abridged History of An Avenue in Atlanta
When I was first moving to Atlanta, people warned me not to go down a certain way on a street near where I would be interning for the summer.
Of course that immediately made it even more interesting to me.
The road is Boulevard. It stretches from two blocks away from Ponce City Market on Ponce De Leon Ave in the north to MacDonough Blvd at the Federal penitentiary at the south. Beyond one small meander around the Oakland Cemetery, Boulevard runs directly North-South through the city.
It wasn’t just the people I talked to as I was moving to Atlanta. Atlanta press bemoaned the danger of the road and the hopelessness in the communities around it, and in some small ways these warnings might have been right.
That said, after spending the larger part of the last 18 months working or living near Boulevard (now doing both!), I’ve noticed a much different local character than originally told to me. Maybe things have changed, and perhaps these views are outdated. Maybe I inhabit a different perspective of safety and culture than those other points of view I heard. Regardless, I’m finding much of what I heard as truth to be instead false.
There are few places I have ever been that have such a strong sense of place as some of the communities along Boulevard. The history of this area is extremely rich, and though there have been major struggles along the road in the past (and remaining problems to beat in the years to come), the people living along Boulevard are a resilient, diverse, and creative group. I chose to live in this area for a reason, and wanted to do as much research into the rich history and setting of the surrounding communities so I better understand where I’m living while I am here.
Boulevard is the center of what could be an overwhelming round of gentrification sweeping through central east and south Atlanta. There are plans to control or reverse any coming displacement, though even some of the better-prepared communities eventually succumb to the overwhelming force of outside developers who don’t give a shit about the community they are building in. I hope, both for my time in the area and for the continuing excellence of the area, that these trajectories are not reproduced in much of Atlanta. I pray that development happens at a healthy rate with plenty of local consultation.
But before getting into where we are going, it’s important to think of where we have been.
Even at first glance, Boulevard has an extremely discordant legacy. This is a street that prompted the construction of a trauma center because of shootings along it. It is also the street that created Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Ebenezer Baptist Church.
So how did we get to here? What is the history of this clearly decades-old road in Atlanta?
Atlanta was not known first by its current-day name. Originally, the location was called Terminus, due to its position at the end of the railroad shipping lines (railroads now being reused for new things — more on this later). There are a few decades of the history of Atlanta/Terminus that I’m going to skip here before the end of the first Civil War.
Confederate Nostalgia Era
Atlanta, like many cities in the South, has a history since 1860 that includes at least some detectable nostalgia for the Antebellum South or Southern rebel cause among some denizens. Even today there is a road in Grant Park (a neighborhood near Boulevard) named E Confederate. There is a Jim Crow Rd in Flowery Branch, just outside of the city (ironically not named for the racist laws, but not in good taste regardless). One could write a long post about this nostalgia alone, how it remains today, and how it impacts contemporary Atlanta. We will save that for another time.
Atlanta, of course, was the city central to Gone with the Wind. It was a key location on Sherman’s march to the sea, a military offensive that forced a Southern surrender by destroying the commercial centers of the South.
After the war, though the Confederates had lost, new names for old vestiges of the Confederacy appeared. Boulevard, as we now know it, was not immune to this renaming. A few years after the war, Atlantans renamed the road that would become Boulevard “Rolling Mill Street”. This name was a reference to the Confederate Rolling Mill that burned to the ground during Sherman’s advance. It is still unclear whether this mill was lit on fire by Sherman’s forces, or from the spread of fire that the Confederates themselves set upon their ammo warehouses. Many older historians blame the former.
Rolling Mill Street did not exist on maps for too long, and was renamed by 1878. The new name, Jefferson Street, would hold up until the current day name was applied.
I’m yet unsure if the name “Jefferson” came from Mr. Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the CSA’s brief existence. I’d say it’s unlikely to be just coincidence, as the Georgia flag even today is a slight rethinking of the Confederacy’s First National Flag.
The Reconstruction did not wait around when it came to Atlanta. Development started swiftly, with plenty of private investment leading the way. One interesting bit of the impact this had on Boulevard had to do with public transportation. Today, neighborhoods several blocks from Boulevard have a streetcar, a new development in the past few years. However, there used to be a huge streetcar presence in Atlanta.
The owners of the streetcars and streetcar lines changed several times after the Civil War, but in 1887 the new owners of the streetcars built a line up Boulevard. The company doing the construction was Union Street Railroad Company, and they bought the Gate City Street Railroad Company that year. In 1889, the Fulton County Street Railroad, a separate company, built a line that rode alongside Boulevard for part of its route.
Unfortunately, pretty much all the streetcars would be removed from Atlanta because wealthier white folk in Atlanta were afraid of their nonwhite neighbors. (This is a theme in a lot of Atlanta history, unfortunately.)
The Great Fire of 1917
On May 21, 1917 a massive fire swept swept through the communities along Boulevard. The fire destroyed Grace Baptist Church, and a ton of residential homes and stores.
Boulevard, which was paved with wooden blocs at the time, literally caught on fire. The image of a street on fire is not one I imagine many of us will ever experience, but I am sure that it was surreal and terrifying among the fire raging through the buildings of the neighborhoods.
Fire damage amounted to five million dollars. Nearly 2000 buildings were destroyed. 10000 from the local community were made homeless temporarily.
The fire prompted Atlanta’s fire department to replace any remaining horse-drawn fire brigade carriages with motorized brigade vehicles.
The big fire of 1917 led to a massive displacement of predominantly Black residents in the communities near Boulevard. The communities would rebuild, but the scar of the fire would remain. Many photographs from the period shortly after the fire indicate the damage done by the event, though they also express the agency and resilience of the Black communities living in the area at the time.
The Black Renaissance in Atlanta
Boulevard and the communities around the road are a fascinating study of non-White development and autonomy in an urban setting. We have heard a lot of the Harlem Renaissance, especially as that historical period is finally finding its way into curriculum and textbooks across some parts of the country. Atlanta’s own Renaissance is likely worthy of some study as well.
Atlanta in the 20’s was nowhere near the size of New York City or even Harlem, but it was still a commercial center and had a diverse population. Young Black folk made up an important part of Atlanta in the 20's.
In this period, as with others, Black leadership in Atlanta was critical.
In 1917, 11 men formed the NAACP chapter for the city. In 1919, one of the founding members would lead the Atlanta NAACP. This man was named Walter F. White. White was middle class and worked for the Standard Life Insurance company in Atlanta. He wrote two novels that dealt prominently with the ongoing trend of lynching at the time.
Atlanta’s National Urban League was founded in 1919 by Jesse O. Thomas. Besides his Urban League work, Thomas helped to raise money to rebuild the Big Bethel Church after it burned down in 1923.
Clayton Russell Yates, a graduate of Atlanta University, founded the Atlanta Negro Voters League in 1925. He did this while climbing the corporate ladder of the Citizens Trust Company, where he would rise from teller to chairman of the board.
Patti Holmes, who married Dr. Hamilton Holmes, was one of the founders of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses.
William A. Scott, the son of Mississippian Emmeline Scott, founded the second running newspaper in Atlanta in 1928. Atlanta World, as it was called, was so successful it would develop into a daily paper by early 1932.
With many in Atlanta leadership (male and female), Black fraternities played a large role in shaping a sense of community and duty.
Auburn Avenue, a road that crosses Boulevard, was known during this time as “The Negro Peachtree” for the huge amount of Black business that found its home on a small but dense stretch. The Atlanta State Savings Bank, and the Standard Life Insurance Company (where Walter F. White worked) were just two of the many prosperous businesses on the strip.
This area of Atlanta was also home to many important creatives. One of these artists, Paul Poole, was a prolific photographer. He lived in O4W and was born to a shoemaker. His photos are well composed, gorgeous, and timeless. He took photos of all the powerful and successful folk of the areas around Boulevard and his photos remain a phenomenal record of Black success in the neighborhood. Just to put this in perspective, everyone I have mentioned in this section has a surviving photo of them made by Mr. Poole.
MLK’s Civil Rights Era
The history of MLK has been better written many places by many better writers. It is an important period of Atlanta history, and I recommend reading more in-depth than I can cover here. The movement has continuing impacts today, and deserves more attention than I can give it space in this piece.
Boulevard, however, did have significant impact on the movement. It did this not only by providing the people for marches, but for providing the spaces for one of the biggest thought leaders of the Black liberation movement.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, located off of Boulevard. It was recently the target of a major renovation to make space for an ever-growing church-going population, but MLK’s original church still stands across the street.
MLK’s influence still impacts Boulevard, as constant reference to his legacy or what he would think of current protest movements remain pervasive today. The MLK museum and the adjoining MLK Center are seated right off of Boulevard. The newer MLK-honoring statue off of the highway sits atop a the hill Boulevard runs across.
This history is a history that is thankfully pretty well known, though its situation within the neighborhoods off of Boulevard may have missed most of our history textbooks.
The “Crack Invasion” of Boulevard
In the late 80s, crack cocaine arrived on Boulevard, and had a significant impact on the community by the early 90s (when I was born in Atlanta). One response by some Section 8 Housing along Boulevard was to market some studio units to college students. This helped bring in role models who weren’t drug dealers or users.
Edna Moffat, who pioneered this shift, realized this wouldn’t be enough. She started an after-school program for the kids of Bedford Pines, her ailing neighborhood off of Boulevard. At first, they met in the basement of one of the buildings the college students rented in, but by 1996 the program would become a certified non-profit. Operation PEACE (Positive Education Always Creates Elevation) today provides GED classes, summer camps, and after school programs. In 2012, it served 65 kids year-round and 125 during their summer camp.
Another key focus of Operation PEACE’s mission involves changing the narrative around the community. They want to make it clear that not everyone from the neighborhood is involved in illegal activities nor has to be. Most people don’t want to stay in Section 8 housing all of their lives, and Edna Moffat’s organization helped to express that further.
Edna is now retired after an impactful 18 years of service. Operation PEACE is now run by Dr Catherine Foster Roswell, who left Families First to work with Atlanta’s children in a different way.
In 1994, Lydia Meredith and her husband began to run a church on Boulevard. They found out their church was previously the location of a known criminal hangout. The learned that drug dealers still slung product at a convenience store on the corner nearby. She lamented that “third generation unwed teen mothers” resided in the nearby apartments, including those owned by Edna’s original employer, Wingate.
Meredith and her then-husband attempted to combat the drugs that gripped a population of her neighborhood. They started by founding a neighborhood social-service organization called Beacon of Hope. Lydia still operates Beacon of Hope to this day.
The North-South Renaming of Boulevard
I’m not sure exactly when this happened, but at some point in the last 100 years, streets were renamed after they crossed Ponce or North Street. Boulevard was one of these streets, and the northern part of the street was renamed Monroe Street, for a landscaping firm operating in the area. Monroe came into existence so that affluent, white people in the north of Ponce/North would not have the same street address as their less-wealthy, less-white neighbors to the south.
In addition to Boulevard, several other streets had similar renaming events. Part of Briarcliff became Moreland and part of Juniper became Courtland. Argonne now continues onto Central Park and Parkway continues onto Charles Allen. It confuses every visitor to Atlanta almost as much as the fifty-thousand streets named Peachtree, but it marks the grossness of Atlanta’s infrastructural racism like nothing else.
Atlanta may be the “city too busy to hate”, but it has been too busy to truly integrate, too.
After this rename, the area of the street now referred to as “Boulevard” was significantly shortened. The median income of someone living on a Boulevard address plummeted. This paved the way for creating Boulevard as a reference for poverty, non-white living in Atlanta, and the general “other” for many of Atlanta’s white elites, even before crack cocaine became a scourge on the neighborhood.
This renaming further ratified the physical boundaries of Ponce and North, encouraged further development of the social divides of class and racial division across these boundaries, and create new psychological barriers between these divided communities by removing any experience of shared address identity. It was an awful move for creating a united Atlanta. It only aggravated issues on southern Boulevard while allowing a wealthy white population to distance themselves from these problems.
The years preceding this split weren’t a period of prosperity for the denizens of southern Boulevard, but anyone could have predicted the problems were only going to get worse. Perhaps this is why the whites pushed for this rename.
Sure enough, the decades that follow saw Boulevard become a street of “relative lawlessness”. Shootings were frequent, despair was high, and the Boulevard identity became something that even out-of-town writers, journalists, and rappers cited to invoke images of perceived Black lawlessness or Black struggle.
Besides the low level of hope shared by many of the residents during this transformation, the sights on the road grew more and more hopeless in appearance. Kudzu grew over vacant lots, and storefronts remained unused up and down Boulevard. Local morale was low among those living in the area. A community tucked in the middle of Atlanta was quarantined by many of their other neighbors in the city, left to be forgotten in rot.
The 2000’s and All of That
To simplify in a lot of ways, the 2000s were a mixed period for Boulevard and the communities that lived along the road.
Earlier, I mentioned Edna Moffat and her efforts in one of the project housing locations along Boulevard. Wingate, the development company in charge of much of the Section 8 housing in the area has not been as forgiving of the community as Moffat and her cohort has. In 2009, following criticism over his company not providing even a basic level of care for its tenants, Gene Lockard said “It shouldn’t be our responsibility to round up all the drug boys in their white T-shirts. I can’t think of another part of town where this kind of open-air drug market has been allowed to operate.”
Kit Sutherland, a ‘neighborhood activist’ and large proponent of development projects along Boulevard, offered a different view of Wingate. She believes Wingate’s operations in the neighborhood create a negative environment along the road.
Sutherland said of the project housing in 2009, “There’s not a single person who puts on a tie and goes to work every day. That doesn’t give the kids here any role models.”
Her criticism of Wingate was not that Wingate and Lockard didn’t care about the tenants of their buildings, but that subsidized housing in general creates a neighborhood of lawlessness and bleak world outlook. This view is troubling for a number of reasons. This highlights the fact that not everyone who moved to the neighborhoods around Boulevard wants to include current residents in development, irregardless of how long those communities have lived in the area.
The BeltLine and Atlanta’s Tide of Gentrification
Old Atlanta railroads are currently being repurposed as the BeltLine, a beautiful but controversial pedestrian and bike path set to cover most of Atlanta. The BeltLine seeks to provide an alternative mode of transportation around the city, hopefully leading to a more integrated metro area. Any Saturday afternoon speaks to the volume of Atlantans and tourists using the BeltLine, and the crowd in attendance is one of the most diverse by race that any free space in Atlanta can boast.
However, there has been significant controversy among the board of the Atlanta BeltLine Partnership. The planners hoped to build 5600 affordable homes along the BeltLine. The actual number, developers last month announced, is fewer than 200. On 26 September, this lapse prompted the resignation of Ryan Gavel and Nathaniel Smith from the BeltLine project.
These two seem concerned that their project was becoming a cudgel for the brutal force of gentrification, a force that has accelerated throughout much of Atlanta over the last decade. The BeltLine project intended to help develop and grow the community, though rent prices have continued to rise along the BeltLine and the neighborhoods it borders. There has, of course, been significant displacement of populations from their apartments and homes due to this. A large number of luxury apartments have been built or are being built in the area as testament to this.
This isn’t to say that a neighborhood can’t be lifted up without displacing people. There are definitely ways to achieve this, and I do believe that Gavel and Smith desired to not displace local populations through their project. It’s a noble but disappointing move that they decided to resign from their positions over the issue, and I only wish their resignations had a more apparent impact on developers and planners in the area. Maybe this effect will come in the future, but for now developers seem interested in continuing their normal, less-than-ideal trajectory.
The BeltLine isn’t the only change coming to the neighborhoods along Boulevard, to the less-white areas of Atlanta, or to Atlanta overall. Not by a long shot. To make matters worse, the former leaders of the BeltLine project may be one of the most gentrification-cognizant community developers in the area among those who are having major impact on the city. Even so, their efforts to avoid gentrification seem to have failed. This should be great cause for worry as other developers are much less aware or worried about their impacts.
In 2014, the city’s oldest Black church, Friendship Baptist Church, held its final service. It was demolished to build the new Falcons stadium. The church has a new home but it’s a shame that the building, which stood for around 150 years, was demolished for a new stadium.
Also in 2014, a developer announced that an historic Old Fourth Ward building was going to be destroyed to make room for a gated apartment complex. In 2015, destruction of the old Creomulsion Company factory began. The factory building and property had fallen into disrepair, but most of the century-old architecture remained. Rather than repurposing the remaining structures (which was definitely possible), John Wieland Homes bulldozed the area for a dozen townhomes. This development was unpopular with the residents of the area, for good reason. Not only was it removing the local architecture for new, cookie-cutter development, the area had been marked for mixed use by the O4W Master Plan (more on this later).
It’s a shame to see some of these failures and shortcomings in community-driven development, but to focus on just this would do major disservice to other work being done from the community.
The Years of Boulevard
In a bid to revitalize the community from within, Atlanta City Councilman Kwanza Hall declared 2012 to be the “Year of Boulevard”.
He experienced a remarkable degree of success. Within a year, a new police precinct had been built on Boulevard. Crime dropped by nearly a sixth. Landlords renovated some of the dilapidated buildings on the street, in part due to public pressure.
Some of the initial drop in crime may have only been the margins of the machine of crime that had found some home along Boulevard, as many of the old traphouses even exist to this day. The police approach, like the approach of most departments in the US, is to arrest and stop hard drug users rather than their dealers or suppliers. This, of course, isn’t due solely to an in ability by the police to penetrate some of the forces behind crime on the street, but also to the fact that developers and landlords have allowed property to fall into a state that allowed for the houses to be used in this way. Bank foreclosures and predatory loans generally didn’t help in a battle against this crime.
This is a good time to mention the O4W Master Plan, a document published in 2009 exploring in great detail what a group of leaders from the community want for their neighborhood. This plan was, of course, informed not only by the leadership but by the people living in the neighborhood.
The plan is extensive and even contains a map of desired land use for the area.
Unfortunately, despite the meticulous planning and thorough descriptions of the neighborhood’s aspirations from 2008 onward, the city had not prioritized these ideals. Developers seemed unaware of the plan altogether. Hall’s YoBoulevard could not have been better timed to reintroduce the agency of the neighborhood’s residents. It’s their neighborhood, and they ought to have a say in their home’s fate.
After one successful year of focus on Boulevard, Kwanza Hall kept the momentum moving. He announced a second year of boulevard in 2013. 50 businesses collaborated on the effort or supporting the community to get another study of development in the area commissioned.
In 2014, Kwanza Hall announced a third year of boulevard to a massive audience, thankful for the progress the previous two years brought. I didn’t attend the event, but it appears to have been a diverse meeting and a great marker on the refurbished unity across some really tense divides.
A man before declared a slumlord on Boulevard was received warmly, in no small part due to new community-building efforts and encouragement to repair and care for the aching housing he managed. By 2014, several local businesses had held fundraisers or created awareness for issues in the communities along Boulevard — the arcade bar Joystiq helped to raise money for Saturday lunches for kids in the community, and a local nonprofit Greening Youth provided summer job and training programs.
The goals for 2014 seemed to focus on food availability and, just as importantly, access to food. Transportation remains a difficulty for those trying to buy groceries. Even then, the Kroger near Ponce City Market (Murder/BeltLine Kroger ) is being destroyed to make way for a new parking lot.
It’s important to recognize that this development really does take a long time, and it’s critical to make sure revitalization comes with minimized gentrification. Boulevard is currently poised to be an avenue on which this balance is carefully struck.
The denizens of Boulevard are currently writing the next chapters for the communities that live around the avenue. The road forward is not an easy one, but thankfully there are likely as many agents working for good as there are those working for profit.
