Atlanta Memories… Does time heal all wounds, or expose them?
Bull Sullivan
I see old the “Ivy Street Marist” campus, and next to it, the gravel lot where we learned to march in formation, and practiced mediocre 5-AAA high school football. Behind that, Sacred Heart Gym, where some fine championship basketball was played. On the north side, Sacred Heart Basilica, offering little hope for the damned, and beyond that, the Domino Lounge in the Imperial Hotel, featuring that prissy old schoolmarm, Patti White. Now that was a place of great education… see earlier reference to “the damned.” March, marching Marist Cadets, what a great urban neighborhood: Peachtree, West Peachtree, Piedmont, Spring, trolleys to go, grand houses with Technicolor movies to see with not one damn CGI special effect. Haberdasheries and Haute Couture, Rich’s, Davison-Paxton, Muses, Regenstein’s, the list was endless, but it did end, as thousands of Yankees moved South, and filled the farms around the city with suburbs, and subdivisions, and their fear of Negroes, and hundreds of Atlanta institutions, like Marist, fled in “White Flight” from an imagined “boogie man” and well, the greatness of a City Too Busy to Hate fled out with them.
G. A.
Just the fact that you said “Negroes” tells me everything I need to know that that wasn’t a great time in history…
Bull Sullivan
Thank you, that’s precisely my point. I grew up in Atlanta, and never thought to describe a friend by color of skin, nor to discriminate therefrom. I am not saying that there wasn’t an understanding of cultural differences, nor that racial tensions did not exist, but rather that tensions were exacerbated by Northern migration, primarily corporate driven, and concomitant “white flight” to the suburbs. The abandonment of entire neighborhoods, the relocation of many small businesses and light manufacturing facilities and the out movement of entire sectors of our city’s economy, such as hospitals, automobile plants and railroad yards were both a cause and a result of economic distress among many Atlantans, and led to a decline in individual income and family wealth.
T. Z.
The heavy manufacturing changed and much was sent overseas. The newer GM plant in Doraville replaced a smaller multistory facility close in on the south side. The post war increase in auto ownership and highway development made the suburbs feasible. At the Fulton mill in Cabbagetown most workers lived in site of the mill and walked there. As for white flight it had a silver lining is that it created an inexpensive enclave for a variety of young counter culture types. Many stayed here and created and changed the city. If you bought a house it really paid off.
Bull Sullivan
All of your well considered points seem to confirm my hypothesis. The flight of heavy manufacturing and the GM plant relocation were effected by distant management, up “North,” without consent and often notification of the denizens of Atlanta. Noticeably, suburban sprawl can later to the South and Atlanta, than it did up “North.” In the 40’s and 50’s, and well into the 60’s, the “Suburbs” were such remote areas as Buckhead, Bankhead, Campbellton, East Point, College Park, Clarkston, and Chamblee, to name but a few communities which had existed for decades with their own identity, clustered about “city centers and town squares.” Atlanta had an excellent transit system, and trains moved people to many of these “exurbs.” it was still unusual into the late 60’s for families to have more than one “newer” automobile. As I recall, one of the first major subdivisions, that is the first of what was later called “PUDs,” Planned Urban Developments, was “Long Acres,” off PID in Chamblee and its Shopping Center, developed Circa 1955-1962, Interestingly enough, it was developed by the same company that built both the Darlington and the Howell House, circa late 1940’s, multistoried apartment buildings for a growing white urban middle class. I might add that Georgia’s suburban and rural highway network were far less developed than those up “North.” While many national and multinational corporations began trickling mid-level management employees into Atlanta after WWII and the Korean War, the greatest influx of “Yankees” began after it was clear that primarily Birmingham AL and other Southern cities such as Memphis TN and Charlotte, NC had and still faced serious racial divisions and uncertain futures as employment and housing centers. in all the South, only one city enjoyed broad racial harmony, and that was Atlanta. Progressive, with both prominent White middle and upper classes, and an expanding Black middle class of educated and successful entrepreneurs, the urban core was ready to thrive. That did not occur, as it should have, primarily because the influx of bigoted northern corporate transplants almost immediately sought refuge in new homes built primary in northern exurbs, creating a ring of new homes and communities around the northern tier of metro Atlanta. These new subdivisions, coupled with troubled national racial harmony and the fear of declining property values, as well as corporate and financial speculation, spurred many to flee the urban neighborhoods. Without investment in the “inner city,” without renewal of facilities and infrastructure, and with declining tax revenues, Atlanta began a forty year decline. The romantic notion of workers trundling off to work on foot, lunch boxes in hand, to the textile mills of the 4th Ward ignores the rest of the city and its citizens, to the East, South and West, many of whom lived in preferenced racially segregated but contiguous neighborhoods. “White Flight” was a major contributing factor to Atlanta’s economic decline, it weakened if not obviated the opportunities afforded both the Black and White “lower middle class,” it stripped the urban communities of financial resources and educational k-12 funding, and contributed to the growth of White supremacy and Black antagonism. Atlanta went from a “City to Busy to Hate” to a “City to Busy to Care.” and so it remains today. Geographically segregated, compassionately alienated. Not at all the City I grew up in, nor the City I hoped to grow old in.