Named for the famous Spanish explorer who was said to have discovered the Fountain of Youth, Atlanta's Ponce de Leon Avenue began as a simple country road that conveyed visitors to the famous healing springs. Now, few motorists realize that the avenue, one of Atlanta's major commuter thoroughfares, was a prestigious residential street in Victorian Atlanta, home to mayors and millionaires. An economic turn in the twentieth century transformed the avenue into a crime-ridden commercial corridor, but in recent years, Atlantans have rediscovered the street's venerable architecture and storied history. Join local historian Sharon Foster Jones on a vivid tour of the avenue - from picnics by the springs in hoopskirts and Atlanta Crackers baseball to the Fox Theatre and the days when Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable and Al Capone lodged in the esteemed hotels lining this magnificent avenue.
A vibrant narrative history of three hallowed Manhattan blocks—the epicenter of American cool. St. Marks Place in New York City has spawned countless artistic and political movements. Here Frank O’Hara caroused, Emma Goldman plotted, and the Velvet Underground wailed. But every generation of miscreant denizens believes that their era, and no other, marked the street’s apex. This idiosyncratic work of reportage tells the many layered history of the street—from its beginnings as Colonial Dutch Director-General Peter Stuyvesant’s pear orchard to today’s hipster playground—organized around those pivotal moments when critics declared “St. Marks is dead.” In a narrative enriched by hundreds of interviews and dozens of rare images, St. Marks native Ada Calhoun profiles iconic characters from W. H. Auden to Abbie Hoffman, from Keith Haring to the Beastie Boys, among many others. She argues that St. Marks has variously been an elite address, an immigrants’ haven, a mafia warzone, a hippie paradise, and a backdrop to the film Kids—but it has always been a place that outsiders call home. This idiosyncratic work offers a bold new perspective on gentrification, urban nostalgia, and the evolution of a community.
Named for the famous Spanish explorer who was said to have discovered the Fountain of Youth, Atlanta s Ponce de Leon Avenue began as a simple country road that conveyed visitors to the healing springs that once bubbled along it. Now, few motorists realize that the avenue, one of Atlanta s major commuter thoroughfares, was a prestigious residential street in Victorian Atlanta, home to mayors and millionaires. An economic turn in the twentieth century transformed the avenue into a crime-ridden commercial corridor, but in recent years, Atlantans have rediscovered the street s venerable architecture and storied history. Join local historian Sharon Foster Jones on a vivid tour of the avenue from picnics by the springs in hoopskirts and Atlanta Crackers baseball to the Fox Theatre and the days when Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable and Al Capone lodged in the esteemed hotels lining this magnificent avenue."
A vivid journey back into Atlanta's past revealing some of the city's most grievous losses to the wrecking ballOld theaters, hotels, ballparks, civic buildings, and the early transport system of Atlanta are recalled in this book written by an Atlanta historian and his colleagues at the Atlanta History Center. Listed in chronological order the losses stretch back to 1821 and the Creek Indians. Major events in Atlanta history are covered, such as the Civil War destruction of 1864, the Cotton States International Exposition of 1896, the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917 right though to 1996 and the dismantling of key venues after the 1996 Olympic Games. Sites include: Georgia State Capitol, Ponce de Leon Springs, Jacob's Pharmacy, Candler Race Track, Union Passenger Depot, Kimball House Hotel, Atlanta Crackers, Buttermilk Bottom, Hebrew Orphanage, Henry Grady Hotel, Plaza Park, 1904 Atlanta Terminal Station, The Omni, the Greyhound Bus Terminal, Fort Hood and the Ponder House, Pidemont Hotel, Lake Abana, the Howard Theatre, and ferries across the Chattahoochee.
Francis Palmer Smith was the principal designer of Atlanta-based Pringle and Smith, one of the leading firms of the early twentieth-century South. Smith was an academic eclectic who created traditional, history-based architecture grounded in the teachings of the cole des Beaux-Arts. As The Architecture of Francis Palmer Smith shows, Smith was central to the establishment of the Beaux-Arts perspective in the South through his academic and professional career. After studying with Paul Philippe Cret at the University of Pennsylvania, Smith moved to Atlanta in 1909 to head the new architecture program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He would go on to train some of the South's most significant architects, including Philip Trammell Shutze, Flippen Burge, Preston Stevens, Ed Ivey, and Lewis E. Crook Jr. In 1922 Smith formed a partnership with Robert S. Pringle. In Atlanta, Savannah, Chattanooga, Jacksonville, Sarasota, Miami, and elsewhere, Smith built office buildings, hotels, and Art Deco skyscrapers; buildings at Georgia Tech, the Baylor School in Chattanooga, and the Darlington School in Rome, Georgia; Gothic Revival churches; standardized bottling plants for Coca-Cola; and houses in a range of traditional "period" styles in the suburbs. Smith's love of medieval architecture culminated with his 1962 masterwork, the Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta. As his career drew to a close, Modernism was establishing itself in America. Smith's own modern aesthetic was evidenced in the more populist modern of Art Deco, but he never embraced the abstract machine aesthetic of high Modern. Robert M. Craig details the role of history in design for Smith and his generation, who believed that architecture is an art and that ornament, cultural reference, symbolism, and tradition communicate to clients and observers and enrich the lives of both. This book was supported, in part, by generous grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Georgia Tech Foundation, Inc.
