19 things you didn’t know about Atlanta’s past
Everyone knows our city’s hallmarks: Coca-Cola, Martin Luther King Jr., Gone With the Wind, Sherman’s March. But there’s so much more that’s been cast aside.
Photograph courtesy of the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center
Atlanta has a particular knack for erasing its history. One of the city’s defining characteristics is, after all, its ever-optimistic march to the future, its affinity for “progress,” its knack for scrubbing a slate clean and starting anew. Atlantans love to build shiny new structures, even if it means jettisoning grand architecture—or whole neighborhoods. This bullishness has caused us to suffer from a kind of collective amnesia. Sure, everyone knows our city’s hallmarks: Coca-Cola, Martin Luther King Jr., Gone With the Wind, Sherman’s March. But there’s so much more that’s been cast aside. We dug our heads into history books and consulted historians and veteran Atlantans to excavate a lesser-known, hazier narrative of the city. If you’re a longtime (or native!) Atlantan, perhaps these anecdotes will spark nostalgia. If you’re a more recent arrival, this may all be news to you.
Written by Mary Logan Bikoff, Gavin Godfrey, Jennifer Rainey Marquez, Hannah Palmer, and Betsy Riley
- Swimmers and boaters once flocked to a six-acre lake in Grant Park
- Atlanta was founded on sprawl—and hospitality
- W.E.B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk at Atlanta University
- Zoo Atlanta was founded with animals from a defunct circus
- There’s a hidden cave in Chastain Park
- Little Richard and James Brown cut their teeth at the Royal Peacock
- Atlanta’s first celeb chef was the mother of modern Southern cooking
- Rich’s downtown hosted annual fashion shows that drew the likes of Pucci and Hubert de Givenchy
- Atlanta’s first talk radio station launched national voices
- The country’s deadliest hotel fire prompted new national safety codes
- Atlanta once had its own “Berlin Wall”
- Atlanta had its own version of Haight-Ashbury
- In the 1970s Atlantans hit the ski slopes in Vinings
- The Sex Pistols made its American debut in a Piedmont Road shopping center
- Pleasant Peasant brought casual fine dining to Atlanta
- Eastside Atlanta neighborhoods were almost split by an interstate
- The Kinks, Willie Nelson, and ZZ Top left their handprints on Peachtree Road
- Smokey and the Bandit II blew up Atlanta’s most famous roller coaster
- CNN Center was once the site of the world’s largest indoor amusement park
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