Tag: Auburn Avenue

From Black-owned financial institutions and restaurants to Ebenezer Baptist Church, the NAACP, and the legendary Royal Peacock nightclub, Atlanta’s Black history makers have always made their way to Auburn Avenue. So it should be no surprise that, tucked away in a small brick building on that iconic street, is the site of the first Black-owned radio station in the United States, WERD.

Rare and classic books keep finding Rosa Duffy. Some have fragile, first edition spines that creek like arthritic joints. Others have musings jotted in the margins by previous owners. These are Duffy’s favorites—the ones that she hand-selects from online sellers, collectors, or other independent bookstores to live in her Auburn Avenue reading room and store, For Keeps Books.

It’s a “stitch” as in a way to sew together the moribund patch of no-man’s-land between the Civic Center MARTA station on West Peachtree Street and Folk Art Park at Piedmont. A. J. Robinson, Central Atlanta Progress’s president, floated the idea in 2016: a cap on I-75/I-85 to create a pedestrian-friendly space about two-thirds the size of Centennial Olympic Park. Basically, we’d build a roof over about 4,000 feet of the Downtown Connector and plant trees on it.

Long before Covid-19 clamped down upon so many Atlantans’ livelihoods, skyrocketing housing costs and other ills of gentrification were forcing city dwellers—especially younger ones—to get creative when it came to living arrangements. That trend has only accelerated since the pandemic.

In their documentary, Atlanta filmmakers Shonda Harper and Alahna Lark trace the history of Auburn Avenue as a nexus of black culture and commerce, a springboard of the civil rights movement, and a community irreparably cleaved in two by the construction of the Downtown Connector.

Rosa Duffy's bookstore, For Keeps, is more than a place for visitors to purchase rare and classic black books. Duffy designed it to also be a reading room where people can stop in and interact with history that is often overlooked or placed in the bottom of the dollar bins at other bookstores.

Author Gary Pomerantz published his book Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn in 1996 after five years of uncovering slave graves in the woods, conducting more than 500 interviews, and filling the holes left behind in Atlanta’s history by a lack of proper documentation. He spoke Thursday in honor of the opening of Gene Kansas's new coworking space, Constellations.

Gene Kansas has an affinity for adaptive-reuse projects, especially those on imperiled Auburn Avenue, the heart of a district famously dubbed Sweet Auburn when it was thriving during the first half of the 20th century. Kansas knows how fragile community and history can be, having seen his hometown literally underwater.

Freddy Cole sits at a table in a back corner of Sweet Auburn Seafood restaurant. The linens are crisp, the decor modern: shimmering tile, high-backed benches—all unmarked by smoke or time. This place is a welcome sign of slow resurgence in this historic part of town.

Atlanta is riddled with vacant properties, many of them development efforts that stalled during the recession. But other decaying structures have been that way for years—decades even—often in the middle of burgeoning neighborhoods.