Tag: Atlanta Civic Center

Obsessed with reinvention since its inception, Atlanta today is witnessing a more piecemeal changeover, as I’ve personally seen over more than a dozen years of covering the city’s physical evolution. Instead of entire districts being flattened, it’s a row of older bungalows, an aging apartment complex, a shuttered factory—all broadly described as gentrification. But is that a gentler way of saying urban renewal never really ended?

If you walk east on Ralph McGill Boulevard from Piedmont Avenue in the Old Fourth Ward, you won’t see any evidence that the Forrest Arms Hotel ever existed. There’s no trace of the building that, between 1955 and 1965, hosted pretty much every prominent Black entertainer who passed through Atlanta — including Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, James Brown, and Sam Cooke.