Driving in Atlanta 1987 & 1990

I often regret that I didn't stick a video camera on my dashboard and drive around Atlanta back in the 80s and early 90s. Thankfully, a few others did exactly that and have posted the videos on Youtube.

This first one is from Youtube user reillync and was shot in August 1987. It's interesting to see the construction mess during the widening of the downtown connector.

dirtypairxx posted this one from 1990 or 1991. It begins in southwest Atlanta and then heads north on Peachtree. You can see what the Margaret Mitchell House really looked like before the restoration.

Peters Street Depot

One of the inspirations for driving around Atlanta and photographing 19th century industrial buildings was found at the Brookhaven library way back in 1987, a fantastic book with the unglamorous title "Atlanta Historic Resources Workbook". Published by the Atlanta Urban Design Commission in September 1981, the book painstakingly details the history and significance of hundreds of structures and historic districts around town, everything from the Fox Theatre and the Flatiron Building to houses and old bottling plants. I managed to find a well worn ex-library copy on Alibris a few years ago. It's a fascinating time capsule and profiles many historic structures that have since been demolished.

One of the more obscure entries in the book was this nondescript freight depot in the Castleberry Hill area.

The old depot is the white brick building on the left of this photo I took from a parking lot off of Spring Street on January 10, 1990. A fire destroyed the structure in 1992.

Something I never anticipated when to returning to sites I had photographed two decades earlier is the astonishing proliferation of chain link fences. There are now fences on bridges, fences underneath bridges, fences blocking access to bridges, fences around parking lots, fences around vacant lots, fences along the railroad, fences around buildings, fences across driveways, fences across roads. Fences, fences everywhere! One such fence kept me from recreating the same perspective of the above photo, but this is pretty close. January 5, 2012.

A much better view of the old depot can be found on this 1989 postcard of the former Atlanta & West Point engine 290. Locomotive #290 was built in 1926 for the Atlanta & West Point and operated with the New Georgia Railroad during the late 1980s and early '90s. It also appeared in the movie Fried Green Tomatoes (...not to mention Decompositions) Anyway, #290 is now on display at the Southeastern Railway Museum in Duluth, GA.

Date of top photo: September 12, 1989

Bottom photo: January 5, 2012

An interesting comparison of bird's eye views from 1892, 1919, and 2010. What is striking about the first view is how self contained this area appeared to be in 1892. Before the advent of the automobile, houses, businesses, and industries were, by necessity, within walking distance of each other. The railroad depot was the focal point of the neighborhood. In the modern view, those relationships are completely lost.

Castleberry Hill 1989 / 2012

This is an old factory building in the Castleberry Hill area of Atlanta as seen from the Peters St. bridge. Top photo was taken in January 1989 and the bottom one was taken January 2012. This former factory was built in 1914 and has been converted to lofts. Not a whole lot has changed between these two shots other than the size of the trees. Off in the distance on the right side, the old Omni Coliseum has been replaced by Philips Arena.

January 5, 2012: The kids had returned to school from Christmas break, my wife was at work and the weather was beautiful. Alone again. Just like the old days. I looked out the window and, for the first time in over 16 years, decided it would be fun to grab my camera, drive downtown and just wander around like I used to do when I was 20. I grabbed a few old photos and set out to retrace the steps of that long haired kid in the 1966 MG.

So I ended up here in Castleberry Hill, an old industrial neighborhood that looks much like it did when I was a train obsessed kid in the 1970s. We used to drive through here on the way to the skating rink at the Omni every weekend or on the way to one of mom's marathon shopping trips to the downtown Rich's department store that once stood a few blocks away. For the most part, this area of Atlanta still looks pretty cool, with the slightly unsettling vibe of an industrial wasteland even though most of the old buildings are now lofts or galleries.

I took the top photo from the Peters St. bridge in January 1989. As I stood in the exact same spot 23 years later, my digital shutter clicks were accompanied by the sounds of a homeless guy playing flute on the opposite side of the bridge. Surreal.

The next photo shows a different view of the same scene taken in 1935 from the Southern Railway building (which is also still standing). This came from the Southern Railway Historical Association.




This 1961 aerial photo of downtown Atlanta is from the Atlanta History Center. These buildings can be seen at far left.