Archive Atlanta

This week, we’re talking about the history of the telephone - when and where it arrived in Atlanta, the buildings that were built, the different technologies, long distance and area codes. Can you imagine a time when calling Decatur was long distance? Or when every county in the state of Georgia shared the 404 area code? Tune in for these stories and many more!

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Replaying this episode from February of 2021, as the City of Atlanta has restarted public meetings to discuss updating our zoning. 

Atlanta’s Office of Housing & Community Development recently created a revised zoning plan and I got to interview director Josh Humphries to find out some history, the new plan's details and next governmental steps. 

By 2050 Atlanta expects our population to (more than) double and right now, we're the 316th densest city in the US...so there is room to grow and it’s up to Atlanta residents to decide how that growth is going to happen - will we continue to be the one of the most racially and economically segregated in county, or will we have a place where all different income levels live in the same neighborhoods? 

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This week, we’re talking about Atlanta’s earliest surveyors and map makers. If you do enough historic research, you'll see the names of engineers and surveyors at the bottom of plat maps, bridge plaques, or newspaper articles, so this episode idea was a great way to honor the people whose work was important and yet unnoticed.

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Franklin Miller Garrett, Atlanta’s only, ever official historian, was born in 1906 and moved to Atlanta in 1914. You can’t “do” Atlanta history without running across Garrett’s name and volume of work. I own almost all the books he has written, and the more I began learning about him and his life, I realized a similarity we shared - being an "enthusiast". Franklin Garrett didn’t have a history degree, but he came to Atlanta and let his curiosity lead the way - a way that brought over eight decades of research, published work, history groups that still exist today and so much more. 

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The Crackers may sound familiar, but what about the Osceolas, Atlantans, Firecrackers, Windjammers, Deppens, Cubs and Panthers? This week, I’m talking about the parallel worlds of white and Black baseball in Atlanta, all of the club iterations, where these games were played and how local baseball connects to Henry Grady and Coca Cola.

Book mentioned

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The 1956 Sugar Bowl was played in New Orleans, LA, pitting the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets against the University of Pittsburgh Panthers. It was the first integrated bowl game in the Deep South. College football reigns supreme in the South, but if you’ve listened to previous episodes about sports, or stadiums, you know that nothing exists in a vacuum. Amateur and professional sports in Atlanta are intricately tied into class, race, boosterism, and the infamous Atlanta Way. This short episode highlights all of those things and more.

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For this Halloween, Liz Clappin (Tomb With A View) and I are are talking about Atlanta’s most prestigious funeral home, Spring Hill Mortuary, it’s creator, Hyatt Patterson, but also the history of funeral homes in general, the practice of embalming, the architecture, historic preservation, the transformation of HM Patterson into the modern age and the SCI model and so much more. 

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The “numbers game” is a form of illegal gambling where the bettor attempts to pick three digits to match what will be chosen the next day. In Atlanta, we called it "playing the bug", and it was HUGE in the 1930s. “Writers'', “Pick up men”, “Bankers”, “Bolster” or “runner” and the “Digits Barons” raked in $30K a day in bets between 1937-1938. At one point, twelve syndicates, or banks, operated in the city.

In 1935, kingpin Eddie Guyol was murdered in his driveway. You can read more about the complex case here.

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This weekend is Pride in Atlanta and while I would have loved a new episode, I couldn’t resist sharing one from two years ago this month, where I interviewed Charlie Paine and learned about Atlanta’s LGBTQ history through the lens of the Atlanta Eagle, which in itself tells us the story of Ponce de Leon’s transition from grand residential street to commercial corridor. There were stories about vibrating mattresses, Italian restaurants, punk rock, RuPaul and Red Dog raids.

Shortly after the episode was released in 2020, the Atlanta Eagle closed its doors but it has recently reopened at Ansley Mall. It was also designated as a local landmark by the City of Atlanta and is now protected from demolition by the City’s Historic Preservation Ordinance. It is the first structure In the Deep South protected under a Historic Zoning Protections for LGBTQ+ History!

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This week’s mini episode is all about Antoinette Farnsworth Drew, the little we know about her life, her artwork and the story of her unsolved murder. History is often unkind to women, and at best has simply forgotten their names and achievements. This is especially true for women that don’t reach national fame and/or those that don’t have descendants to carry on their memory. Both of these are true for Antoinette. 

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