Category editorial

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Atlanta’s Gulch

Apr 23, 1913

THE CONSTITUTION, ATLANTA, GA, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23, 1913.

Page Four.

There is a distinct connection between grand opera week and the revival of the projects for sinking the tracks of the Georgia and state railroads and building viaducts over Pryor street and Central avenue. The town is thronged with representative visitors from every portion of the south. Most of these people are well-traveled. They have a basis of comparison gained by visiting other large cities. And to them the sight of the hideous gulch running through the heart of Atlanta, the necessity of waiting for the passage of trains at Pryor street crossing, must seem an anomalous experience in a city otherwise metropolitan in appearance and appurtenances.

The plans so laboriously drawn up in Chief of Construction Clayton’s office and so glibly and inexplicably turned down by council offer at least a step in the direction of abolishing the canon that splits the heart of the city. They are not so complete nor so ornate or far-seeing as the civic center designs drawn some years ago by Harralson Bleckley and submitted to the legislature. Our judgment is that sooner or later Atlanta will come to an improvement of this magnitude. It is unthinkable that a city of our rate of growth and prestige should tolerate the inconvenience, the danger and the unsightliness that now attends the railroad approach to the union passenger depot.

It will require the expenditure of some millions of dollars and co-operation between city and state and property-owners to solve this intricate problem in the right way. But the need of its solution is so obvious, and the eventual profit from the improvement so tremendous, that early consideration urges itself upon the Atlantan who does not confine his mental processes to the needs of the moment.

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No More Tinkering with Streets’ Names.

Dec 21, 1909

The Constitution: Atlanta, GA

Tuesday, December 21, 1909

The announcement made in council yesterday afternoon that the street committee would meet in special session on Friday of next week for the purpose of reconsidering its recommendation to change the names of Marietta and Decatur streets, indicates very clearly that not only the committee, but council, is about to escape the mess in which both committee and council were in a fair way to become entangled.

It is worthy of note that only a few years ago a street committee of council recommended the change of names of these two streets, and when the report was submitted to council, so emphatic was the protest that even the members of the street committee adversed their own report and voted against the very change they had recommended.

It  is to be hoped that the present street committee will do itself the credit of adversing its report in this instance, for there can be no doubt that the city is overwhelmingly opposed to this proposed change of name of two historic Atlanta thoroughfares.

The word “Atlanta” itself is no more indissolubly identified with the city than are the names by which a few of the principal residential and business streets are designated in history, in legal matters, and in everyday usage.

Pryor and Peachtree, Whitehall and Capitol avenue, Peters and Courtland, Washington and Ivy, Walker and Spring, West Peachtree and Gordon, and so on indefinitely – each one of these names recalls to the Atlanta of both generations clear-cut and tangible associations.

Marietta and Decatur streets are no less permanently connected in the public mind with evolution, growth, business and tradition.

Because here and there undesirable or unpleasant elements have projected themselves, there is no more excuse for abandoning appellations that are of honored derivation and of honored present significance, than there would be in changing a man’s name to reform him.

Both streets are now being rehabilitated, and can be further rehabilitated by means more lasting and effectual than an appeal to unthinking flippancy.

It is a reflection on the dignity and the high functions of the city council of the south’s metropolis, that it should be called upon to invest time in even rejecting such superfluous and frivolous proposals.

And yet, periodically, some member is inspired to agitate innovations of this nature, and always with the same inevitable result.

Every previous suggestion to alter the name of some central or well-established thoroughfare has invariably created a storm of popular protest.

In no important instance has council acceded to the scattered and finicky hysteria to tamper with the titles of prominent thoroughfares, but continued and emphatic rebukes of this character seem to glide harmlessly off the backs of one on to the next council that feels called upon to grapple with the same old question.

But we believe this lesson of the pending episode will settle the question for at least a few years.

It is high time for this “up the hill and down again” horseplay to come to an end.

Formidable problems face the council of Greater Atlanta.

Its members have not the time, certainly they should not have the inclination to fritter away energy in bubble-blowing of this kind.

They have more serious business on hand!

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Changing Street Names.

Oct 20, 1903

The Constitution: Atlanta, GA

Tuesday, October 20, 1903

The protest made by Mr. Forrest Adair to the city council yesterday against the frequent and often capricious changing of the names of streets in the city is deserving of that body.

The value of certainty in the metes and bounds used in describing real estate grows in importance with the growth of the city. The activity of the real estate market is dependent in large measure upon the accuracy and permanency of such descriptions, the more so as the city fills up with new citizens. They are unacquainted with our old maps and the metamorphoses of local names. They look only to the chain of titles and, as Mr. Adair says, they frequently refuse a property because of the vagarious changes of the names of streets that occur in consecutive deeds.

A yet greater reason why council should be slow to change the names of our thoroughfares is the fact that already the names of landmark streets have been changed, the honors paid to pioneer citizens obliterated and names that should have remained linked with localities and thoroughfares crossed off our map for fanciful and unsuggestive substitutes, in some cases these changes have almost amounted to a profanation of the fathers of the city. The names of former mayors, even of that one who heroically bore the interests of the city in the awful days of Sherman’s siege and occupancy, the noble James M. Calhoun, have been sacrificed for meaningless titles.

Change Whitehall street to “Commerce avenue,” Marietta street to “Bucephalus boulevard,” and Peachtree street to “Elite avenue,” and by those three simple substitutions that can be adopted in three minutes in council, the Atlanta of history and of common knowledge and pride throughout Georgia and the union will be obliterated.

Patriotic and commercial reasons, especially the important one of making readable and acceptable titles to real estate, are plenty enough to cause council to deliberate long before it takes down the names of well-known streets to replace them with the tony and pride-tickling titles that have been invented without rhyme or reason. We trust the city is at the end of that sort of uncalled for vandalism.

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