The layers of history

It probably goes without saying that pretty much everything was something before it became what it is today. An examination of any city’s past is an exercise in peeling back the layers of, as the Beatles might have put it, the long and winding road.

Because of our city’s particular penchant for casting out the old and bringing in the new, Atlanta is particularly rich when it comes to peeling back layers. And there is no better place to walk through the pages of time than in the heart of Atlanta…Five Points.

One block west of Five Points is the Fairlie-Poplar district. A place that once was the heart of Atlanta’s commerce and, still to this day, is the location of some of Atlanta’s oldest and, therefore, most revered buildings.

A truly walkable neighborhood, it is a joy to spend a lazy afternoon strolling through the Fairlie-Poplar district. On every street there are rich layers of Atlanta’s history that reach back to the very formation of the city itself. And each one of those layers tells a story about who we were and how we lived. Such is the case with the intersection of Broad and Luckie Streets as you will see in this week’s Stories of Atlanta.