Cities always like to put their best foot forward. Atlanta is no exception. There is a long history in “The City Too Busy To Hate” of boosterism. Some might even say Atlantans have been guilty of going overboard when touting the city’s achievements and capabilities. On occasion, that may have been true but, then again, […]
Tag: Atlanta History Stories
Posted inStories of Atlanta
A busy store on a busy corner
Our intent this week was to talk about Atlanta and her visitors. Any city that attains any sort of momentum attracts interesting visitors…some famous, some not so much. But with every visitor comes a story and this week we were going to tell a visitor story. A pretty good one too. Kind of a Day the Earth Stood Still thriller, only, not the whole earth, just a little corner in Georgia. Anyway, that was all before we discovered Miss Fluffy Raffles.
Fluffy is not a name one just skips past without pausing to at least express, “What the heck?” And to no one’s surprise, there is a bit of a story attached with Miss Raffles. On the surface, it’s a story of a playful woman who for almost two weeks tweaked the collective noses of an entire city and became front-page news in the process.
Posted inMain Slider
The Stories continue
With the posting of this story…scratch that…with the release of this shameless, self-congratulatory, video attempt at associating the Stories of Atlanta brand with long-cherished American ideals such as freedom of speech and the right to assembly…we’d like to acknowledge the start of the 3rd season of the Stories of Atlanta. Last week marked the end […]
Posted inMain Slider
His request has been honored
Even Atlanta, with it comparatively young history, is not without its colorful characters. And one of Atlanta’s more interesting individuals was Jasper Newton Smith. Smith was an Atlanta businessman during the city’s reconstruction days. He owned a business at what is today the intersection of Peachtree and 14th Streets.
Jasper Smith, or Jack as he was known, was a brick maker and you can imagine that, at a time when Atlanta was rebuilding from the devastation of the Civil War, a guy who made bricks was in high demand. High enough demand to make Jack Smith wealthy. By some accounts, Smith’s company produced somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million bricks.
Posted inStories of Atlanta
The House on Marietta Street
Most people, when giving a tour of the City of Atlanta to friends or family, usually find themselves starting more than one sentence with the phrase, “On this spot…” It’s pretty much a necessity in Atlanta to point out what was in a location because, as almost everyone knows, Atlanta has never been particularly sentimental […]
Posted inStories of Atlanta
We didn’t give up without a fight
Of all of the legendary names who were instrumental in building Atlanta into one of the nation’s premiere metropolitan regions, the name Carl G. Fisher is not one of them…but perhaps it should be. One could make the case that without the motivation supplied by Mr. Fisher, Atlanta would not be the city that it […]
Posted inStories of Atlanta
A lasting legacy
It will come as no surprise to anyone that Peachtree Street was not always the bastion of business that it is today. At the turn of the 20th century, Peachtree Street was a tree-lined avenue with magnificent mansions on either side. It was a neighborhood…a neighborhood filled with well-to-do residents but a neighborhood none the […]
Posted inStories of Atlanta
She was fast and reliable
They say it’s the journey, not the destination. And for some in the 1950s and 60s whose destination was Atlanta, the journey was more than mere conveyance, it was, in fact, Southern Tradition. For many, the trip is a lingering memory from childhood. For others, it was just how we lived back in the day, […]
Posted inStories of Atlanta
For sale, the State of Georgia
There are many facets that make up a successful community, city or state, but without question, one of the most important elements, if not the most important element, is people. It’s hard to have a thriving community if nobody’s home. Which was exactly the case for the State of Georgia at the turn of the […]
Posted inStories of Atlanta
First, it kept an eye on the people of Atlanta
For time after the Civil War, Atlantans found themselves living under military occupation. In fact, the government built barracks close to downtown which housed Federal troops for that specific purpose. You probably know the name….
Posted inStories of Atlanta
Their name reflects their gratitude
The Lord works in mysterious ways, as the saying goes, and, were he here today, the Reverend Frank Quarels would, no doubt, offer his personal testament to that adage.
Posted inStories of Atlanta
It was a big deal for the entire town
There is something undeniably compelling about the shared experience. It’s a human thing. We all have it, that need to be with others. A neuroscientist could probably offer a pretty strong biological reason for what the sociologists call collective behavior. You and I, we don’t usually feel the need to get that deep into the […]
Posted inStories of Atlanta
For a while it was king of the hill
There was a time when movie-goers had a number of choices in downtown Atlanta. From the Loew’s Grand and the Paramount to the 81 and the Roxy, the options on Peachtree Street were plentiful. In the early 20th century, Atlanta boasted the largest movie theater in the Southeast and it’s still in operation today. Only, […]
Posted inStories of Atlanta
What’s your favorite color
They say the human eye can distinguish upwards of 7-million different colors. With so many options, it makes one wonder just how picky must Steve Jobs have been that he had to design his own shade of white because he couldn’t find one he felt worked for his computers.
Posted inStories of Atlanta
A wartime skill finds new life
One of the challenges of our 21st century lifestyle is trying to process the unprecedented amount of information available at any given moment. We are subjected to so much input on so many different topics that it is hard for us to imagine how people got along before the invention of instantaneous communications. It helps, […]
Posted inStories of Atlanta
A vacation paradise on the outskirts of town
One constant that seems to endure no matter how much life changes is the need people feel to “get away.” The vacation is a time-honored tradition that has long been on the minds of Atlanta’s workers. It is as true today as it was in the 1870s when Atlantans discovered a new vacation spot to wash away the memory of the challenges of big city life.
Posted inStories of Atlanta
The birth of a legend
There has been much conversation of late about “fake news” and it seemed like a good time to revisit a story we did about a very “real” news event that happened in Atlanta in 1883.
Posted inStories of Atlanta
In hindsight, it seems obvious
Part of the fun in looking back through time is examining the origins of the things that today we take for granted. Even though it is obvious that there clearly had to be a first for just about everything, that doesn’t make it any less interesting to find out just exactly how a particular “first” went down. So, once again, we pause to consider just exactly who was the first and what had to happen to make it that way in this week’s Stories of Atlanta.
Posted inStories of Atlanta
He was a credit to his profession
Ask anyone in Atlanta what comes to mind when you mention our city’s boxing tradition and chances are you’ll get the name Evander Holyfield. That is assuming the person you are asking doesn’t confuse boxing with wrestling, in which case, you’ll probably get Dusty Rhodes, Rick Flare or Gordon Solie. But it is Evander “The […]
