Fig. 1. St. Mark AME in the foreground of an aerial photograph, looking east toward midtown and downtown Atlanta. (Photo by Danielle Willkens).
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Ruins, Rhetoric, and Renewal: Atlanta’s St. Mark AME
forthcoming in Change Over Time Danielle S. Willkens, Winston Taylor, David Y. Mitchell Located in the heart of Atlanta’s English Avenue neighborhood, St. Mark AME is a little over a century old. Yet, the building witnessed countless changes, including revisions to adjacent street names that have altered the address, shifts in ownership between two religious organizations to its current ownership by a non-profit organization, and dramatic demographic change to the racial and socio-economic composition of its surrounding residents. Nevertheless, the integrity of the building’s stone exterior walls and its role as an icon in the neighborhood remain unchanged (Figure 1). The nearly cubic building is made of Stone Mountain granite, a local blue-grey igneous rock quarried just east of the city. As a building closely associated with the Modern Civil Rights Movement, it may seem contradictory that it shares materiality with the Atlanta rock outcropping Stone Mountain, known as the largest Confederate memorial in the world due to the figures of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson carved into its face.[i] This, however, is just one of the many complexities of St. Mark AME that make it simultaneously a rich case study in postbellum architecture and a building that necessitates nuanced interpretation. This page presents the history of St. Mark AME, its physical and symbolic roles in the neighborhood, and how the building functions as a case study for the challenges of preservation planning and policy that often inhibit work in predominantly African American communities in the United States, especially the South. The building and its multifaceted support network exemplify successful, incremental preservation planning rooted in community-engaged practice. As a case study, St. Mark AME also presents a workflow for successful historic site designation and adaptive reuse advocacy when city, state, and even federal regulations do not facilitate a clear path for conservation and rehabilitation. The story of St. Mark AME is one of ongoing resiliency and the power of community action. The building, now a stone shell, once contained a basement level and a main sanctuary space with an upper gallery. Despite its current condition, the now stabilized ruin is a monument to the craftspeople who constructed it, the congregations that worshipped within its walls, and the visionaries who saw beyond its ruinous condition in the 1990s to imagine a progressive future in the twenty-first century. This article presents the story of St. Mark AME in four parts, prefaced by a transcription of a recorded dialogue between two key figures: Pastor Winston Taylor, an Atlanta native and architect who purchased the building in the 1990s, and David Yoakley Mitchell, the Executive Director of the Atlanta Preservation Center, a non-profit partner integral to saving and restoring the building. |
Preservation Dialogues, part I[2]
Even as a stone shell, why does St. Mark AME matter?
Taylor: You can never minimize the visual component of something. Even if it's in really bad shape…the visual component of seeing something being there versus nothing being there.
Mitchell: When you devalue it, you can no longer say it's significant or important. However, if you say, for example, we know so many things took place inside that structure, so much happened there that you can't devalue that, then those walls become this kind of unique boundary, if you will, of retaining that. It's really important to understand that and so, those walls, architecturally, [are] witnesses. You know, you have witness trees on battlefields; those walls become significant. And to what Winston's saying, the fact that you don't have all these other bells and whistles like you do in other churches, they really went on this way to say look at the building, look at this thing and that, that really kind of gives a different construct to the whole thing.
Taylor: And these churches are more than just churches as David [is] saying, these churches anchor, so you know when you start to look at these type[s] of monumental churches, they were put in strategic places. St. Mark is not just at the center of the community – it is literally the center of the community. You know the trolley [used to] come down, so everything revolved around this place. Without activity, there's no anchor on this corner; the corner just sort of becomes a four-way stop.
Why should St. Mark AME be considered not just a building but a monument?
Taylor: It was a new South statement. This was not an individual church movement, this was the whole new South coming together. You had masons from all over the state, this was that type of statement. This is not just a congregation. In fact, the congregation that was originally there, [Western Heights Baptist Church], was not big enough to do this piece, but they tore down the old wooden church and built a this new one. This was a new South, and they were making [a statement] on the West side. Then they left, and [they] moved to even a more prominent place and built an even more prominent church. But this is the only one [of their buildings] that survived. And then for St. Mark to move in, it was a very similar thing because they had this small wooden church in Vine City. It burned down, and they move[d] into this monument; and then [the congregation] became instrumental to the civil rights movement because of the prominence of this structure. Metropolitan was the larger church, and there were AME churches in Vine City. [As a congregation], there was movement from Old Fourth Ward: St. Mark came out of Big Bethel. And that group went from that little bitty wooden church to a focus of the civil rights movement, even more so than Big Bethel or any other AME church in the city of Atlanta.
Mitchell: And, it has significant architecture, it has certain things…unparalleled. So when you get to the argument as to why it's eligible, valuable, and needing support, you get a discussion of preservation as a whole. My question would be – if it is lost, what could you put there to match the historic site in any way, shape, or fashion? How could you respect history but replace that?
Site Context
In 1919, the English Avenue neighborhood of Atlanta’s Westside welcomed an English-born architect to complete the new Western Heights Baptist Church. Situated on the prominent corner of Kennedy and Chestnut Streets (now 491 Cameron M. Alexander Blvd. at the intersection of James P. Brawley Dr. NW), architect Charles H. Hopson (1865-1941) designed an impressive church structure using local Stone Mountain granite. Although the new building represented the congregation’s commitment to longevity at the site through significant investment in a unique edifice, the shifting demographics of the neighborhood eventually transformed the building’s ownership: thirty years after its construction, Western Heights Baptist Church became St. Mark African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Today, St. Mark AME is a stone shell in a neighborhood that is undergoing substantial financial and formal transitions prompted by neighborhood-level and city policies, as well as conscientious interventions that interrupt the historic fabric of the community, such as large-scale homes and privately-funded resource centers. In this context, St. Mark AME is poised to be the spark that reignites neighborhood redevelopment and sets a precedent for conservation and adaptive reuse in a predominantly African American community. Beyond its fascinating, layered history, the story of St. Mark AME sets forth two critical questions: what is an effective rhetoric for historic preservation when a site has undergone radical changes, and how can an urban ruin be reborn?
English Avenue neighborhood residents and advocates, eager to see positive change in the area, worked with the City to develop the transformative Westside Land Use Framework Plan (2017). This planning document provides guidance for responsible development from zoning changes that encourage mixed-use endeavors to the prioritization of preservation and rehabilitation of historic structures. At the core of this plan is the conservation of St. Mark AME and the reinvention of the stone shell into a secular community resource. Research and documentation, however, are critical: a rehabilitation project cannot happen at the site without a holistic understanding of the building’s history, its transition to a stone shell, and the community-driven interests in its adaptive reuse.
Preservation designation processes at the local, state, and national levels typically rely on guidance from the National Register of Historic Places for seven aspects of integrity: location, setting, design, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association. These definitions of integrity often pose systemic barriers to preserving Black heritage.[3] St. Mark AME epitomizes these challenges: ownership changes that cause a thin archival record, declining conditions in the surrounding neighborhood that interrupt the historical character, physical alterations to the building, and until recently, a lack of verified and published historical research. Although it was established to assist Black communities, even the established metrics of the National Trust’s Preserving Black Churches program exclude St. Mark AME because (1) the church was not originally erected by a Black congregation, (2) the building was not constructed by a Black architect/builder, and (3) the building was not occupied by an active Black congregation for at least 50 years.[4] St. Mark AME serves as a center for neighborhood arts and community engagement, yet, as a stone shell the site does not technically meet the Trust’s definition of a ‘historic building’ but is, instead, defined as a property. Despite these challenges, neighborhood advocates for the church along with Paster Taylor’s Beloved Community, Inc, the Atlanta Preservation Center, Landmark Preservation, Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture, and countless other pro-bono partners secured a City of Atlanta Landmark designation for the site in late 2022 thereby ensuring the structure’s survival. As a community-grounded monument, built and christened with fanfare, St. Mark AME is a model of people-centered architectural development, preservation, and advocacy.
In 1919, the English Avenue neighborhood of Atlanta’s Westside welcomed an English-born architect to complete the new Western Heights Baptist Church. Situated on the prominent corner of Kennedy and Chestnut Streets (now 491 Cameron M. Alexander Blvd. at the intersection of James P. Brawley Dr. NW), architect Charles H. Hopson (1865-1941) designed an impressive church structure using local Stone Mountain granite. Although the new building represented the congregation’s commitment to longevity at the site through significant investment in a unique edifice, the shifting demographics of the neighborhood eventually transformed the building’s ownership: thirty years after its construction, Western Heights Baptist Church became St. Mark African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Today, St. Mark AME is a stone shell in a neighborhood that is undergoing substantial financial and formal transitions prompted by neighborhood-level and city policies, as well as conscientious interventions that interrupt the historic fabric of the community, such as large-scale homes and privately-funded resource centers. In this context, St. Mark AME is poised to be the spark that reignites neighborhood redevelopment and sets a precedent for conservation and adaptive reuse in a predominantly African American community. Beyond its fascinating, layered history, the story of St. Mark AME sets forth two critical questions: what is an effective rhetoric for historic preservation when a site has undergone radical changes, and how can an urban ruin be reborn?
English Avenue neighborhood residents and advocates, eager to see positive change in the area, worked with the City to develop the transformative Westside Land Use Framework Plan (2017). This planning document provides guidance for responsible development from zoning changes that encourage mixed-use endeavors to the prioritization of preservation and rehabilitation of historic structures. At the core of this plan is the conservation of St. Mark AME and the reinvention of the stone shell into a secular community resource. Research and documentation, however, are critical: a rehabilitation project cannot happen at the site without a holistic understanding of the building’s history, its transition to a stone shell, and the community-driven interests in its adaptive reuse.
Preservation designation processes at the local, state, and national levels typically rely on guidance from the National Register of Historic Places for seven aspects of integrity: location, setting, design, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association. These definitions of integrity often pose systemic barriers to preserving Black heritage.[3] St. Mark AME epitomizes these challenges: ownership changes that cause a thin archival record, declining conditions in the surrounding neighborhood that interrupt the historical character, physical alterations to the building, and until recently, a lack of verified and published historical research. Although it was established to assist Black communities, even the established metrics of the National Trust’s Preserving Black Churches program exclude St. Mark AME because (1) the church was not originally erected by a Black congregation, (2) the building was not constructed by a Black architect/builder, and (3) the building was not occupied by an active Black congregation for at least 50 years.[4] St. Mark AME serves as a center for neighborhood arts and community engagement, yet, as a stone shell the site does not technically meet the Trust’s definition of a ‘historic building’ but is, instead, defined as a property. Despite these challenges, neighborhood advocates for the church along with Paster Taylor’s Beloved Community, Inc, the Atlanta Preservation Center, Landmark Preservation, Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture, and countless other pro-bono partners secured a City of Atlanta Landmark designation for the site in late 2022 thereby ensuring the structure’s survival. As a community-grounded monument, built and christened with fanfare, St. Mark AME is a model of people-centered architectural development, preservation, and advocacy.
Fig. 2. A Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from 1911 illustrated the Western Heights Baptist Church site, with author’s annotations. (From the Digital Library of Georgia, accessed 2024).
Neighborhood Transitions
“The rich man’s wealth is his strong city: the destruction of the poor is their poverty.”
Proverbs 10:15
James. W. English, Jr. (1867-1914), recognizing an opportunity for speculative development on the Westside, purchased land in 1891 for a residential community to support Atlanta’s growing industrial economy. With expanding commerce, In the late 19th century, Atlanta’s expanding economy made it the de facto center of the New South. English envisioned an ‘upper westside’ white residential neighborhood. His development work was largely inspired by the work of his father, James W. English, Sr. (1837-1925). English Sr. was born in Louisiana,served in the Confederate Army, and settled in Atlanta in 1865 where he eventually served as mayor from 1881 to 1883. He initiated the city’s first paid fire department and a citywide campaign to pave roads. The latter, a seemingly progressive initiative, was self-serving. As the founder and owner of the Chattahoochee Brick Company (f. 1878), which was located in the northwest section of the city, English Sr.’s company was advantageously positioned to fulfill the neighborhood’s street paving project. Reflective of the Jim Crow south, the company’s projects and profits were built upon the labor of convict leasing, predominantly targeting African American populations.[5]
In the early 1900s, the area known as Western Heights became synonymous with its developers and its main transportation corridor: English Avenue. The neighborhood was not delineated on the 1899 Sanborn maps, but the 1911 edition illustrates a community filled with wooden, single-family cottage and shotgun dwellings, brick-veneered businesses, and twenty-five churches in an approximately sixty-block radius. It was a bustling neighborhood with a dedicated streetcar, the River Line, that ran between the 1880s and 1949.[6] Georgia, in its efforts to maintain clear lines of racial separation, was the first state to pass Jim Crow legislation segregating streetcars in 1891 -- predating Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
In 1904, when the English Avenue neighborhood was a little over a decade old, the First Baptist Church of Atlanta established a mission in the community. Initially, their outreach consisted of a simple tent on the corner of Kennedy and Griffin Streets (marked by the authors on Figure 2), just to the northeast side of the site now occupied by St. Mark AME and identified with the callout on the 1911 Sanborn map.[7] It is unclear how long the mission operated from this temporary structure. The Constitution, one of Atlanta’s premiere newspapers, noted that the congregation began fundraising in early 1910. Within a year, they had built a one-story wooden edifice with a hipped roof at the corner of Kennedy and Chestnut Streets. As indicated on the 1911 Sanborn map, the building had “heat, furnace, lights, gas.” Like the current configuration of St. Mark AME, the church’s main entrance was along Chestnut Street.[8]
In less than two decades, the all-white congregation outgrew the building, and in reaction to the Great Fire of Atlanta in 1917, they commissioned a new parish constructed of more durable materials and seating for 1,450.[9] By 1919, the congregation also needed additional space for their Sunday School initiative as they planned to establish one of the largest in the state.[10] A perspective of the proposed building, as seen from the northwest corner of Kennedy and Chestnut (Figure 3), shows an imposing Neoclassical structure with an English basement that responds to the substantial slope on the site. Lacking a steeple or other signifying ecclesiastical features, the symmetrical western façade with two entrances looks more like an institutional building than a church.[11] The architectural masterpiece, comprised of Stone Mountain granite, would be designed by Charles H. Hopson, a transplanted architect building a portfolio of religious architecture in the city.
Born in Reading, England, Hopson crossed the Atlantic after his apprenticeship with Joseph Greenaway in England. He settled in Nova Scotia and moved progressively southward from Washington D.C. to Selma, Alabama, before arriving in Atlanta, around 1914.[12] His name first appeared in Atlanta newspapers in September 1915, as the architect for a new Methodist Episcopal church and chapel along Ponce de Leon and Piedmont Avenues.[13] When a perspective sketch of the design was published in The Constitution in October 1915, the Tudor Revival brick structure, now the Ponce Presbyterian Church, was described as an innovative and “handsome structure.”[14] By 1921, Hopson was recognized as an established “Atlanta architect, who makes churches a specialty.” He was known for employing local stone in his structures, such as the Tudor Revival Rock Spring Presbyterian Church (1923-1933) quarried from local Cheshire Creek granite.[15] Hopson utilized different styles and materials in his projects and worked for a wide variety of clients. In addition to several Christian commissions, he designed projects for Atlanta’s second-oldest Jewish community, Ahavath Achim.[16]
The Constitution noted that the cornerstone ceremony for Western Heights Baptist Church took place on March 21, 1920, complete with a special Masonic service to celebrate the construction of “the handsomest stone structure of the city” with an estimated cost of $50,000.[17] Rev. W.M. Albert’s goal to have the structure completed by Thanksgiving Day 1920 came to fruition in the fall of 1920, when 2,500 patrons celebrated:
the new church building, almost completed, resting on the crest of a high hill of Stone mountain granite [sic]…the interior is finished with mission oak. The auditorium has a seating capacity of 600, and the balcony seats 300. The choir loft is one of the largest in Atlanta, having seats for 165 singers.[18]
In other reports, the building was described as “a monument to both the sacrificial giving of the people and the loyal leadership of Mr. Albert.”[19]
With minimal setbacks and an unembellished form, the building’s layout and style signified a departure from the linear arrangement of the previous Western Heights Baptist Church on the site (Figure 4). Hopson diverged from the English colonial and Gothic Revival precedents found in the English Avenue neighborhood and introduced an unadorned Mission Revival form. The building’s masonry craftsmanship was evident in the precision of its stone walls, which were two feet thick at their foundations, and the decorative carving of its column capitals, cornices, and modillions along the cornice (Figure 5). Western Heights Baptist church was one of a few notable buildings in the Atlanta metro area constructed of Stone Mountain granite. Others included the Richardsonian Romanesque Westview Cemetery gatehouse (1890) and several monuments within, gateways and retaining walls within Piedmont Park (c. 1895), the Georgia State Capitol foundations and stairs, the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary (1902), and Rhodes Hall (1904), now a Georgia Trust property. Other religious structures constructed of the local granite include the Central Presbyterian Church (1885), the North Avenue Presbyterian Church (1898), the First United Methodist Church (1903), and the famous Big Bethel AME (1923) of Sweet Auburn.
The congregation spent the next two decades paying for the final $65,000 in construction costs and held a dedication ceremony on November 20, 1938.[20] The much-lauded monument, so vividly extolled by the community and in publications, would be abandoned in 1940 and sold a mere decade after its dedication because of “Negro encroachment.”[21] Shifting demographics and disinvestments in the 1930s and 1940s prompted White Flight along English Avenue, and the Western Heights congregation moved to a new building near Maddox Park, at Bankhead Avenue and Woods Street. Unlike their former church’s impressive and well-crafted stone form, the new wood and brick church was a stylistic hodgepodge. It was home to the congregation until 1965. Although the congregation was once rooted to a central Atlanta location, it eventually moved outside the city to Cobb County, and the building along Bankhead Avenue was eventually demolished to make way for the Bankhead MARTA station.
The stone church at the corner of Kennedy and Chestnut Streets sat unoccupied for several years until it was purchased for $75,000 by the African American congregation of St. Mark AME Church. In October 1948, this congregation marched to the stone church from the ruins of their old wooden building located a few blocks south at 33 Chestnut Street. The congregation’s much smaller church in English Avenue’s historically Black neighborhood in Vine City, to the south, suspiciously caught fire on July 3rd (Figure 6). The St. Mark AME congregation was initially founded as a mission of Big Bethel AME, but after the congregation took over the Stone Mountain granite building, it grew exponentially and eventually became one of Atlanta’s most populated AME churches. It hosted several large gatherings for the community, such as the Atlanta-North Georgia annual conferences and the midterm graduations of Booker T. Washington High School, the state’s first public high school for Black students.
The congregation altered the northwest section of the façade in May 1969 by placing a commemorative granite plaque alongside the insertion of the 1895 cornerstone from their original church at 33 Chestnut Street. Despite the excitement over a new home for the congregation, substantial changes to the area were imminent. The streetcar line closed in 1949, houses fell into disrepair, and racial tensions in the neighborhood were high. Georgia’s educational system maintained its ‘separate but equal’ policies following Brown v. Board of Education (1954) using equalization schools like English Avenue Elementary School (1911).[22] The school, located three blocks north of St. Mark AME, was initially built for the children of the area’s white working-class residents. Changing neighborhood demographics in the 1940s led to a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawsuit in pursuit of integration: although now the racial majority in the English Avenue neighborhood, Black students were barred from the English Avenue Elementary School and forced to attend the overcrowded Gray Street Elementary, over a mile away. The lawsuit did not lead to integration, but it did prompt a switch in the racial association of English Avenue Elementary School: in 1950, the Atlanta Public School system designated the it a ‘Black only’ school (identified in blue, Figure 7).[23] Segregationist policies resulted in a number of detrimental effects including substantial overcrowding, underfunding, and a lack of maintenance. When English Avenue Elementary School was finally slated for desegregation, a bomb exploded outside of the school’s southwest corner in December 1960. Desegregation was violently opposed by white racists.
The St. Mark AME congregation remained in their church until 1976. Poor public transportation infrastructure and inadequate parking led them to relocate outside the newly constructed Interstate-285 loop, on Campbellton Road. The stone sanctuary, once again abandoned, would suffer years of decline. The abandoned building became a focal point within “The Bluff,” a notorious area coined in newspapers and magazines as Atlanta’s ‘open-market drug bazaar.’ The area even made an appearance in Tom Wolfe’s 1998 satire about the city and its post-Olympic haze:
Georgia Tech's all-American football star, a running back named Fareek Fanon, constantly referred to in the newspapers and on television as Fareek ''the Cannon" Fanon, a local boy, the proudest product of one of Atlanta's most run-down areas, the Bluff, in a neighborhood known as English Avenue.” [24] Although once a significant icon and point of pride for English Avenue residents, white in the early twentieth century and Black in the midcentury, the building became a symbol of an under-served and unhealthy community.
“The rich man’s wealth is his strong city: the destruction of the poor is their poverty.”
Proverbs 10:15
James. W. English, Jr. (1867-1914), recognizing an opportunity for speculative development on the Westside, purchased land in 1891 for a residential community to support Atlanta’s growing industrial economy. With expanding commerce, In the late 19th century, Atlanta’s expanding economy made it the de facto center of the New South. English envisioned an ‘upper westside’ white residential neighborhood. His development work was largely inspired by the work of his father, James W. English, Sr. (1837-1925). English Sr. was born in Louisiana,served in the Confederate Army, and settled in Atlanta in 1865 where he eventually served as mayor from 1881 to 1883. He initiated the city’s first paid fire department and a citywide campaign to pave roads. The latter, a seemingly progressive initiative, was self-serving. As the founder and owner of the Chattahoochee Brick Company (f. 1878), which was located in the northwest section of the city, English Sr.’s company was advantageously positioned to fulfill the neighborhood’s street paving project. Reflective of the Jim Crow south, the company’s projects and profits were built upon the labor of convict leasing, predominantly targeting African American populations.[5]
In the early 1900s, the area known as Western Heights became synonymous with its developers and its main transportation corridor: English Avenue. The neighborhood was not delineated on the 1899 Sanborn maps, but the 1911 edition illustrates a community filled with wooden, single-family cottage and shotgun dwellings, brick-veneered businesses, and twenty-five churches in an approximately sixty-block radius. It was a bustling neighborhood with a dedicated streetcar, the River Line, that ran between the 1880s and 1949.[6] Georgia, in its efforts to maintain clear lines of racial separation, was the first state to pass Jim Crow legislation segregating streetcars in 1891 -- predating Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
In 1904, when the English Avenue neighborhood was a little over a decade old, the First Baptist Church of Atlanta established a mission in the community. Initially, their outreach consisted of a simple tent on the corner of Kennedy and Griffin Streets (marked by the authors on Figure 2), just to the northeast side of the site now occupied by St. Mark AME and identified with the callout on the 1911 Sanborn map.[7] It is unclear how long the mission operated from this temporary structure. The Constitution, one of Atlanta’s premiere newspapers, noted that the congregation began fundraising in early 1910. Within a year, they had built a one-story wooden edifice with a hipped roof at the corner of Kennedy and Chestnut Streets. As indicated on the 1911 Sanborn map, the building had “heat, furnace, lights, gas.” Like the current configuration of St. Mark AME, the church’s main entrance was along Chestnut Street.[8]
In less than two decades, the all-white congregation outgrew the building, and in reaction to the Great Fire of Atlanta in 1917, they commissioned a new parish constructed of more durable materials and seating for 1,450.[9] By 1919, the congregation also needed additional space for their Sunday School initiative as they planned to establish one of the largest in the state.[10] A perspective of the proposed building, as seen from the northwest corner of Kennedy and Chestnut (Figure 3), shows an imposing Neoclassical structure with an English basement that responds to the substantial slope on the site. Lacking a steeple or other signifying ecclesiastical features, the symmetrical western façade with two entrances looks more like an institutional building than a church.[11] The architectural masterpiece, comprised of Stone Mountain granite, would be designed by Charles H. Hopson, a transplanted architect building a portfolio of religious architecture in the city.
Born in Reading, England, Hopson crossed the Atlantic after his apprenticeship with Joseph Greenaway in England. He settled in Nova Scotia and moved progressively southward from Washington D.C. to Selma, Alabama, before arriving in Atlanta, around 1914.[12] His name first appeared in Atlanta newspapers in September 1915, as the architect for a new Methodist Episcopal church and chapel along Ponce de Leon and Piedmont Avenues.[13] When a perspective sketch of the design was published in The Constitution in October 1915, the Tudor Revival brick structure, now the Ponce Presbyterian Church, was described as an innovative and “handsome structure.”[14] By 1921, Hopson was recognized as an established “Atlanta architect, who makes churches a specialty.” He was known for employing local stone in his structures, such as the Tudor Revival Rock Spring Presbyterian Church (1923-1933) quarried from local Cheshire Creek granite.[15] Hopson utilized different styles and materials in his projects and worked for a wide variety of clients. In addition to several Christian commissions, he designed projects for Atlanta’s second-oldest Jewish community, Ahavath Achim.[16]
The Constitution noted that the cornerstone ceremony for Western Heights Baptist Church took place on March 21, 1920, complete with a special Masonic service to celebrate the construction of “the handsomest stone structure of the city” with an estimated cost of $50,000.[17] Rev. W.M. Albert’s goal to have the structure completed by Thanksgiving Day 1920 came to fruition in the fall of 1920, when 2,500 patrons celebrated:
the new church building, almost completed, resting on the crest of a high hill of Stone mountain granite [sic]…the interior is finished with mission oak. The auditorium has a seating capacity of 600, and the balcony seats 300. The choir loft is one of the largest in Atlanta, having seats for 165 singers.[18]
In other reports, the building was described as “a monument to both the sacrificial giving of the people and the loyal leadership of Mr. Albert.”[19]
With minimal setbacks and an unembellished form, the building’s layout and style signified a departure from the linear arrangement of the previous Western Heights Baptist Church on the site (Figure 4). Hopson diverged from the English colonial and Gothic Revival precedents found in the English Avenue neighborhood and introduced an unadorned Mission Revival form. The building’s masonry craftsmanship was evident in the precision of its stone walls, which were two feet thick at their foundations, and the decorative carving of its column capitals, cornices, and modillions along the cornice (Figure 5). Western Heights Baptist church was one of a few notable buildings in the Atlanta metro area constructed of Stone Mountain granite. Others included the Richardsonian Romanesque Westview Cemetery gatehouse (1890) and several monuments within, gateways and retaining walls within Piedmont Park (c. 1895), the Georgia State Capitol foundations and stairs, the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary (1902), and Rhodes Hall (1904), now a Georgia Trust property. Other religious structures constructed of the local granite include the Central Presbyterian Church (1885), the North Avenue Presbyterian Church (1898), the First United Methodist Church (1903), and the famous Big Bethel AME (1923) of Sweet Auburn.
The congregation spent the next two decades paying for the final $65,000 in construction costs and held a dedication ceremony on November 20, 1938.[20] The much-lauded monument, so vividly extolled by the community and in publications, would be abandoned in 1940 and sold a mere decade after its dedication because of “Negro encroachment.”[21] Shifting demographics and disinvestments in the 1930s and 1940s prompted White Flight along English Avenue, and the Western Heights congregation moved to a new building near Maddox Park, at Bankhead Avenue and Woods Street. Unlike their former church’s impressive and well-crafted stone form, the new wood and brick church was a stylistic hodgepodge. It was home to the congregation until 1965. Although the congregation was once rooted to a central Atlanta location, it eventually moved outside the city to Cobb County, and the building along Bankhead Avenue was eventually demolished to make way for the Bankhead MARTA station.
The stone church at the corner of Kennedy and Chestnut Streets sat unoccupied for several years until it was purchased for $75,000 by the African American congregation of St. Mark AME Church. In October 1948, this congregation marched to the stone church from the ruins of their old wooden building located a few blocks south at 33 Chestnut Street. The congregation’s much smaller church in English Avenue’s historically Black neighborhood in Vine City, to the south, suspiciously caught fire on July 3rd (Figure 6). The St. Mark AME congregation was initially founded as a mission of Big Bethel AME, but after the congregation took over the Stone Mountain granite building, it grew exponentially and eventually became one of Atlanta’s most populated AME churches. It hosted several large gatherings for the community, such as the Atlanta-North Georgia annual conferences and the midterm graduations of Booker T. Washington High School, the state’s first public high school for Black students.
The congregation altered the northwest section of the façade in May 1969 by placing a commemorative granite plaque alongside the insertion of the 1895 cornerstone from their original church at 33 Chestnut Street. Despite the excitement over a new home for the congregation, substantial changes to the area were imminent. The streetcar line closed in 1949, houses fell into disrepair, and racial tensions in the neighborhood were high. Georgia’s educational system maintained its ‘separate but equal’ policies following Brown v. Board of Education (1954) using equalization schools like English Avenue Elementary School (1911).[22] The school, located three blocks north of St. Mark AME, was initially built for the children of the area’s white working-class residents. Changing neighborhood demographics in the 1940s led to a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawsuit in pursuit of integration: although now the racial majority in the English Avenue neighborhood, Black students were barred from the English Avenue Elementary School and forced to attend the overcrowded Gray Street Elementary, over a mile away. The lawsuit did not lead to integration, but it did prompt a switch in the racial association of English Avenue Elementary School: in 1950, the Atlanta Public School system designated the it a ‘Black only’ school (identified in blue, Figure 7).[23] Segregationist policies resulted in a number of detrimental effects including substantial overcrowding, underfunding, and a lack of maintenance. When English Avenue Elementary School was finally slated for desegregation, a bomb exploded outside of the school’s southwest corner in December 1960. Desegregation was violently opposed by white racists.
The St. Mark AME congregation remained in their church until 1976. Poor public transportation infrastructure and inadequate parking led them to relocate outside the newly constructed Interstate-285 loop, on Campbellton Road. The stone sanctuary, once again abandoned, would suffer years of decline. The abandoned building became a focal point within “The Bluff,” a notorious area coined in newspapers and magazines as Atlanta’s ‘open-market drug bazaar.’ The area even made an appearance in Tom Wolfe’s 1998 satire about the city and its post-Olympic haze:
Georgia Tech's all-American football star, a running back named Fareek Fanon, constantly referred to in the newspapers and on television as Fareek ''the Cannon" Fanon, a local boy, the proudest product of one of Atlanta's most run-down areas, the Bluff, in a neighborhood known as English Avenue.” [24] Although once a significant icon and point of pride for English Avenue residents, white in the early twentieth century and Black in the midcentury, the building became a symbol of an under-served and unhealthy community.
Fig. 4. West (left) and north elevation of St. Mark AME, prepared for the Historic American Building Survey by Georgia Tech faculty sponsor Danielle Willkens and student field team Weston Byerly, Thomas Bray, Griffin Fish, and Ben Ullrich. (From Library of Congress, year accessed 2024, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/item/ga1184/)
Fig. 7. St. Mark AME, identified in red, and English Avenue Elementary School, in blue, within the English Avenue Neighborhood boundary. (Map from Georgia Tech’s Flourishing Communities Collaborative and Danielle Willkens)
St. Mark AME, Reborn
In the early 1990s, a fire and general lack of maintenance, paired with illicit use of the building, accelerated the deterioration of the interior and the near collapse of the roof at St. Mark AME. In 1995, pastor, architect, and Atlanta native Winston L. Taylor, Jr. purchased the site and removed the wholly marred interior and fractured roof, leaving the Stone Mountain granite shell. Over five feet of dirt fill was added to the now-open interior to stabilize the walls and prevent water infiltration in the foundations. Water and power services for the building, stripped since the late 1970s, were restored in 2019, allowing the site to host community events such as jazz nights, weddings, and Phoenix Flies, a month-long celebration of architecture and historic preservation through tours and workshops, led by the Atlanta Preservation Center. In 2021, the site became home to a colorful pollinator garden in partnership with Trees Atlanta, the Atlanta Botanical Garden, and St. Mark AME has been reborn as a recognizable and vibrant anchor in the community. Its resiliency, afforded by incremental grassroots preservation efforts, embodies the beloved community and actively works against the Triple Evils identified by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: poverty, racism, and militarism.[25] The restored building serves as an icon and resource for the community.
The plans to reinvigorate English Avenue through community-based investment are now well underway. Today, approximately 44% of homes in the surrounding English Avenue neighborhood are vacant, and two-thirds of its residents live below the federal poverty line. Additional, urgent neighborhood concerns include the existing service desert (e.g., broadband internet, food security, energy burdens), stormwater flooding exacerbated by climate change, and mounting external development pressures. Despite these challenges, the neighborhood is poised for positive change, and much of this work centers around St. Mark AME. The 2017 Westside Land Use Framework Plan identifies the church as an anchor site in a broader vision of neighborhood regeneration. It specifies adaptive use of the church alongside the creation of a neighborhood market and other mixed-use developments. The fully approved planning document is now ready for implementation.[26] At the heart of this redevelopment plan is the intersection of Cameron M. Alexander Blvd. (formerly Kennedy Street) and James P. Brawley Dr. NW (formerly Chestnut Street), with the St. Mark AME site anchoring the southeast corner.
The street name changes around St. Mark AME are an important part of the history and interpretation of the site since these reestablish connections to local African American history. Kennedy Street was changed to Cameron M. Alexander Blvd in 2010, and Chestnut Street to James P. Brawley Drive, NW in 1985. Cameron M. Alexander (1932-2018) was born in Atlanta’s Grady Hospital, attended the city’s pioneering Booker T. Washington High School, and received a BA and Master of Divinity from Morehouse. As an American Baptist minister at Antioch Baptist Church North (est.1969), he grew the congregation from less than 500 to 14,000. Unlike other religious leaders in the area, he invested in the English Avenue community amid the turmoil of the early 1990s by initiating a new construction at the intersection of Kennedy and Northside Drive to house an expanded worship center, administrative complex, and Antioch Urban Ministries. He was President of the General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia from 1975 to 2004 and a Life Member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). His lifetime of service to the community was recognized in 2009 when he was inducted into the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame and the Black College Alumni Hall of Fame. James P. Brawley (1894-1985) was born in Texas and taught in Mississippi before settling in Atlanta for his MA in Religious Education at Clark University. He became the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in the fall of 1926. He served as the President of Clark from 1941 until 1965, maintaining an active record of publications about African American educational history. To omit these figures from the story of St. Mark AME is to bypass a rich network of support and resilience within the history of the Westside, often overlooked in favor of a reductive attitude towards the English Avenue neighborhood.
In the early 1990s, a fire and general lack of maintenance, paired with illicit use of the building, accelerated the deterioration of the interior and the near collapse of the roof at St. Mark AME. In 1995, pastor, architect, and Atlanta native Winston L. Taylor, Jr. purchased the site and removed the wholly marred interior and fractured roof, leaving the Stone Mountain granite shell. Over five feet of dirt fill was added to the now-open interior to stabilize the walls and prevent water infiltration in the foundations. Water and power services for the building, stripped since the late 1970s, were restored in 2019, allowing the site to host community events such as jazz nights, weddings, and Phoenix Flies, a month-long celebration of architecture and historic preservation through tours and workshops, led by the Atlanta Preservation Center. In 2021, the site became home to a colorful pollinator garden in partnership with Trees Atlanta, the Atlanta Botanical Garden, and St. Mark AME has been reborn as a recognizable and vibrant anchor in the community. Its resiliency, afforded by incremental grassroots preservation efforts, embodies the beloved community and actively works against the Triple Evils identified by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: poverty, racism, and militarism.[25] The restored building serves as an icon and resource for the community.
The plans to reinvigorate English Avenue through community-based investment are now well underway. Today, approximately 44% of homes in the surrounding English Avenue neighborhood are vacant, and two-thirds of its residents live below the federal poverty line. Additional, urgent neighborhood concerns include the existing service desert (e.g., broadband internet, food security, energy burdens), stormwater flooding exacerbated by climate change, and mounting external development pressures. Despite these challenges, the neighborhood is poised for positive change, and much of this work centers around St. Mark AME. The 2017 Westside Land Use Framework Plan identifies the church as an anchor site in a broader vision of neighborhood regeneration. It specifies adaptive use of the church alongside the creation of a neighborhood market and other mixed-use developments. The fully approved planning document is now ready for implementation.[26] At the heart of this redevelopment plan is the intersection of Cameron M. Alexander Blvd. (formerly Kennedy Street) and James P. Brawley Dr. NW (formerly Chestnut Street), with the St. Mark AME site anchoring the southeast corner.
The street name changes around St. Mark AME are an important part of the history and interpretation of the site since these reestablish connections to local African American history. Kennedy Street was changed to Cameron M. Alexander Blvd in 2010, and Chestnut Street to James P. Brawley Drive, NW in 1985. Cameron M. Alexander (1932-2018) was born in Atlanta’s Grady Hospital, attended the city’s pioneering Booker T. Washington High School, and received a BA and Master of Divinity from Morehouse. As an American Baptist minister at Antioch Baptist Church North (est.1969), he grew the congregation from less than 500 to 14,000. Unlike other religious leaders in the area, he invested in the English Avenue community amid the turmoil of the early 1990s by initiating a new construction at the intersection of Kennedy and Northside Drive to house an expanded worship center, administrative complex, and Antioch Urban Ministries. He was President of the General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia from 1975 to 2004 and a Life Member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). His lifetime of service to the community was recognized in 2009 when he was inducted into the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame and the Black College Alumni Hall of Fame. James P. Brawley (1894-1985) was born in Texas and taught in Mississippi before settling in Atlanta for his MA in Religious Education at Clark University. He became the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in the fall of 1926. He served as the President of Clark from 1941 until 1965, maintaining an active record of publications about African American educational history. To omit these figures from the story of St. Mark AME is to bypass a rich network of support and resilience within the history of the Westside, often overlooked in favor of a reductive attitude towards the English Avenue neighborhood.
Atlanta Preservation Frameworks
St. Mark AME reflects the neighborhood’s history of spatial racial and economic segregation. Initially developed for white, working-class residents, with respectable single-family housing and well-supported schools, the neighborhood was negatively transformed by racist attitudes as Black residents moved into the area. ‘White flight’ and Jim Crow policies of segregation led to decades of government and private sector disinvestment.[27] Today, the architectural, spatial, and social history of English Avenue is at risk of demolition and redevelopment due to a lack of public awareness regarding the neighborhood’s deep, layered history and the absence of an established preservation framework.[28]
For many early twentieth-century neighborhoods, especially in systemically underserved and underfunded areas, the established preservation protocols are not fesible: sites are not interested in museum or heritage tourism programs, there is no funding to support regular maintenance, let alone comprehensive historic district surveys, and many of the buildings that could contribute to historic districts have changed in form, materiality, or integrity due economic necessity. Additionally, when a neighborhood has a disproportionate energy burden (e.g., higher electricity bills, poor insulation leading to compromised thermal conditions, aging and inefficient appliances, etc.), or lacks basic infrastructure such as clean water, affordable electricity, or internet, the preservation of historic building fabric often falls to the end of a site’s financial priorities. The result is that historic community assets are not documented or assessed; the potential for local, state, or federal historic register listings is not recognized; tax incentives and grants are not actualized; and structures that were once representative of a community’s character fall into further disrepair or are demolished altogether. This perpetuates an issue for African American communities across the nation - erasure in the historic built environment. In such cases where other immediate needs precede preservation, how can the existing built environment be modified to meet contemporary needs and expectations? Is preservation only available in the toolkit of a well-developed and securely funded area? If this is the case, the US will continue to erase the impactful and significant built histories and legacies of marginalized populations.
Several blocks south of St. Mark AME, in the Vine City neighborhood, two ongoing restoration and rehabilitation projects demonstrate the preservation spectrum for Atlanta sites tied to African American history and the Modern Civil Rights Movement: Historic West Hunter Street Baptist Church (1906) and the Paschal Brothers’ Restaurant (est. 1947). The Vine City neighborhood was the historically Black counterpart to English’s white Western Heights development on the Westside. The east-west spine of the neighborhood operated along Hunter Street, named for one of the city’s largest slaveholders, and in 1976 it was fortuitously renamed M.L.K, Jr. Drive SW to acknowledge King’s roots in the city and his legacy.[29] This street also comprised a significant portion of his funeral procession in 1968: on April 9, 50,000 mourners went from King’s church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Sweet Auburn to the Morehouse campus in the southwest.
The Historic West Hunter Street Baptist Church at 775 Hunter Street NW, now 785 MLK, Jr. Drive SW, was known as a ‘spiritual home of the civil rights movement’ under the direction of Rev. Dr. Ralph David Abernathy. Located on the same north-south street as St. Mark AME, Brawley Drive, West Hunter Street Baptist Church is a much smaller Silver Cloud Imperial Georgia granite building. The Gothic Revival church has a simple nave, an interior gallery above the entryway on the south side, and a basement. The stained-glass windows were added in 1953.[30] Although the congregation moved to a new building in 1953 and then to its current location in southwest Atlanta in 1973, Historic West Hunter Street Baptist Church benefitted from the advocacy of locals and elected officials after it fell into severe disrepair between the 1980s and 2008. It was purchased by the Ralph David Abernathy III Foundation. In 2014, directed by Public Law 113-291, the National Park Service undertook a Special Resource Study for the building to determine its eligibility to be added to the National Park system. More than eight million dollars of investment support the study, restoration, and rehabilitation of the site from both the National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights Grant (since 2017) and a $4-million federal Community Project Funding Grant (2023).
Although connected to similar, significant figures in the Modern Civil Rights Movement, a much larger site just two blocks west of the Historic West Hunter Street Baptist Church has not benefitted from the same preservation advocacy, and its future is precarious, at best. In 1947, brothers Robert (1908-1997) and James (1920-2008) Paschal opened a small sandwich shop at 831 Hunter Street, and a decade later, their bustling restaurant moved to a new location at 837 Hunter Street NW to accommodate more customers. First cited in the 1950 edition of The Green Book, the Paschal Brothers’ Restaurant would be a regular feature within the guide until the final edition of the Travelers’ Green Book: 1966-67 International Edition for Vacation without Aggravation. By this point, the enterprise had blossomed into an entertainment complex with a jazz club and the city’s first Black-owned hotel, known as the Paschal’s Motor Hotel and Restaurant. Renowned for its food and hospitality, it was a haven for Black travelers, and those arrested at peaceful sit-ins or marches could receive a free, hot meal after their release, no matter the time of day. As a secure place for civil rights leaders to gather, Paschal’s became known as “Black City Hall.” In a different form of communion, Black and white patrons gathered in the same dining room, a radical configuration for the typical landscape of the segregated South. Paschal’s fostered community through repast and sustenance could be found in celebration and reflection. John Lewis noted he first ate at the restaurant when he arrived in Atlanta from Alabama, working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.[31] Lewis also stated that Paschal’s was the last place he saw Martin Luther King, Jr. alive.
Once a Westside Atlanta institution that served generations of progressive advocates and policymakers, the site of Paschal’s Motor Hotel and Restaurant is barely recognizable. Only the skeletal frame of the roadside sign remains, and debris litters the shuttered balconies of the International Style hotel. In 1996, Clark Atlanta University purchased the famous site, operating the restaurant and a dormitory in the former hotel until 2003. Barely escaping the wrecking ball and ongoing litigation, the site continues to move towards demolition by neglect, but it is identified within Clark Atlanta’s ongoing redevelopment plans. Although the historic site is in peril, Paschal’s is still thriving as a business: the brothers franchised to the Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport in 1980, partnering with Herman J. Russell’s Concessions International, and in 2002, James and Herman opened a new location in Atlanta’s Castleberry Hill. The story of Paschal’s, an icon within Atlanta’s culinary and social narrative, highlights a disconnect between in-situ preservation and historical interpretation in the city. The widely-known business is recognized as a prototype for Black entrepreneurialism, but the historic fabric of the original Motor Hotel and Restaurant is undervalued and unprotected.
When studied together, the Historic West Hunter Street Baptist Church and Paschal’s Motor Hotel and Restaurant in the Vine City neighborhood and English Avenue’s St. Mark AME demonstrate the need for Atlanta to apply consistent, proactive, and conscientious preservation action at sites related to African American. The city is often referred to as the cradle of the Modern Civil Rights Movement, yet key sites have already been demolished and others are slipping away.[32] Since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Atlanta has been recognized as the city of the New South yet it is, simultaneously, a city riddled with a legacy of anti-preservation. As an urban forest and a city of distinct neighborhoods, Atlanta prioritized development over preserved memory, especially in historically Black neighborhoods.[33] Within its rapid growth, complex or contested sites were often discarded or devalued. This attitude of transience in the built environment was even embodied in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936):
St. Mark AME reflects the neighborhood’s history of spatial racial and economic segregation. Initially developed for white, working-class residents, with respectable single-family housing and well-supported schools, the neighborhood was negatively transformed by racist attitudes as Black residents moved into the area. ‘White flight’ and Jim Crow policies of segregation led to decades of government and private sector disinvestment.[27] Today, the architectural, spatial, and social history of English Avenue is at risk of demolition and redevelopment due to a lack of public awareness regarding the neighborhood’s deep, layered history and the absence of an established preservation framework.[28]
For many early twentieth-century neighborhoods, especially in systemically underserved and underfunded areas, the established preservation protocols are not fesible: sites are not interested in museum or heritage tourism programs, there is no funding to support regular maintenance, let alone comprehensive historic district surveys, and many of the buildings that could contribute to historic districts have changed in form, materiality, or integrity due economic necessity. Additionally, when a neighborhood has a disproportionate energy burden (e.g., higher electricity bills, poor insulation leading to compromised thermal conditions, aging and inefficient appliances, etc.), or lacks basic infrastructure such as clean water, affordable electricity, or internet, the preservation of historic building fabric often falls to the end of a site’s financial priorities. The result is that historic community assets are not documented or assessed; the potential for local, state, or federal historic register listings is not recognized; tax incentives and grants are not actualized; and structures that were once representative of a community’s character fall into further disrepair or are demolished altogether. This perpetuates an issue for African American communities across the nation - erasure in the historic built environment. In such cases where other immediate needs precede preservation, how can the existing built environment be modified to meet contemporary needs and expectations? Is preservation only available in the toolkit of a well-developed and securely funded area? If this is the case, the US will continue to erase the impactful and significant built histories and legacies of marginalized populations.
Several blocks south of St. Mark AME, in the Vine City neighborhood, two ongoing restoration and rehabilitation projects demonstrate the preservation spectrum for Atlanta sites tied to African American history and the Modern Civil Rights Movement: Historic West Hunter Street Baptist Church (1906) and the Paschal Brothers’ Restaurant (est. 1947). The Vine City neighborhood was the historically Black counterpart to English’s white Western Heights development on the Westside. The east-west spine of the neighborhood operated along Hunter Street, named for one of the city’s largest slaveholders, and in 1976 it was fortuitously renamed M.L.K, Jr. Drive SW to acknowledge King’s roots in the city and his legacy.[29] This street also comprised a significant portion of his funeral procession in 1968: on April 9, 50,000 mourners went from King’s church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Sweet Auburn to the Morehouse campus in the southwest.
The Historic West Hunter Street Baptist Church at 775 Hunter Street NW, now 785 MLK, Jr. Drive SW, was known as a ‘spiritual home of the civil rights movement’ under the direction of Rev. Dr. Ralph David Abernathy. Located on the same north-south street as St. Mark AME, Brawley Drive, West Hunter Street Baptist Church is a much smaller Silver Cloud Imperial Georgia granite building. The Gothic Revival church has a simple nave, an interior gallery above the entryway on the south side, and a basement. The stained-glass windows were added in 1953.[30] Although the congregation moved to a new building in 1953 and then to its current location in southwest Atlanta in 1973, Historic West Hunter Street Baptist Church benefitted from the advocacy of locals and elected officials after it fell into severe disrepair between the 1980s and 2008. It was purchased by the Ralph David Abernathy III Foundation. In 2014, directed by Public Law 113-291, the National Park Service undertook a Special Resource Study for the building to determine its eligibility to be added to the National Park system. More than eight million dollars of investment support the study, restoration, and rehabilitation of the site from both the National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights Grant (since 2017) and a $4-million federal Community Project Funding Grant (2023).
Although connected to similar, significant figures in the Modern Civil Rights Movement, a much larger site just two blocks west of the Historic West Hunter Street Baptist Church has not benefitted from the same preservation advocacy, and its future is precarious, at best. In 1947, brothers Robert (1908-1997) and James (1920-2008) Paschal opened a small sandwich shop at 831 Hunter Street, and a decade later, their bustling restaurant moved to a new location at 837 Hunter Street NW to accommodate more customers. First cited in the 1950 edition of The Green Book, the Paschal Brothers’ Restaurant would be a regular feature within the guide until the final edition of the Travelers’ Green Book: 1966-67 International Edition for Vacation without Aggravation. By this point, the enterprise had blossomed into an entertainment complex with a jazz club and the city’s first Black-owned hotel, known as the Paschal’s Motor Hotel and Restaurant. Renowned for its food and hospitality, it was a haven for Black travelers, and those arrested at peaceful sit-ins or marches could receive a free, hot meal after their release, no matter the time of day. As a secure place for civil rights leaders to gather, Paschal’s became known as “Black City Hall.” In a different form of communion, Black and white patrons gathered in the same dining room, a radical configuration for the typical landscape of the segregated South. Paschal’s fostered community through repast and sustenance could be found in celebration and reflection. John Lewis noted he first ate at the restaurant when he arrived in Atlanta from Alabama, working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.[31] Lewis also stated that Paschal’s was the last place he saw Martin Luther King, Jr. alive.
Once a Westside Atlanta institution that served generations of progressive advocates and policymakers, the site of Paschal’s Motor Hotel and Restaurant is barely recognizable. Only the skeletal frame of the roadside sign remains, and debris litters the shuttered balconies of the International Style hotel. In 1996, Clark Atlanta University purchased the famous site, operating the restaurant and a dormitory in the former hotel until 2003. Barely escaping the wrecking ball and ongoing litigation, the site continues to move towards demolition by neglect, but it is identified within Clark Atlanta’s ongoing redevelopment plans. Although the historic site is in peril, Paschal’s is still thriving as a business: the brothers franchised to the Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport in 1980, partnering with Herman J. Russell’s Concessions International, and in 2002, James and Herman opened a new location in Atlanta’s Castleberry Hill. The story of Paschal’s, an icon within Atlanta’s culinary and social narrative, highlights a disconnect between in-situ preservation and historical interpretation in the city. The widely-known business is recognized as a prototype for Black entrepreneurialism, but the historic fabric of the original Motor Hotel and Restaurant is undervalued and unprotected.
When studied together, the Historic West Hunter Street Baptist Church and Paschal’s Motor Hotel and Restaurant in the Vine City neighborhood and English Avenue’s St. Mark AME demonstrate the need for Atlanta to apply consistent, proactive, and conscientious preservation action at sites related to African American. The city is often referred to as the cradle of the Modern Civil Rights Movement, yet key sites have already been demolished and others are slipping away.[32] Since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Atlanta has been recognized as the city of the New South yet it is, simultaneously, a city riddled with a legacy of anti-preservation. As an urban forest and a city of distinct neighborhoods, Atlanta prioritized development over preserved memory, especially in historically Black neighborhoods.[33] Within its rapid growth, complex or contested sites were often discarded or devalued. This attitude of transience in the built environment was even embodied in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936):
Scarlett always liked Atlanta for the very same reasons that made Savannah, Augusta,
and Macon condemn it. Like herself, the town was a mixture of the old and the new in
Georgia, in which the old often came off second best in its conflicts with the self-willed and vigorous new.[34]
When the film premiered on December 15, 1939, even the uncanny Moorish 'movie palace' of the Fox Theatre (b.1928) became a chameleon in the city: a temporary façade transformed the theatre's elevation along Peachtree Street into an antebellum mansion with Tara's signature columns and pediment.
Atlanta’s architectural dysphoria and rapid growth after the Civil War meant that the city’s development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was eclectic. Unlike many other cities in the United States that had neighborhoods closely associated with immigrant populations, Atlanta’s neighborhoods developed into a binary: white areas and Black areas. Yet, while white neighborhoods were actively protected with historic district listings following enthusiasm for the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act, Black neighborhoods were being demolished. For example, east of Downtown Atlanta, the Fulton Bag & Cotton Mill (founded 1881; closed 1977) and its adjacent residential area known as Cabbagetown, historically home to white laborers from Appalachia, were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 as a historic district and in 1997 it became Atlanta's first Landmark District. Almost directly to the west, a Black community saw a very different preservation outcome: the precisely detailed modernist blocks of University Homes (1937) were drastically altered in the 1980s, despite being part of the Atlanta University Historic District, and these changes later provided the rationale for the demolition of the site in 2009 due to compromised historical integrity.[35]
Although examined primarily through a literary lens, the work of Katherine McKittrick deftly explores the concepts of subjective racial geographies that skew perceptions of place, community, and significance.[36] Her methodology directly applies to the implicit biases within preservation practices in the United States. It is no coincidence that the preservation movement began in the last tumultuous years of the antebellum era, with the Mount Vernon Ladies Association saving George Washington’s Potomac plantation, and the movement was codified through private endeavors after Reconstruction was killed and the Jim Crow era blossomed.
As demonstrated by sites in Atlanta, there is often a logic problem within many local, state, and national preservation requirements in the United States. For example, the significance of a site often hinges on its integrity. Yet, how can a preservation policy be equitable or inclusive when historical financing and development studies reveal the presence of de jure and de facto segregation that directly impact the quality, maintenance, and protection of the built landscape in minority communities? Although the most critical preservation protections are typically associated with local designations, most grant and tax rebate opportunities require that projects have state or national preservation designations.
When assessing St. Mark AME from an integrity standpoint, an initial review of the structure by the city deemed that it was ineligible as a ‘landmark building’ because it no longer had a roof. However, as historic drawings and photographs illustrate, the building’s roof was never a significant feature of its form or impactful to the sightlines from the nearby streets. Furthermore, unlike many churches, the building did not have a steeple. Therefore, the building’s distinctive architecture was tied to its mosaic stone walls; and these walls are very much intact, and they now fortify a community greenspace and butterfly sanctuary instead of rows of pews.
Taylor, the Atlanta Preservation Center, Georgia Tech, and other organizations lobbied the city to designate St. Mark AME an Atlanta Landmark under a new category of ‘ruin.’ The category references existing North American and European sites as precedents for preserving open structures, such as Mesa Verde and Casa Grande in the US, the border abbeys of Great Britain, and war-torn structures like the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, Germany.
Within the language of Atlanta’s historic designation codes, St. Mark AME defies the ambiguous ‘appropriateness’ clause as a structure that does not match the prevailing character of the English Avenue neighborhood. St. Mark AME was commissioned as a distinctive building, and it was intended to be unlike anything in the city. With diligence, St. Mark AME was able to leverage other aspects of the city’s policies, as well as broad local support, to achieve landmark status.[37] Although a flawed system, Taylor and partners carefully followed the prescribed designation process in the city: beginning with detailed historical studies and physical surveys, followed by the April 11, 2022 Notice of Intent to Nominate, and an April 27, 2022 Urban Design Commission public hearing. The project was nominated under three criteria:
Recognizing that St. Mark AME needed thorough documentation to establish its landmark eligibility and demonstrate its architectural merit, Taylor and the Atlanta Preservation Center partnered with the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture. Led by Willkens, students in the spring 2021 Race, Space, and Architecture in the United States seminar conducted a series of 3D LiDAR scans and aerial photogrammetry captures of the site. Using Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) guided methods, they executed a drawing set of the church and submitted it to the Library of Congress (Figure 8). This initiative provided essential documentation and underscores the value of partnering with a local organization to give students real-world experiences that contribute to community goals, serving supportive and capacity-building functions.[38] The execution of measured drawings using only analog methods would have required scaffolding and extensive time on-site to document each and every stone. The use of 3D laser scanning, however, captured every mortar joint and nuance of the stone walls, with a 1/16” tolerance. This type of digital documentation is typically cost-prohibitive for small, community-led projects, yet St. Mark AME was the ideal subject for a service-learning endeavor in preservation technology and a team of students was able to fully document the using hybrid methods: analog measurements, 3D laser scanning, and aerial photogrammetry using drones. Georgia Tech continues to study the site through studio exercises (Figures 9-10) and document the structure using non-destructive defect monitoring, led by PhD architecture candidate Botao Li. This work informs the site’s preservation and stabilization initiatives, supporting the next stages of structural assessment and rehabilitation.
The integration of community support has been critical to the ongoing success of St. Mark AME’s reinvention, led by Taylor and the Atlanta Preservation Center. The site was formally dedicated as a City of Atlanta Landmark on February 23, 2023.[39] It is important to note that with landmark status, the building shell has protections against alteration and any development within the site lines under the purview of the Urban Design Commission.[40] However, St. Mark AME maintains the potential for rehabilitation: reinventing the site through interior interventions that do not substantially disrupt the historic walls. In addition to other economic incentives administered by the State of Georgia that may apply to the Landmark Building, including the state-sponsored Rehabilitated Historic Property Tax Abatement Program and the Income Tax Credit Program, St. Mark AME is now eligible for the Federal Historic Tax Credit and charitable contribution deductions, enhancing the site’s financial and sustainable future.
Although the city officially granted the landmark designation for St. Mark AME, and this achievement was recognized in local publications and myriad media outlets, Atlanta retains a lackluster record of preservation advocacy from a public access standpoint: as of July 20, 2024, St. Mark AME has not been listed on the page of the City of Atlanta's website that cites officially landmarked structures.[41] This lack of visibility has been interpreted by some as an ongoing slight to the Westside, complicating the perceived value of preservation opportunities and relegating advocates to use other published media sources instead of a certified government website to verify the site’s stature for grant and foundation applications. Additionally, the absence of recognition on governmental sites does little to incentivize English Avenue to pursue a historic district (HD) or landmark district (LD) neighborhood listing, joining the other neighborhoods designated between 1989 and 2020, and balancing an inventory predominantly composed of white communities: Adair Park HD, Atkins Park HD, Brookwood Hills Conservation District, Cabbagetown LD, Castleberry Hill LD, Collier Heights HD, Druid Hill LD, Grant Park HD, Inman Park HD, MLK Jr. LD, Means Street LD, Oakland City HD, Poncey-Highland HD, Sunset Ave HD, West Wend HD, Whittier Mill HD.
Atlanta’s architectural dysphoria and rapid growth after the Civil War meant that the city’s development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was eclectic. Unlike many other cities in the United States that had neighborhoods closely associated with immigrant populations, Atlanta’s neighborhoods developed into a binary: white areas and Black areas. Yet, while white neighborhoods were actively protected with historic district listings following enthusiasm for the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act, Black neighborhoods were being demolished. For example, east of Downtown Atlanta, the Fulton Bag & Cotton Mill (founded 1881; closed 1977) and its adjacent residential area known as Cabbagetown, historically home to white laborers from Appalachia, were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 as a historic district and in 1997 it became Atlanta's first Landmark District. Almost directly to the west, a Black community saw a very different preservation outcome: the precisely detailed modernist blocks of University Homes (1937) were drastically altered in the 1980s, despite being part of the Atlanta University Historic District, and these changes later provided the rationale for the demolition of the site in 2009 due to compromised historical integrity.[35]
Although examined primarily through a literary lens, the work of Katherine McKittrick deftly explores the concepts of subjective racial geographies that skew perceptions of place, community, and significance.[36] Her methodology directly applies to the implicit biases within preservation practices in the United States. It is no coincidence that the preservation movement began in the last tumultuous years of the antebellum era, with the Mount Vernon Ladies Association saving George Washington’s Potomac plantation, and the movement was codified through private endeavors after Reconstruction was killed and the Jim Crow era blossomed.
As demonstrated by sites in Atlanta, there is often a logic problem within many local, state, and national preservation requirements in the United States. For example, the significance of a site often hinges on its integrity. Yet, how can a preservation policy be equitable or inclusive when historical financing and development studies reveal the presence of de jure and de facto segregation that directly impact the quality, maintenance, and protection of the built landscape in minority communities? Although the most critical preservation protections are typically associated with local designations, most grant and tax rebate opportunities require that projects have state or national preservation designations.
When assessing St. Mark AME from an integrity standpoint, an initial review of the structure by the city deemed that it was ineligible as a ‘landmark building’ because it no longer had a roof. However, as historic drawings and photographs illustrate, the building’s roof was never a significant feature of its form or impactful to the sightlines from the nearby streets. Furthermore, unlike many churches, the building did not have a steeple. Therefore, the building’s distinctive architecture was tied to its mosaic stone walls; and these walls are very much intact, and they now fortify a community greenspace and butterfly sanctuary instead of rows of pews.
Taylor, the Atlanta Preservation Center, Georgia Tech, and other organizations lobbied the city to designate St. Mark AME an Atlanta Landmark under a new category of ‘ruin.’ The category references existing North American and European sites as precedents for preserving open structures, such as Mesa Verde and Casa Grande in the US, the border abbeys of Great Britain, and war-torn structures like the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, Germany.
Within the language of Atlanta’s historic designation codes, St. Mark AME defies the ambiguous ‘appropriateness’ clause as a structure that does not match the prevailing character of the English Avenue neighborhood. St. Mark AME was commissioned as a distinctive building, and it was intended to be unlike anything in the city. With diligence, St. Mark AME was able to leverage other aspects of the city’s policies, as well as broad local support, to achieve landmark status.[37] Although a flawed system, Taylor and partners carefully followed the prescribed designation process in the city: beginning with detailed historical studies and physical surveys, followed by the April 11, 2022 Notice of Intent to Nominate, and an April 27, 2022 Urban Design Commission public hearing. The project was nominated under three criteria:
- Group I (historic) criteria 2, 3 - Reflective of white flight, associated with different religions/races
- Group II (architectural) criteria 1,2,4,5,8,11 - Dominates a street scene/urban landscape, notable architect, exceptional style, significant used of material, original orientation
- Group III (cultural) criteria 2 - Broadly known/recognized by residents in the neighborhood
Recognizing that St. Mark AME needed thorough documentation to establish its landmark eligibility and demonstrate its architectural merit, Taylor and the Atlanta Preservation Center partnered with the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture. Led by Willkens, students in the spring 2021 Race, Space, and Architecture in the United States seminar conducted a series of 3D LiDAR scans and aerial photogrammetry captures of the site. Using Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) guided methods, they executed a drawing set of the church and submitted it to the Library of Congress (Figure 8). This initiative provided essential documentation and underscores the value of partnering with a local organization to give students real-world experiences that contribute to community goals, serving supportive and capacity-building functions.[38] The execution of measured drawings using only analog methods would have required scaffolding and extensive time on-site to document each and every stone. The use of 3D laser scanning, however, captured every mortar joint and nuance of the stone walls, with a 1/16” tolerance. This type of digital documentation is typically cost-prohibitive for small, community-led projects, yet St. Mark AME was the ideal subject for a service-learning endeavor in preservation technology and a team of students was able to fully document the using hybrid methods: analog measurements, 3D laser scanning, and aerial photogrammetry using drones. Georgia Tech continues to study the site through studio exercises (Figures 9-10) and document the structure using non-destructive defect monitoring, led by PhD architecture candidate Botao Li. This work informs the site’s preservation and stabilization initiatives, supporting the next stages of structural assessment and rehabilitation.
The integration of community support has been critical to the ongoing success of St. Mark AME’s reinvention, led by Taylor and the Atlanta Preservation Center. The site was formally dedicated as a City of Atlanta Landmark on February 23, 2023.[39] It is important to note that with landmark status, the building shell has protections against alteration and any development within the site lines under the purview of the Urban Design Commission.[40] However, St. Mark AME maintains the potential for rehabilitation: reinventing the site through interior interventions that do not substantially disrupt the historic walls. In addition to other economic incentives administered by the State of Georgia that may apply to the Landmark Building, including the state-sponsored Rehabilitated Historic Property Tax Abatement Program and the Income Tax Credit Program, St. Mark AME is now eligible for the Federal Historic Tax Credit and charitable contribution deductions, enhancing the site’s financial and sustainable future.
Although the city officially granted the landmark designation for St. Mark AME, and this achievement was recognized in local publications and myriad media outlets, Atlanta retains a lackluster record of preservation advocacy from a public access standpoint: as of July 20, 2024, St. Mark AME has not been listed on the page of the City of Atlanta's website that cites officially landmarked structures.[41] This lack of visibility has been interpreted by some as an ongoing slight to the Westside, complicating the perceived value of preservation opportunities and relegating advocates to use other published media sources instead of a certified government website to verify the site’s stature for grant and foundation applications. Additionally, the absence of recognition on governmental sites does little to incentivize English Avenue to pursue a historic district (HD) or landmark district (LD) neighborhood listing, joining the other neighborhoods designated between 1989 and 2020, and balancing an inventory predominantly composed of white communities: Adair Park HD, Atkins Park HD, Brookwood Hills Conservation District, Cabbagetown LD, Castleberry Hill LD, Collier Heights HD, Druid Hill LD, Grant Park HD, Inman Park HD, MLK Jr. LD, Means Street LD, Oakland City HD, Poncey-Highland HD, Sunset Ave HD, West Wend HD, Whittier Mill HD.
Preservation Dialogues, part II
What is next for St. Mark AME?
Taylor: It's making the case for preservation, you know because again within the Black community, the case is not made. How is it that any individual walks past St. Mark, stops the car, pulls up, [and is] absolutely taken in? We met with Trees Atlanta [non-profit group], and we're down standing down on English Avenue looking up the hill, and they were like, 'Oh my god, that building is just absolutely breathtaking.' Oh my god, you see it from a distance, I'm just mystified every time. Now, you know David and I were standing back there, I'm like David, if nothing else, I gotta get some lights on that!
Conclusion
Located at the figurative and literal center of the English Avenue neighborhood, the historic St. Mark AME is a magnet for community engagement. It is a critical neighborhood resource, attracting people, honeybees, and butterflies. Since its incremental rehabilitation in the late 1990s, weddings and concerts have been held on the site, and the restored stairs on the western façade function as a meeting place for the area. The site is a conduit and incubator for community activities throughout the year, and it is ultimately a generator for historical placekeeping within an underserved and consciously under-resourced neighborhood. With preservation planning and strategic interventions, work at the site seeks to prevent historical erasure in an area poised for a wave of investments due to development pressures tied to the new Microsoft campus and the expansion of the Atlanta green corridor of the Beltline. As a project comprising 33 miles of urban trails, with connected initiatives in inaugurating new greenspaces, affordable housing, transit, and public art, the Beltline has been described by developers as “the most exciting real estate project since Sherman burned Atlanta.”[42] This quote reveals a flippant attitude towards decades of underinvestment in the city, particularly on the Westside, where residents note that there has not been significant attention on housing or urban development in the region since the mayorship of Maynard Jackson (1938-2003). Additionally, the Beltline has done little to safeguard against the displacement of legacy residents and rising housing costs connected to speculative development. The landmark designation of St. Mark AME is one important step toward the site’s conservation and a more sustainable future. The story of St. Mark AME emphasizes the need for local leadership, transparency, and advocacy to build partnerships and maintain community priorities while leveraging the potential of historic sites for generative development. To support resiliency and address local needs, historic African American neighborhoods can leverage local resources and collaborate with non-profits and educational institutions to fully actualize the transformative power of preservation.
Located at the figurative and literal center of the English Avenue neighborhood, the historic St. Mark AME is a magnet for community engagement. It is a critical neighborhood resource, attracting people, honeybees, and butterflies. Since its incremental rehabilitation in the late 1990s, weddings and concerts have been held on the site, and the restored stairs on the western façade function as a meeting place for the area. The site is a conduit and incubator for community activities throughout the year, and it is ultimately a generator for historical placekeeping within an underserved and consciously under-resourced neighborhood. With preservation planning and strategic interventions, work at the site seeks to prevent historical erasure in an area poised for a wave of investments due to development pressures tied to the new Microsoft campus and the expansion of the Atlanta green corridor of the Beltline. As a project comprising 33 miles of urban trails, with connected initiatives in inaugurating new greenspaces, affordable housing, transit, and public art, the Beltline has been described by developers as “the most exciting real estate project since Sherman burned Atlanta.”[42] This quote reveals a flippant attitude towards decades of underinvestment in the city, particularly on the Westside, where residents note that there has not been significant attention on housing or urban development in the region since the mayorship of Maynard Jackson (1938-2003). Additionally, the Beltline has done little to safeguard against the displacement of legacy residents and rising housing costs connected to speculative development. The landmark designation of St. Mark AME is one important step toward the site’s conservation and a more sustainable future. The story of St. Mark AME emphasizes the need for local leadership, transparency, and advocacy to build partnerships and maintain community priorities while leveraging the potential of historic sites for generative development. To support resiliency and address local needs, historic African American neighborhoods can leverage local resources and collaborate with non-profits and educational institutions to fully actualize the transformative power of preservation.
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Endnotes
[1] Shannon Byrne, "This Used to Be a Mountain: Mapping Stone Mountain Granite in Metro Atlanta," Atlanta Studies (October 17, 2017); J. Vincent Lowery, "A Monument to Many Souths: Tourists Experience Distinctiveness at Stone Mountain," in Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History, ed. Karen L. Cox (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012). [2] Interview at the Atlanta Preservation Center, 18 July 2024, facilitated by Danielle Willkens. Only minor changes were noted in the captured text [3] Di Gao and Jenna Dublin, "Preserving African American Places: Growing Preservation's Potential as a Path for Equity," in A report of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (National Trust for Historic Preservation and The JPB Foundation, October 2020). [4] See eligibility requirements: https://savingplaces.org/preserving-black-churches-guidelines [5] For information on the restrictive and racist policies of the Jim Crow era, especially in Atlanta, see F. Ruechel, "New Deal Public Housing, Urban Poverty, and Jim Crow: Techwood and University Homes in Atlanta," The Georgia Historical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (1997); Elizabeth Guffey, "Knowing Their Space: Signs of Jim Crow in the Segregated South," Design Issues 28, no. 2 (2012); Steven A. Reich, The World of Jim Crow America, Daily Life Encyclopedias Ser. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2019). The Chattahoochee Brick Company is mentioned in Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name (2008) but a full history of the company, its policies, and the distribution of its products awaits study. [6] Mary Beth Reed et al., "Historic Streetcar Systems, Georgia," ed. Mary Beth Reed (Stone Mountain, GA: New South Associates, 2012), 23-24. [7] "Western Heights Baptist Church Dedicates Meeting House," The Christian Index, December 8, 1938. [8] Newspaper ads from 1910 cite the address as 577 Chestnut Street. [9] The fire was centralized in the Old Fourth Ward, east of Downtown, but prompted city-wide changes. [10] "Splendid Building Will Soon Be Erected by the Western Heights Baptist Church," The Constitution, July 20, 1919. [11] Ibid. [12] Robert G. Hill, "Charles Henry Hopson," http://dictionaryofarchitectsincanada.org; Kenneth H. Thomas, Jr., "Rock Spring Presbyterian Church," (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service), 11. [13] "New Pastor Comes for M.E. Church on Ponce De Leon," The Constitution, September 18, 1915; "New Ponce De Leon Church to Be Handsome Structure," The Constitution, October 10, 1915. [14] "New Ponce De Leon Church to Be Handsome Structure." [15] The church was added to the National Register in 1990. [16] "Building Operations Begin on New Presbyterian Church," The Constitution, February 27, 1921; "Handsome New Building Is Planned for the Ahavath Achim Synagogue," The Constitution, August 3, 1919. [17] "Western Heights Baptists to Lay Cornerstone Today," The Constitution, March 21, 1920. [18] "Western Heights Church Is Opened Thanksgiving Day," The Constitution, November 26, 1920. [19] "Western Heights Baptist Church Dedicates Meeting House." [20] Ibid. [21] "Mayor’s Day," The Constitution, January 7, 1949. [22] Black public schools established to be ‘equal’ to its white schools became known as ‘equalization schools.’ Steven Moffson, "Equalization Schools in Georgia‟S African-American Communities, 1951-1970," (Atlanta, GA: Historic Preservation Division, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, September 10, 2010). [23] Max Blau and Todd Michney, "Terror in the City Too Busy to Hate: How the English Avenue School Bombing Challenged Atlanta’s Popular Myth of Racial Progress," Atlanta Studies (December 12, 2020). [24] Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full: A Novel (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). [25] https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/the-king-philosophy/ [26] "Proctor Creek North Avenue Watershed Basin: A Green Infrastructure Vision," (Atlanta, GA: Park Pride, 2010), 56-57. [27] R. Weyeneth Robert, "The Architecture of Racial Segregation: The Challenges of Preserving the Problematical Past," The Public historian 27, no. 4 (2005): 12. [28] Susan Marsden and Peter Spearritt, eds., The Twentieth-Century Historic Thematic Framework: A Tool for Assessing Heritage Places (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Conservation Institute, 2021), 5. [29] Today’s visitors to MLK Drive, however, see a street that perpetuates the problematic stereotype of economic marginalization aligned with King commemoration.See Matthew L. Mitchelson, Derek H. Alderman, and E. Jeffrey Popke, "Branded: The Economic Geographies of Streets Named in Honor of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr," Social science quarterly 88, no. 1 (2007). [30] "West Hunter Street Baptist Church Special Resource Study," ed. U.S. Department of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, February 2022), 31. [31] Kevin Sack, "Obituary for R. H. Paschal, 88, Restaurateur Who Nurtured Rights Leadership," The New York Times, October 10 March 4, 1997. [32] See the condition assessment described in the east Atlanta counterpart: Jackie Tyson, "Sweet Auburn National Historic Landmark District, Atlanta, Georgia Integrity and Condition Assessment," (Atlanta, GA: New South Associates, Inc., 2019). [33] For Atlanta’s green canopy, see "Proctor Creek North Avenue Watershed Basin: A Green Infrastructure Vision." J. D. Capelouto, "New Atlanta Preservation Center Director Plans to Expand Advocacy Efforts," TCA Regional News (2020). [34] Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (New York, NY: Scribner, 1936), 142-43. [35] Christina E. Crawford, "Black Community Building: New Deal Programmatic Advocacy at Atlanta’s University Homes," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 81, no. 2 (2022). Katherine McKittrick, "'Black and' Cause I'm Black I'm Blue: Transverse Racial Geographies in Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye," Gender, Place & Culture 7, no. 2 (2000). [37] City of Atlanta, N-21-175 / D-21-175. Sharon Egretta Sutton, When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story About Race in America's Cities and Universities (New York, NY: Empire State Editions, an imprint of Fordham University Press, 2017); Sharon E. Sutton and Susan P. Kemp, The Paradox of Urban Space: Inequality and Transformation in Marginalized Communities (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Beth Tauke, Korydon H. Smith, and Charles L. I. I. Davis, eds., Diversity and Design: Understanding Hidden Consequences (London: Routledge, 2015). [39] Riley Bunch, "Old St. Mark Ame Church Gains Historic Landmark Designation," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 23, 2023. [40] Sec.16-20.001-011 of the City of Atlanta’s Historic and Cultural Conservation Districts. https://library.municode.com/ga/atlanta/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=PTIIICOORANDECO_PT16ZO_CH20HCHICUCODI [41] See https://www.atlantaga.gov/government/departments/city-planning/historic-preservation/property-district-information [42] Dan Immergluck, Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta (Piraí, CA: University of California Press, 2022), 67. |
Works Cited
Blau, Max, and Todd Michney. "Terror in the City Too Busy to Hate: How the English Avenue School Bombing Challenged Atlanta’s Popular Myth of Racial Progress." Atlanta Studies (December 12, 2020). "Building Operations Begin on New Presbyterian Church." The Constitution, February 27, 1921. Bunch, Riley. "Old St. Mark Ame Church Gains Historic Landmark Designation." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 23, 2023. Byrne, Shannon. "This Used to Be a Mountain: Mapping Stone Mountain Granite in Metro Atlanta." Atlanta Studies (October 17, 2017). Capelouto, J. D. "New Atlanta Preservation Center Director Plans to Expand Advocacy Efforts." TCA Regional News (2020). Crawford, Christina E. "Black Community Building: New Deal Programmatic Advocacy at Atlanta’s University Homes." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 81, no. 2 (2022): 213-34. Gao, Di, and Jenna Dublin. "Preserving African American Places: Growing Preservation's Potential as a Path for Equity." In A report of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund: National Trust for Historic Preservation and The JPB Foundation, October 2020. Guffey, Elizabeth. "Knowing Their Space: Signs of Jim Crow in the Segregated South." Design Issues 28, no. 2 (2012): 41-60. "Handsome New Building Is Planned for the Ahavath Achim Synagogue." The Constitution, August 3, 1919. Hill, Robert G. "Charles Henry Hopson." http://dictionaryofarchitectsincanada.org. Immergluck, Dan. Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta. Piraí, CA: University of California Press, 2022. doi:10.1525/9780520387652. Link, William A. Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War's Aftermath. Civil War America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Lowery, J. Vincent. "A Monument to Many Souths: Tourists Experience Distinctiveness at Stone Mountain." In Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History, edited by Karen L. Cox, 223-46. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012. Marsden, Susan, and Peter Spearritt, eds. The Twentieth-Century Historic Thematic Framework: A Tool for Assessing Heritage Places. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Conservation Institute, 2021. "Mayor’s Day." The Constitution, January 7, 1949. McKittrick, Katherine. "'Black and' Cause I'm Black I'm Blue: Transverse Racial Geographies in Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye." Gender, Place & Culture 7, no. 2 (2000): 125-42. Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. New York, NY: Scribner, 1936. Mitchelson, Matthew L., Derek H. Alderman, and E. Jeffrey Popke. "Branded: The Economic Geographies of Streets Named in Honor of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." Social science quarterly 88, no. 1 (2007): 120-45. Moffson, Steven. "Equalization Schools in Georgia‟S African-American Communities, 1951-1970." Atlanta, GA: Historic Preservation Division, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, September 10, 2010. "New Pastor Comes for M.E. Church on Ponce De Leon." The Constitution, September 18, 1915. "New Ponce De Leon Church to Be Handsome Structure." The Constitution, October 10, 1915. "Proctor Creek North Avenue Watershed Basin: A Green Infrastructure Vision." Atlanta, GA: Park Pride, 2010. Reed, Mary Beth, Patrick Sullivan, W. Matthew Tankersley, Sara Gale, and Mary Hammock. "Historic Streetcar Systems, Georgia." edited by Mary Beth Reed. Stone Mountain, GA: New South Associates, 2012. Reich, Steven A. The World of Jim Crow America. Daily Life Encyclopedias Ser. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2019. Robert, R. Weyeneth. "The Architecture of Racial Segregation: The Challenges of Preserving the Problematical Past." The Public historian 27, no. 4 (2005): 11-44. Ruechel, F. "New Deal Public Housing, Urban Poverty, and Jim Crow: Techwood and University Homes in Atlanta." The Georgia Historical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (1997): 915-37. Sack, Kevin. "Obituary for R. H. Paschal, 88, Restaurateur Who Nurtured Rights Leadership." The New York Times, October 10 March 4, 1997, MM58. "Splendid Building Will Soon Be Erected by the Western Heights Baptist Church." The Constitution, July 20, 1919. Sutton, Sharon E., and Susan P. Kemp. The Paradox of Urban Space: Inequality and Transformation in Marginalized Communities. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Sutton, Sharon Egretta. When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story About Race in America's Cities and Universities. New York, NY: Empire State Editions, an imprint of Fordham University Press, 2017. Tauke, Beth, Korydon H. Smith, and Charles L. I. I. Davis, eds. Diversity and Design: Understanding Hidden Consequences. London: Routledge, 2015. Thomas, Kenneth H., Jr. "Rock Spring Presbyterian Church." Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service. Tyson, Jackie. "Sweet Auburn National Historic Landmark District, Atlanta, Georgia Integrity and Condition Assessment." Atlanta, GA: New South Associates, Inc., 2019. "West Hunter Street Baptist Church Special Resource Study." edited by U.S. Department of the Interior. Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, February 2022. "Western Heights Baptist Church Dedicates Meeting House." The Christian Index, December 8, 1938, 7; 20. "Western Heights Baptists to Lay Cornerstone Today." The Constitution, March 21, 1920. "Western Heights Church Is Opened Thanksgiving Day." The Constitution, November 26, 1920. Wolfe, Tom. A Man in Full: A Novel. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. |
