Markets respond to demands. That’s good capitalistic economics. Ten years ago, the Peachtree-14^th  Street area had the usual shops – grocery stores, a delicatessen or two, couple of ladies’ dress shops, hardware stores, pharmacy, etc. There were always a couple of arts stores, too- small galleries, frame shops, paintings –you know, because of the art school and that crowd. A little weird, that bunch, but didn’t bother the neighbors much.

That was before 1964. That was before Haight-Ashbury. That was before the East Village. That was before “hippie” meant anything but fat. Then there was summer 1965? 1966? 1967. There was 12^th gate. There was Grand Central Station. There was Catacombs. Hippies????! In Atlanta?????? Yeah.

And a community was born. Beauty, love, freedom, alternative life style.; the street people.

Markets respond to community. Last year, Middle Earth was born and later and English Street begins. There was the short-lived Morning Glory Seed sacrificed, martyred during the summer ’67 repression. As Middle Earth, Expansion, etc. struggled to survive, downtown put over a pseudo-masquerade and came uptown in the form of the Merry-Go-Round. Asterisk was born downtown, moved uptown this summer.

They dream free exchange. The reality? $$$$$$$$

Danny Cochran is co-owner of Atlantis Rising. Danny Cochran knew the Peachtree 14^th Street area ten years ago. He grew up here. Danny Cochran knows the world of the marketplace. He ran a swimming pool company , a tavern, was into mortgages, insurance.

Chuck Monroe knows street people. The family. The needs for survival. Chuck Monroe is co-owner of Atlantis Rising.  He approached Cochran, others, talked about a place relevant to the community, evolution of an idea.

Business Reality: Cochran and Morgan pay $400 per per month rent. Shop owners will give up 10% of their take to Cochran and Morgan. How decision s concerning Atlantis Rising will be made has not been decided yet. Atlantis Rising is evolving. One shop owner states, “We’ll have equal say, we can make sure of that.” Each shop has an open-ended lease with Atlantis Rising (Cochran and Morgan) and the “management” has made numerous business loans to get shops started with low rate of interest, cost, rate, margin. The market place.

The scene: Dogs, children, chatter, congregating, color, smells, sweat, beckoning, barter, bargain, money. The market place. Atlantis Rising. “Hey man, didja see those new books on palm-reading? Dig it, we could sell all the books we can get. “Lookit these hand made. Just gottem in. Groovy, man.” “Watch my shop for a second willya? Jeez its hot in here.”

Stock, supplies, prices, Sales receipts, orders, hours, bail, lease, take, percentage, profit, money. The new market place. Atlantis Rising.

The vision. More than a market place. More than exchange of goods and cash. Hope for a meeting place in there – the tea room with its tree invites gathering, human exchange. Atlantis Rising is a business. Yes. But it is hope in the prospect of encouraging creative energy for the booths. It is a hope if a free store can exist beside shops which sell for survival. It is a hope if it continues to be the energy and spirit of a community striving to be free, if profit remains secondary to people.

– maude from The Great Speckled Bird

My memories of the Catacombs and Piedmont Park era are of great fondness. I went to high school and lived in Forest Park. I was a senior in 68′ and played in a band called “The Celestial Voluptuous Banana”. I use to sneak out at night when my parents were asleep and steal their car and drive up to 14th Street to frequent the Catacombs where I got turned onto a lot of great music.

Doug Merrill(rip) was the owner and I wasn’t really aware of all the supposedly illegal things going on behind the scene but became friends with The Hampton Grease Band, The Bag and many other groups. I met Steven Cole (rip) who understood the possibilities of the music scene way before other promoters actually acted on it. He predicted that one day bands would be playing huge venues to packed audiences. It was under Steve’s management that The Celestial Voluptuous Banana, Hydra, The Fifth Order, Booger Band, Radar, The Hampton Grease Band, The Bag and many others started working clubs and performed in Piedmont Park.

The Catacombs was home to a lot of different characters that have scattered to the wind but I remember a guy named Jim Nieman who was a regular there and he would perform solo with a great voice and a pretty good sense of humor. Jim also had a gig for a while on a radio station based in south Atlanta called WBAD. His show was called “The Nasty Lord John Show” and he played some very hip stuff. A special show was put together at the old Atlanta City Auditorium which was promoted through the station and the band was called “The Jeff Espina Banana Boat Blues Band and Traveling Freak Show Too featuring Eddie The Road Manager”. I went to the show which was sparcely attended but the band kicked ass and then you also had the strobe lights and smoke machines. I also got turned onto Ellen McInwayne and still have the 45 that she put out and sold from the catacombs. Ellen left and went to New York to work with a band called “Fear Itself” and I only remember Steve Cook as one of the band members.

I remember seeing some incredible music at the Catacombs including a band from DC called “Flavor” which was a three piece group that killed as did the night I saw the “Candymen” there. The Candymen was the basis for later formed “Atlanta Rhythm Section”. I can remember the catacombs just like it was yesterday and the smells of the smoke machine which was furnished by “The Electric Collage” which was owned and ran by Frank Hughes who was also a partner of Steve Cole of the Discovery Agency.

I remember performing at Piedmont Park and the crowds were incredible and receptive. The Banana was nothing more than a cover band but still, the crowds were great. During that time (68-70) you could see and hear a lot of great music in the park like the time I saw the Allman Bros. with Boz Skaggs sitting in and Chicago Transit Authority staying over after a concert at the auditorium and they would perform with Santana. Local groups got in the act as well with Booger Band being one of those groups that people would make sure not to miss. Keyboardist, Will Boware (sp?)was formally with “The Souljers” and he was not unlike Stevie Winwood in the respect that he was a child phenom. He sang, wrote and played an amazing Hammond B3 and keyboard bass. The drummer, Joel Maloney (rip) was an amazing young drummer and the guitarist, Ted Trombetta was equally incredible on guitar.

Most of my memories are great ones although I do remember being hassled by the man. Yeah, don’t stand there and keep moving. Some restaurants wouldn’t serve you and if they did then they demanded a minimum. One restaurant located at 14th & Peachtree at the time (the name escapes me), demanded a 50 cent minimum order so one night Doug Merrill took a bunch of us over there and packed out the place and we all ordered the minimum and pissed off the owners. Cops were called and since they couldn’t do much they busted some of the ones that they could figure out charges on such as minors etc.

I remember the riot on Peachtree when the buildings were set on fire and the cops were called and remember getting the hell out of there as cops were on a rampage to make arrests.

I remember the frat boys coming up from Ga. tech trying to get a piece of free love and hassling the groovy chicks with tie dyed shorts etc. I also remember some of those same frat guys driving by and throwing urine at the “hippies” standing around.

I remember thinking that the neighborhood started going down when drugs started making it’s presence. Sort of like the time one of our guitarist drank beledonna (sp?) that was laced in his soft drink. Met a lot of incredible people there and a few I still am in contact with but have no idea where Jim Nieman is or what happened to some of the great musicians I saw but they all left an impression on me.

I also use to go to the 12th Gate which was on 10th and it was a house converted into a coffee house/music venue. I saw some of the most incredible music ever including drummer Elvin Jones, Pianist McCoy Tyner, Sonny Fortune, Oregon and many others. I performed there once with a collection of other local guys and it was just a place for magic to be on a stage that had seen some of your childhood idols. I could probably go on and on but that’s pretty much the gist of a lot of my memories when music had so many possibilities and there were so many places for us to get our fix.

Darryl Rhoades

Atlanta Weekly December 5, 1982 pg.  (courtesy Miller Francis)

Peace and love came to the Strip in the 1960’s. Then it vanished.

By Rick Briant Dandes

Rick Briant Dandes is a former Atlantan who lives in New York. His most recent story for the magazine was about broadcaster Skip Caray.

It was a crowded place 15 years ago. There was always something happening on the Strip. At any hour of the day you had to push your way down the sidewalk. The streets were jammed, blocked by automobiles full of people come to gawk or to buy The Great Speckled Bird or sex magazines or drugs. Drugs were sold openly — there were passing fashions, but marijuana, LSD and mescaline were the standbys, the constants. The sales were so frequent, the competition so stiff, that dealers would hang bags of whatever they were selling out into traffic and wave them, chanting, “Ounces of hash, bags of grass.” When you walked down the street you were constantly being talked to, propositioned or one thing or another. At night, especially on weekends, the activity on the Strip was so frenetic and dense that traffic would be backed down Peachtree south of North Avenue.

All these memories seemed like a dream the other night, when I decided to revisit the section of Peachtree Street near 10th Street where Atlanta’s hippies used to hang out. The area was, as usual these days, almost deserted. One of the few places open was the Stein Club. It’s a bar that was a popular spot in the heyday of the hippies, and I went there to talk with David Heany, the co-owner. He led me to a table by the front window where we could look out onto the empty street.

“It’s all gone,” said Heany, who has lived in the area since 1969. He went on to say that in recent years many buildings in the area have been demolished. In their place are vacant lots, construction sites and condominiums. “It’s the midtown boom,” he said sarcastically.

It was 9:00 p. m. and in the bar about 50 customers were milling around. Heany pointed to one, a social worker named Karen, he said, a regular at the Stein Club for almost as long as it has existed, 21 years. Karen sat alone, sipping from a mug of beer as she leafed through a note pad. I don’t know how Heany recognized her. She was, for all intents, incognito, like a young Greta Garbo, dressed in a’ black silk blouse and prairie-length dress. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf, her eyes hidden behind wraparound sunglasses.

“She was a hippie,” Heany said, taking me over to meet her.

“I lived down here when this entire area was overrun with young people,” Karen said. “It was a good time to be young, those years. I learned so much about life. It was exciting. I think I knew it couldn’t last forever, my youth I mean. But I still sometimes wonder what happened down here, why everyone left.”

“A harder element moved in, Heany said. “I remember when it turned into a rough neighborhood. You couldn’t walk a block without -being propositioned for anything you could imagine, drugs, sex. Whatever you wanted to buy, it was for sale. When the hippies left, the Strip became a no-man’s-land. There was a lot of arson. Businesses that had been here for a decade moved out. I remember in 1974, walking down the street and in a three-block area there were only 11 shops open. It really scared me.”

“That’s the real question,” Karen said. “How did this area go from hippie community to combat zone to middle class — which is what it is becoming.”

Heany nodded agreement. “I wish I knew what happened during those hippie years. I lived here, but I’ll be damned if I know.”

The Hippies overran a neighborhood that was steeped in Atlanta lore and history. Full of old houses, it had grown up around Piedmont Park to become a showcase middle-class neighborhood. In the earliest days of the city, however, the neighborhood around what was to become the Strip — an area roughly bordered by the park on the east, 14th Street on the north. Spring Street on the west and 7th Street on the south — was called Tight Squeeze.

“In the 1870’s, it was well beyond the city,” according to historian Timothy Crimmins of Georgia State University. “Peachtree Road didn’t follow its present course back then, it followed the route of what is now Peachtree Place to 11th Street, so it was much narrower. It was, though, a main route of commerce into Atlanta, and so as you were going out from the city, you were tunneled in through this narrow neck of road. Shanties were erected alongside the route. “Late in the 1890’s the shanties were pushed out,” continued Crimmins. “As long as there was no demand for the land, the squatters who lived there had no problems, but with the development of streetcar transportation, the entire area came within the orbit of Atlanta, and at that point it became a more desirable place for affluent Atlantans to live.”

As the trolley moved north in the early 20th century, large Victorian homes were erected by the city’s wealthy elite, and in 1906, Ansley Park was developed north of 10th Street. Soon there was a demand for commercial services, and 10th and Peachtree became the intersection where they were provided. By the early 1920s drugstores, bakeries, bicycle and dress shops fined I0th Street.

During and after World War II, there was a lot of pressure for housing in the area, and many of the buildings were eventually zoned as multifamily residences. In the 1950’s, however, there was a wholesale northward exodus of residents. This effectively set the stage for the 1960’s, creating an area with relatively inexpensive housing around a commercial strip where the market had declined, leaving empty, low rent storefronts.

The counterculture had I its origins in San  Francisco at about the same time the civil rights movement peaked in the South. By the time the hippies appeared in Atlanta, the Strip was where the “life” was, in the words of many who lived there. Filmmaker Gary Moss, who later chronicled his experiences on the Strip in a movie entitled Summer of Low, remembered leaving the University of Georgia and moving to the area in 1967. “I knew something was happening, even if I didn’t know what it was,” he said. “I had friends who

lived on 9th Street, and I’d visit them and see an entirely new attitude in how they talked and looked. I was fascinated, and found myself being drawn into the life. It was just very exciting to be down there. We had freedom, and to some extent we had drugs, mainly marijuana. It was a playful time, sad, of course, we were learning about love and sex.”

In 1967, the number, of hippies living in the neighborhood was still small, perhaps a few hundred. (By August 1969, according to a Community Council of Atlanta report, the number of hippies living in the 10th Street area was estimated at 3,000.) Yet they had great visibility, making themselves instantly recognizable by characteristics that seemed intended to stun — long hair, for example, and instead of conventional dress, fantasy garb as different and unique as could be found: old hats, long dresses and shawls. In a way, dress was a nonverbal dialect created by hippies as a way not only to recognize each other but to keep at bay the curious in straight society.

The new community took seed at the Mandoria, an art gallery owned by David Braden (“Mother David”) and Kathryn Palmer, a jeweler. In late 1966, Braden and Palmer moved their gallery into a two-story house at the corner of 14th and Peachtree streets, across from what is now Colony Square. In the basement of the house was a music club called the Catacombs (“A place for peace and creation,” read early ads). Above the Mandoria, Braden rented out beds to people coming into Atlanta, many of whom were runaways.

“There was a verbal network, and word got out that there was a place to stay at Mother David’s,” recalled Anna Belle Illien, who purchased the gallery from Braden and changed the name to Galerie Illien. “Beds were rented in shifts, there were so many kids. I heard there was once as many as 50 people upstairs at one time.”

Braden eventually landed in prison (serving a seven year sentence for marijuana sale, his arrest was generally regarded as the area’s first political bust), but the scene kept on growing. It was centered at 10th Street around new hip establishments like the Twelfth Gate (a folk-music club operated by a young minister, Bruce Donnelly), the Middle Earth, Grand Central Station, the Merry Go Round and Morning Glory Seed — Atlanta’s first “head shop.”

Along with the clubs, other expressions of the scene began springing up. One of the most important was The Great Speckled Bird, a weekly newspaper. Its first issue came out on March 15, 1968, and the paper rapidly became the voice of the community. About the same time. Dr. Joseph Hertell, a former national director of the American Red Cross, was teaching Sunday school at Rock Springs Presbyterian Church when he “noticed a good many of my students spending time at the Twelfth Gate cafe. My wife and I went down there, met Bruce Donnelly and saw that the club was spiritually oriented — he held services every Sunday It was a very warm and pleasant atmosphere.”

Dr. Hertell asked Donnelly if he could help in any way and the minister told him, “There is no place for sick kids to get help. When I have a sick youngster on my hands, I can’t get any help — not even from Grady.” That’s when Dr. Hertell and Donnelly opened a clinic in a back room of the Twelfth Gate (the clinic later moved to Juniper Street).

Music was everywhere back then. Nasty Lord John, a disc jockey at WBAD in Hapeville (Atlanta’s first true progressive radio station), was also a musician, a drummer in a band that played at a club called the Scene, and listeners followed him to the Strip. “His radio show turned me on,” said Darryl Rhoades, a longtime local musician. “I wanted to see him. When I was in high school, he was a topic of conversation. Music was a big reason to go to 10th Street.”

At the Scene, Twelfth Gate and the Catacombs, bands like the Bag, Hampton Grease Band and Dr. Espina’s Banana Boat Blues Band and Traveling Freak Show were big attractions. Rhoades himself played in a band called the Celestial Voluptuous Banana. Concerts in Piedmont Park were common, with local bands playing alongside The Allman Brothers, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Cream.

By the summer of 1969, young people from all over Georgia and the rest of the South were coming to Atlanta. Many of them joined communes, which were characterized by their informal living arrangements and the sharing of property. This eventually created problems, according to Mary Huffaker, a social worker in the community. “Every single commune I know anything about failed because they would accept anybody and everybody,” she said. “Obviously. you’d get freeloaders who were happy to sit back and watch everybody work except them. The fact is, communes couldn’t work if everyone didn’t pull his own weight — and the nature of human beings is that they don’t.”

(old French embassy on 14^th)

Eventually the police became a major factor on the Strip. Tension had always existed between hippies and the police. Fulton County Assistant Police Chief Lewis Graham, then an Atlanta homicide investigator, recalled a “strong dislike of them on the force. The average police officer saw traditional values disappearing — kids with long hair, beards and their up-front attitudes. Most officers wouldn’t allow themselves to believe that many hippies were good kids with educations. They were simply classified as bums, identified by how they dressed, how they looked.”

Nonetheless, a kind of peace existed between hippies and the police for a while, and at least one officer was different — Ray Pate, who was assigned to community relations on the Strip. Pate was never given instructions on what to do or where to work. “I had no hours,” he recalled, “but I worked 9:00 p. m. to 5:00 a. m. in the park, at the clubs. I tried to identify with the youngsters. I wanted them to realize that cops are human, too, that they could depend on me if they needed help.”

The problem in the early days, according to Pate, “was mainly with shop owners who saw the values of their businesses depreciating. People were being driven to bankruptcy.” At times, pedestrian traffic in the area was so heavy that people walked in the streets. Tour buses included the Strip as a sideshow in their journey through Atlanta.

Some area store owners do not blame the hippies for their problems in the 1960’s. Mike Roberts of the Hard ware and Supply Company said, “In my opinion, it wasn’t the hippies who ran the area down. I think the area was already in decline by 1965, when shopping centers in the suburbs were built.”

By all accounts, the winter of 1969-1970 was a turning point in the history of the Strip. Pate remembered that “in late 1969, things took a nose dive. It was a cold winter. Everyone stayed indoors. The streets were relatively empty, and by spring it seemed almost like a small child had grown up and turned mean. Maybe the kids realized they had to survive somehow, find food — and soon. But it wasn’t the same and I couldn’t put my finger on why.”

Dr. Hertell also sensed a change in the neighborhood. “Disillusionment had already set in,” he said. “The love, the fraternity, the beauty and the warmth was souring.” Dr. Hertell and others believe that the increasing drug traffic up and down the Strip — and the change from marijuana to harder drugs like amphetamines and heroin — led to the community’s downfall.

With harder drugs on thy streets, the police cracked down on the community. Pate explained, “In 1968, we were flooded with crowds of exuberant, music-loving kids. We couldn’t do things the old law-and-order way with them •— the media would have killed us. But in 1969, with the criminal element moving in, well, those were our kind of people, so we flooded the area with helmets and nightsticks.” In 1970, Police Chief Herbert Jenkins declared, “I’m convinced 10th Street is no longer a hippie community. It’s just a stopping place for outlaws and criminals from all over the nation.”

The police raids were awesome, in a chilling kind of way. On weekends, police would arrive on the Strip after midnight in school buses. They would stream out of the vehicles in riot gear and move down the street in formation, stopping in front of each storefront while several went in and cleared the kids out with billy clubs.

One of the biggest events of this period occurred on the night of October 4, 1971 That was when a policeman was shot in Piedmont Park on “hit-up hill,” an area near the pavilion used by drug peddlers. A man who lived on 11th Street at the time remembered being awakened “by all the light and noise. I looked out the front door to see throngs of people screaming and running up the hill to Peachtree. Overhead, herding them like cattle, were helicopters with bright floodlights and loudspeakers blaring. The police entered every apartment on the park that night and turned them over.” (Soon after that incident, horse patrols were instituted by the city as a way to deal with policing the park.)

By then, the community was in chaos on all levels. Dr. Hertell’s clinic was treating more and more heroin addicts, and it eventually came under police surveillance as a result of its methadone program. “The police said I was responsible for more methadone being out on the streets than any drug pusher,” Dr. Hertell said. Its work with addicts also brought the clinic into contact with motorcycle gangs. “The bikers were power hungry,” said Dr. Hertell. “They came to me one day and said, ‘We want the clinic open tonight.’ I said I wouldn’t do it. Well, they took over because of their violent nature.” Mary Huffaker said that such incidents finally caused the clinic to close. “We didn’t know how to deal with violence.”

Along with hard drugs, the Strip was spawning an increasing number of pornographic bookstores, X-rated movie theaters and strip joints. Prostitution was on the rise. Gary Moss, who left the area for a few years, remembered coming back in 1972. “That’s when I realized the scene had grown dark and ugly,” he said. “I ran into an old friend with whom I had lived in a commune, and we Stopped and talked for a minute. She indicated to me that occasionally people came by and gave her money for sex. I sensed she was burned-out inside. She said she had had a vision in which trees burned down like match sticks.”

The Strip was literally burning down. A shop named Atlantis Rising had been firebombed, and The Great Speckled Bird house on 14th Street was destroyed in a fire. As early as July 1969 the Atlanta Fire Bureau reported 26 “significant” fires in the area causing $800,000 damage. At the time. Chief J. I. Gibson said it “looks like the work of an arsonist.” Indeed, arson grew rampant along the Strip. Houses were frequently burned as vengeance in bad drug deals. And a fire investigator said, “We hear that one small store owner paid well to bum up his unbreakable lease.” Many businesses, unable to get fire insurance, were forced to relocate.

Rumors persist to this day regarding the decline of the Strip during the early 1970’s. At the time, it was common knowledge that the Colony Square project and the planned MARTA station at 10th Street would change the face of the area. Many people in the community believed — and still do — that the Strip was intentionally allowed to deteriorate, thereby lowering land values, permitting real estate speculators to purchase plots at deflated prices before reselling them to developers at huge profits.

Many of these rumors center on former Mayor Sam Massell. He and other members of his family own land in the area, and Massell is familiar with the charges against him. “One rumor,” he said, “was that I was bringing the hippies into the area, importing them, in order to run down the values of the property, or that I had gotten options on lots, then allowed the property values to run down and buy in. Well, of course, if you had options on land, you’d have them at current prices, not run-down prices. Secondly, if you didn’t have the option, anyone could get the same option and buy it when land value decreased. And thirdly, if you did allow the land to run down, look at what it takes to build it back up.”

Unquestionably, land speculators in the area did make money. Some lots were sold in the early 1970’s, when land values were deflated, and a few years later they were resold at a profit to developers. However, no decisive relationship between the decline of the Strip and profits derived from it can be proved.

The real story behind the passing of the hippies from the Strip probably lies elsewhere, but nobody really has any clear-cut theories. Any discussion of the community by people close to it is, inevitably, suffused with a sense of wistful regret. As Dr. Hertell put it, “1967 and 1968 were beautiful. The kids were so filled with love, and it was so sad because what the hippies believed in was impossible. I knew it was impossible, and I felt like saying, life is not like this, life isn’t this way. They had a dream, and I’ve lived long enough to know that the dream wasn’t going to come true.”

But there was more behind the rise of the hippies than simply a dream. In their way, they mounted a strong protest against society. For many Americans, the Vietnam War represented a failure of the system, and the hippies were out to change it. As Charles A. Reich wrote in The Greening of America, an enormously influential book that articulated the hippie ethic, “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like ‘ revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. This is the revolution of the new generation.”

That sounds quaint and overblown today, but it was a potent message when it was first delivered. And across the country, it drew young people? pie to places like the Strip. They thought they were joining a revolution, but it’s my guess that in the long run they were just loose, on the run and lost. When I think honestly about the Strip, I remember that most of the people there were incredibly young. They were teenagers. So many of the girls were pregnant, and the boys seemed desperate. But they didn’t have any bona fide political convictions to back them up.

A friend of mine recalled an incident that pointed up the contradictions that haunted the Strip. “One day,” he said, “everybody on the Strip, went ga-ga over a car that was driving up Peachtree. It was a new Lincoln Continental, one with an arch in the back trunk hood for a spare tire. That would have been properly disdained in any truly revolutionary environment for good political reasons. On the Strip, the flower children rubbernecked and whistled.”

The Life and Death of Practically Everything except Franco’s…

The Death of the Strip by John Dennis 

Huge bosoms loom from the screen. They sway a moment, then recede behind a narrow back, white bunched buttocks. Carefully entwined to hide their slumbering organs, the couple ruts mechanically. The sound track switches into fevered gasps, the same ecstasy sequence you’ve heard in the previous mating scenes. The camera moves closer; necrophilic pallor fills the battered theatre. The starers are mostly winos nursing their afternoon bottle. Fraternal, the derelicts pass their paperbags along the row for sips. Occasionally they remark on the action, comments about dominance and vigor long forgotten, perhaps never known. Another sip. The skin flic is their quiet place away from the street.

Stepping outside you glance toward Tenth Street, then north toward Colony Square. Where are the hippies, the runaways, the suspicious characters, the police, the curiosity seekers? Peachtree is deserted here. You could see more longhairs in downtown Dahlonega than on the famous Strip. You walk past vacant stores, interiors littered with refuse. Suddenly two bikers careen out of a bar, macho mutterings. Their steeds are nowhere to be seen. Lost somehow, they step away quietly.

A handful of headshops are still open, but business is light, selections limited, merchandise touristy. Handlers of more genuine counter culture goods like the People’s Crafts Co-op, better known as the Laundromat, have folded. A few older stores, thirty and forty years at their locations, remain. “The Lt. Governor’s wife still  trades with us and so do her children,” one owner reveals. A flash, of Virginia Maddox wedging her way through hips, blacks, the whole street melange to buy a dress. Most business people are cautious. “I never saw anything bad happen. I don’t want to say anything else.”

Food is the hot item these days. At the expanded American Lunch tidy secretaries chat over vegetable plates; a Third Battalion Fire Chief with the afternoon free grabs a bite before teeing off.

Franco’s near Peachtree and llth is booming. Baked goods, delicatessen items, lots of pizza—1500 a day sometimes. The interior is shopping mall slick, complete with TV camera that scans the well-dressed customers. Where do they come from? “Oh, Colony Square, 17th Street, even downtown.” Why do they come? “To get pizza made with the very best meats and cheeses,” Franco answers proudly. “And the dough is rolled each morning.” Locals? “Some.” Winos? “No drunks inside. They come to the window. They like pizza too. You try it.” I taste. It’s delicious: light layers blending into a fluffy crust. How long have you been here? “Two years, a little more.” You missed the real strip. “I guess.” What now? “I stay. Business gets better. Everybody likes good pizza.” He’s right about that. I wiggle out past a long line of pizzaphiles.

Maybe in five years Franco will have the pizza concession for another Colony Square. The Marta Station will be in around llth; the shotgun apartments, boarding houses, neighborhood stores will be gone. In their place will be office towers. Toward Monroe Drive refurbishments and condiminiums will house solid middle class. Perhaps some ex-hippies, by then forged into suitable work units, will toil in those new office towers. And sometimes perhaps they will search the streets below for a thread back to their carefree days along the Strip. But they will find little to break the seal on their now ordered lives.

No doubt about it, the Strip, Tight Squeeze, Tenth Street—darling of the media, bane of respectable peo­ple and their representatives at City Hall, mecca for small town rebels, slaughtering ground for criminals and carpetbaggers, stock market for illegal drugs, boardwalk for the lonely and very young—all this is gone. Already people have trouble remembering who was there, where the buildings were, the right year. “’68? That’s going way back. Ask across the hall.”

There was crime, but nobody really knows how much. Police statistics weren’t broken down geographically until about a year ago. “You could go through the case files.” How many for the years I want? “Half a million.” Narcotics either knows a great deal or nothing, for they talk in circles, generalities. Marijuana and cocaine are up; heroin, downs and acid off. Activity in a certain location? “Maybe. Hard to say. Could be. Don’t know.”

Crime, drugs and hippies—the three are interconnected when you mention Tenth Street. Yet to focus on these items alone is to miss a great deal about a subject that has much to say about Atlanta’s future as well as its past.

Fifty years ago the Tenth Street neighborhood was one of the better addresses in Atlanta. Stretching south to Ponce de Leon, and east along it were stately homes and townhouses, the domain of many of the city’s most respected and well-to-do families. In those days Buckhead was a relatively bucolic suburb; and Brookhaven was the country. City Council Chairman Wyche Fowler recalls: “I remember hunting only two miles above Buckhead as late as 1958.” Trolleys and electrified buses still trundled through the streets. The downtown skyscrapers were undreamed of. But in the fifties, Atlanta experienced an unprecedented boom in population and affluence. During that decade the metro area swelled some 30,000, half of which flooded Atlanta proper. By 1960 nearly half a a million people lived inside the city limits, a number that has grown only slightly since. There was room in the city then. Countless trees and houses went for apartments, service stations and eateries.

Like many parts of Atlanta, Tenth Street grew in population, but declined in aesthetics and property values. Peachtree was zoned C-3, Central Area Commercial, in 1953, while the areas north of 14th remained a hodge-podge of residential and apartment zonings on into the sixties. Most of the new residents worked: there were ties to the established community; but change was definitely in the wind. Cushman Corporation assembled its 11.6 acre Colony Square package in ’65 and ’66, applying for C-3 rezoning in ’67. By then the Arts Center was going up. Speculation speeded decline: more absentee owners meant decreased maintenance, less attention from city services. Other rumblings were afoot.

Spurred by cries for more education that had grown out of the ’57 Sputnik shot, colleges opened their doors to millions of young people. Then as now, these youths looked for a Rite of Passage to convey them from adolescence into full adulthood.

The twenties had prohibition; the thirties depression; and the forties war—all effective Rites of Passage. But in the fifties not even war was called war anymore. Society provided youth with vague symbols like drivers licenses and diplomas, but these only marked equally vague changes in status: there was no large, emotion ally satisfying demarcation between childhood and maturity. Perhaps this need prompted the Beat movement of the late fifties with its romantic rebel lion.

 In the early sixties the cries about feelings that the Beats had stirred spread in the student world. First folk music and then rock emerged as highly participatory movements. Large numbers of young people were coming closer together in ideas and inner rhythms.

 By 1965 a small underground of Beat/alternate life style people had built up in Atlanta. At the Commune near Emory, the Big House near Tech and the Georgia State student clusters around Little Five Points, fifty or more might show up for a party.

 These people knew they were different, quite how they did not yet know. They could see that the usual collegiate success plan was not for them. And those who thought about politics saw that Vietnam would not do as a Rite of Passage either. It was simply an artificial death rehearsal for our dollar bloated legions.

About this same time strange new substances began to filter into Atlanta from Mexico, Texas and California. Peyote, mescaline and LSD opened up the head and gave a glimpse of incredible other realities. The only problem was that they were too distorting for everyday use. Something was needed that would loosen the chains that bound these seekers, while still allowing them to operate in the world. What about this marijuana stuff? They tried it, and Pow! The cannabis cyclone hit the country and things haven’t been the same since. Suddenly there was an easy divider to separate the sheep from the divine goats. Folks started feeling good in a way you don’t get on Old Crow, Mill town, and Norman Vincent Peale.

Suddenly they were in touch with a whole universe of sensation and in sight that had been lost by main stream white society. They were different now: they couldn’t relate their new consciousness back to the old community. It was too structured, anyway. For their Rite of Passage they needed a separate existence. Thus, the logical thing to do was to drop out of the old order’s schools and work, because their work now was this new community. In fact, the community itself was their Rite.

These are the people who first came to Tenth Street. They came to join the small colony of artists and leftover Beats who had already made bohemian landmarks of places like the Roxy Deli and the Palatzio apartments. Later they were called “true” hippies as opposed to the hoards of imitators and displaced persons who came after them. Many were artists who came to be near the Arts Center. Others were simply looking for some place cheap near their friends, and someplace equally removed from the city’s colleges. At last, a place to be themselves.

 The first head shop/coffee house scene was probably Bo Lozoff’s Middle Earth off Peachtree on 8th which opened in ’67. In a prophetic gesture the cops were there the very first night, sizing up this new lunatic fringe. Soon they had more to inspect than they’d bargained for. The Catacombs at Peachtree and 14th revved up: then came the 12th Gate where, in addition to music, the clinic that later became part of the Community Crisis Center operated for a while. Bands began to play in Piedmont Park and concerts became a regular event. Performers like the Allman Brothers, Hampton Grease Band, Boz Scaggs, Joe South, Avenue of Happiness and the Grateful Dead filled a mile-wide space with sound, and the air around the bandstand turned green with hemp.

 Expressing the growing sense of community, the Great Speckled Bird was started in early ’68. Now in its 7th year, the Bird had its roots in papers like the Los Angeles Free Press and the outspoken collegiate journalism that had gradually been driven off campuses in the early and middle sixties. The Bird didn’t bother so much then with reform of the old order: it was a glorious display of new self. The early issues were direct in formation sources for the culture then firming up. Articles appeared regularly on drug properties and responses, freedom of the press, crafts, semi-religious inspiration and community doings. Satire and togetherness pieces ran often. To pick up pocket money hippies began to sell the paper along Peachtree. From there it found its way into colleges, high schools, and onto young professional’s coffee tables, everywhere raising disquiet and recruiting converts.

 Despite its then radical values, the Tenth Street community might have gone on quietly for years, a haven for artists and malcontents, but three faraway events forever changed the local idyll. There was some time lag, but rapid communications and the sheer fascination that these events held for the general public insured that Tenth Street as a genuine grass roots movement would die quickly.

 First came Haight-Ashbury’s much publicized ’67 Summer of Love. Haight-Ashbury as an indigenous movement probably died like Tenth Street, before its greatest fame, but what came out of the Summer of Love, in song, truckin’ and heavy media, was a social gospel of drugs and free living that infiltrated the entire country.

 Next came two mass gatherings: the May ’68 March on Washington was the more organized of the two, drawing its energy from war frustration and reaching back through the civil rights movement for its tactics. The other gathering was Woodstock later that summer. There the word finally got out. Young people every where felt the call and went spontaneously, nearly half a million of them. They learned on a mass scale that they could go, that they could come together and be high on music, drugs, sex, adventure. All you had to do was go. Hundreds of thousands who had never before seen a way out, or even known that they wanted out, suddenly got very restless.

 What this meant for Tenth Street was a population explosion. The Strip soon began to look like a barnyard of exotic animals—bare skin, flowing manes, and the powerful smells and sounds of a close-together herd.

 Actually, the Strip was a highly diverse collection of individuals, many of them quite intelligent and purposeful. Labels were made out of drug use, outlandish dress and supposedly freer sex, but the only real standard was non-conformity. What ever established society had expected the Strip people rejected. If family had counted before they would take only first names; if money had count ed, they would have none. Whatever established society hid—its massive drug use, promiscuity and discontent —these Strip people showed openly.

Individuality was respected: if you looked hard enough you could find freaks who never touched drugs. There was only one universal sin. Squealing.

 From small towns all across the South kids swarmed to the Strip. Some stayed only a few weeks, then drifted home, their Rite needs satisfied. Others remained, suspended in their flowering time. 

Many came to buy drugs. The underground network for illegal sales was not built up as it is today. Atlanta was one of the few places where drugs could actually be obtained. “Grass, speed, acid,” ventriloquist whispers came as you jostled in the crowd. “Scag, reds,” floated up from the curb. Larger dealers slept by day, venturing out at night, money belts jammed, to make connections away from the Strip. By today’s standards even the big dealers were small. A few pounds stash made you a neighborhood hero.

 The Bird began to print advice about where to sleep or seek aid. Too young, too pampered, many of the new arrivals literally did not know how to take care of themselves. They didn’t recognize infection or malnutrition; they didn’t realize that rags can ignite or that rooms need ventilation. Everyone had extra people in their apartment: crash pads were jammed. The overflow slept in the parks or competed for abandoned buildings with the winos who had been driven out of downtown by Underground Atlanta. Outsiders sneered at the slovenly residents while landlords let water drain down onto the street. The city did nothing.

 Stores, clubs and theatres opened:

Asterisk, Society Page, 10th Street Art Theatre, Percy Flasher, Sexy Sadie’s. Of particular interest is the Merry-go-round which came along in ’69. A young entrepreneur named Lenny Weinglass with a partner who has since departed, smelled money happening and threw their savings into the hip clothes store. Weinglass now runs 50 Merry-go-rounds out of Baltimore. Except for the Allman Brothers who were really a Macon band, Weinglass’ business growth is the only real traditional success story to come out of Atlanta’s flirtation with cultural pace setting.

There were other kinds of success however. For many the Strip provided a home. Raymond, a prison escapee from a neighboring state, was not a conventional dropout, but his story is typical. Bandied about in foster homes as a child, by the time Raymond made his way to the Strip he had spent half his 25 years in jail. On the Strip he found people who accepted him. Raymond never sold the Bird—too risky. He trimmed hedges and drove nails for spending money. He read a book or two, but he doesn’t read so well; mostly he listened, basking in the smooth vibrations. He backpacked a few times, and he painted a picture, not a bad picture for a beginner, lots of greens and open spaces. For a year he lived like a human being. Finally things got hot and he surrendered voluntarily. An other year in. Once out, confined to his hometown by parole regulations, skilless, jobless, pulled in on lineups, he’s awaiting trial now on his same old charge, burglary of a few dollars.

 Angie is probably not typical either. But after seven years on the Strip she has seen it all. “I was seventeen; I had dropped out of high school. Later, when I went back I went straight into college.” Did you do drugs? “Sure, nearly everybody did.” How did you live? “I sold the Bird, I worked odd jobs. I never depended on a man, so I was better off than most women.” Angie never speaks of girls and boys on the Strip. “We were not children. We had left that behind.” How were you better off? “I never had to sell myself, or take crap from men.” Were many women younger than you? “Lots. There were thousands of runaways— thirteen, fourteen-year-olds. They could look older and get by.” Why were they there? “They were looking for something. Everybody was. We didn’t know what it was, but at least things were different than what we’d come from.” Why do you stay now? “It’s my home. So much has happen ed. It’s like my life began here.” Are you happy? “I think so. The important thing for me is other people.”

 A new kind of weekender came by the thousands. Donning “hip” apparel, perhaps bought right on the Strip, these plastic hippies promenaded with the rest, hungry for mini adventure: a joint in the park, a cultish conversation, running from a cop.

 Blacks were on the Strip in numbers too. They were mostly young men, searching for freedom and companionship that their own tighter, more traditional cultures could not provide.

Saturday night on Peachtree there was a nearly solid chain of body contact from 7th to 14th. Vibes raced up and down the street, throbbing like a single pulse. Dusty’s being hassled at the Krystal. Richard the Narc’s up at Jumping Jack’s let’s go to Grin’s and snort up. Watch out for the bikers they’re leaning on folks tonight. Bikers have always been around Atlanta. The Suns, the Huns, Iron Cross, more had come. Mostly Outlaws stopping off between their clubs in Kentucky and Jacksonville. Rugged, fiercely independent, many are also mean and tormented. They could and did mug, torture and kill. Some clubs maintained veritable arsenals, and they weren’t the only ones.

 The hippies were by no means all gentle folk. The October ’70 riot between police and hippies grew out of hippie anger over biker harassment. The bikers got the word that night and stayed off the street, leaving a wound-up crowd that exploded when a cop attempted a street search.

Step right up. Hur-ray, hur-ray, see the Freaks. If you actually lived around Tenth Street then, you know what it was like. If you didn’t, no amount of description can give it to you. I lived less than five blocks away, but it was more like a light year. With friends I would saunter down on an evening to see the sights. Perhaps I was a more benign curiosity seeker than those Grayline Tours once proposed to bus in; more sym pathetic no doubt than those whose cars jammed Peachtree, gaping, and trying to pick up girls; gentler than the thugs who reacted to difference by assaulting with abandon on the side streets, but I was a curiosity seeker nevertheless. The excitement and carefree happiness made you feel good; you smiled, flashed peace signs. 

Maybe my values were not that removed from these adventurers: the difference between us was one of risk. To live on the Strip, to trust on the Strip, to go home on it was to risk big. Someone might flip before your very eyes. People were still learning then how to handle themselves under drugs, and unscrupulous dealers would sell poisonous compounds. Mugging and rape were rampant and a lot of it went unreported. Worst of all you could be busted. Nobody knows how many people were arrest ed for possession or selling drugs on the Strip. However, Al Horn, at one time the only lawyer in town who would take a drug case says, “I must have handled 2000 such cases from ’68 to ’72.” Not all were as a result of Strip arrests. There’s no way of knowing the real tolls in money and time in jail Strip people paid for their community.

As early as ’69 Ivan Allen’s seek and destroy police tactics caught national attention. Then Sam Massll’s “Tight Squeeze” police precinct— the Pig Pen—came along in, was it ’71? Anyway it was there a while and then it wasn’t.

Who the officers and narcs were does not matter now. Some were sensible and did good jobs; some didn’t. How much serious crime against life and property the police prevented is open to question. Their presence often served only to heighten the paranoia that was always on the Strip in some degree. Even when fifty or more officers patrolled Peachtree U.S.A. from 8th to 12th you wonder if it was more a matter of visibility than real community protection. Peachtree, Juniper and Crescent were probably safer, but, in the shadows, crime went on with a vengeance. The hip organized Street Patrol, sixty strong, walked women home and generally helped out, but the volunteers were young and the patrol floundered after a few months.

Fire was a problem too: 7693 pumper missions during ’68-72 from stations II and 15, which serve the Tenth Street area. Poor living conditions and carelessness were definite causes, but arson was the real threat. Eventually the arson squad went to “Tight Squeeze” fires as a matter of routine. “We found so many gas cans we stopped picking them up,” one investigator said.

 Rumors proliferate that developers were behind some of the flames, but there’s little hard evidence. Fires could be convenient for an owner too, especially when there are 5000 suspects milling around outside. Again, little evidence. Atlanta’s fire problems have not been confined to Tenth Street however. In ’68 alarms jumped nearly 25% city-wide and have remained high ever since. Diverse sections like Johnson Ferry Road and Fulton Industrial Blvd. showed just as heavy increases as Tenth Street. Although it has never fallen to pre ’68 levels Tenth Street’s fires have slackened somewhat. Alarms in other places are still climbing.

 One theory has it that the concentrated police pressure drove true freaks away, ending the Strip. More likely the police were simply the most visible of several factors that made the area an increasingly undesirable place to live; population pressure, ever poorer housing, more business people to whom the freaks were merely the drawing card, ever more hopeless transients—destitute wanderers for whom Tenth Street was a brief stimulant in the midst of long, hopeless years. And finally the inescapable fact that the Strip was a Rite. After you have passed through, after you have stood on your own and survived, you move on.

 Why young people chose to test themselves this way while others of their age group went quietly to war or the factories is a pointless question. They did, and in so doing they changed all of us. Their Rite was sometimes brutal, but anything less real might not have served.

 The happening that was the Strip probably peaked in 1970. That summer you could scarcely pass on the sidewalk, and the Byron Pop Festival in July drew over 100,000.

 If you could pinpoint a change from community to ghetto it might be December 29, 1970. That night Tree Me Sherry a hippie and a biker protégé drew a gun in a biker arsenal at White Columns on 14th and was double barrel wasted. Simultaneously, a few blocks away on Juniper Bruce Gwynn, a sightseer from Virginia, was being tortured by other bikers, his body later dumped outside the city. Two weeks later Chief Jenkins declared “Tight Squeeze” was “no longer a hippie community, but a stopover place for outlaws and criminals from all over the nation.”

 Strip population always thinned in the winter. The hoards were there again in the summer of ’71, but not as dense as the previous summer. Group consciousness diminished. Now many were street-wise returnees, aggressively stalking the territory they had mastered. You saw more downs and heroin. Arson increased and there were fire bombings: Atlantis Rising went, then the ‘Bird’ office in ’72. The permanent Strip denizens were older, tougher. The hip stores were patronized by suburbanites and straight kids. As a matron might seek out Lenox, they came to Tenth for records and smokin’ papers.

 The Crisis Center’s clinics handle hundreds of cases each month: their phone calls average over two thousand—almost none of which concern drugs anymore, but by previous standards their business is way off.

 The Strip has been deserted by youth, and it’s now a dangerous place to be.

Except for rape, which is off a bit, 8th to 16th on Peachtree does a brisk business in murder, robbery, assault, car theft, any category you care to name. Throw in the side streets and you have nearly as much crime as Hunter, Capitol, Cascade, Ponce and Pryor streets combined.

 This is an abominable situation that the new police administration should work to correct. Hopefully they will try some new approaches. However, illegal street searches have always gone on in the district: as recently as April of this year lawyers were protesting them. Aside from” being highly questionable constitutionally, the crime rate speaks for their ineffectiveness.

 New development will undoubtedly diminish crime in the area. The lower income predators and victims will be pushed into some new pocket of the city. Ponce de Leon and Little Five Points are already shaping up as hot spots. But will this time honored urban practice actually lessen crime, or merely cordon it off?

 Cultural dynamic change aside, the Strip was fated to be short lived be cause it stood on very attractive real estate. The Central Area Study pre pared under Mayor Massell tells the story plainly. There will be more office space, more hotels, less housing in the Inner Ring of the city. “Growth.. .is assured.. .if concerted efforts are made to keep the traffic flowing and to remove the barriers to the investment opportunities which will inevitably generate.” The Arts Center project, among others, was designed to provide “maximum development leverage.” Enter corporate planner, exit poor people. “Spot zoning started the Tenth Street area’s problems,” says Wyche Fowler. So you reach the inescapable conclusion that the offensive hippies were truly a windfall for a predevelopment neigh borhood.Already going to seed.

 It has also been suggested that Atlanta’s uptight response to hippiedom stemmed from its own insecurity. Compared to other cities’ problems, Tenth Street was mild; and after ’69 it was almost all derivative culture imported from elsewhere. Atlanta should have loved that. Yet rejection was vicious and widespread. Perhaps a clue lies in our vast—estimates run as high as 70%—middle class. Atlanta has always been the great escape valve of the South. Generations have come as the street people did, to find bright lights and opportunity. A lot of small town folk have done well here. Perhaps the seediness of the hippies reminded too many Atlantans of their own pasts.

 Where are the hippies today? Everywhere. Their Rite accomplished, they have gone to work and life styles as diverse as the ones they originally came from. Whether what they experienced was really different from the adventures of past generations cannot yet be answered. Neither can we know now how well their moment in the sun prepared them for their years ahead. Only one thing can be said for certain: it was a truly grand moment.

 In the aftermath of the hippie phenomenon a question remains for Atlanta. As it seeks the pearl of “international city” status, will it learn to appreciate and to plan for the diversity that is the hallmark of great cities? Glamorous as Colony Square is, let’s hope the entire city doesn’t end up looking like this; and let’s hope that the next neighborhood where artists and new thinkers congregate Won’t end up a criminals’ and developers’ war zone.