In 1962 The area was hailed as
“Atlanta’s own Greenwich Village”
Read it here.

Thanks to High School student Trevor Alexander for researching Tight Squeeze, as the area was first called..

Peachtree Street near 10th Street has long attracted diverse travelers, even before it was Peachtree. There was a path following the ridge between Creek settlements at Suwanee and Standing Peachtree on the Chattahoochee.  About 1813 local men  upgraded the path into more of a wide trail. With this completed, Lieutenant George Gilmer left Fort Daniel,  Hog Mountain in present-day Gwinnett County, traveled south on Peachtree Road and completed Fort Peachtree [Gilmer] on a small knob overlooking the Chattahoochee. Now the trail was first known as  Peachtree Road.

At the time the fort was built this was the western edge of America’s frontier and not a part of the state of Georgia. The Creek ceded the land in 1821. In 1837 Western and Atlantic Railroad approved the location of the southern terminus of the railroad just south of Fort Peachtree on the Peachtree Road. Late in 1847, Atlanta, defined as extending 1 mile from that Terminus, was incorporated.

The Civil War touched the area directly. The Great Locomotive Race ended for Andrews and some of his raiders when they were hung at what is 3rd and Juniper.

During the Battle of Peachtree Creek on July 20, 1864, both sides wanted to take the high ground, Peachtree Ridge, which Peachtree follows. Confederate troops fell back as far down Peachtree Road as the intersection at Ponce de Leon Avenue, where the Fox Theatre now stands.  Union troops got about as far south as the area between Tenth and Eleventh Streets.  Visualize that the next time you ride through the area.

Between 1865 and 1867 as the Southern states tried to recover from Civil War, Atlanta arose as the rapidly expanding new economic center of the Southeast. This attracted relatively large Jewish and black populations accentuated with people from virtually every state and many foreign countries, creating  a  more cosmopolitan city than any other in Georgia.

According to Franklin Garrett’s three-volume history of Atlanta: Atlanta and Environs, back in 1867 Peachtree, narrow, crooked and bordered by heavy woods, jogged sharply westward at the present Peachtree Place and followed what is now Crescent Avenue until returning to its present course at  about 11th Street. It was between the town, which by then had inched north to around 2nd street,  and the wagon yard around the present 14th Street, at the bend in Peachtree which is now 10th Street, that Tight Squeeze popped up after the war. It was a bunch of shanties, together with a black smith’s shop and several small wooden stores – beside a 30 foot deep ravine.

The ravine was thick with brush after the Civil War. It was a classic postwar period; desperate times. The hungry, the homeless, the wounded, the hopeless filled the city streets. The ravine became a rest stop to both freedmen  and displaced Confederate veterans, some left morphine addicts.  Just north of the ravine where Peachtree intersected a country road that’s now 14th Street, was the wagon yard, where freight was unloaded for the merchants further south in downtown Atlanta.

Merchants en route to the wagon yard on 14th with their pockets full of the “cash on the barrel-head” demanded by the freight companies, or merchants returning with wagons loaded with goods, slowed to skirt the ravine at today’s 10th Street.   In the days before Flagship Merchant Services as a traveler slowed, it was the practice of residents of the ravine or real highwaymen to attack and grab or rob anything they could. It was said that it “took a mighty tight squeeze to get  through with one’s life.” So the area acquired the name Tight Squeeze. Way outside of Atlanta at Tight Squeeze, desperation inspired rowdyism and a good deal of lewd vagrancy.

You can still locate Tight Squeeze today.  Drive along Peachtree between 10th and 11th, notice that midway in the block the street is depressed. Where it is depressed was the lip of the gully. The lip was filled in for the street in 1887 when old Peachtree Road was straightened. If you look to the east, you’ll see that old hollow, that’s partly a paved parking lot now. The hollow goes all the way down to Piedmont. That was Tight Squeeze.

Many victims of Tight Squeeze did not make it through with their lives. John Piaster, a Confederate veteran, after selling a load of wood in Atlanta, was fatally knocked in the head there on Feb. 22, 1867. His attackers were not apprehended. Another victim, Jerome Cheshire, sustained life-long injury in a similar attack. Now a prominent citizen had been murdered and there was an outcry. The Fulton County Grand Jury, alarmed by the attacks, urged that a force of “sober, steady and energetic Secret Detectives” be set up to patrol Tight Squeeze and other approaches to Atlanta to protect travelers.  Much as they set up the Pig Pen on Peachtree in the early 1970s.

Between 1870 and the 1890’s, other than postwar rebuilding projects, Tight Squeeze became the first urban renewal project in Atlanta. The area gradually improved as the suburbs of Atlanta crept north on Peachtree. Developers now wished to sell houses in the area, so it needed an image make-over. By 1872 it was renamed “Blooming Hill”. A man known only as Spiker, a citizen of Blooming Hill, wrote the local paper in 1872 that Blooming Hill is a “considerable little town,. . . with several fine dwellings, two grocery stores and another building”.

Just north of the city limits, then still around 6th Street, a group of rich Atlantans with an interest in horses had formed the Gentlemen’s Driving Club on 189.43 acres northeast of Blooming Hill. They subsequently formed the Piedmont Exposition Co. to hold a large 1887 Exposition on the club acreage, newly named Piedmont Park.

By then the residential area of Atlanta had reached Bleckley Road, now 10th Street.  In preparation for the Piedmont Exposition, Fulton County filled in part of the ravine and straightened Peachtree to its present course, leaving the old course as a back street.  The old Peachtree which had curved  around Tight Squeeze was renamed Crescent Avenue.

The success of this fair prompted the Piedmont Exposition Co. to buy most of the acreage which was to become Piedmont Park from the Gentlemen’s Driving Club. Several more fairs were held on the land until plans began for the major 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition. There were exhibits by six states and special buildings featuring the accomplishments of women and blacks. On opening day, September 18, military bands played, followed by speeches from political, business, and other leaders, including the prominent African American educator Booker T. Washington. In a speech that came to be known as the “Atlanta Compromise” speech.

The midway was at 10th Street and Piedmont.

In 1894, the owners of the park offered to sell the land to the city of Atlanta for $165,000.00, but Mayor John Goodwin refused. The park, therefore, remained in private hands for ten more years outside Atlanta city limits and taxes. Meanwhile the land between the park and the central business district began to grow as a residential area, undoubtedly aided by the 1900 extension of streetcar lines to Fourteenth Street along both the major traffic arteries of Peachtree and Piedmont. This encouraged development along the northern blocks of both roads. During this time, the park was the site of major and minor recreational activities and a magnet for growth. State fairs were held in Piedmont Park and celebrations on July 4th and Labor Day. Atlanta was always more progressive than the surrounding areas. The Piedmont Exposition Co.  opened a special section for African-Americans including a “comfort station.” At this time, most city parks were much more strictly segregated.

In 1903 George Washington Collier died and his undeveloped land, 202 acres west of the park and north of the city, was sold and subdivided in 1904. The main developer was Edwin Ansley, who created the Ansley Park subdivision along guidelines set by Frederick Law Olmsted. Thus the streets were a curving maze with large open spaces or “mini-parks.”

The other major event of 1904 was the renewed offer by the Piedmont Exposition Co. to sell Piedmont Park to the city — this time for $160,000. Mayor Evan Howell favored the purchase, but only if annexation included those developed areas adjacent to the park. This would add approximately $35,000.00-$40,000.00 in tax revenues annually and provide justification for the park’s purchase price. In the end, Atlanta paid $98,000.00 and acquired an improved tract of land, complete with roads, sewers and drains, water facilities, fair buildings, and a baseball field. In 1904 Atlanta’s city limits were extended from Sixth Street all the way to 15th Street.

“It’s a shame what happened to this part of Atlanta; almost everything I knew is gone,” says Dr. Bernard Wolff as he peers down Peachtree Place, his childhood stomping ground. “I was born right under there in 1909,” Wolff says, pointing to modern slabs of the Southern Bell switching office, next to the Midtown MARTA Station. The site used to be occupied by the Wolff family’s seven-bedroom Dutch colonial house, until he sold it to AT&T in 1962. All around were the mansions and maples of Blooming Hill. “Look at that big magnolia tree beside the telephone building. I’ll be darned; it’s still there.”

Wolff recalls his neighborhood as full of trees, mansions and children. “Tenth Street School, which is long gone, was the best grammar school in Atlanta. Ask Franklin Garrett, he was in the class ahead of me.” The Wolff family kept a cow in a nearby pasture. “My father, also a doctor, always complained the milk was bad because Sherman infested the grass with daisies.” Wolff played baseball in a field north of 979 Crescent Ave, The Windsor House, later known as “The Dump.” The house was built as a single-family residence in 1899. In 1907 the original family moved to Druid Hills. Years later the house was divided into the Crescent Apartments.

Urban Atlanta continued its northward movement. In 1911 the Georgian Terrace Hotel at Peachtree and Ponce had its grand opening. It immediately became known as one of the finest hotels in the Southeast.

In 1913 on Peachtree Street the homes and mansions of the wealthy were still prevalent. Ansley Park, northwest of Eleventh Street, was the new suburb for the city’s elite. Apartment houses proliferated in the areas between.

Yet eleventh Street was only developed from Peachtree to Piedmont and that was paved only with rubble. Although sewerage went all the way to the park, water ran only to Piedmont Avenue as late as 1918. Perhaps due to this lack of development and services, the section of Eleventh Street from Piedmont Avenue to the park became the site not for luxury apartments but the decidedly middle class Piedmont Park Apartments. These were designed by one of Georgia’s first woman  architects, Leila Ross Wilburn.

In 1924 the new governors’ mansion is opened at 205 Prado in Ansley Park cementing its place as a leading address for Atlanta’s elite. A new clientele  for the area merchants emerged.

The secret of Tenth Street’s early success was the independent “quality minded merchant.” The area became famous for the place where you could get the best of everything in what had become a unique “village” type atmosphere. “Remond’s” French Restaurant or the King Hardware Store that carried most everything; Knights and Baldwin’s purveyed the finest in produce, and Mr. Reed delivered tons of the finest meats to Tenth Street’s prize clientele Roxy Delicatessen was Atlanta’s original “Spaghetti House” and the greatest sandwich in town was their bill of fare. Bennie Kaplan and Davis Ajouelo were fine craftsmen making repaired shoes good as new. There were many more fine merchants—too numerous to mention—during Tenth Street’s “Golden Era.” During that time Tenth Street was the place to eat, live and shop for Atlanta’s elite, from the Governor’s family of the day to the wealthy dowagers complete with chauffeur driven limousines. In this period, people from Paces Ferry, Garden Hills and Morningside enjoyed the area.

Margaret Mitchell parent’s home was near the village around Tenth Street, the nicest shopping area in Atlanta. Everybody walking or hauling their groceries home in their arms or those little carts. The stores were busy and interesting, and the streets were fragrant with bakery smells from King Cole bake shop and rich delicatessen aromas from the old Roxy. It was called  Atlanta’s Greenwich Village.

“Tenth Street was a lady, a good-looking, viable retail center sort of like Lenox Square today,” recalled Franklin Garrett. “There seemed to be at least two of everything. Bank  branches, hardware stores, 10-cent stores, butchers, bakers, florists, dress shops. Fruits and vegetables were displayed outside, at that grocery stores, which were individually owned, while inside, mature clerks with pads waited on the matrons, charged their orders and had them delivered. The Hemlock telephone exchange, a fine, cream brick building erected in 1916, is now a U.S. military processing station. The Roxy Delicatessen had the best sandwiches in Atlanta. The Universal Garage was well patronized, but it was converted to the Hideaway, a Dixieland jazz club. The Tenth Street Theater was pulled down when they widened 10th west of Peachtree.”

Grown-up Margaret Mitchell wrote for the The Atlanta Journal Sunday magazine,  Her book, Gone With the Wind, would not be published until 1936. Located in what was then Atlanta’s largest business district outside of downtown, close to trolley lines, and walking distance from her parents’ house, the Crescent Apartments was home to Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh when they married in July 1925.

The 1920s were unstable financial times and had an effect upon the area. Crescent Apartments’ owner became over-extended, and the building was sold at auction in 1926. The next owner, too, was driven to bankruptcy when the stock market crashed in 1929. Maintenance declined, contributing to Mitchell’s characterization of their apartment as “the Dump.” By the fall of 1931, there were only two occupied apartments in the building, one of which belonged to the Marshes, but they, too, moved to a larger apartment a few blocks away in the spring of 1932.

In 1926 Mrs. H.M. High donates her home to Atlanta on the condition it become an art museum which opened in October. This would make the area a point of focus for the artistic, a trend that began when the artisans who had created and performed at the Cotton States Exposition wished to live as near to their work in the  Park as possible.

In 1929 The Fox Theatre, a place of the performing arts and the motion picture, opens. Vaudeville on Peachtree.

“My first knowledge of the Tenth Street area came in September of 1937,” says Jack Hazan. “My father opened a business there, and I candidly felt that he might have a rough time making it out there in the ‘country’.  He made it, and we were in that same store until November 1970. From the four or five stores located in the Tenth Street Shopping District in 1937, the area grew to be Atlanta’s first major shopping center away from the Central District; at one stage during the ’40’s the Tenth Street Merchants Association boasted a membership of close to 100 wholesale and retail business outlets.”

From 1946 to the early 1960’s, the area continued as a prime location to live or shop. A large percentage of Atlanta’s female support staff, secretarial, clerical, and medical, lived in apartment buildings near the Peachtree and Piedmont trolley lines which gave easy access to downtown. They called it the 10th Street  Business Section, and—“taken together with 13th, 14th and 15th streets immediately to the north—it’s as near as Atlanta comes to having its very own Greenwich  Village, Soho, Chelsea, Left Bank, or whatever other big cities call the collective digs of their avant-garde citizenry”.

The city’s high schools ended their gender segregation in 1947. Tech High and Boys High combined to became still active coed Grady High,  while Girls High became coed Roosevelt High, now The Roosevelt apartments.

Modern new shopping centers and parking took their toll. The  10th Street area began a decline in August 1959 when Lenox Square mall opened with 47 shops. The sophisticated aura of the new shopping area farther North on Peachtree began to sap customers from the areas between and beyond. The handwriting was on the wall for the charming Village of Tenth Street, Georgia. Vacancies began to appear.

The clarion of events to come was a several page  announcement in 1964 that a shopping center called “Ansley Mall” with plenty of customer parking  and modern stores of all types would soon be  built, and would open a scant couple of miles from 10th at the gateway to one of its “mainstays,” the Morningside Community. This proved to be a crucial blow to the underdeveloped area in the center of downtown Atlanta, the old commercial district on Peachtree Street between 8th and 14th. Merchants concurred that business volume dropped a good 20 to 30 percent when Ansley Mall opened. The shopkeepers had made a feeble, but futile attempt to offset this by operating a parking lot in what remained of the ravine in the rear of some shops; it helped some, but it was not enough. The downward trend continued. Next came the removal of parking meters and an almost complete ban of “on street parking” in the area. As if this were not enough, Tenth Street, Piedmont and Fourteenth Street were made “One Way.” This sure helped to move traffic! —away from and around the Tenth Street district.

Along Juniper, 11th, 12th,  13th and 14th streets, modern apartments blend with old homes converted to boarding houses or apartments which have served, and are serving, generations of Atlantans. If one were a sociologist, he likely would find that young high school and college graduates, during the 60s and 70s, coming to Atlanta to seek their fortunes gravitated naturally to the 10th Street section due to its artistic aura, its reasonable rents, convenience of transportation and shopping facilities. For those not yet ready or willing to accept a sentence to staid suburbia and the eternal lawn-mowing chore, the 10th Street section is a welcome means of escape. The 10th Street section was a vital, throbbing, essential part of Atlanta—culturally and otherwise.

Unfortunately the Georgia surrounding Atlanta was much less enlightened. Lester Maddox, wielding gun and ax handle, chased blacks from his Pickrick restaurant on Northside Drive near Georgia Tech in early July 1964. The following month, Maddox closes the restaurant after being ordered to desegregate under the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding non-discrimination in public accommodations. Maddox then started a petition campaign for mayor, but was easily trounced by Mayor Hartsfield who was reelected to a sixth term.(Maddox in front of Grady High demonstrating his ability to lead Georgia into the future.)

Maddox decided his constituency was outside cosmopolitan Atlanta, so in 1966 he ran for governor. Although Bo Callaway, one of the first Republican members of the United States House of Representatives elected from Georgia since Reconstruction, won a plurality, he lacked a majority and the Legislature picked Lester Maddox as governor.

The new Governor seemed at odds with the city. Atlanta is a metropolitan city. It had always been in the forefront of civil rights and progressive action for a southern city, as well as any in the country. It had a history of being a political anomaly. Peachtree Street was more than a romantic connotation. Atlanta is a symbol of everything Maddox was not. Spiritually Atlanta was more akin to San Francisco and New York than it was to Birmingham, Alabama. Another point was that by the 1970s San Francisco and New York had become more the land of the “put on” and the “putdown” than the real thing.  But in Atlanta there was a whole new generation of hippies, Southern youngsters bearing small resemblance, except by name, with the hippies of fun and frolic who occasionally paraded nude through the streets of the San Francisco. In Lester Maddox Georgia, it could be dangerous to be too flamboyant around the wrong people. Keep that freak flag furled till you reach 10th Street and Peachtree or  Fourteenth.

The new Governor’s Mansion on West Paces Ferry Road opened in 1967, with Lester Maddox as its first occupant. West Paces Ferry Road replaced The Prado as the seat of culture. Around the park area even more large houses, and even embassies on 14th Street, become available to rent. Some are rented informally or communally and further subdivided. People rented a room to their friends and rents became even cheaper. Some of these homes served as salons for the free discussion of arts and ideas. These small groups of bohemians began to reach a critical mass and began to be aware of each other and interact.

When the hip thing first started, the old Atlanta neighborhood of Tight Squeeze or Blooming Hill, and environs, was a congregating place for hips idling on the corner. The scene was called the Strip by hip inhabitants as self-deprecating humor that the hip part of town was still small town, small time. The original hips created the Strip — intentionally or unintentionally — as a meeting place for sharing their culture, but it gradually expanded beyond their needs, and beyond their control. As more people of different stripes were attracted to the area, they added their own characteristics to the basic ones, causing the mutations which eventually drove out the early community members.

The next era was a hectic and tempestuous time in the area. Down from Fourteenth Street, out of deference to more progress , the Colony Square Project, came the Bohemian, hippy, flower children. Colorful boutiques sprang into being, and the vacant stores were filled with a new breed of merchant that cottoned to the urges of the new generation. There was sporadic violence as the streets teemed with people, and the phrase, “Wall-to-wall people” applied very well to what took place at what was now called “The Strip.”

Chances are if the hippies had come to Atlanta with money in their jeans, the reaction might not have been all that violent. The one great equalizer, above and beyond all else, is the economic reality of life. Former Congressman Charles Weltner, whose liberal point of view stood out like the Southern Cross, at the time commented sardonically, “There just, ain’t no percentage in hippies if you’re a businessman.”

March 8, 1969 Underground Atlanta opened as Atlanta’s Bourbon Street, the all-hours fun location. Many of the hip community, especially musicians, welcomed this as a dependable source of income.   Civil Rights and white flight shifted the sociology of Atlanta. The establishment in  Atlanta officially shifted in 1969 when Sam Massell becomes the first the Jewish Mayor of Atlanta with Maynard Jackson, a Black, was vice mayor. That year Black aldermen increased from one to five, and Benjamin Mays, mentor to Martin Luther King, was elected to the Board of Education.

The hippies had made an incursion into the city and the neighborhood. They opened their own stores only to have them burned and looted. Time magazine reported the first bombing of a leather craft store owned by Susie and Ron Jarvis. As Time reported it, “When Ron complained to police (there were 27 bullet holes in the front of their store), he was arrested for shooting back. Says Ron bitterly: ‘We’ve got a new n-word in our society, and the way to tell him is by his hair and his beard.'”

In 1970, the flowering of the hip area reached full bloom. By June 1971 it is a several block stage show, played free of charge to a drive by audience almost nightly with extremes every weekend.

It is un-choreographed and undirected, the cast changes every night and none of the performer’s is given any lines to read.

Yet for more than two years it remained near the top of the entertainment list for Atlanta residents and their guests. When visitors came to the city, someone was sure to take them, or at least recommend that they go, to “The Strip.”

Like some of the other less conventional forms of entertainment in Atlanta, it received constant attention from the city’s law enforcement agencies. So much attention, in fact, that the police become regular members of the cast, taking on roles as vital to the show as those of the longhairs in the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic drama played there nightly.

But, strangely enough, most of the people responsible for this highly successful, long running show were no longer part of it. Many say they no longer enjoyed the performance and ceased to go on or near the stage. “Too many hassles!”

These young men and women, who through their searching for new horizons developed the characterizations and costuming for the show, now described the scene they left as “sick,” “dying,” having “bad vibrations” and being “nothing but a wholesale drug market.”

Law officers helped to make it unpleasant. The hippies were arrested for everything from breaking municipal jaywalking laws to reciting incantations of the devil. Raids were held with Gestapo like precision on homes where there was a suspicion of drugs. Furniture, possessions and walls were unapologetically smashed in some “searches”. They occurred with such frequency that calls and cries of harassment were heard from the once quiescent residents of an otherwise vital metropolis. Hippies were sprayed with Mace, whose use was then not generally approved.

As far back as 1969, a rock concert was proceeding at a relatively peaceful level when a cop, reacting to some thing less than a kind remark drew his service revolver. The wife of a professor at one of the nearby colleges tried to calm him. She was clubbed for her troubles, taken to a hospital in handcuffs and had six stitches in her head for her efforts. The war had begun!

Police began to stop strollers in the parks, using more force and indiscretion than any ‘stop and frisk’ law would permit. Piedmont Park which had changed from a native paradise to a homosexual hangout, was the focal point of picture taking by police who wanted to build a mug file of the new groovers. Remember homosexuality was still illegal in Georgia then.

The Police did not harass everyone coming in the area. The police had a particular fascination for ignoring the clean-shaven bands of vigilantes who had taken it upon themselves to beat up the out-of-towners. These ‘skinheads’ went after the hippies with all the zest of a lynch mob.

Hippies were shotgunned by these marauding vigilantes. Beaten and bruised hippies were jailed for disturbing the peace when they tried to report the crime, sometimes being told they had just got what they had deserved. One longhair was arrested for bleeding on the officer when he tried to report a beating.

You can speculate on the reason, but while Police vigorously pursued people with marijuana and psychedelics, many ignored hard drug dealers who very openly set up shop along the sidewalk on 11th Street. Wonder why the Police looked the other way?

After the hippies, and the ensuing deluge, the streets of the Flower Children got real mean,  Strip joints, hard drugs, death and mutilation replaced the head shops, the funky little coffeehouses and the leather craft stores. There was a significant  difference in the character of the Strip by 1973 as contrasted with the sense of community and purpose it had once had.

“A year ago,” says Bruce Pemberton of the Bridge, the area’s runaway mediation center, “I could spend five hours on the Strip, rapping the whole time. Now I can walk down there and literally not see a person I know.”

The Strip then seemed populated largely by runaways, transients, part-time hippies, and drug dealers. A visitor to the area rarely ran into the sort of young person who talked about an intellectualized search for alternative cultures; as used to be the case, instead there seems to be mostly people who parrot catch phrases about “the establishment” and the “‘pigs”.

Some disagree with this assessment. “I still think the same kind of kid that came down to this area four or five years ago and got involved in the community is still coming down, and that’s the tragedy of it.”

“It’s a business out there,” says Dennis Doherty, director of  the Community Crisis Center, the agency that works most directly with the street people. “A lot of people wouldn’t be out there if they weren’t working — dealing (drugs), crafts, or spare-changing (panhandling).

Doherty says some of the seekers still come to the area and volunteer to work in one of the several agencies handling Strip problems. But when these people are absorbed into the highly structured system of agencies, they cease to be true street people.”

“It got pretty tawdry during the hippie era. They weren’t just peddling the Great Speckled Bird [underground newspaper} on the streets. You couldn’t walk 20 feet without somebody trying to sell you drugs or pot”.

“After the hippies pulled out, we had our fire age,” says an area resident. “Everywhere you see a vacant lot or a pocket park, there was a major fire in the late 1970s. Speculators would buy a building leased by a TV repair shop or a go-go club and two weeks later, the place would burn down. Very mysterious. But some of us tough cookies held on and made improvements.”

The police started building bridges to the rest of the community. As part of a trend that was taking place in many of the major cities of the country, their new attitude was one of trying to understand, ”or at least communicate with the community. And if hippies happened to be members of the area, communicate with them too. Rap sessions took place between people who were once throwing bricks and tear gas canisters. The thugs eventually found other rocks to crawl under and for 10 years, and more, Tight Squeeze was on hold. Cha Gio, Theatrical Outfit, Brother Juniper’s and some gay bars kept it alive.

While the new cast members play before the hundreds of automobiles cruising slowly by, the original or early characters are seeking new scripts for their lives—and the scenarios they are choosing usually exclude the high visibility inherent to The Strip. Many hips—especially those who set up housekeeping—moved away from Tight Squeeze and its problems. Throughout the middle stretch of  Atlanta, there are hip families and generally they make good neighbors. The reasons for this diaspora are manifold and intertwined. They include police pressure, drugs, publicity and the changing nature of the people involved.

The underlying purpose of the Strip also seems to have changed. What started out as one specific facet of the alternative culture of the hip movement in the area appears to have become an end in itself to the newcomers to the hip scene.

Today the Strip lies in something of a limbo state: The larger hip community seems to be abandoning the struggle to keep the street life going, while no new leaders rise from the crowd to take up the battle flag cast aside in the retreat.

THERE ARE exceptions to the charge of abandonment. Earlier staff members of the Great Speckled Bird, an underground newspaper in Atlanta, staged a “loiter-in” demonstration on the Strip to protest the great number of arrests under the “Safe Streets and Sidewalks” ordinance.

For about two and a half hours the Bird staffers loitered  on the sidewalk wearing picket signs announcing “We ain’t doing nothing” and “I’ll stay out of your way if you’ll stay out of mine.” The police stood by and watched and there were considerably fewer arrests that night.

But participation in the demonstration by the street people was less than enthusiastic. While the pickets were there, a few Strip regulars stood talking, remarking how pleasant it was not to have to “keep moving” or risk arrest. Later, however, when the demonstrators had gone, the situation returned more or less to normal, and few obvious loiterers were noted among the street people.

On another night there was an arrest of several young people in a car in the alley behind the Strip. As is traditional, a crowd of street people swarmed angrily toward the bust. talking about resistance and riot.

In the past, similar scenes had sometimes developed into vigorous resistance as the affronted hips banded together to protect their own. This time though, when a single portly policeman strode purposefully toward the crowd and growled, “Move it out,” the longhairs quietly scattered and went back to strolling along the Strip.

The seekers of three or four years ago brought a kind of coherence and purpose to street life, mostly in their efforts, to put together agencies to deal with problems.

Those of today, however, tend to move directly into established programs, and their abilities are directed not toward creating unity as much as toward solving individual crises.

The Rev. Greg Santos, cofounder of the Bridge, recalls that when he came on the scene the most binding activity was the drive to form the helping agencies needed in the area — the crisis center, the runaway facility, temporary housing for transients, and so forth.

Now these are organized and operating, most of them stable in their concepts if not in financing or staff. Santos suggests there is little left for the original “movers and shakers” to do, so they are leaving.

Some people within the hip community go so far as to suggest that if the crisis center and Aurora, a church-sponsored recreation center on the Strip, were not offering the services they do, the street people would not remain.

Doherty, on the other hand, says the removal of the agencies might actually bring back some of the lost leadership in a renewed effort to bring stability to the Strip.

No one can predict the future of the street life in Tight Squeeze, the historic name for the Peachtree 10th Street area. In 1968 it was announced that the Strip was dead and that there would be no more hippie community, but that forecast was quickly proved mistaken. ”

In a sort of hibernation since last fall, the Strip now is rebuilding its population with the increase in summer travelers and school vacationers. The tourist trade is beginning to pick up. Daily arrests are at a higher level than last summer when there was a special police precinct set up to deal specifically with the area.

The hip community leaders who have left the Strip and who now lack confidence in its ability to survive seem not to consider one possibility: That others could develop into leaders just as they once did, and as others before them did.

It is not impossible that a new “generation” of community organizers could spring from the street people this year, or next, independent of the older community which is moving on to new pursuits.

It seems unlikely, on looking at the apparently aimless character of the street people at this moment. But that could change with the influx of a new group of highly motivated young people.

Dennis Doherty describes the Strip as a “phase in the hip way of life. The question is, are the motivated, sincere newcomers going to feel it a necessary phase in their own development?

Like the land along Peachtree Street’s seamy “Triangle” area, Atlanta’s other major adult entertainment strip—Peachtree from Eighth Street to 12th Street—is owned by some of the city’s most prominent citizens.

The owners of the property all say they rent to their controversial tenants because there are no other takers for the premises. “I hate the fact that we’ve got  to rent to that kind of establishment,” said Massell. “But at the same time we’ve got taxes and loan payments.

“If you leave a building vacant they (winos) come in and burn down the block. And so nobody wants it. I’ve owned that property since 1950. We’ve produce stores. We’ve had delicatessens. We had a first-rate neighborhood shopping center.

“But when the hippies moved in— you saw what happened. Many people were afraid to go down there.

1986 In 120 years, this colorful Peachtree-l0th Street district of Midtown Atlanta has evolved from a perilous bottleneck known as Tight Squeeze in the 1860s to a charming residential neighborhood named Blooming Hill in the 1880s to the tony 10th Street shopping area of the 1920s to the hippie- jammed Strip of the 1960s and early ’70s.

Garrett, Franklin. “A Short History of Land Lots 105 and 106 of the 17th District of Fulton County, Georgia,” Atlanta Historical Journal, Vol. XXVII #2, 39-54.

Garrett, Franklin. Atlanta and Environs: A Chronicle of Its People and Events, Athens: University of Georgia Press,

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 Alien’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.

In the early ‘70s developers moved on the 14th street and strip areas. Most rental property left became too expensive. The cheap places were filled with folks full of most anything but peace and Love. A rash of firebombings discouraged attempts to build a more solid community presence. No city officials seemed to look too hard to solve destruction so helpful to the big boys plans for urban renewal projects. Anyone with kids or wanting a peaceful, easy feeling had to look elsewhere.

Many People view the killing of Tree on 14th as being just after the high water mark.

decline – The Great Speckled Bird Jan. 1971 Vol. 4 #1 pg. 3

14th St. Shooting

“Tree” died in the doorway of 238 14th Street early Tuesday morning. He was shot twice with a shotgun, residents of the house said, after he refused to leave and advanced toward one person with his hands in his coat pockets. According to police reports a loaded pistol was found on his body.

238 14th Street, once the elegant residence of the French Consul, is the last of-the 14th Street “crash pads” that helped create the original Atlanta Hip Colony of Peachtree and 14th fame.

In the past few months 238, known as “the Columns,” had become armed for self-defense. As a friend of one of the residents put it, “Every time one of these tough dudes needs money he goes up there and rips them off.” About two weeks ago two guys were shot when they tried to rip off the place. The cops came and according to one source, said, “If they come up here to rob you—shoot ’em.” A few days later two more guys tried a rip off again. They were shot at too.

“Tree should have known that he couldn’t go up there late at night like that, I wouldn’t do it,” said someone who knew him. “He wasn’t a bad guy, a lot of people didn’t like him, but I did.” Another said that Tree “hassled me and hassled a lot of people, if you had any money on you it was his.”

The cops descended on 14th Street after the shooting, arresting everyone they found in the house, charging them with murder. It’s hard to imagine the police arresting seventeen residents of a rooming house in nearby Ansley Park and charging them with murder when one man was shot by one person. Then the police vandalized the house in what was’ described as a “search,” One UPI reporter who saw several rooms said, “they destroyed the place.” Later reporters for the Bird and the straight press were refused admittance.

Then someone discovered that one of those arrested is Robert TSouvas, a defendant in the My Lai massacre. Suddenly what is sensational  local news, “Hippie Area Shotgun Slaying Linked to Feud With Bikers,” becomes very hot national news.

T’Souvas has been stationed at Ft. McPherson here in Atlanta. In July he was arrested on charges of possession of grass. His attorney charged that the CIA was conducting a campaign against the My Lai defendants. The charges were dropped. T’Souvas says that he and his wife and child were asleep in their room in the back of the Columns when they were awakened by the police and arrested.

As the Bird goes to press it seems that the police are preparing to drop murder charges against the seventeen, presumably accepting the seemingly obvious explanation of the seventeen that the guy who shot split before the cops arrived. But word is that drug charges and charges of occupying a dive will be left against at least some.

What about the feud between Hippies and Bikers? Well, in the first place, Tree was not a member of a bike club. There is a lot of destructive violence in Atlanta’s freak community, but it’s not be- cause of “feuds.” It’s there for many of the same reasons that there’s violence in Buttermilk Bottom— because it’s hard to survive when Amerika constantly tries to wipe you out. Why do the police and the straight press push the notion of a “feud?” Because if we don’t watch it, it will keep us divided at a time when we must get together to survive.

—gene guerrero

Community  Reprinted from The Great Speckled Bird, vol. 3 #27 July 10, 1970

It has been said that you have to understand the past to know the future. Freaks don’t necessarily believe that. We’ve seen how our parents have used the past as an excuse for standing still. In our lifestyle we are attempting an affirmation, not of the past, nor the  present, but the future.

Now though, after several years of growth, the hip community in Atlanta does have a past. There have been important struggles in Atlanta-struggles for the street, for the park, for store-fronts, for our own institutions, for unity against straight Atlanta’s rulers. This is our history and we can learn from it.

For years, the Midtown area of Atlanta has been the center of a small bohemian colony. It grew around the Atlanta Art School, located on Peachtree near 15th. In those days (late fifties) before the corporations decided that art was a necessary part of good business, the Art School was a pretty open, groovy place. One of the first coffeehouses, The Golden Horn, opened near the Art School during the folk music craze begun by the Kingston trio. At the time the only place you could see quality foreign films was at the Peachtree Art Theater, and near it were two of the best record shops in town. Grass was plentiful and if the cops busted a party for too much noise or something they didn’t know to look for it or know to recognize the wonderful sweet aroma.

Not all was peaches and cream, though. Before the Golden Horn, a coffeehouse had been opened on West Peachtree and busted on opening night. The owners were busted for operating a dive and for obscenity from Playboy pinups upstairs in a bedroom.

The economics of the neighborhood supported the colony. With the flight to the suburbs in the mid-fifties, the neighborhood had been surrendered to working class whites and rents were pretty cheap. Rentals of storefronts were relatively cheap since many merchants in the area moved to Ansley Mall when it opened about 1965.

In 1966 a student at the Art School, David Braden, opened an Art Gallery on the north side of l4th. That was Mandorla No. 1 and when he moved it to the corner of Peachtree and 14th it became Mandorla No. 2. In the basement Braden opened a coffeehouse-The Catacombs.

Braden was gay and was out front about it. People respected him for that and for the openness of his gallery  to new art. In the summer of 1967 when kids, mostly from metro Atlanta, began to come into the area, Mandorla was the natural place to go. A few hip people began to sit on the porch or on the wall across the street.

Summer of 1967 was the Haight-Ashbury summer, and news media across the country began looking around their towns for hippies. Atlanta was no exception; They found Braden and made him into the “leader of the hippie colony.” The cops got uptight, and Braden was busted for possession in November 1967. He got a year’s suspended sentence for that but in March 1968 he was busted for selling to a minors- a police frame-up. Braden had attempted suicide and when his lawyer pleaded him guilty, his charge was reduced to simple possession. He’s still in jail, one of many taking the rap for the rest of us.

Six hours after Braden’s second arrest, the vice squad raided the Morning Glory Seed, Atlanta’s first headshop, located on West Peachtree near North Avenue. The owner was a friend of Braden’s who had helped him with the defense in his bust. Two employees were busted and a warrant was issued for the owner. The Morning Glory Seed was closed.

But the police weren’t able to close the Middle Earth head shop on Eighth Street near Peachtree. They did try, though. The Middle Earth was opened in November 1967 by Bo and Linda Lozoff. They opened with a poetry reading by an Emory professor. The cops came that night and practically every night after that, hassling customers, hassling Bo about his cycle, threatening arrests for “obscene” posters in the shop. Bo fought back and kept his shop alive.

Spring 1968 came and the warm weather brought kids back into the area. The Catacombs had been reopened as a rock club and kids gathered around the corner of Peachtree and 14th creating Atlanta’s first real street scene. Lozoff opened a branch of the Middle Earth upstairs where the gallery had been. in March 1968 the Bird began operating from a house down 14th a half block from the corner.

The city saw what was happening and sent the cops to clean it out. Kids were arrested for loitering, jaywalking, vagrancy-anything the cops could think up. Sometimes 20 or 30 were arrested at a time. Bird sellers began getting arrested for “violation of pedestrian duties.” Lozoff, who was seeing his customers arrested in his 14th Street shop, wrote in the Bird, “The Atlanta Police Department is not a corrupt arm of democracy. It is a fascist branch of an increasingly fascist society based on violence, intolerance and oppression.” He was right.

Drug busts increased with increased use of undercover narcs. Then during the summer Lozoff was forced to close his branch because the police harassment was| driving away customers. The Twelfth Gate, a Methodist Church coffeehouse on 10th Street which had earlier opened a free clinic on 15th Street, opened the 14th Gate in the space. Logoff had used. Their idea was to provide a place for kids to get in off the street, away from the cops. They had a good jukebox and inexpensive food.  But the cops came in and busted kids for loitering and sleeping in a public place. Near the end of the summer the l4th Gate closed.

The first struggles for Piedmont Park began in July 1968. In the spring and summer, kids had been run out of the park by the cops. In July folks got together a Be-In. Eight hundred people showed-up. Some bands  were there but the electricity was turned off. A generator was on hand but the cops stopped it. The Be-In moved to the Bird’s back yard. No real protest was made made-the community was still weak then.

During the summer, at the trial of some kids who were busted at the corner of l4th and Peachtree. Municipal Court Judge Jones summed up what everyone by then knew was happening. In court he said, “I’ve never tried one of these cases before, but we’ve received complaint after complaint from business about people hanging around and taking over the area. Now these officers have their instructions, and if you’re brought into this courtroom on charges of loitering, the court is going to find you guilty.”

In fall of 68 the street scene slowed down as kids  went back to school and the weather grew colder. In October  a sit-in was held at the Pennant Restaurant near l4th and Peachtree after the restaurant began refusing freaks service. The Pennant returned to a policy of serving anyone.

Also in October, the Merry-Go- Round opened on what is now called the Strip. Opened by two guys who were shrewd enough to see that there was a lot of money to be made from hip culture in Atlanta, the Merry-Go-Round did well from the start. Previously the real estate interests had refused to open the strip to anything that looked hippish. Some real estate men saw that they too could make money off the hippies, and the strip was open with in most cases higher rents charged to the merchants of hip culture.

The winter of 68- 69 was pretty quiet. Drug busts continued, often concentrated in two apartment buildings on either side of the Bird office on 14th Street. In January another sit-in was held, this time at the Waffle House on Peachtree near Tenth. It too succeeded in opening the restaurant up at least for a time.

Spring 1969 opened with a Bird birthday party in the park on March 29. The Bird had discovered that there were no ordinances prohibiting the use of electric music in the park or regulating the use of the pavilion. So the celebration was held with the live, electric music of the Hampton Grease Band. The park was opened.

In April work was begun on She trade mart which was to become Atlantis Rising. The store was owned by two persons who thought of it as a cooperative in which “tradesmen” could lease space for their wares at overhead cost. For a time Atlantis became the focus for the community, with a lot of kids helping in the construction. As the street scene picked up again Atlantis became one of two places to hang around.

The other gathering place was the Middle Earth up on Eighth Street. At night kids began to gather, talk and deal on the parking lot across the street from Middle Earth. Again the city got uptight and sent the cops. Arrests on a large scale began for the same old charges jaywalking, vagrancy, etc. At times police would set up roadblocks on Eighth Street to conduct searches of cars.

On May 17 three kids were arrested at the Waffle House when they refused to leave after being refused service. Spontaneously a demonstration was held in front of the restaurant. The community was getting together. Things would be different in 1969.

Late in the winter, construction was begun on Colony Square, the office development that stands at Peachtree&14th. Older residents knew that area was slated or high-rise development but the Colony Square construction brought the news home to everybody. In the months before construction began, city housing inspectors were busy inspecting and condemning buildings to help pave the way for the developers. Housing became harder and harder for freaks to find, for their buildings were the first to be condemn

1969 was an election year in Atlanta and the hip community soon became one of the political issues when Alderman Everett Millican, a mayoral candidate, began calling for action against the “sex deviates” and hippies in the parks and along Peachtree Street. Not to be out- hippie baited by Millican, Mayor Allen, who supported another candidate, said on June 30: “We arrest them by the hundreds for the slightest infraction of the law.” It was true: hundreds of arrests were being made on Eighth Street and throughout the community.

On July 4th, the first Atlanta Pop Festival was held near Atlanta. Afterwards more kids were on the streets. Harassment arrests continued. Bird sellers were arrested for jaywalking when they stepped off the curb.

On August 4 police conducted another large narcotics raid on 14th Street. Some of the kids were charged with occupying a dive. As the police led the kids into the paddy wagon, a crowd gathered and began chanting at the police. After ten or fifteen minutes of “Pigs Out of Our Community!” the police charged, maced, and started blasting. Three Bird staffers were charged with inciting to riot. The next week the Bird was give an eviction notice because the insurance was cancelled after someone planted Molotov cocktails in the bushes in front of several 14th Street buildings.

The community was uptight. Next week a community meeting was held behind Atlantis Rising but nothing was done. Later a community patrol was begun for a couple of weeks to try to protect freaks from police harassment.

Over the summer music had continued sporadically in the park. Late in August when tensions were highest, The Hampton Grease band gave a “Labor of Love” in the Park. It was a fine time.

Then in September, Atlantis Rising was firebombed. Although several witnesses gave police a description of the car, no one was caught. Atlantis stayed closed over the winter.

Next week the Atlanta people, with the cooperation of the community, got together a mini-Pop Festival which was to be a benefit for the rebuilding of the store. The city provided the showmobile stage and the music was held on the ball field in Piedmont Park. Several thousand people came during the weekend, but expenses were higher than contributions and nothing was raised for Atlantis.

The following weekend music was held again in the park. It was on a smaller scale, with the bands back on the stone steps. A plainclothes narc was in the crowd looking for a bust. George Nikas recognized, him and started telling people. The narc tried to arrest George, A crowd gathered. George split. Cops came back and arrested Bird photographer Bill Fibben, who had been taking pictures. The crowd was angry, shouting at the cops. The cops blew their cool and started lobbing tear gas. A professor’s wife was beaten. National TV carried close-up film of a kid being beaten in the face with a billy club. The following Saturday six to eight hundred freaks marched down Peachtree Street to the police station. The community was together, and the police retreated, staying out of the community for the most part until 1970. In October a three-day festival was held in the park to claim it once again as ours.