digATL | The Digital Atlanta Portal

Digital tour of the rise and fall of the bawdy brothels that lined Downtown Atlanta’s Collins Street from the late 1800s to the early 1900s—showcasing tantalizing tidbits from newspapers, census records, city directories, property records, maps, and more from Georgia State University Library’s digital resources. Walk the streets (well, not like that!) and transport your imagination back to those bygone days when sin and Southern hospitality went hand in hand.

Date Created
Spring 2022

Related Content

• Interview on Archive Atlanta Podcast
• Presentation with Allyson Stephens at 2022 Atlanta Studies Symposium — “Sin in a Southern City: The Unearthed History of Atlanta’s Postbellum-to-Progressive Era Prostitution Trade” 

Digital project that investigates the history of Georgia Avenue, which once served as an important commercial thoroughfare in the neighborhoods south of downtown Atlanta, and is now the southern edge of GSU’s campus. This interactive historical narrative rediscovers a neighborhood that was entirely replaced by urban renewal projects, and explains why Summerhill, and other “stadium neighborhoods” in Atlanta, were so thoroughly transformed over the course of the twentieth century. 

Atlanta, originally named Terminus, has a profound history which is extensively intertwined with transit. This project visualizes how the city’s public transit system, now a shadow of what it once was, falls short of its far-reaching intentions. By highlighting the routes which have been proposed in the development of these systems, this project aims to contribute to larger discussions taking place around the topic of public transit in Atlanta. The displayed map layers were georeferenced from planning documents available through GSU’s Planning Atlanta collection. These historical, paper maps often served general planning purposes and therefore were not created with attention to precise geographical accuracy. While map layers represented here accurately reflect rail transportation routes displayed by planning documents, please be advised that the map layers accessible from this page have limited geographical accuracy and do not necessarily align with one another. 

Student project from GSU Department of Geosciences. With more than 80,000 acres of tree cover inside the Perimeter, Atlanta leads the nation in urban tree cover; approximately 47% of the city has significant tree growth. Atlanta’s forest is home to over 50 species of native trees, which work to reduce carbon dioxide, produce oxygen, conserve and filter water, serve as habitats for native and endemic species throughout the Piedmont region, cool neighborhoods, and serve as recreational areas. In a city where the tree canopy is already being lost, is submerged in its own wastewater, is experiencing extreme climate change, including enhanced heatwaves, and other factors documented here, the current threat of deforestation has placed the city’s trees in an historically critical situation. Launched 2022; last accessed 2022-10-15