digATL | The Digital Atlanta Portal

Atlanta, a new city established by the railroads in the 19th century and transformed by the automobile in the 20th century, was built first for the movement of goods and then later for people, not unlike most industrial U.S. cities. As the city managed tremendous growth and the rise of the automobile, city planners and visionaries sought to alleviate traffic and safety concerns at the city’s numerous rail crossings by building a series of viaducts and raised streets, thus creating an “elevated city” in portions of downtown. This idea spread as city planners envisioned a platform city where automobiles, streetcars, and pedestrians could move freely on elevated concrete and steel platforms above the “grimy” and “smoky” congestion-causing railway lines. Today’s Underground Atlanta is a result of such initiatives, namely the twin viaducts project of 1927-1929, which elevated the streets around then Union Station (1871-1930) in the heart of downtown. During this time, one visionary architect, Haralson Bleckley, championed the idea of an extended raised city plaza to cover much downtown, a dream that was never realized. Later in the 1960s, a new university for downtown Atlanta, Georgia State College (now University), developed plans to build a “Plaza Campus” with elevated pedestrian platforms above the noise and inconvenience of city traffic. Other visionary architects followed, envisioning Atlanta as an elevated city of the future. While these plans may have been forward thinking, many were also aligned with, if not partially driven by, urban renewal efforts of city leaders. More recently, ambitious urban revitalization projects such as Centennial Yards, which will transform Atlanta’s railroad Gulch, and The Stitch, with plans to cover the multi-lane interstate Connector from Downtown to Midtown, seek to connect people and communities on elevated plazas and platforms above Atlanta’s “least attractive” (The Gulch) and most congested (Downtown Connector) areas — or as Bleckley put it in 1915 in describing Atlanta’s railway tracks and yards, “the grimy chasm that scars Atlanta’s beauty.”

Mapping Atlanta’s Jim Crow Era Women’s Basketball Community. During the era of legalized segregation, Black Atlantans created their own economic, educational, and recreational institutions. In Black schools, community centers, and entertainment venues, Black women played basketball. Sarah Almeta Hill captained a title-winning basketball team while teaching full-time. Then, she became Atlanta’s most successful coach. She won titles, trophies, and temporary stardom. Reporters even described her as a tennis queen and basketball veteran. Despite the five consecutive city titles, two back-to-back state championships, and consistent press during her playing days, Hill barely shows up in an internet search. Neither do the women she competed with in Atlanta’s Jim Crow Era Black women’s basketball community. Those women played basketball and represented their schools, women’s clubs, and sometimes their employers. Sometimes they were models of respectability, sometimes they entertained, and sometimes they simply played because they were competitors. There are traces of their lives and careers made visible through digging through archival documents, yearbooks, and news reports. Most information is not easily accessible, but understanding their participation in basketball is an important part of sports history.

Georgia State University students map Atlanta’s past. This website is produced by Dr. Marni Davis and her students at the downtown Atlanta campus of Georgia State University. GSU has been part of downtown Atlanta since 1913, when it was founded to offer evening courses in business and commerce. As GSU grew, so did its presence in the city. Today, GSU’s downtown campus includes historic buildings and neighborhoods, brand new buildings and public space, urban renewal project areas, and an Olympic stadium. But cities are always built on top of history. What was here before GSU’s campus as we know it? If the past is invisible to us at street level, how can we make it visible?

The ATLMaps platform, a collaboration between Georgia State University and Emory University, combines archival maps, geospatial data visualization, and user contributed multimedia location pinpoints to promote investigation into any number of issues about Atlanta. While currently focused on one city to demonstrate the power of stacking thousands of layers of information on one place, this innovative online platform allows users to layer an increasing number of interdisciplinary data to address the complex issues that any city poses. The project looks to offer a framework that incorporates storytelling reliant on geospatial data and for normalizing input across a range of data sets about so that material can be cross-compared in novel ways, allowing users to make connections between seemingly unrelated data sources and ask questions that would not be apparent when only looking at one particular project. The ATLMaps project will also encourage knowledgeable members of the university and local communities to curate data on the site to demonstrate the possibilities for synthesizing material across projects and data types.

Complete list of ATLMaps contributors and past and present team members at https://atlmaps.org/about

Originally built in 1925 as one of the first parking garages in the city, the Ivy Street Garage was renovated and opened to students in 1946. In 1964, it was renamed Kell Hall to honor Wayne S. Kell, the original director of the school. Kell Hall was demolished and replaced with a campus greenway in 2021. On this website, you can browse the collections of digital items gathered, read about Kell Hall’s history, take a virtual tour of the building and contribute your own stories to the project.