digATL | The Digital Atlanta Portal

Originally Atlanta’s first modern parking garage, Kell Hall began as a 1920s “automobile hotel” and later became Georgia State’s first permanent building, illustrating urban ambition, cost effective development, and adaptive reuse. A testament to the resourceful and inventive spirit of GSU’s early leaders, Kell Hall endured through more than seven decades of growth and innovation as Georgia State evolved from the University System of Georgia’s “Atlanta Extension Center” to a world-class urban research university.

The September 1990 announcement that Atlanta would host the 1996 Olympics surprised and thrilled many Atlantans. The ’96 Summer Games would mark the 100th anniversary of the modern games, and Athens, Greece, home of the modern Olympiad, had also put in a bid. But Atlanta lawyer Billy Payne was determined. Ultimately dubbed by the President of the International Olympic Committee Juan Samaranch as the “most exceptional” Olympics thirty years later, the lasting legacy for Atlanta is still complicated. Was hosting the Games ultimately just an opportunistic business venture, or was it motivated by a real desire to show off “the city too busy to hate”? Between a serial bomber, a charismatic lawyer, and a city searching for its identity, the conclusion is still mixed to this day.

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. Launched Spring 2022.

GSU student 3D Atlanta visualization project. Here, including a demo of a “future-peeking” device allowing users to see downtown Atlanta streets in 2017, and as they were in the 1920s, including many historically accurate buildings modeled from photos taken at the time. The virtual environment introduces users to many of the historically significant buildings that stood before parking lots came to dominate Atlanta’s downtown.

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?

Within Georgia State University Library’s digital collections can be found a series of approximately 100 photographs depicting downtown Atlanta streets in 1927, focusing mainly on the area just south of GSU’s present-day downtown campus. These images were scanned from glass plate negatives owned by the Special Collections of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System, which were loaned to GSU Library so that they could be digitized and shared with a wider audience. Of particular interest are images of city streets and storefronts at street level before many were covered over to make way for the “twin viaducts” project of 1927-1929, the city project that elevated the street levels of Central Avenue and Pryor Street (the viaducts) running north to south as well as Alabama and Wall Streets (the laterals) running east to west. This project quite literally entombed the original ground-level streets and storefronts below to become what we now know as Underground Atlanta. Thanks to this unique collection of images, we can return to downtown Atlanta before the construction of these viaducts and elevated streets.

This student project allows users to experience Atlanta as it was in the 1920s, including many historically accurate buildings modeled from photos taken at the time. The virtual environment introduces users to many of the historically significant buildings that stood before parking lots came to dominate Atlanta’s downtown.