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.”

Archived by the Wayback Machine.

Traces the history of the historic rail corridor that is currently under redevelopment as the Atlanta BeltLine. This site showcases items from repositories around the city of Atlanta and the United States, gathered and posted by students in HIST 8885, Theory and Practice of Digital History, a course in the Heritage Preservation Program at Georgia State University. Students have also created narrative exhibits that interrogate themes relevant to the history of the Rail Corridor including communities, neighborhoods, educational institutions, businesses, and the changing uses of the natural and built environment. Students have made a concerted effort to obtain permission for the use of items on this site. Rights and licenses are posted on the individual item pages.  If you have any questions or need to request that an item be taken down, please contact the project coordinator, Adina Langer, at alanger at gsu.edu.

Digital collection of material related to city planning and urban development in Atlanta. The collection consists of city planning maps, city planning publications, demographic data, photographs depicting planning activities, oral histories, and aerial photographs. Much of the Planning Atlanta material was created by the City of Atlanta, the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Additionally, items from other agencies and entities, such as the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), are included. Planning Atlanta is a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funded project and seeks to move beyond the traditional digital library model of simply providing digital equivalents of tangible objects. This city planning focused collection provides free and open access to digitally transformed, dynamic, and engaging content with the goal of enhancing this material for educational and research uses. Many items in the collection have been transformed into digital objects that can be engaged with and manipulated. 

Archived by the Wayback Machine. Not all layers or content may load.

Created in Classic Esri Story Maps, a platform retired in 2026. This project visualizes the transformations of Atlanta’s public transit system over the last 100 years. By highlighting the routes that 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. 

Formed in 1971, Research Atlanta was a non-profit organization established to study public policy issues affecting the Atlanta metropolitan area. Research Atlanta served as Atlanta’s think tank for urban problems and published policy studies from 1971 to 2006 on major urban issues confronted by metropolitan Atlanta and placed Atlanta’s urban problems within a national context. During its 35 years of operation Research Atlanta produced numerous public policy studies on issues ranging from public school desegregation to creating a downtown cultural district. In 1992, Georgia State University agreed to assume responsibility for operating Research Atlanta. In 2006, Research Atlanta merged with the Regional Leadership Forum and the Metro Group to form what is now the Civic League for Regional Atlanta. 

Interactive web map created by Georgia State University Library that invites researchers, students, and the public to visualize the extensive built environment and demographic changes that have occurred throughout our metropolitan region from the 1940s to the present. The project provides aerial imagery overlays of the five core metropolitan counties – Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett, and Clayton – documenting over eight decades of growth and change in our region. Also included are census tract level population and housing data, providing additional context to these visualizations. Among the changing patterns revealed are the dramatic growth of the suburbs, decline in agricultural areas, decline and rebuilding of the urban core, and shifting racial and housing patterns. 

Located in Midtown between Peachtree Street and Spring Street and constructed from September 1937 to June 1938, Rhodes Center was Atlanta’s first modern shopping center geared towards the automobile. This Historic Structure Report covers the historical significance of the property, conditions of the buildings, planning options for future use, stabilization of the property and on-going maintenance for the future. The purpose of this report is to provide a current assessment of the condition of the structures and to provide recommendations for needed repairs and options for future use.

Date created:
Fall 1990