King site leads endangered places list
Atlanta's Auburn Avenue commercial district, once the heart of the nation's black business community, is lined with historical treasures such as the house where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was born -- and with crumbling, boarded-up buildings.
That makes "Sweet Auburn" the most recognizable and jarring of the state's historical places listed as "in peril" in a report released this past week by the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation, the nation's largest nonprofit state preservation group.
While thriving black-owned businesses from the 1920s to the 1950s earned the mile-and-a-half-long stretch the nickname "the richest Negro street in the world," many middle-class and wealthy residents left after desegregation in the 1960s.
With homelessness and crime rampant, activists started to try to revitalize the historic houses, but the commercial district on the avenue's west end has lagged behind.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which releases an annual list of America's 11 most endangered historic places, has long sought to protect black heritage in the South -- putting on its list all historic black churches in the region in 1996 and all black colleges and universities in 1998.
"You can't look at the history of the South and not talk about African-Americans," said John Hildreth, director of the national trust's Southern office.
While Auburn Avenue is the most visible of the 10 "Places in Peril," Georgia Trust president Greg Paxton said a broad range of historic monuments across the state need to be saved from the wrecking ball, encroaching sprawl and deterioration.
The Milledgeville, Ga., house of literary great Flannery O'Connor can't be maintained without more funds, according to the trust. CVS Corp., one of the nation's biggest drugstore operators, plans to demolish a block of historic buildings in downtown Hartwell in northeastern Georgia to build a pharmacy.
U.S. 17, dubbed the "gateway to historic Brunswick and the Golden Isles," on the southern coast, needs planning to protect it from sprawl and make its vistas on Victorian homes and unspoiled marshlands a Route 66 for the South.
"Every project on the list can be preserved," Paxton said.
The list comes as a call to action to use existing funding -- such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Main Street program aimed at revitalizing commercial areas -- and local activism to reclaim those and many other historic sites across the state, Paxton said.
Preservation projects generate significant economic windfall for towns through heritage tourism, which is a part of the $25 billion industry in Georgia, second only to agriculture, according to speakers at a preservation conference held in April in Thomasville, Ga. Georgia attracts 48 million visitors a year.
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Sunday, November 20th 2005 at 9:59AM
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