Citation: Sinclair, Bryan. “Before Underground.” Atlanta Studies. February 15, 2025. https://doi.org/10.18737/atls20250215
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. In Spring 2016, a group of students working in the GSU Library under the direction of then Maps & GIS Librarian Joe Hurley conducted a project involving these digitized glass-plate negatives by which they would revisit Atlanta in 1927 just before the viaduct project of 1927-1929. The students first set out to geo-tag these images and then “stitch” them together in order to create panoramic “streetscapes” of entire city blocks or portions of blocks of these downtown Atlanta streets soon to be covered and largely abandoned.
These photographs provide a rare glimpse of Atlanta life at that period from ground level, including advertising signs for freak shows and NuGrape soda, restaurant menus and prices, and storefronts of numerous businesses: barbershops and baths, shoe repair shops, drug stores, a billiards and chili parlor, and many others. They depict Black and White Atlantans, including working class laborers, shopkeepers, and businessmen, going about their daily lives. They may also show an area of downtown that was somewhat in decline. Reports in The City Builder at the time indicate the area had become stagnant, not helped by the constant traffic congestion caused by trains passing through this area, with some businesses declining in sales and some buildings allowed to deteriorate.1
These images portray a city readying to move on and up to something new, with many businesses advertising moving sales and posting their new addresses on shop windows. They further document the preparation work and surveying happening at the street level as the city readied for this major construction project: streets would need to be raised in some areas and lowered in others in order to accommodate motor traffic underneath. Up and down Alabama Street, modifications and upgrades to underground electric cabling, gas mains, sewers and other improvements were required before construction could begin.
Similarly, concerns regarding drainage and grading would need to be addressed. Alabama Street would need to be elevated where it met Pryor Street, making it level with Whitehall Street (now Peachtree).2 In other sections, the brick paved streets would be torn up, lowered several feet, and then repaved in order to maintain clearance below. The plan was for storefronts and businesses to move their main entrances to the platform story above, leaving the story below as a service entrance for deliveries with ample height for delivery trucks. At the same time, extensive excavation work was required to lower and relay the tracks for rail clearance beneath the viaducts.3
The map below indicates the location of the street images photographed in 1927 as crews began to prepare the area for the viaduct construction. All of the original glass negatives and panoramic “streetscapes” created by GSU students under the direction of Joe Hurley can now be accessed through GSU Library’s Digital Collections.
1. Alabama Street North Side 1
2. Alabama Street North Side 2
3. Alabama Street South Side 1
5. South Pryor Street West Side 2
6. South Pryor Street East Side
8. East Hunter Street North Side
9. East Hunter Street South Side 2
12. Central Avenue East Side 2
Bryan Sinclair is Associate Dean for Public Services at Georgia State University’s main campus library located in downtown Atlanta, where he provides leadership in multiple innovative service areas, including campus outreach, user services, instruction, and growing areas of research data support and data literacy instruction.