Chamblee54

This content was posted June 4, 2013. … The neighborhood along Peachtree Road has always been a great place to be a freak. For a long time it didn’t have a name. It is north of downtown, between Piedmont Park and Georgia Tech. Sometime in the early eighties, people started to call it Midtown, and the name stuck.
In the time after the War Between the States, this area was a shantytown called “Tight Squeeze.” It evolved into a pleasant middle class area. In the sixties, hippies took over. The area was known as the strip, or tight squeeze. Many stories could be told.
After the flower children moved on, the area went into decline. Gays started to move in, with the battle cry “Give us our rights or we will remodel your house.” Developers, worshiping the triune G-d of location, location, location, began to smell money. The neighborhood became trendy, then expensive, then more expensive. The freaks with money remain.

This content was posted August 4, 2009. … There is a nifty webcam up now. It shows the progress of 1010 Midtown, a high rise going up at 12th and Peachtree in midtown. The location of the camera itself is not certain. The most likely location is 999 Peachtree, on Tenth Street.
A glance at the image reveals a curve in the road, between the two glass boxes under construction. Atlanta does not have wide, straight boulevards extending to the horizon. It is said that Atlanta did not build roads, but paved the cow paths.
People of a certain age will remember this area as the the strip. The tenth street district was a neighborhood shopping area, up until the mid sixties. At some point, the old businesses started to move out and the hippies moved in. For a while, it was a festive party. Soon reality returned, and the area went into a crime filled decline.
The 999 complex is the neighborhood story in a nutshell. Before 1985, it was a block of small businesses. There was a hardware store, with the peace symbol set in tiles on the sidewalk. On Juniper Street stood the Langdon Court Apartments. They were named for my great uncle Langdon Quin.
Across the street was a Chinese restaurant, the House of Eng. A staircase on the side led to the Suzy Wong Lounge. Behind the building was an apartment building. It was one of the residences of Margaret Mitchell, while she wrote “Gone With The Wind.” She called it “the dump,”which was fairly accurate. The museum on that site would have amazed her.
I went to the House of Eng for lunch one day in 1985. I noticed that I was the only customer in the house, at 12:30 pm on a weekday. After finishing lunch, I knew why.
At some point, it was decided to build a high rise there. Heery was one of the equity partners, along with a law firm and an ad agency. The building was designed by Heery (duh).The ad agency folded before the building opened, followed within a couple of years by the law firm. Heery was sold to a British company. 999 Peachtree is now owned by Piedmont Office Realty Trust. … Pictures today are from Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library “Dub” took the social media photograph February 2, 1950. “Shell service station Piedmont and 10th streets.”
©Luther Mckinnon 2026 · selah