11 Most Endangered Historic Places
Sweet Auburn
Year Listed: 1992
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
This historic district was a thriving neighborhood and business community for Atlanta's black community throughout the twentieth century. Residents such as Alonzo Herndon, founder of Atlanta Life Insurance, and civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., lived in the district and made a lasting imprint on local and national history. Throughout the 1980s this once vibrant neighborhood went into decline due to crime, highway construction, and abandonment. Since the 1990s the Historic district Development Corporation has worked with local residents to bring life back to the neighborhood.
For more information
National Park Service, http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/atlanta/aub.htm
Significance
Once rich with the sounds of Cab Calloway, Diana Ross and James Brown, Sweet Auburn thrived in the mid-20th century as a bustling center of Atlanta's African American life. But in the 1960s and 1970s, like so many other inner-city neighborhoods, Sweet Auburn fell victim to disinvestment, crime and abandonment, its problems compounded by highway construction that split the area in two. Despite community activities and the efforts of preservationists, there is no long-term plan for revitalizing the Sweet Auburn historic district.
