Druid Hills

The last residential community designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., and the only subdivision in which all three Olmsteds were involved, Druid Hills’ spinal column is the curvilinear Ponce de Leon Avenue and its necklace of six parks. In the 1980s the expansion of Ponce de Leon into an expressway and a connection to the proposed parkway for the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum would have significantly altered three of the linear parks and forever decimated the Picturesque character of the neighborhood. Residents protested and finally won a consent decree that preserved and protected the neighborhood in 1991.

History

In the late nineteenth century, Atlanta developer Joel Hurt engaged Fredrick Law Olmsted, Sr., to design a residential community. Olmsted, Sr., worked with John Charles Olmsted, revealing two plans in 1893. In the second plan, “Ponce de Leon Parkway,” a divided, curvilinear avenue following existing topography, serves as the community’s central spine. The proposed parkway was interlaced with six linked public parks, reimagining the traditional village green into a linear, two-mile-long scenographic experience. The Panic of 1893 delayed the project and in 1905 Olmsted Brothers updated the plan, retaining the parkway (now Ponce de Leon Avenue) and its six public parks.

In the postwar era in Atlanta and nationally, sacrificing parkland (and neighborhoods) for highway construction was widely embraced. Eventually there was blowback. In 1975, prompted in part by a proposed freeway project, the Druid Hills Civic Association nominated the “Druid Hills Parks and Parkways” to the National Register of Historic Places. In 1979 the more expansive 1,300-acre Druid Hills Historic District was listed in the National Register. Two years later plans to construct the freeway reemerged to provide access to the Carter Library. The result would have substantially widened Ponce de Leon and introduced freeway on- and off-ramps on the western edges of Shadyside and Dellwood Parks.

The proposals concerned Druid Hill resident Sally Harbaugh who joined the newly-formed National Association for Olmsted Parks (NAOP), a national network of Olmsted park and landscape stewards and advocates. Through NAOP, she learned about Buffalo, N.Y.’s Kensington Expressway, which was constructed over the Humboldt Parkway and routed through Delaware Park (both designed by Olmsted, Sr.) in the 1960s. Harbaugh leveraged this knowledge to recruit others.

Harbaugh galvanized many of her neighbors, who, like her, were unaccustomed to activism. Their involvement in three advocacy groups – Roadbusters, the Olmsted Park Society (OPS), and a coalition of nine neighborhood associations named CAUTION (Citizens Against Unnecessary Thoroughfares in Older Neighborhoods) – bolstered collaborative challenges to road construction. Strategically located protests took place at the site of the proposed Carter Library (completed in 1986), city hall, the state capital, and in the Druid Hills neighborhood parks of Shadyside and Dellwood.

At the onset of construction protestors vandalized machinery, removed survey stakes, and perched atop cranes. Others climbed and occupied trees marked for removal or chained themselves to tree trunks. Images of the women being arrested and dragged from trees by police generated front-page coverage in local newspapers, raising public awareness of the demonstrations. Many participants had never publicly protested before and believed that doing so was the best way to advance their cause. Protestors transformed Shadyside Park into a “tent city” and slept under trees to prevent their removal. At the adjacent Dellwood Park, lawn expanse served as stages for rallies where speakers, including then-city council member John Lewis, rallied against the proposed freeway.

The Druid Hills protestors successfully advocated for the intrinsic value of public parks and historically significant landscape designs, giving weight to the movement to revitalize Olmsted-designed parks taking hold across the city. Two miles west of the neighborhood, 219 acres of homes, businesses, and a part of Goldsboro Park had been leveled and graded in preparation for construction. While this was not an Olmsted design, the coalition formed by Roadbusters, OPS, and CAUTION organized to stop the expressway long before it even reached the historic neighborhood. Lawsuits filed by CAUTION argued the city had unlawfully secured land for construction by condemning public parks, demonstrating a pattern of behavior by state and city officials who supported expressways over access to public space. Protestors experienced alternating victories and defeats, with construction resuming after every loss.

In 1991, Druid Hill residents finally won protection for their neighborhood. The cleared land west of the neighborhood became Freedom Park, the city’s largest park at that time, and a smaller parkway was proposed in place of the expressway. Today the tree-lined John Lewis Freedom Parkway, named for the seventeen-term congressman, has only two lanes, a 35-mph speed limit, and terminates at Ponce de Leon Avenue, just .6 miles west of Olmsted’s Druid Hills. The advocacy and collaboration manifested by the protests solidified community commitment to the preservation of the parks, culminating in the establishment of the Olmsted Linear Park Alliance (OLPA) in 1997 whose mission is to “preserve and protect” the Olmsted design legacy.