Adair Park

Adair Park is a residential neighborhood located southwest of downtown Atlanta. It has the form of a left curly bracket, bordered by the MARTA north-south rail line on the northwest, the BeltLine trail on the southwest and Metropolitan Parkway on the east. Historically Adair Park also included the area from Metropolitan Parkway to McDaniel Street on the east, but the city now considers that area part of the Pittsburgh neighborhood.

The bungalow suburb was developed from the 1890s to the 1940s, when Atlanta was transitioning from a "railroad town" to an urban area. Shortly after the Civil War, land speculators, notably George Washington Adair, John Thrasher and Thomas Alexander, began purchasing land in this area anticipating future growth. To increase the value of this land, Adair joined with Richard Peters in 1870 to form the Atlanta Street Railway Company to provide horsecar access to the area. He also established the Atlanta Real Estate Company, and continued purchasing land for development. Adair's company became the largest developer of property in Atlanta before he died in 1889. His sons, George and Forrest, continued the company, and began designing the Adair Park subdivision and selling lots in 1910. Adair Park developed into a small white working-class neighborhood of modest houses.

By the 1950s Adair Park was surrounded on all sides by neighborhoods that either always were or had transitioned to majority-black. In 1955 white flight began, triggered by the sale of a single property on Beryl Street near Dewey Street to a black family. Soon Dewey, Hope and Beryl Streets had transitioned from white to black, as did Mayland Avenue and Mayland Circle in 1958. Supported by the West Side Mutual Development Committee (WSMDC), which Mayor Hartsfield had formed to block or manage racial transitions in Atlanta neighborhoods, the Adair Park Civic Club attempted to pool white community resources to repurchase houses and keep white areas white, but there was not enough support compared to those white residents who wished to sell and the transition continued. In 1969, the Georgia grand dragon of the United Klans of America was elected as the Adair Park Civic Club's vice chairman. A day later he, along with black real estate agent Johnny Cornelius Johnson, were elected to policy positions in Atlanta's federally sponsored Model Cities Program.

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