Neighborhood Planning Unit V

Neighborhood Planning Unit V (NPU-V) includes the six intown Atlanta neighborhoods of Adair Park, Mechanicsville, Peoplestown, Pittsburgh, and Summerhill/Capitol Homes. These neighborhoods are some of Atlanta's oldest residential areas with a rich history that mirrors much of Atlanta's history. The neighborhoods were formed during the decades following the Civil War. As Atlanta regained its importance as a railroad crossroads for the Southeast, the NPU-V neighborhoods grew up around the East Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia rail yard. Today, the CSX and Southern rail lines continue to form portions of the borders of NPU-V neighborhoods while also serving as the dividing line between some of the neighborhoods. In their developing years, these neighborhoods were served by horse-drawn trolleys that were replaced by electric street cars in 1893. These cars carried residents to and from jobs and shops in downtown Atlanta.

The five neighborhoods were home to a diverse array of residents. Adair Park became a predominantly white neighborhood of blue collar workers near the turn of the 20^th Century. Mechanicsville became a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse neighborhood with western and eastern European Jews, Greeks, and African Americans settling there. Peoplestown was also home to Jewish immigrants, African Americans, and native whites while Pittsburgh was founded as an African-American neighborhood to provide a haven for black residents and businesses during segregation. Summerhill was also diverse, with African Americans, Jewish immigrants, and native-born whites.

While the neighborhoods of NPU-V thrived from the 1870s to the 1940s, they began to decline during the 1950s. The northern expansion of Atlanta's business center lured many wealthy and powerful white residents northward. Middle-income African Americans moved to suburbs and closer to the developing historically black colleges and universities-Atlanta University, Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University), Morehouse College, Morris Brown College, and Spelman College. The diversity of the neighborhoods declined and by the 1950s, they were becoming predominantly working class African-American communities.

The negative impact of this residential migration was compounded by decades of misguided federal, state, and city policies and programs, beginning with the 1949 Federal Housing Act which provided communities with funding to support "urban renewal." This urban renewal in Atlanta provided the city with power to acquire tracts of land that were deemed physically or economically depressed. The 1950s Rawson-Washington project sought to connect the downtown area to Atlanta's suburbs with a major highway and to move all African Americans out of the downtown area, targeting NPU-V neighborhoods. In the 1960s, city leaders sought to make Atlanta a "national" city by constructing a new civic center, convention center, and baseball stadium within walking distance of downtown which could also serve as a buffer between downtown and the African-American neighborhoods to its south. The construction of Interstates 75/85 and 20 and of the Atlanta Fulton County Stadium and its replacement Turner Field, resulted in thousands of residents being displaced and historical structures being demolished. The neighborhoods of NPU-V are now divided by the Downtown Connector of Interstates 75/85 traveling north-south, and are skirted to the north by Interstate 20, separating most of NPU-V from downtown Atlanta.

According to the 2000 Census, the population of the NPU-V neighborhoods totaled 15,825, just slightly less than the 15,960 residents in 1990. With 42.8 percent of NPU-V families living in poverty, as compared to only 26 percent of families in the City of Atlanta, the neighborhoods have a high concentration of poverty.  More than 92 percent of NPU-V residents were African American in 2000. In recent years, NPU-V has been becoming more diverse. Between 1990 and 2000, the population of races other than African American and white more than tripled and the number of Hispanics more than doubled. While racial diversity is increasing in all neighborhoods except for Summerhill/Capitol Homes and Peoplestown and ethnic diversity is increasing in all of the neighborhoods, the increases were most dramatic in Adair Park. The number of people who defined their races as other than white or African American on the census in Adair Park increased from 18 to 405 while the number of Hispanics increased from 8 to 41. Much of this increase in diversity in Adair Park is the result of immigrants making their home in the neighborhood. Since 1990, approximately 450 foreign-born residents have settled there, the large majority of whom (355) are from Vietnam.

The neighborhoods have been changing rapidly even since the 2000 Census. Capitol Homes, the 700-unit public housing complex in Summerhill/Capitol Homes was demolished in 2002 in preparation for the construction of Capitol Gateway, a mixed-income complex that includes 1,000 residential units, 45,000 square feet of offices, shops, and restaurants, and a youth development center. All of the families who lived in Capitol Homes have been relocated since the Census. Similarly, the Pittsburgh Civic League Apartments in Pittsburgh were vacated in 2004 in preparation for redevelopment, displacing the largest concentration of families with children in the neighborhood. Heritage Station, which was built to replace PCLA, was opened to residents in 2007.

Several schools have served the neighborhood of NPU-V during its history. Before Atlanta's schools began the process of integration in the 1960s, however, there was only one public school in the neighborhoods that served African-American students. That school began in the basement of Pittsburgh's Ariel Bowen United Methodist Church  in the late 1890s and was called The Pittsburgh School. The school later moved into a two-room rented building and became a part of the Fulton County School System. In 1909, area residents raised their own money (receiving only $75 from the school board) to construct a wooden school building, renaming it Crogman School in honor of Dr. William Henry Crogman, the first African-American president of Clark College. In 1922, a brick structure was built to house Crogman School which educated youth and adults until 1979. Today, that building serves as a community center, senior housing, and apartment complex.

Perhaps the biggest asset of NPU-V is its location to the immediate south of downtown Atlanta and north of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. And in keeping with its roots as a rail transportation hub, the NPU is also strategically located at the crossroads of two of the area's largest interstates. Conversely these interstates (I-20 and I-75/85) can also be viewed as a detriment to the NPU since they effectively separate neighborhoods from one another.

The area overall has a healthy mix of residential, commercial, and industrial space - some of which is already utilized, some of which is vacant and holds potential for future community development. Such development could include a large supermarket or other type of commercial development which are amenities local residents currently lack in their neighborhood. It includes several important community resources, including a Atlanta Healthy Start Initiative location in the Center for Black Women's Wellness which sends Resource Moms to expectant and new mothers in the neighborhoods in order to connect them to health care and other supports.

Today's NPU-V youth are served by six schools located inside the neighborhoods. They are: Dunbar Elementary School in Mechanicsville; Stanton Elementary School in Peoplestown; Gideons Elementary School in Pittsburgh; Parks Middle School in Pittsburgh; and McGill Elementary School and Cook Elementary School in Summerhill.