"Green Spots in the Heart of Town": Planning and Contesting the Nation's Widest Streets in Georgia's Fall Line Cities

This peer-reviewed article was published in the winter 2020 issue of Georgia Historical Quarterly, one of the premier state-level historical journals. My article examines the planning struggles and civic battles over the uses of extraordinarily wide downtown streets in three midsize Georgia cities. Many people in Augusta, Macon, and Columbus viewed their wide streets favorably in comparison with the narrower streets of Atlanta and northern cities. All three cities experienced ongoing debates over how to use extraordinary streets whose dimensions suggested their capacity to do more than merely convey vehicular traffic. The debates involved municipal governments, newspapers, merchants, and clubwomen, and they hinged on matters such as retail trade, tourism, civic beauty, environmental quality, and racial order. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, commentators either heralded the introduction of center parks on these streets as a progressive step in creating modern, beautified central cities or decried it as an impediment to the “country trade” in what were still agricultural market towns. Following the relegation of the country trade to the periphery of nascent downtown districts in the early twentieth century, controversies arose over whether to reduce or remove the parkways to facilitate the growing use of automobiles, as well as over whether traffic lanes or parking spaces were more important. These debates persisted from the late 1910s to the late 1950s. Finally, leaders in the three cities reached a consensus that their wide streets were assets whose further embellishment might mitigate downtown decline. From the late 1950s through the mid-1970s, these leaders considered and sometimes implemented dramatic recreations of their main streets. My article situates little-examined smaller cities in broader regional and national contexts, providing a new dimension in urban planning history.