Cabbagetown

Tucked away behind the Oakland Cemetery is the remarkable little neighborhood of Cabbagetown.  One of Atlanta's most historic communities, Cabbagetown is now one of the main centers of bohemian life and culture in the city.  

In 1881, during the Era of Reconstruction, Jacob Elsas, a German-Jewish immigrant from Cincinnatti, began operations of the first textile mill in the South.  Located on the site of the former Atlanta slave market and just south of the Georgia Railroad., the mill specialized in producing cotton agricultural sacks, and was known as the Fulton Cotton Spinning Company. 

In the area surrounding the cotton mill, Elsas built a milltown of small shotgun houses and cottages to house his workers.  The workers were mainly impoverished white men, women and children recruited from the Appalachian mountains of north Georgia, and the small houses were built on very narrow plots on even more narrow streets.  The Appalachian cotton mill workers were known for growing cabbages in their small front yards, and it's said that outsiders derisively called the area Cabbagetown because of the constant smell of cooking cabbage.  

Through the first three quarters of the 1900s, Cabbagetown remained a small, semi-isolated but tight-knit community of families descended from the original Appalachian mill workers.  The cotton mill finally closed in 1977, and the neighborhood that it created fell on to very hard times through the 1980s and early 1990s.   

In the mid-1990s, Cabbagetown became one of the "hot spots" of Atlanta's in-town revival, and in 1997 construction began on the redevelopment of the cotton mill into New York-style industrial residential lofts.  Now known as the Stacks Lofts, the development is the largest residential loft community in the country, and surrounding milltown houses have become home to a lot of artist and musician types.  The main street, Carroll Street, (which is so narrow that two cars can barely navigate past each other) is now home to a few cute neighborhood eateries and bars, as well as a tattoo shop, a hair salon, and the Little grocery store.  

 

In looking at Cabbagetown, I became interested in how the neighborhood has been created through texture, space and the re-use of spaces, and in a less common expression in Atlanta neighborhoods - color.  Cabbagetown stands out, in regards to Atlanta neighborhoods, in its embrace of bright colors and odd combinations.  Even so, Cabbagetown is a perfect example of the kind of quirky, hidden niche of a neighborhood that makes Atlanta so cool.