West End

About a  five minute drive southwest of Downtown Atlanta and Castleberry Hill, the neighborhood of West End stands proud and steeped in history, culture, and architectural beauty.  West End is, in some ways an inner-city small town.  It has a thriving and very walkable main street, Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, lined with shops and restaurants, places of worship, and the West End Mall - and it is surrounded by some of the oldest and most architecturally interesting homes in all of Atlanta.  Residents have known each other for years, and still the community is a part of Atlanta's urban central core.

In 1830, the area now known as West End was simply a crossroads.  The Newnan Road connected the small town of Newnan with Decatur, and crossed over the Sandtown Road which went west into the Native-American village of Sandtown - or Oktahasasi in Creek.  In the early 1830s, the Whitehall Inn was built near the crossroads, and development followed over the next decades.  

After the Civil War, real estate developers saw the Whitehall area's potential as an ideal suburb for affluent Atlantans to take up residence, and in 1868 the neighborhood was renamed, West End, after the upscale London theatre district.  In 1870, a trolley rail line was established, and the neighborhood prospered and grew up until the Great Depression.  

The aging West End neighborhood struggled through the mid-20th Century and then the collapse of Jim Crowe and segregation laws in the 1960s brought large numbers of African-Americans to the neighborhood.  With three historically Black college campuses - Spelman, Morehouse, and Clark Atlanta - just a few blocks away, African-American professors and students took advantage of the close proximity and beautiful old homes available. Now, West End is about 96% African-American.

The influence of  African-American academics and thought leaders has given West End a very distinct character.  While other historic African-American neighborhoods, like Sweet Auburn and The Old Fourth Ward, are colored by their prominence in the years of the Civil Rights Movement, West End has a visible and strong post-sixties Afrocentric vibe.  West African dashikis, kaftans and  head wraps are common street attire.  There's a prominent African-American Islamic center, and The Shrine of the Black Madonna - a congregation of the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church.  On the main strip, there are several African-American bookstores, shops selling African decor and clothing, and a popular vegetarian soul food restaurant. 

Just off Abernathy Boulevard are beautiful tree-lined streets with homes that are textbook examples of Queen Anne architecture, Craftsman bungalow, American Foursquare, Folk Victorian, and Colonial Revival.  Peeples Street, in particular, has some magnificent historic residences, including Hammonds House, formerly a prominent physician's home, that now houses a signficant African-American art collection and is open to the public.  

The West End neighborhood is another wonderfully unique panel in the Atlanta quilt of neighborhoods.  It's a bustling, thriving niche that is, in many ways, self-contained, but still shares its spirit and history and character with the whole.  And, that's exactly the dynamic that makes Atlanta such a cool place to live and explore.