Virginia-Highland

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The Virginia-Highland neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia was founded in the early 20th Century as a streetcar community. The locus and origin of the name is the commercial district at the intersection of Virginia and North Highland Avenues. It is bounded on the north by Morningside, east by the Druid Hills neighborhood, on the south by Poncey-Highland and on the west by Piedmont Park and Midtown. Local residents often refer to their neighborhood as "the Highlands," a term that may have originated in reference to the combined neighborhoods of Virginia-Highland and Poncey-Highland.

Unlike other neighborhoods like Inman Park and Grant Park, this neighborhood never really faltered during Atlanta's intown downturn in the 1960s. In the late 1960s a highway was proposed to connect what is now Freedom Parkway through the neighborhood to I-85 and Stone Mountain and Va-Hi residents, along with those of Inman Park and Morningside were instrumental in defeating the project. The residents were successful and became a political force to be reckoned with in city politics. In fact, the current Neighborhood Planning Unit (NPU) system is an outgrowth from the defeat of I-485. The Jimmy Carter Library and Museum sit on the very hill that was to be the major interchange between the new bypass and another new highway that would have led to Stone Mountain. The remnants of both of these cleared rights-of-way made Freedom Park possible.

Today, the neighborhood is prosperous with many restaurants and shops and hosts its major festival, Summerfest, the first weekend of June.

Culturally, Virginia-Highland has recently become a small musical center, home of the "Grape Tree" scene which produced a plethora of small, mostly inconsequential garage-rock bands as well as a handful of not-so-inconsequential artists, most notably Supreeme, an internationally-themed rap group, No Face, an experimental pop band, and The Good Moods, a locally-themed mariachi group.

Like many communities in the metro Atlanta area, many homes in Virginia-Highland have serious problems with rat infestations including both the Norway rat and tree rat. [1] [2]

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In 1925, the Atlanta Street Railway Company began selling pieces of land for suburban development. Developers bought large plots and divided them into areas for residential and commercial use. This growth continued steadily until the 1960s, when most of the city's original suburbs including the Highlands began to decline.

In the 1970s, the Highlands were swept up in a wave of revitalization that was also bringing new life to surrounding areas. Proposed freeway construction threatened to crush this renaissance, but the idea was defeated by the community.

In 1988, John Howell Park on Virginia Avenue was dedicated to the memory of Highlands resident John Howell, one of the many residents who fought hard to stop the development of I-485. The park occupies three acres of land where 11 homes were demolished for the proposed highway. Howell died from complications of HIV in 1988.

In November 2006, the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation added Virginia-Highland to its list of "places in peril" due to an acceleration of teardowns and infill projects by real estate developers and newcomers to the area.