Racing time: District of MLK's birthplace tops list of endangered historic sites

ATLANTA -- Atlanta's Auburn Avenue commercial district, once the heart of the nation's black business community, is lined with historic treasures such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birth house -- and also with crumbling, boarded-up buildings.

That makes it the most recognizable and jarring of the places listed statewide as "in peril" in a report released Monday by the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation, the nation's largest not-for-profit state preservation group.

While thriving black-owned businesses from the 1920s to the 1950s earned the mile-and-a-half-long stretch the nickname "the richest Negro street in the world," many middle-class and wealthy residents left after desegregation in the 1960s.

With homelessness and crime rampant, activists started to try to revitalize the historic houses, but the commercial district on the avenue's west end has lagged behind.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which releases an annual list of America's 11 most endangered historic places, has long sought to protect black heritage in the South -- putting on its list all historic black churches in the region in 1996 and all black colleges and universities in 1998.

"You can't look at the history of the South and not talk about African-Americans," said John Hildreth, director of the national trust's Southern office.

While Auburn Avenue is the most visible of the 10 "Places in Peril," Georgia Trust president Greg Paxton said there's a broad range of historic monuments across the state that need to be saved from the wrecking ball, encroaching sprawl and deterioration.

The Milledgeville, Ga., house of literary great Flannery O'Connor can't be maintained without more funds, according to the trust. CVS Corp., one of the nation's biggest drugstore operators, plans to demolish a block of historic buildings in downtown Hartwell in northeastern Georgia to build a pharmacy.

Highway 17, dubbed the "gateway to historic Brunswick and the Golden Isles," on the southern coast, needs planning to protect it from sprawl and make its vistas on Victorian homes and unspoiled marshlands a Route 66 for the South, the group said.

"Every project on the list can be preserved," Paxton said.

---

On the Net:

The Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation: http://www.georgiatrust.org