William Bailey Williford

Most attempts at a history of a city start with a person or a place. This starts with a street.

It's an intriguing idea: Take a city's most noteworthy road and build a history about it. It didn't work very well for me, though. There were too many names thrown about, and too few connections between people and houses and events. To be sure, I am not a resident of Atlanta, so there may be things that are obvious to residents that I just don't know. Worse, I think, is the fact that the book is now very out of date -- although Peachtree Street is still there, Atlanta has changed a lot, with many buildings that stood when this book was written having been torn down, and traffic patterns utterly changed by freeways. The result is that a lot of the anecdotes don't, er, lead anywhere.

And, let's remember, it's a book written by a southerner in the early 1960s. There are no overt indications of racism or sexism, but they seem to be there underneath it all. There is no questioning of the institutions that built the Jim Crow south. There are approving references to the Confederacy and Confederates. This is a Fine Old Southern Gentleman writing about Fine Old Southern Gentlemen and Ladies.

That might not bother you. But it made me fairly uncomfortable. Combine that with the fact that I was always getting, as it were, lost, and I found this a very difficult book to work through.… (altro)