Decatur Street (Atlanta)

Decatur Street, late 1864

Decatur Street is a street in Atlanta, Georgia. It was one of the first 7 streets of the city.

In 1854 the first theater in the city, the Athenaeum, opened on Decatur near Peachtree.

In the early 20th century, it included an African American entertainment district. In 1906 it was the site of a race riot. At the start of the 1920s it was commemorated in the Clarence Williams song "Decatur Street Blues". Today it cuts across the Georgia State University campus (founded in 1913).

Having grown from very humble beginnings, the City of Atlanta's streets are not organized in rational rectilinear patterns like better organized cities. Rather the Atlanta metropolitan area exhibits the "cluster of grapes" pattern; dozens of small communities (including Atlanta) squashed "cheek by jowl" with each having a road running to each in an overlapping maze. For that reason Atlanta's streets, such as Decatur Street, can be confusing. Decatur Street for example runs from Atlanta to Decatur on the east. However once you pass by the "zero mile post" in downtown Atlanta's Five Points district heading west, the same road runs to northwest to the community of Marietta. Hence Decatur Street is the same street as Marietta Street. The situation is made more confusing when leaving the city limits of, in this example, Atlanta, because when one enters the "neutral zone" between cities another street name is used, and when entering the "remote" city yet another name is used. So, traveling on this one street from Marietta on the northwest the sequence is: Atlanta Road, Marietta Boulevard, Marietta Street, Decatur Street, DeKalb Avenue (DeKalb being Decatur's county), and finally Howard Avenue in Decatur; all this in under twenty-five miles. (This leave out the "West" and "East" variants that are also present.) For this reason you can see why it is frequently said "half the streets in Atlanta are named Peachtree but all the others have three or four names to make up for it."