1948
1948 I N 1948 the Georgia legislature enacted a building safety law, in direct response to the Winecoff Hotel fire of 1946. It sought to provide methods for enforcing national safety standards in public buildings, not only in hotels but in office buildings as well. The Atlanta Fire Code was even more stringent than the state law, and the city's chief of building inspectors, O. Marvin Harper, was recognized nationally as one of the "most conscientious exponents of fire safety and maintenance of construction standards in public buildings." In the months following the Winecoff fire a systematic and thorough inspection of all buildings affected by the local codes was tabulated, recommendations were made, and most owners were cooperative in making construction changes without delay. And in the winter of 1948 Atlanta engineers began preparing an entirely new building code for the city.1 In September the need for codes and their continued enforcement had once again been dramatically demonstrated when E. Rivers School at Peachtree and Peachtree Battle Avenue was destroyed by fire. There were no injuries reported, and the school was soon replaced by a modern building. The two major downtown department stores had not yet in 1948 begun the flight to the suburbs, and each made substantial investments in its central city physical plant. On March 19, 1948, Rich's opened its spectacular new Store for Homes, featuring the glass-enclosed bridge five floors above street level, over which throngs of shoppers moved from the main store across Forsyth Street. Here is where "The Great Tree" would be lighted at formal services thereafter on Thanksgiving night to launch the Christmas season. Davison-Paxon, not to be outdone by its old rival, constructed a five-story addition at the rear of the main store and provided a separate entrance on Carnegie Way.2 In the fall of 1948 a survey done by the Greater Atlanta Traffic Improvement Association showed that more than 415,816 people were in the downtown area between 7:00 A.M. and 7:00 P.M. on any given business day. The maximum number of vehicles downtown on any average day at 2:00 P.M. was 14,500. To help move these cars in and out of the city, work was started on a $40 million expressway system, the beginning of hundreds of millions of dollars of freeway construction to follow. One disturbing effect on a city proud of its history was that some of the historic old houses that were in the path of the approaching expressway would have to be taken down or moved. One of these was the home of Patrick Lynch, a gigantic Irishman, who owned a blue-stone quarry and built his house on Simpson Street with the rock from his quarry. It is not recorded exactly when he built the house, but he bought the land in 1860 (24 acres for $1,230) and died in 1870. His weight was said to be 300 pounds, which had kept him from serving in the Confederate Army. It is ATLANTA AND ENVIRONS, 1948 145 thought to be this, plus the fact that he was a Catholic, that caused Sherman to spare his house. Another and more widely known of Atlanta's old homes was the brown granite mansion built by John Silvey at the corner of Marietta and Spring streets in 1885. Mr. Silvey, a wealthy merchant, foresaw the fact that his house might one day stand in the way of the city's progress, so he bought a tract of land out Peachtree Road and provided in his will that at his death the house should be moved there. And this was done in 1900-1902. Every arch and artifact of the twenty-room house, its Tiffany stained glass windows, mahogany paneling and carvings, and Italian tile fireplaces, along with a covey of cement ducks, all were moved to the new location at 1611 Peachtree Road. And there, by the end of 1948, progress caught up with it again. Silvey's daughter, Mrs. W. A. Speer, age ninety, was moving out, making way for the demolition crews that would raze the house and clear the land for an expressway . The growth of the Atlanta area suburbs was dramatized when the population within East Point's corporate limits was estimated at 22,000, almost double that of the 1940 census report of 12,403. Among events of more than passing interest in 1948 was the dedication of the stadium...
OR
