![]() ![]() As my neighbors abandoned Forest Park, I tried not to be sentimental about the vacant storefronts on Main Street. Main Street’s businesses followed their white customers, who were relocating south, to Henry and Fayette counties. And Forest Park was allowed to remain detached from Atlanta, effectively self-segregating for a couple more decades.īut as Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport expanded through the 1990s, bringing more airplane noise and industrial growth to the area, Clayton County’s population continued shifting to what is now majority-minority. Because they opted out of MARTA rail, Main Street was spared the brutalist concrete stations and oversize parking lots that gutted the central business districts of nearby cities like College Park and East Point. Much has been written about voters’ racial motivations for rejecting MARTA in that early referendum. Illustration of proposed MARTA service terminating in Forest Park, from “Atlanta Region Comprehensive Plan: Rapid Transit,” 1961. Forest Park’s transit station, sketched out as the southern terminus for MARTA rail, was never built. In 1971, Clayton County voters defeated a proposal to fund the new MARTA system. The Main Street I remember was built for cars. The city really became Forest Park in the 1950s and 1960s, when it expanded rapidly in population, housing, and auto-centric development. We fell asleep each night to the clatter of freight trains rolling through the heart of town, but have no memory of riding the train. The back doors along Main Street opened to the tracks, yet there was no station in Forest Park. The city was still mostly white then, and Main Street looked like a Leave It to Beaver set, in part because of what Forest Park lacked-public transportation. It was a point of pride to patronize Smith Hardware before Home Depot.Īs new shops replaced old ones, and decades passed, Main Street’s all-purpose storefronts remained an incubator for independent businesses. As big-box stores colonized greener pastures up and down I-75, my family still went to Main Street out of convenience, loyalty, and maybe nostalgia. Our high school homecoming parades rolled down Main Street, staging at the First Baptist Church and ending behind the Chick-fil-A Dwarf House. Main Street was a time capsule of small-town commerce and culture at a time when pre-Olympics Atlanta was sprawling in every direction. By the time I was a kid, the hodgepodge of mid-century storefronts on Main Street were aging and small, but I thought it was cool that our dry cleaners and pharmacy looked straight out of the 1960s, with the retro neon signs. ![]() We took our car to Crumbley Tire Center, picked up 2 percent milk and frozen Cokes at the drive-through Golden Gallon, and got haircuts (and a few unfortunate perms) at Lou’s Coiffeurs.Ī simple two-lane street parallel to the railroad tracks, Main Street offered most basic goods and services. Our dentist, accountant, bank, and pediatrician were all located there. GROWING UP IN FOREST PARK in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were still plenty of reasons to go to Main Street.
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