The first settlement here was on land formerly occupied by Union troops and was called
Shermantown for many years. It developed quickly being near the
Georgia Railroad and in 1879 was at the endpoint of a newly graded road called simply
Boulevard, which led from the railroad to
North Avenue near
Ponce de Leon Avenue and Angier Springs. The rise of Auburn Avenue as "the" black business district in Atlanta was to a great extent an outcome of the 1906
Atlanta Race Riot. Prior to this time black businesses operated largely in downtown Atlanta — a business district integrated as far as business ownership was concerned. But competition between working-class whites and blacks for jobs and housing gave rise to fears and tensions. In 1906, print media fueled these tensions with hearsay about alleged sexual assaults on white women by black men, triggering the riot, which left at least 27 people dead (25 of them black) and over 70 injured. Black businesses started to move from previously integrated business district downtown to the relative safety of the area around the
Atlanta University Center west of downtown, and to Auburn Avenue in the
Fourth Ward east of downtown. "Sweet" Auburn Avenue became home to
Alonzo Herndon's
Atlanta Mutual, the city's first black-owned life insurance company, and to a celebrated concentration of black businesses, newspapers, churches, and nightclubs. In 1956,
Fortune magazine called Sweet Auburn "the richest Negro street in the world", a phrase originally coined by civil rights leader
John Wesley Dobbs from the poem
The Deserted Village by
Oliver Goldsmith. Sweet Auburn and Atlanta's
black colleges formed the nexus of a prosperous
black middle class and
upper class which arose despite enormous social and legal obstacles. Sweet Auburn was designated a
National Historic Landmark in 1976. However, like so many other
inner-city neighborhoods, Sweet Auburn fell victim to lack of
investment, heavy, widespread
crime,
homelessness, and
abandonment, compounded by construction of the
Downtown Connector freeway that split it in two. In 1992 the
National Trust for Historic Preservation recognized that it was one of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places and, in 2005, the
Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation included the area in its 2006 list of
Places in Peril. The Historic District Development Corporation (HDDC) was formed to turn the trend around, starting with houses surrounding the birth home of Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., and working outward. In 2014, the city of Atlanta completed the installation of the
Atlanta Streetcar, a line that creates a loop connecting the
Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park to downtown and the tourist attractions of
Centennial Olympic Park. The streetcar travels east along
Edgewood Avenue and west along Auburn Avenue. ==Historic structures and businesses==