crescent avenue

Before the Federal Reserve Bank was constructed in 2001, Crescent Avenue, the street that bisects the Atlanta History Center’s property, actually formed a crescent and it was apparent how it had once been a portion of an earlier alignment of Peachtree Street when it was still a country wagon road. Older than the city itself, the road followed the topography and originally looped around a deep ravine where the bank now sits. In the wake of the Civil War, a shanty town evolved around the gulch, gaining notoriety 1867, when John Plaster and Jerome Cheshire, sons of two of the old pioneers in the area, were assaulted. Plaster’s death and Cheshire’s serious injury provoked a large public outcry, and there were vigilante efforts to clean up the area. It was noted that it could be "a mighty tight squeeze getting through there with your life," giving rise to the area’s nickname, Tight Squeeze. By 1872, there was a church at the intersection of Peachtree Road and Plaster Bridge Road (near present Eighth Street) along with a wagon yard, a blacksmith shop, several small wooden stores, and “the Tight Squeezers up and down the gulch.”

As the city grew in the 1880s, suburban development began to occur, especially after the city’s exposition grounds were opened at Piedmont Park in 1887. As part of the preparations for the first exposition, the gulch at Tight Squeeze was filled and Peachtree Road realigned between Eighth and Twelfth Streets. By 1900, the old portion of the road had become Crescent Avenue.

now ain't that inneresting?