Ponce de Leon Avenue - History

History

The original street extended eastward from Peachtree Street and was called Ponce de Leon Circle. In August 1872, a horsecar line that went from downtown Atlanta up Peachtree to Pine, was extended to Ponce de Leon Circle. At some point later it was extended to Ponce de Leon Springs, where the Ponce de Leon amusement park would be built; today, Ponce City Market (formerly the Sears building, then City Hall East) stands on the site. Finally in 1889 the line was electrified and extended with the "loop" around what is now Virginia-Highland.

West of Peachtree Street were Kimball Street and 2nd Street, portions of which were renamed Ponce de Leon Avenue. (see maps at Atlanta annexations)

In the 1890s-1910s, Ponce de Leon between Midtown and Moreland Avenue (the border of Druid Hills) was one of the city's premier residential streets lined with large houses of the city's elite. With the arrival of the automobile, the richest families started to move further out, to what is today Buckhead, to Ansley Park and to Druid Hills. Upscale apartment buildings started to appear on the boulevard. Ponce, as did much of the city, lost many of its middle- to upper-middle-class residents in the 1950s and 1960s, and large parking lot areas and new buildings built away from the street made Ponce lose much of the walkability that it had - and its focus gave way fully to automobile traffic. Though a renaissance was beginning in the 1970s, Ponce still was renowned for prostitution, drug sales, but also for its eclectic character up to the turn of the 21st century, celebrated in books such as George Mitchell's Ponce Deleon : An Intimate Portrait of Atlanta's Most Famous Avenue and Sharon Foster's Atlanta's Ponce de Leon Avenue: A History. Today, the areas that Ponce passes on its way from Midtown to Druid Hills are largely affluent: Midtown, the Old Fourth Ward where gentrification is well underway, and fully gentrified Poncey-Highland and Virginia-Highland.