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WHAT’S UP IN NEW DEVELOPMENT
Eighty-eight years ago, Warren Manning, an important
landscape architect of the era and disciple of Frederick law
Olmsted, developed a plan for the City ef Athens. Manning's
plan encompassed an area similar enough in scope to our con-
temporary city center that it can speak to many of our present
areas of controversy including Prince Avenue, downtown am?
Oconee Street.
I recently ventured into the new UGA Special Collections,
library to take a look at blueprints that resulted from that
planning exercise, journeying up the stairs through the build
ing's (first) lobby, around the spiral staircase of the rotunda on
the second level and through two sets of locked and attended
doors into the Hargrett Library Reading Room. The formal and
impressive sequence of civic spaces leading up to ami through
the library draws upon ideas of Manning's era, especially
those associated with the City Beautiful movement. But, it
may have been other ideas of the time, such as the Garden City
movement, that more influenced Manning in his recommenda
tions for Athens.
The Manning drawings are fascinating, not just for what
they recommend, but for how they capture the whole scope
of the Athens community at the time. Then, there were two
streetcar lines in Athens, one looping down MiUedge (via
Hill Street) and back up Lumpkin (how they conquered the
hill I don't know), along with the more familiar loop along
Boulevard and Prince. The map outlines the four hydroelec
tric stations that supported that system. Station No. 1 was
at Mitchell Bridge (just upstream from Lester's Branch, now
often called Hunnicutt Creek), and No. 2, the Taltassee Shoals
Hydro Station—now demolished and rebuilt as a modem
power plant—was a few miles upstream. No. 3 was on a much
smaller water body, the intown stream sometimes known as
Brickyard Creek across the railroad tracks from the Southern
Mill, in Boulevard. The car barn for the trolleys was nearby,
along with other Georgia Power offices and substations. No. 4,
the Barnett Shoals Hydro Station, was the farthest afield, in
Oconee County.
An early transmission network is sketched out, a pioneer
ing mark of the infrastructure that was to come. It's interesting
to consider that at the time, the vast majority of the county
would have been fields, and so if those same transmission
routes are in use today, then the forests have actually grown
up around them, though it appears they were sliced through.
Numerous "landing fields" dotted the farmland surround
ing the county, of which only one remains today, as Ben Epps
Airport. At the time, the street grid downtown was much more
extensive, predating both historical and present-day urban
renewal. Of course, the area was much more residential at
the time; the majority of the commercial core stood between
Washington and Broad streets, with smaller, dispersed foot
prints illustrated on the more northerly blocks.
Some of the early considerations about sewage and water
are also apparent from the plan, with recommendations for
water quality areas to be set aside on the Middle and North
Oconee rivers, downstream from town. 'Tor Oconee Valley
Watershed purification fields of 20 acres should be acquired at
a point" below where East Campus now rises, the map dictates.
Another 10-acre field is proposed on Bobbin MiU Creek, which
feeds into the Middle Oconee.
"In Sandy Creek Valley, Athens' present water supply, and in
Trail Creek Valley, the future water supply, public forests should
be established, especially on steep slopes and wet lands not
fit for tillage, by city, county or state, and other protective
measures taken to assure pure water." This prescient recom
mendation predates the establishment of Sandy Creek Nature
Center and Park, as well as Cook's Trail by decades. It's also
interesting that another such public forest network was pro
posed for Trail Creek, which was designated as the future water
supply for Athens.
Early versions of a greenway network were also proposed,
with "The Bluff Park* on the western bank of the North Oconee,
near where Aguar Plaza is currently buitt. Tanyard Creek and
Trail Creek also have park-like
trail corridors sketched out the
south fork of Tanyaid being des
ignated "The Proposed Botanic
Park." Also included are plenty
of suggestions for new pathways
that increase the connectiv
ity of the city, snaking through
larger blocks of Boulevard and
elsewhere. A park is proposed for
the Easley Mill property, where
the granite outcrop will soon
be blasted away for student
housing.
An earty version of what we
now know as the bypass is also
shown, with dashed lines denot
ing proposed "traffieways" loop
ing around the north and east
side of the city in a shape very
dose to the current configura
tion, before heading south and
west and ultimately paralleling
the Middle Oconee roughly to the
historical Epps Bridge. Of course,
the parkways of that era were
quite a bit different from the
limited access highways of today.
Numerous other new traffieways were also proposed, tying
various neighborhoods together, often in the same curvaceous
character.
As we discuss the planning of Athens' future, it's important
to realize that this has been done before, not only here, 88
years ago, but in just about every other community in the
country. Further, while some of the ideas that were proposed
in Manning's plan were very spedfic responses to the condi
tions at that point in time, many of them are the sorts of self-
evident general principles of good planning that people have
come back to again and again. Among these, connectivity and
a healthy balance of accessible greenspace throughout the tity
are espedaUy worthy of reaffirmation.
The questions that the Manning Plan has most effectively
raised in my mind have to do with the scale and scope of the
planning effort currently under consideration: a downtown
master plan. At the time (well before tity-county unification),
the study took in the whole of the City of Athens, and that
might be a better and more synoptic planning unit, as opposed
to a single district or corridor.
Further, there's a lack of compartmentalization of the
varying urban infrastructures in this historical plan, which
we would do well to revisit. There are conflicts between the
strategies of public utilities, parks, planning, and schools to
provide service, and that Lack of governmental cohesion has
produced many of the conflicts in this community. If we're
going to move forward, perhaps the best place to start is by
looking back.
Kevan Williams athensrising@flagpole.com
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APRIL 18, 2012 • RAGPOLE COM 7