Druid Hills Historic District

Druid Hills is a suburb of about 1,300 acres and 1,300 properties in northeast Atlanta and DeKalb County, laid out between Atlanta, Decatur and Emory University. Houses date from the late 1890s to the 1930s and range from mansions to bungalows, mostly in Italian Renaissance, Spanish Villa, English Tudor, Jacobean, Georgian and Federal styles. Streets follow the rolling Piedmont terrain and are landscaped like parkways, with parks in the wide median of Ponce de Leon Avenue. The suburb began with Joel Hurt's Kirkwood Land Company, which hired Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., in 1892 as planner. Later work by the Olmsted Brothers and the Druid Hills Company under Asa G. Candler carried the plan forward. It was listed as a district because of its landscape architecture, architecture and community planning, and because its development stayed faithful to Olmsted's principles. Intrusions are mainly 1950s and 1960s ranch houses and low-rise apartment buildings.