Underground Atlanta Historic District

Underground Atlanta is a downtown district where the street level was raised by one story, leaving older ground-floor shops below the city. It includes about two blocks of brick commercial buildings from the late 1800s and early 1900s, mostly Victorian with some Neoclassical and Functional designs. Concrete viaducts built in 1928-29 over Central Avenue, Pryor, Alabama and Wall streets lifted traffic above the railroad gulch that had divided the city. Stores along Alabama Street became basements, with new entrances built at the higher level. The district also holds the 1869 Georgia Railroad Freight Depot, an Italianate red-brick building that is the oldest surviving structure in the central business district, and the 1850 Zero Mile Post of the Western and Atlantic Railroad. Its significance rests on how these elements show Atlanta's change from a railroad and walking town to an automobile city. Renovation beginning in 1968 and later MARTA rail construction altered parts of the area, though many iron-column facades remain.