Orange you glad you moved here?

If you can’t build a Home Depot between a freeway and a warehouse district on the site of a dilapidated hotel where a corpse was found, where can you build it?

Residents of several neighborhoods near the Howell Mill Road exit of I-75 say a Home Depot would bring even more traffic to an already congested area and would lower property values. They are disturbed that the prolifically self-replicating hardware store would want to build on the site of the old Castlegate Hotel. The 17-acre property, its Tudor touches visible from the interstate, is under contract to Home Depot.

At one time, the neighbors had hoped that Crawford Communications — owned by Jesse Crawford, a partner in the company that owns the Castlegate property — would locate offices there, but it was not to be. Winter Properties, which has loft-ized much of Atlanta, did take a serious look at the property, but chairman Bob Silverman says it was too expensive to allow his company to do the kind of development they favor.

Home Depot will demolish the hotel.

Not that the hotel is such a treat. When it was still open it had a reputation for attracting hookers and their johns. Once closed, it was a haven for vagrants. A young, female security guard assigned to watch the place on April 19 was killed and her body found in one of the hotel’s 370 rooms. Still, what the neighbors are envisioning for the site is a mixed-use development with maybe loft apartments, small shops and restaurants. Not a Home Depot.

“We do not want a large box retail complex,” says Linda Alcott. “Just look at the Home Depot on Sidney Marcus, that’s an eyesore.”

Because the site is already zoned commercial, the neighbors have almost no recourse to block the project. And Home Depot officials think the site is perfect. “It’s a wonderful property,” said company spokesman Don Harrison.

But neighbors with visions of an improving neighborhood aren’t so sure. Alcott says her home on Bellemeade Drive is undergoing a $100,000 renovation. She bought it in 1992 for $105,000. Now, she says her home and the vacant lot next door are worth about $425,000. She had envisioned a neighborhood that would be reminiscent of some areas of San Francisco when she bought the house, but that vision is fading.

Already traffic on Howell Mill Road is a parade of bumping, grinding industrial grade dump trucks, cement mixers and semis, all jockeying for position with regular cars on a road that is at its widest a four-lane. Traffic on Chattahoochee Avenue backs up for half a mile at times as vehicles wait for the green light on Howell Mill. And as the area’s traffic congestion becomes a suffocating, crawling tangle, drivers become urban explorers, slipping down shady side streets like Bellemeade, Antone or Forrest.

Richard Arnold, chair of the land use committee of Berkeley Park Neigh-borhood Association, says he’s not opposed to development. Last week, Arnold sent out a forlorn e-mail to other residents informing them that his research shows that Home Depot — they call it “Agent Orange” — is the least expensive place to buy stakes for the “Say No to Home Depot” signs they’d planned to place on their lawns.

Home Depot, fresh from successful negotiations with Midtown residents who initially opposed placement of its now-open Ponce de Leon Avenue store, wants to negotiate with these residents as well.

“It’s already zoned commercial so we don’t have to ask to go in there,” Harrison says. “It has been an abandoned eyesore for years and we’re looking forward to working with the neighborhoods to understand what their concerns are and bringing a Home Depot to that part of Atlanta.”