Capitol View Manor added to National Register of Historic Places

• Charlie Miller/Historic Preservation Division/Georgia Department of Natural Resources
• Capitol View Manor stood among south Atlanta’s earliest planned subdivisions.

The historic neighborhood of Capitol View Manor has been added to the National Register of Historic Places.

The Georgia Department of Natural Resources yesterday announced that the 87-year-old southwest Atlanta historic district is now listed in the national index, which includes more than 80,000 landmark sites and structures deemed worthy of preservation, for its “importance to Atlanta as an early planned subdivision.”

The neighborhood, located three miles south of Downtown, was built following a population boom in the 1920s as an effort to provide affordable housing to the city’s southwest residents. Atlanta civil engineer Olin I. Freeman, noted for his involvement with similar projects throughout Georgia, designed the 96-acre subdivision’s layout.

Freeman’s design departed from traditional gridiron-patterned street layouts with “curving drives, mostly running east and west, with fairly uniform lots on a gently rolling landscape” - all which remain in Capitol View Manor today. The neighborhood’s middle-class homes represent a collection of traditional housing styles built between the 20s and 50s.

While Capitol View Manor has become one of Atlanta’s most diverse neighborhoods, that wasn’t always the case in its early years. Georgia State University graduate students, who studied the community for its 2011 NRHP application, wrote that the neighborhood was “virtually one-hundred percent white” in its earliest years (it had one black resident by 1935). The community remained largely segregated until around 1975.

The NRHP application delves much further into the neighborhood’s intriguing history.