Welcome to Creflo Dollar Highway

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Ride this route and see a slice of American weirdness, American ingenuity, and American poverty, bookended by two Waffle Houses. See a psychic and a poodle groomer, the hot-pink lettering of “Ryding Dirty Motor Sports” and the strips of vacant land whose sale is advertised on weathered signs that read “19.72 acres” or “11.23 acres,” “owner financing available” or “price reduced.”

On its southern end, near Jonesboro Road, are stretches of the American dream: clapboard houses nestled in complexes with names such as Stone Ridge Enclave and Thornwood Park; Madison Place and Fairfield Square.

Along the road are bus stops and memorials to the dead and flecks of glimmering litter and teens holding signs that say "We Buy Gold" or "Car Insurance $37." There are tax-filing centers and auto-title loan shops and two separate recruiting offices for the U.S. Army. Plywood boards close the fronts of some shops. Others are busy, busy; at 11:30 a.m. the line for lottery tickets at the Stone Gate Bottle Shop stretches four deep and keeps building. In the afternoon, the bar top at the 50 Yard Line fills up and the air gains the vinegary sniff of hot wings. At night, there are lines at the Royal South Central, the Grown Folks Café, two clubs.

Times have changed. The “quiet” and “calm” days that old-timers recall are punctured by news reports of shootings. There was the Jan. 25 shootout between police and three men accused of robbery followed closely a Dec. 12 fatal shooting at a busy Chevron — down the road from another Chevron where, in 2013, another man was killed. The rapper Waka Flocka Flame was shot along this road at a car wash in 2010 after an alleged thief wanted his jewelry.

Eugene Travis, a retiree who wears cashmere turtlenecks under leather jackets and two-tone loafers, now keeps an AK-47 at home and more guns in the car — protection he didn’t bother with 30 years ago when he came into the area as a young homebuyer. Now, he and his neighbors make regular trips to the Fulton County Sheriff’s station to check up on local incidents. That’s what Travis was doing on Tuesday morning when the radio blasted news that was, perhaps, even more surprising: a state senator wanted to dedicate Old National Highway in honor of Creflo Dollar.

Dollar, as most Atlantans surely know by now, is the megachurch-preaching, Gulfstream-riding, Rolls-Royce-driving head of arguably metro Atlanta’s most controversial megachurch, which goes by the wide-ranging name World Changers Church International but is headquartered near where Dollar was raised, on a tract of land along the Old National highway that was once a strip mall anchored by a K-Mart.

When Travis got back, that renaming was the news that riled his neighbors.

“If they change it, most of the people around me would move,” Travis says. “You got people preaching about prosperity. But what are you doing to lift up the neighborhood?”

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By the 1990s, white suburbanites had fled the mixed neighborhood and taken their business with them. On their heels, Richway, Zayre, and K-Mart left, too. Dollar’s church built a $6.5 million headquarters in K-Mart’s grave, to the consternation of neighbors who glommed planning meetings during its initial planning in 1990 and its expansion in 1992; the building opened in 1995. Neighbors told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the time that contractors had cut down trees without warning and that the building’s asphalt footprint was flooding their yards.

The relationship between residents who live off of Old National Highway and the church building has not improved much since. While the church preaches a doctrine of “prosperity” – a belief that parishioners who ascribe to its view and donate their own funds will be rewarded with earthly wealth as a sign of God’s grace, it is surrounded by vestiges of poverty which it has walled itself from. Around its ochre-colored, copper-domed building, nine visible security cameras peer out. A guard circles in an unmarked white van, checking on strangers who park in the lot. At the entrance to the administrative building, a metal detector frames the doorway, and a guard goes through briefcases and purses.

Past the church building and its enormous spread of parking lot rolled MARTA’s No. 189 bus which on Tuesday, and just about every day of the week, carries Mr. Johnson, a 38-year old father of five, who rides to his job as a kitchen remodeling contractor. Johnson says he didn’t like the idea of changing the name of the road for a man that he doesn’t see taking the bus, doesn’t see in community meetings, doesn’t see at the gas station or in the parks giving away water to kids.

“It’s not Creflo there giving away bottles of water, it’s the teachers and the gym coaches,” says Mr. Johnson, who asked his first name not be used. “He does for his church and his church members, but not for us.”

Vic Bolton, a spokesperson for the church, says that worries about the highway being named or renamed for Creflo Dollar are "unfounded," as the highway would rather be dedicated with two "honorary signs" above road signs that bookend the stretch.

"It is not actually a renaming, but a dedication, which means the road name stays the same. Honorary signs go up at both ends of the corridor above the ‘Old National Highway’ signage, so neighbor concerns about the expense associated with the street name changing are unfounded."

The church did not request the legislation, Bolton says, but is pleased with the idea.

"We see it as a great honor for the Senator to propose this resolution," he says. "We are grateful to have the work of our church in the community recognized in this way, and will be honored if the Legislature approves it."

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Doug Dryden opens Jackson’s Music, his music shop on Old National Highway, every morning by picking up litter.

Ten-year store employee Dewayne admires Dryden’s early morning ritual. And he admires the other business owners like Dryden who invested sweat into the neighborhood he grew up in, even as it went through a downward spiral in the mid 1980s, he says.

“There’s a lot of good folks here, and a lot of businesses that are interested in building up the area,” Dewayne says. “People here are willing to work for their advancement, willing to put their effort and their labor into their prosperity rather than it just be given to them.”

So it pains Dewayne to see the street of that labor named for the founder of a church that tells parishioners that prosperity comes from prayer.

“A lot of times religion creates – I don’t know how to say this – kind of non-realistic expectations,” says Dewayne, who wanted to go by his middle name only out of fear of retaliation from church leaders.

Maybe instead of naming the road, government leaders should be putting in that elbow grease to improve the area, says Kimberly Cooper, a 23-year-old server at This is It! BBQ and Seafood, who moved to the area with her family nine years ago, and could not help noticing high grass, litter in the road, and crosswalks spaced so far apart that she sometimes walks half a mile to find the next light to cross.

“There’s a lot that needs to be done,” Cooper says.

Indeed, crosswalks would seem to be a top priority: a 2014 Atlanta Journal-Constitution report found that between 2003 and 2014, 77 pedestrians were killed in accidents on Old National Highway, making it the 10th deadliest street over that period in the metro area.

On an afternoon this week, traffic sped past the Shell station on Bethsaida Road. Inside, the atmosphere was quiet and homey. Customers call clerk Jamal Saha “Dada” – he’s worked along the road at various shops for 17 years, he says. And the shop is known for giving out ice cream to kids on hot days.

Today, Saha and another clerk are joking about the name change. It was pointless, just like how Britain had renamed “Mumbai” as “Bombay,” though the city’s residents still called it by their own name, they say.

“It’s a traditional name,” Saha says of Old National Highway. “It’s Old.”

In the late afternoon, Shirlee Sims comes in.

“Hey Shirlee, what’s going on,” Saha says.

The 53-year-old grandmother asks for lottery tickets and spends her time choosing her games.

“There we go,” she tells Saha. “That’s the winning ticket right there.”

Outside the shop she considers the five-lane stretch of road that she had called home for 25 years; her grandkids call it “Old Nasty,” she jokes. But to her, it would always be “Old Nat,” she says.

“It’s home,” she says. “Old Nat is Old Nat.”