A Look Back at the Early Days of Georgia Tech and The Flats, by Rod Arroyo, FAICP, Master of City Planning (1982)
This post is a departure from my regular explorations of Detroit history, so I can journey back to my alma mater, Georgia Tech. I’ve always been fascinated by the layers of history embedded in the school and the evolving landscape surrounding it—a place where topography, ambition, and the social fabric of Atlanta shaped places, institutions, and much more.
What follows is a story of transformation: how a spring-fed creek valley became the unlikely birthplace of a technological and collegiate powerhouse and America’s first federally-funded public housing. It’s a narrative about fill dirt and football fields, about who gets to stay and who gets displaced, and about how past decisions still shape the ground we walk on today.
Tanyard Creek’s Evolution
Take a stroll at Bobby Dodd Stadium today, and you’re standing on carefully engineered grounds. The “Flats” that gave this place its name were never actually flat—they were comprised of a watershed, slopes draining inexorably toward Tanyard Creek, which began life as a spring in downtown Atlanta and wound its way north through a modest valley before emptying into Peachtree Creek in Buckhead. More about this in a little bit. First, I will review the origins of Georgia Tech.
The school was founded on October 13, 1885. In 1886, Atlanta won the battle to host the Tech campus over Athens, Macon, Penfield, and Milledgeville. Three sites in the City of Atlanta were considered for the school: one on Boulevard, one near the end of Capital Avenue, and Peters Park. The Peters Park site was selected, as Edward C. Peters, son of Richard Peters, donated four acres and agreed to sell some adjacent land at $2,000 per acre. Figure 1 below shows the extent of Peters land holdings in the surrounding area in 1894.
In the fall of 1888, the first two buildings at the Georgia School of Technology, now Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), opened (see Figure 2). These included the first Academic Building (now the Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Administration Building), with the tower that still stands today, and the Shops building, which also had a tower of complementary design and height. The Georgia School of Technology started with 129 students that year. During its early years, each county in Georgia could send the same number of students to Tech as it had representatives in the State Legislature. In-state tuition was free.
Getting back to topography, this 1892 bird’s-eye view of northwest Atlanta captures this geography beautifully: the core Georgia Tech campus perched on higher ground with its distinctive twin towers (before fire claimed one), and below it, the creek’s main branch carving through land that would become legendary in college football (Figure 3). The creek took its name from the Atlanta Tanning Company, whose hide-processing operations sat just northwest of downtown at Simpson and Orme Streets. The pungent work of turning animal skins into marketable leather gave the whole watershed its identity: Tanyard Bottom.
Interestingly, another Tanyard Creek flows under Sanford Stadium at the University of Georgia in Athens, also named for a nearby tannery. Tech’s greatest rival followed Tech in building its stadium atop a creek named for the same industry.
A Neighborhood Born of Necessity
Between the 1880s and 1920s, Tanyard Bottom became something rare in the segregated South: a de facto integrated neighborhood. This wasn’t idealism—it was economics. Low-income workers, both White and African-American, lived in one-story shacks and two-story shanties because they had no other choice. They worked in nearby industrial areas, including that same tannery whose effluent ran through an open sewer in their neighborhood.
The conditions were brutal. Families sometimes shared single rooms. Disease, death, and infant mortality rates were staggeringly high. Yet this overcrowded, impoverished place represented an accidental experiment in racial integration that would soon be deliberately undone.
My composite of 1911 Sanborn map shows the area: Tanyard Bottom stretched roughly from North Avenue south to Cain Street, bordered by Williams Street to the east and Marietta to the west (Figure 4). The Atlanta Housing Commission would later label this entire area a “slum” in their 1938 rebuilding plans (Figure 5).
When a Coach Needed a Field
Enter John Heisman in 1903, hired away from Clemson as Georgia Tech’s first full-time football coach and the nation’s first-ever paid college football coach, at $2,250 per year plus 30 percent of gate receipts. The Blacksmiths (or Smithies, or Techity Techs—the team hadn’t quite settled on an identity yet) had been playing at Piedmont Park, but Heisman wanted something on campus. Besides, he would receive more value from his 30 percent of the gate with a field on campus that had controlled access.
In 1905, Heisman made it happen. Prison workers were brought in to level a playing field right there in the watershed (Figure 6). Land was filled, the creek was diverted through culverts, and “The Flats” was born—not from nature, but from necessity and ambition. Students designed and built wooden bleachers. Baseball games started that April, with Heisman coaching that team too. By fall, football was underway on the new field, and in October, the newly christened “Yellowjackets” (one word initially, later split into Yellow Jackets) had emerged.
The ground beneath was always unstable—literally. That fill dirt created ongoing problems. When Tech Trustee John W. Grant donated $15,000 in 1913 to establish a proper stadium in memory of his deceased son Hugh Inman Grant, engineers had to use reinforced concrete to provide stability for the stands. Tech students contributed their labor to build the 5,600-seat concrete west stands. The stadium would grow over decades—east stands in 1924, south stands in 1925, reaching 30,000 capacity. When the west stands were rebuilt in 1944, rather than removing the original concrete below, they simply built above it. Those 1913 stands are still there, hidden beneath what you see today (Figure 7).
At 51,913 capacity, Bobby Dodd Stadium at Hyundai Field remains the oldest on-campus stadium in NCAA Division I-FBS—built on fill dirt, over a diverted creek, on land that was never meant to be flat. Welcome to the Flats!
The rendering below by architect Ten Eyck Brown shows what Grant Field and the Tanyard Bottoms area looked like in 1917 (Figure 8). Note the change of elevation south of North Avenue and the culvert running under North Avenue towards Grant Field. This area was described as a shanty town.
The First and the Lost Opportunity
By the early 1930s, downtown Atlanta real estate developer Charles F. Palmer had a vision. He owned substantial property in the city center and understood that improving the housing stock to the northwest would increase his holdings’ value. But Palmer thought bigger than private profit. He organized business and institutional leaders to propose something unprecedented: that the federal government fund a public housing project to replace Tanyard Bottom.
In June 1933, demolition began. The Public Works Administration took charge of construction, made possible by New Deal funding during the depths of the Depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself came to dedicate Techwood Homes in 1935, delivering his remarks at Grant Field.
Here’s what was built: 604 units of public housing plus a 300-student dormitory for Georgia Tech—McDaniel Dormitory, completed in September 1935, the project’s first finished building. Techwood Homes became the first federally funded public housing development in the United States. Many considered it a triumph. To others, it was viewed much differently.
Tanyard Bottom had been racially integrated—an exception to the rigid segregation that defined the South. The federal government’s own “neighborhood composition rule,” established by Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s first public housing director, stated that public housing shouldn’t disturb the pre-existing racial composition of neighborhoods. The 1935 Federal Housing Administration Underwriting Manual went further, explicitly requiring segregation for federal loan guarantees.
Techwood Homes could have honored the integrated reality of Tanyard Bottom. It could have been a model for the entire country. Instead, Techwood was restricted to Whites only. A separate project, University Homes—675 units completed in 1937—was built for African-Americans. In 1940, Clark-Howell Homes added another 630 units next to Techwood, also Whites-only until 1968.
The federal government didn’t just allow segregation—it mandated it, ensuring that some integrated neighborhoods would be dismantled and segregated ones preserved. The policies helped booming White neighborhoods exclude African-Americans while cementing racial divisions in American cities.
For Georgia Tech, there was bitter irony: even if Techwood had been integrated, McDaniel Dormitory and the rest of campus would have remained all-White anyway. The school didn’t admit African-American students until 1961, when it became the first collegiate institution in the Deep South to integrate without a court order. Ford C. Greene, Ralph A. Long Jr., and Lawrence Williams—now honored with the “Three Pioneers” statue on campus—were those first students.
By 1996, all of Techwood and Clark-Howell Homes had been demolished to make way for Centennial Place for the Olympic Games. University Homes followed in 2009, replaced by Scholars Landing, a mixed-use, mixed-income development. The creek runs underground now, invisible. The shanties are long gone. But the consequences of those 1930s decisions still ripple through Atlanta’s geography of opportunity.
Planning at Tech
Because I am telling the story of Georgia Tech’s history, I also want to reflect on this history as a graduate of Georgia Tech’s City Planning program. The program was created in 1950 with a $251,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant, bringing Howard Menhinick from the Tennessee Valley Authority as its first director. Menhinick had directed the UN Headquarters planning staff and edited the Planners Journal. Malcolm Little, who would later be one of my professors, joined in 1953.
The program made its own small history at Tech: Thera Richter (MCP ’59) became not just the first female graduate of the City Planning program but the first woman to earn any graduate degree at Georgia Tech. Arthur Campbell (MCP ’70) was the first African-American graduate of Tech’s planning program. Today, consistently ranked among the top ten planning programs nationally, it trains students to grapple with the very questions raised by Techwood’s history: Who benefits from urban planning and the transformation of cities? Who is harmed? Who is missing? How do we build cities that work for everyone?
This past fall, Tech launched a new Bachelor of Science in Urban Planning and Spatial Analytics, extending planning education to the undergraduate student body.
Standing on History
Tech Tower—the Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Administration Building—remains one of the few visible connections to those earliest days. Since 1918, the “TECH” sign has marked all four sides, a beacon visible across a campus and beyond that has expanded significantly from the original four acres donated by Edward C. Peters.
The student body of fall 2024 would be unrecognizable to those 129 young men who enrolled in 1888: 60 percent male, 40 percent female; 36.4 percent Asian, 33.3 percent White, 8.3 percent Hispanic, 8.1 percent Black/African-American, 7.9 percent international, 4.6 percent two or more ethnicities, and 1.3 percent other/unknown. The fourth-best undergraduate engineering program in the country. A top-ten public university leading the way in research and education. Many other top ten rankings have been awarded to Tech, including, as noted above, its urban planning program. Georgia Tech is also ranked second nationally for innovation.
There is much history to reflect upon when attending a football game, enjoying a cultural event, studying, or spending time on campus. Tanyard Creek still flows beneath it all, invisible but still there, following the path gravity carved into the land long before anyone thought to call this place The Flats.
What’s the good word? To Hell With Georgia!
Timeline: Key Dates in Georgia Tech and Techwood History
1882: Macon attorney Nathaniel Harris learns of European technological schools from Major John F. Hanson of the Central of Georgia Railroad. Harris commits to creating a similar institution in Georgia.
1885: Harris, now a state legislator, sees his bill authorizing a new technological school signed into law on October 13.
1886: Atlanta wins the competition to host the campus over Athens, Macon, Penfield, and Milledgeville. Edward C. Peters donates four acres at Peters Park and sells adjacent land at $2,000 per acre.
1888: The first two buildings open in fall—the Academic Building (now Tech Tower) and the Shops building, both with complementary towers. Georgia School of Technology enrolls 85 students: 129 students total over the first year. Each Georgia county can send as many students as it has state representatives. In-state tuition is free.
1890: First Tech baseball game is played against the University of Georgia. H.D. Cutter, Class of 1842, recalls that “Ramblin’ Wreck” was already being sung.
1892: Football arrives at Tech with three games under Coach Ernest E. West. The team plays at Piedmont Park.
1892: Fire destroys the Shops building. It’s rebuilt without the tower (and demolished in 1968).
1893: On November 4, Tech football plays UGA for the first time, winning 28-6 in Athens as “clean, old-fashioned hate” is born. Athens fans reportedly throw rocks at Tech players. Tech is accused of using a “ringer”—Leonard Wood, who enrolled two days before the game.
1903: John Heisman becomes Tech’s first full-time football coach at $2,250 per year plus 30 percent of gate receipts—one of, if not the first, paid college football coach in America.
1905: Heisman hires prison workers to level The Flats for football and baseball. First games are played in April. Students design and build wooden bleachers.
1905: On October 29, the Atlanta Constitution reports that Heisman and the team want to be called the Yellowjackets. The November 5 Atlanta Journal confirms the new name after a 45-0 victory over Tennessee.
1908: The lyrics to “I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech” first appear in The Blueprint yearbook. The Tech band plays it to the tune of “The Son of a Gambolier.”
1913: Tech Trustee John W. Grant donates $15,000 in memory of his son Hugh Inman Grant to establish Grant Field. Students help build the 5,600-seat concrete west stands.
1913: Tech admits women to the Evening School of Commerce (but not full-time until 1952, not to all programs until 1968).
1916: On October 7, Georgia Tech defeats Cumberland 222-0 in the most lopsided game in college football history.
1917: Undefeated Georgia Tech wins its first national championship, beating Penn at home and outscoring opponents 491-17. First Southern team to win a football national championship.
1918: “TECH” sign added to all four sides of Tech Tower.
1924: East stands completed at Grant Field.
1925: South stands completed, bringing capacity to 30,000.
1933: Demolition begins in June on Tanyard Bottom for Techwood Homes, the first federally funded public housing in the United States.
1935: President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicates Techwood Homes and delivers remarks at Grant Field in November. McDaniel Dormitory (300-student dorm for Tech) completes in September as the project’s first building. Techwood opens with 604 housing units—for Whites only.
1937: University Homes completed with 675 units for African-Americans.
1940: Clark-Howell Homes completed with 630 units (Whites-only until 1968).
1944: West stands rebuilt at Grant Field, constructed above the original 1913 stands (which remain beneath).
1950: Graduate City Planning Program created with $251,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant. Howard Menhinick becomes Regents Professor and first Program Director.
1953: Malcolm Little joins City Planning faculty.
1959: Thera Richter becomes first female graduate of City Planning and first woman to earn any graduate degree at Georgia Tech.
1961: Georgia Tech becomes first Deep South school to admit African-American students without court order. Ford C. Greene, Ralph A. Long Jr., and Lawrence Williams are the first admitted.
1970: Arthur Campbell becomes first African-American graduate of the City Planning program.
1993: McDaniel Dormitory demolished.
1996: Techwood and Clark-Howell Homes demolished for Olympic Games; replaced by Centennial Place.
2009: Majority of University Homes demolished; replaced by Scholars Landing (mixed-use, mixed-income).
2016: City Planning program moves from College of Architecture to College of Design.
2024: Fall undergraduate enrollment: 60% male, 40% female. Demographics: 36.4% Asian, 33.3% White, 8.3% Hispanic, 8.1% Black/African-American, 7.9% international, 4.6% two or more ethnicities, 1.3% other/unknown.
2025: Tech launches new Bachelor of Science in Urban Planning and Spatial Analytics.
Sources: Most of the information in this Early Timeline is based on Griessman, B. Eugene, Sarah Evelyn Jackson, and Annibel Jenkins, Images & Memories – Georgia Tech: 1985-1985, 1985, Georgia Tech Foundation. Other sources include the Atlanta Journal, Atlanta Constitution, https://sites.gsu.edu/historyofourstreets/2022/04/11/techwood-homes/, www.epi.org, www.livinghistory.gatech.edu.
For more on Georgia Tech’s current rankings and achievements, visit gatech.edu/about/rankings.