The Constitution: Atlanta, GA
Tuesday, October 20, 1903
The protest made by Mr. Forrest Adair to the city council yesterday against the frequent and often capricious changing of the names of streets in the city is deserving of that body.
The value of certainty in the metes and bounds used in describing real estate grows in importance with the growth of the city. The activity of the real estate market is dependent in large measure upon the accuracy and permanency of such descriptions, the more so as the city fills up with new citizens. They are unacquainted with our old maps and the metamorphoses of local names. They look only to the chain of titles and, as Mr. Adair says, they frequently refuse a property because of the vagarious changes of the names of streets that occur in consecutive deeds.
A yet greater reason why council should be slow to change the names of our thoroughfares is the fact that already the names of landmark streets have been changed, the honors paid to pioneer citizens obliterated and names that should have remained linked with localities and thoroughfares crossed off our map for fanciful and unsuggestive substitutes, in some cases these changes have almost amounted to a profanation of the fathers of the city. The names of former mayors, even of that one who heroically bore the interests of the city in the awful days of Sherman’s siege and occupancy, the noble James M. Calhoun, have been sacrificed for meaningless titles.
Change Whitehall street to “Commerce avenue,” Marietta street to “Bucephalus boulevard,” and Peachtree street to “Elite avenue,” and by those three simple substitutions that can be adopted in three minutes in council, the Atlanta of history and of common knowledge and pride throughout Georgia and the union will be obliterated.
Patriotic and commercial reasons, especially the important one of making readable and acceptable titles to real estate, are plenty enough to cause council to deliberate long before it takes down the names of well-known streets to replace them with the tony and pride-tickling titles that have been invented without rhyme or reason. We trust the city is at the end of that sort of uncalled for vandalism.