Shenandoah

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According to Ann Forsyth’s 2002 article, “Planning Lessons from Three U.S. New Towns of the 1960s and 1970s: Irvine, Columbia, and The Woodlands,” from the late 1950s through the 1970s planners proposed building approximately 150 large, planned developments, or “new communities,” throughout the United States. I knew that Peachtree City was part of these efforts, but wondered if any communities were built in Georgia. According to Wikipedia, one another development in Georgia was proposed, the Shenandoah Community.

An article in the Newnan Times-Herald on April 24, 2005 describes this proposed development. Conceived of in 1969, by 1971 local developer Scott Hudgens had gained the backing of well-known, Atlanta developer Herman J. Russell and proposed a “working cluster of industry, business, residences, and recreation” for approximately 70,000 people along Interstate 85 east of Newnan. They hired Llewelyn Davies Associates to design the development, which would consist of residential neighborhoods and industrial zones, separated by I-85.

The Shenandoah plan was part of the New Communities program, which was backed by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. In an effort to get away from the sprawl of the first wave of postwar suburbanization, Shenandoah was to be like the other new communities we read about this week. The first phase of the development included Highway 34, which would link the industrial park with new residential developments and apartments and a solar-powered ice skating rink that was located in the building that now houses Sunrise Baptist Church.

However, by the mid-1970s the community was a failure. Nicholas Bloom’s 2001 article in the Journal of Urban History, “The Federal Icarus: The Public Rejection of 1970s National Suburban Planning,” roots this failure in marketing. Lots were too small to attract potential home buyers, many of whom perceived it as a “low income project” since nearly half of the units constituted some form of assisted living. In 1980 the HUD New Community Development Corporation took over the development. By July 1981 only 108 residential lots had been built on 1,400 acres. The remaining 6,000 acre development is now an unincorporated industrial, commercial, and residential area, which in the 1990s was transformed by the growing sprawl along the I-85 corridor. While the Shenandoah community was never completed, it did provide a springboard for the growing industrial decentralization and suburbanization of the 1980s and 1990s.

Peachtree City

Peachtree City (PTC), located 33 miles southwest of Atlanta with a population of 36,000, “is considered first in the nation to have built a diversified community around a multiuse path system.” (Atlanta Magazine, March 2007, p. 109) The city consists of 5 villages: Kedron, Aberdeen, Glenloch, Braelinn, and West Village (the only one I couldn’t find a picture for.) These villages represent geographical areas much like Midtown and Buckhead do in Atlanta. The homes in the area range from various sized single family homes to condos and apartments. Many of the city’s residents are employed by the airline industry, especially Delta and Air Tran, because the Atlanta airport is located 15 miles north on I-85. The founding fathers preserved more than 20% of the land as community green space with approximately 3,200 of PTC’s 16,000 acres containing golf courses, two 250-acre lakes (Lake Peachtree and Lake Kedron, both pictured), parks and a boardwalk through the 500 acre Flat Creek Nature Area. But probably the most important and interesting thing about the development of Peachtree City is it’s nearly 90 miles of golf cart paths.
“PTC has been called one of the nation’s most successful examples, if not the most successful example, of a ‘master planned’ city, meaning it evolved not organically along a trade route…but rather because, in this case, a small group of enterprising Georgia businessmen amassed thousands of woody, swampy, creek cut acres in Fayette County simply to build a town, to see if it would work…” (p. 126) In 1956, Golden Pickett and Earl Denny, both “land agents” from College Park, inquired about buying 15,000 acres of land at Redwine Brothers an old, privately owned bank in Fayette Co. There they met Floy Farr, the bank’s manager, who referred them to Bob Huddleston, “the Ted Turner of Fayette County landholding.” Soon Pete Knox, Jr., who manufactured pre-fab homes in a nearby town, got involved with Pickett and Denny. Knox then asked Joel Cowan, who later developed Phipps Plaza in Atlanta, to manage the city. In March 1959, the state legislature chartered Peachtree City with Cowan as Mayer; he was 22 at the time and made headlines as the youngest mayor in Georgia. Within 5 years, seven industries, employing 600 people, moved into the city’s industrial park. Fifty years later, the industrial park has grown to 65 industries with more than 4,500 employees.
The first paved paths appeared in the early 1970s, connecting Peachtree City’s neighborhoods with its golf courses. Now all new developments in the city are required to link to the path system. And everything is connected to these paths— “Almost certainly, PTC is the only American town with a preponderance of golf carts in the carpool lanes; where the high school has a golf cart parking lot (pictured); where it’s not unusual to pass a 7-year-old kid steering a golf cart to T-ball practice from his father’s lap; where it’s somewhat routine, or at least unsurprising, for children to trick-or-treat, for police to patrol, for Santa to arrive, and for criminals to feel by golf cart; where golf cart theft and accidents are a viable categories of the local criminal justice system…” (p. 110) while many suburban cities have a “miracle mile of auto dealerships,” Peachtree City has Huddleston Road where golf carts dealerships offer standard and customized (extra seating, deluxe fabrics, chrome hubcaps) golf carts (pictured). Golf carts even have their own National Highway Transportation Safety Administration classification of Low Speed Vehicles. The city spends more than $100,000 a year on path maintenance but they are still full of potential hazards and are “a potential underbelly of (illegal) activity.” After golf cart accidents on the paths in 2005 and 2006 resulted in the deaths of two individuals, the city is now considering naming and numbering the paths for 911 purposes. This is especially important because most of these paths are in wooded areas and green space not accessible and many times not visible from the main vehicle roadways. Paige Williams says in her article in Atlanta Magazine, “I start thinking of the trailheads as wormholes, mysteries of the universe. Seven feet from someone’s porch rockers, a person can just…appear.” (p. 124) Ruth Conroy Dalton, a Georgia Tech architecture professor, praises the golf cart network “for making transportation more democratic, affordable, and environmentally friendly” even suggesting “that PTC could serve as a model for other developments.” (p. 110)
All of my information for this post came from a very interesting article (I highly recommend reading it!) called “The Secrets of Peachtree City.” It can be found in the March 2007 issue (Vol. 46 No. 11) of Atlanta Magazine. It was written by Paige Williams.