Kirkwood Real Estate

Kirkwood Neighbor's Organization

Kirkwood History

Kirkwood Real Estate traces its beginnings to residential development begun as early as the 1870s. While no one would consider Kirkwood a suburb of Atlanta today, an early tour book described it as an "area of beautiful suburban villas." Kirkwood was an early streetcar suburb to Atlanta. By 1910 streetcars provided express service to and from Atlanta three times daily, and street cars continued service along some streets including Kirkwood Road until the early 1950´s.

Kirkwood was incorporated as an independent municipality in 1899. Governed beginning in 1899 by its own city council and mayor, the town boasted its own water system, school systems and fire department. The former Kirkwood School is a handsome building from this period, located on Kirkwood Road just north of Bessie Branham Park. Individually nominated to the National Register of Historic Places, the primary building on the property´s south side was originally designed by John Francis Downing, the son of the noted Atlanta architect W. T. Downing. Both buildings now comprise the Kirkwood Lofts apartments as a result of a $1 million renovation in 1997.

In 1922, Kirkwood residents voted for annexation into the city of Atlanta.

Beginning in the late 1950´s and continuing into the 1960´s, Kirkwood experienced a transition from an almost all-white community to an almost all-black community. Up until 1965 as the racial composition of the community changed, black citizens made up an increasingly large percentage of the community´s populations, but were denied the opportunity to attend the white, segregated Kirkwood School. As a result of community pressure, the Atlanta School Board in 1965. abruptly integrated Kirkwood School, having declared a phased-in, grade-by-grade attempt at integration a failure.

Beginning in the 1980´s, the neighborhood began to witness another influx of new residents interested in renovating the neighborhood´s stock of historic housing. Still underway, this influx of the middle-class brings with it a whole host of new issues, among them issues related to gentrification, and the clash of people of different social, racial and economic histories living together in one community.

While rich in history, Kirkwood´s rise, its fall into decline, and its recent arrival again as a neighborhood attractive to middle and upper-middle income homeowners illustrate how economic, racial and social forces have shaped this historic inner-city community and many others like it.

Kirkwood's Architecture

Kirkwood's largest homes were built during the community's early years of development in the Queen Anne, East Lake, Arts and Crafts and Victorian Folk styles, primarily along Howard St. between Howard and College Avenue and along Kirkwood Road just north of Hosea Williams Drive. Additional fine larger homes may be found in the Sutherland Terrace subdivision built on the site of the General John B. Gordon estate along Gordon Avenue, Oxford Avenue, and Sutherland Terrace just north of DeKalb Avenue. Although originally part of the Kirkwood, the 1970-era MARTA east rail line severed Sutherland Terrace permanently from the larger Kirkwood community to the south and as a result, Sutherland Terrace is usually now associated more with the Lake Claire neighborhood than with Kirkwood.

As architectural styles changed and evolved following the Kirkwood community's first few decades of growth, we begin to see the craftsman-style two-story American Foursquare homes and the crafts bungalows that today are perhaps the most recognizable features of an Atlanta streetcar suburb community. From the 1920's through the close of the 1930's, Kirkwood would continue to experience great popularity as a suburb convenient ot both Atlanta and Decatur. The neighborhood continued to grow for the thirty years following this period, experiencing another surge in development following the second world war with the development of smaller tract houses typical of that period.

www.historic-kiriwood.com