Cabbagetown, Atlanta: (Re)Placing Identity Jeremy W. Crampton

<1> Cabbagetown is one of Atlanta's oldest industrial settlements, built for employees of the South's first cotton processing mill in 1881 during the heyday of southeastern textile mills. Today its identity and sense of place is highly contested. Originally a white working class community oriented around the mill, today it is undergoing gentrification -- the mill has been converted into gated lofts, and there are few long-term residents still left. Remarkably, the neighborhood is still distinct and unusual. It's almost as if a sense of history has settled into the neighborhood's bones and imbued its new residents with a distinctive sense of place. Cabbagetown, Atlanta: (Re)Placing Identity documents the community's struggle over place-based identity. In particular, it examines how the community "(re)-placed" the mill as the center of the community.

<2> Facing an economic downturn in the 1880s, Atlanta business leaders had recognized the need to step away from economic dependence on agriculture. The International Cotton and Piedmont Expositions was held in 1881 to attract investment. Atlanta billed itself as a commercial center and transportation hub, which then required a cheap labor force as textile mills migrated South.

<3> One of the largest mills was the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, built just a few miles down the eastern rail line from downtown Atlanta. Jacob Elsas, a German immigrant who owned and operated the mill, beckoned white laborers from the rural South, including the Southern Appalachians, to work the Mill. The promise of wages, health care, and housing was an attractive alternative for many who were previously poor sharecroppers. Elsas built a small community of simple frame one- and two-story "shotgun" and cottage-style houses flanking the Mill, and in the fashion of similar paternalistic Mill owners, attempted to provide his workers with everything he believed they needed (including the occasional "picture show"). Everyone in this community worked in the Mill -- men, women, and children. This grew a tightly knit, semi-isolated community of people whose lives were anchored to the Mill as well as the rich culture and heritage they had brought with them.

<4> The Mill thrived until the mid-1950s, when it was sold to new owners, and twenty years later was shut down completely. Some of the workers left to find work, but many stayed, in keeping with a strong land ethic. Robert Coles describes having been told the following from an Appalachian family (outside of Cabbagetown) that succinctly captures this "land ethic": "We stay put if we can help it, and if we can't, we still stay put."

<5> Though abandoned and in disrepair, the Mill was a rare example of Atlanta's earliest industrial architecture and was added to the National Historic Register in 1976, in addition to the original houses surrounding the Mill. In 1995, during a time of rapid renewal and gentrification within Atlanta's neighborhoods, the Mill was sold to Aderhold Properties for conversion into lofts. The project was one of the biggest loft conversions in the United States and required funding from several sources including the City of Atlanta, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Federal Empowerment Zone Program. Some of the caveats enforced before proceeding included the use of original materials whenever possible and the preservation of architectural details such as windows and skylights. In addition, the Empowerment Zone loan would only be given if 206 units were made available to "moderate income renters." Today the old Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill is a gated community called the "Fulton Cotton Mill Lofts" with 504 loft spaces for lease with prices ranging from $655.00 to $1800.00 per month.

Identity, Culture, and Sense of Place

Morgan the Goat: I don't want Ffynnon Garw to be on the map because we begged for it, because we, we -- we pleaded. No. If Ffynnon Garw has to be a thousand feet, then I say let it be a thousand feet! Put 20 feet, that's all we need, a 20-foot tump and we have our mountain!

Jones the JP: I'm not sure how legal that is...

Rev. Robert Jones: Yes, or ethical...

Morgan the Goat: Legal? Ethical? Wh- how legal was it to say that a thousand feet is a mountain and 984 isn't, uh? Uh? Do we call a short man a boy, or a small dog a cat? No! This is a mountain, our mountain, and if it needs to be a thousand feet, then by God let's make it a thousand feet!

--The Englishman who went up a hill and came down a mountain

<6> How does a community take up its own autobiography as an active struggle over place? This is a question of "geography" in the original sense of earth writing. In O'Tuathail's (1996) phrase it is a geo-graphing. For O'Tuathail, geography is not something already possessed by the land, but an active, political, and creative process. In Cabbagetown, the conversion of the mill into a gated loft building meant a radical disruption of both physical and psychic sense of place-identity. The mill, as old and new maps and photographs show, is still a physical presence on the landscape. The long border roads of Cabbagetown (Wylie and Carroll Streets) look down directly on the mill complex. Its tall stacks are visible even on the other side of the elevated MARTA rail tracks. But now its physical (historic) wall is supplemented by an ornate iron fence enclosing the mill. Many Cabbagetown residents outside the mill no longer see it as "in" Cabbagetown at all (a feeling reciprocated by a former mill resident we interviewed). Analysis of census figures reveal a distinctly different population profile: outside the mill the population is 87% white, while inside it is 58% white.

<7> The questions addressed in Cabbagetown, Atlanta: (Re)Placing Identity went to the heart of how a community performs an auto-bio-geography as a process of self-writing (Foucault, 1997). Because we were also interested in how maps produce geographic knowledge (Harley, 1989) we not only mapped Cabbagetown but produced mapping tools for the residents. This interactive map is an online geographic information system (GIS). If, as Elden has glossed both Lefebvre and Heidegger, "space is inherently political; politics is inherently spatial" (Elden 2001, 6), a comment echoed in Harvey's claim that "geographical knowledges occupy a central position in all forms of political action and struggle" (Harvey 2001, 233) we understand our cartographic interventions as questions of the politics of place.

<8> One of the ways the community attempted to write its own "platial" biography (Elden, 2001) was to take up a struggle over the fate of an abandoned school (see maps at Cabbagetown, Atlanta: (Re)Placing Identity). As the city's weekly paper put it in 2000: "Twenty years ago, the school and its 2-and-a-half-acre grounds were alive with students from Cabbagetown, Reynoldstown and Grant Park. But in the past 10 years, its front doors haven't been pushed open by anyone other than prostitutes, drug dealers, crackheads and junkies" (Wall, 2000). No doubt spurred by observation of the mill-to-loft conversion, local residents have spent the last two years attempting to prevent condos being built on the school property and its playing field. As the area becomes "hipper" developers see an opportunity to build. After the School Board indicated they would likely sell the property to developers, the Cabbagetown Neighborhood Improvement Association (CNIA) characterized the struggle in a press release:

Neighbors were attempting to avoid further development in the chronically cramped neighborhood of shotgun cottages. Cabbagetown residents are furious with the School Board, whose vacant elementary school property has been neglected, defaced, and inhabited by prostitutes, derelicts, and drug dealers. The Cabbagetown Initiative received support from Gov. Barnes, State Rep. Orrick, and Council Rep. Dorsey, and embodies city and state committments to maintaining green space. The School Board refuses to support this neighborhood in which it owns property, despite clear indication that funds were available to purchase the abandoned lot. The School Board built the school on a landfill, filled it with asbestos, abandoned the property decades ago, neglected it as it became a crime den, lied to the community about their intentions, and now threatens to sell it to outside developers.

<9> This spring Cabbagetown residents succeeded in acquiring the space, and plan to use the old building as a community center, and the playing field as a small park. Other struggles continue as documented in Cabbagetown, Atlanta: (Re)Placing Identity's picture gallery. Most notable is the current use of the playing field (which has a steep slope at the edge) for go-karts, which many residents support and others oppose.

Conclusions and Summary

<10> Cabbagetown is an example of how a community "re-placed" its sense of identity from its historical focus around the mill, to a green space and potential community center located at the heart of the neighborhood. This replacement was not achieved without struggle. Nor does it represent the end of the story but rather an indication of how struggle over place must and does continue. The objections by some residents to children riding go-karts is no doubt not unrelated to the ongoing tensions produced by gentrification of this "hip" artistic community. In our project we were as interested in how a community produces a sense of place through autobiogeography or self-writing, as in our own interventions with maps and photographs. At the website, one can experiment with the interactive map, stripping away or combining layers of information to reveal the spatial transitions. The researchers also admit the irony that they also underwent an autobiogeography by engaging in the project: a sense of place was produced "within" themselves. Perhaps these different subject positions and objects (residents, students, technologies, maps, interviews, theory, walks, documentation) comes closest to a positive and pleasurable "politics of place" as we can expect.

Works Cited

Elden, S. Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History. Continuum: London, 2001.

Foucault, M. "Self Writing." Ethics Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Vol I. P. Rabinow, ed. The New Press: New York, 1997. 207-222.

Harley, J.B. "Deconstructing the Map." Cartographica, 26.2 (1989), 1-20.

Harvey, D. Spaces of Capital. Routledge: New York, 2001.

O'Tuathail, G. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996.

Wall, M. "Showdown in Cabbagetown. Should old school become park or condo?" Creative Loafing, December 2000.