Atlanta Audio Walking Tour

Highlights

• Emory University

  Emory University, whose campus you have reached, began in 1836 in Oxford, Georgia, and moved to Atlanta in 1915 when Asa Candler, whose Coca-Cola fortune had made him one of the wealthiest men in America, donated seventy-five acres and one million dollars for a new campus here in Druid Hills. That gift, one of the most consequential in American higher education history, transformed a small Methodist college into a research institution of national significance.

• Morehouse College

  Ahead lies the only historically Black liberal arts college for men in the country, where a fifteen-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. enrolled and graduated in 1948. Morehouse was founded in 1867 in the basement of Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, and relocated to Atlanta in 1879.

• 
  Georgia Aquarium

  Opened in November 2005, the Georgia Aquarium in front of you was the largest aquarium in the world by water volume, a distinction it held until 2012. The aquarium was made possible by a donation of two hundred and fifty million dollars from Bernie Marcus, co-founder of The Home Depot, which was itself founded in Atlanta in 1978 and grew into one of the largest retail companies in American history.

• Spelman College

  Your college here, Spelman, opened in 1881 in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church, founded by two New England teachers, Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles, who came to Atlanta to educate Black women. The college was named for Harvey Buel Spelman, whose family donated critical early funds and whose son-in-law John D. Rockefeller became the institution's most significant early benefactor.

• 
  CNN Center

  Behind the glass ahead, a working newsroom hums beneath the CNN sign, the very spot where on June 1, 1980, Ted Turner told Americans they could have news around the clock. The building itself was originally constructed in 1976 as the Omni International complex, a hotel and shopping center attached to a sports arena.

All 40 stops

• MLK Birth Home (Sweet Auburn)

  Picture the two-story Victorian at 501 Auburn Avenue on January 15, 1929, the day a boy named Michael King Jr. drew his first breath inside.

• Ebenezer Baptist Church (Sweet Auburn)

  Look up at the brick façade of Ebenezer Baptist Church, spiritual home to three generations of the King family and one of the most significant…

• MLK National Historic Site (Sweet Auburn)

  Ahead of you spreads the plaza of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park, its eternal flame burning above the crypt where Martin and…

• Sweet Auburn Avenue (Sweet Auburn)

  Picture Auburn Avenue in 1956, the year Fortune magazine called it the richest Negro street in the world.

• Edgewood Avenue (Old Fourth Ward)

  Notice how clubs, theaters, and ballrooms once turned Edgewood Avenue into the liveliest entertainment spine in the South.

• Alonzo Herndon Home (Vine City)

  Your gaze lands on the Herndon Home, the Beaux-Arts mansion Alonzo Herndon built in 1910.

• Butler Street YMCA (Sweet Auburn)

  This modest brick building on Butler Street housed one of the most important organizing hubs of the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta.

• Gate City Colored School Site (Downtown)

  Look at this unmarked block, once home to the Gate City Colored School, among the first public schools for Black children in Atlanta, founded through…

• Oakland City (Southwest Atlanta)

  These quiet residential blocks mark one of Southwest Atlanta's historic African-American neighborhoods, laid out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the city's…

• Atlanta University Center (West End)

  Here at the edge of campus, six institutions rise together — the largest cluster of historically Black colleges and universities anywhere in the world.

• Spelman College (West End)

  Your college here, Spelman, opened in 1881 in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church, founded by two New England teachers, Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles…

• Morehouse College (West End)

  Ahead lies the only historically Black liberal arts college for men in the country, where a fifteen-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. enrolled and graduated in…

• West End (West End)

  West End, the neighborhood you are walking through, is the oldest in Atlanta, one that predates the city itself.

• Five Points / Capital City Club (Downtown)

  Your street grid begins here at Five Points, the intersection that has anchored Atlanta's commerce since the railroad terminus was established in 1837.

• Georgia State Capitol (Downtown)

  Sunlight catches a dome of gold leaf above you, crowning the Georgia State Capitol, completed in 1889 as one of the nation's most distinctive statehouses.

• Underground Atlanta (Downtown)

  Beneath your feet lies one of the strangest urban spaces in America — a buried city that exists only because of a railroad decision made…

• Centennial Olympic Park (Downtown)

  Ahead spreads a broad plaza of fountains and plazas, built for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games and left behind as Atlanta's lasting downtown legacy.

• Georgia Aquarium (Downtown)

  Opened in November 2005, the Georgia Aquarium in front of you was the largest aquarium in the world by water volume, a distinction it held…

• CNN Center (Downtown)

  Behind the glass ahead, a working newsroom hums beneath the CNN sign, the very spot where on June 1, 1980, Ted Turner told Americans they…

• National Center for Civil and Human Rights (Downtown)

  Beside Centennial Olympic Park rises a building shaped like two clasped hands, designed by architect Philip Freelon and opened to the public in June 2014.

• The Tabernacle (Midtown)

  In front of you rises the Baptist Tabernacle, a 1911 church built to seat nearly five thousand worshippers and now reborn as one of Atlanta's…

• Fox Theatre (Midtown)

  Your eyes are about to meet one of the most magnificent movie palaces in the United States, the building Atlanta almost lost.

• Piedmont Park (Midtown)

  Piedmont Park opens up in front of you, 189 acres of lawns, lakes, and wooded paths that make it Atlanta's largest green space within the…

• High Museum of Art (Midtown)

  Look at the luminous white building ahead, the High Museum of Art, the leading art museum in the Southeast.

• Midtown Arts Corridor (Midtown)

  Peachtree Street here carries you through Atlanta's Midtown arts and technology corridor, the city's most concentrated zone of cultural institutions, technology companies, and urban energy.

• Ponce City Market (Old Fourth Ward)

  Ahead of you rises Ponce City Market, one of the largest adaptive reuse projects in the American South and the commercial anchor of the Atlanta…

• Atlanta BeltLine (Old Fourth Ward)

  Beneath your feet runs a 22-mile loop of old railroad corridors, once abandoned freight tracks now reborn as the most transformative infrastructure project in Atlanta's…

• Krog Street Market & Tunnel (Inman Park)

  Krog Street Market and the Krog Street Tunnel sit together in front of you, one of Atlanta's most beloved urban spaces and one of the…

• Inman Park (Inman Park)

  Inman Park, where you now walk, was Atlanta's first planned suburb, developed in 1889 by real estate developer Joel Hurt along the city's first electric…

• Little Five Points (Little Five Points)

  Little Five Points, the intersection you have reached, has been the counterculture heart of Atlanta since the 1970s, its most persistently alternative commercial district.

• Cabbagetown (Cabbagetown)

  Narrow streets and small houses mark Cabbagetown, the neighborhood you are walking through, whose identity is inseparable from the industrial history of the building that…

• Grant Park (Grant Park)

  Grant Park, where you now walk, is Atlanta's oldest public park, established in 1882 when Lemuel P. Grant, the civil engineer who designed the city's…

• Zoo Atlanta (Grant Park)

  Back in 1889, a traveling circus left its animals in Grant Park rather than transport them further, and from that abandonment grew Zoo Atlanta, whose…

• Oakland Cemetery (Old Fourth Ward)

  Beyond these gates lie six acres that have held Atlanta's dead since 1850, when the city set aside this ground as its first permanent burial…

• Peoplestown (South Atlanta)

  These south side streets carry the name Peoplestown, one of Atlanta's historic African-American neighborhoods, laid out during Reconstruction and the early twentieth century as Black…

• Summerhill (South Atlanta)

  Ask why a South Atlanta neighborhood keeps reappearing in the biggest, most painful chapters of Atlanta's history — the answer starts with Summerhill.

• Castleberry Hill Arts District (Castleberry Hill)

  Castleberry Hill, the district you have entered, grew up in the 1990s as an arts district inside a former wholesale and light industrial district just…

• West Midtown / Westside Provisions (West Midtown)

  Howell Mill Road and Marietta Street carry you through West Midtown, a former industrial corridor that two decades of change have turned into Atlanta's premier…

• Fernbank Museum of Natural History (Druid Hills)

  Since 1992, Fernbank Museum of Natural History has stood here in Druid Hills on Atlanta's east side, and you have reached the largest natural history…

• Emory University (Druid Hills)

  Emory University, whose campus you have reached, began in 1836 in Oxford, Georgia, and moved to Atlanta in 1915 when Asa Candler, whose Coca-Cola fortune…

How it works