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 families built homes beyond downtown's racial hierarchies. The neighborhood's name reflects the democratic aspirations of its founders — a place built by and for ordinary people, by working families who laid out streets, built churches, and created the institutions of community life. Peoplestown has faced the pressures that have shaped many South Atlanta neighborhoods: urban renewal clearance in the 1960s and 1970s, highway construction that cut through residential streets, and decades of disinvestment as Atlanta's growth concentrated in the northern suburbs and then in Midtown and Old Fourth Ward.
The neighborhood has become a center of community activism in recent years, with residents organizing against flooding — a chronic infrastructure problem — and against a proposed city-funded public safety training facility on the site of a former recreation center, a project that has been contested in the courts and in the streets. Peoplestown represents a version of Atlanta's story that the city's boosters prefer not to lead with but that is as real as Centennial Park or the BeltLine. It is the city's unfinished work.