Broad Street and the Long Arc of Downtown
Near Augusta, Georgia
Broad Street in Augusta was designed wide from the beginning. When James Oglethorpe laid out the town in seventeen thirty-six, he made the main commercial street wide enough for wagons to turn around loaded with goods. That practical dimension, roughly one hundred and seventy-five feet curb to curb, gave Augusta's downtown a physical character it has maintained for nearly three centuries.
The street became the commercial spine of a trading city and then a cotton city and then an industrial city. The Cotton Exchange anchored its lower end. Hotels, banks, and brokerages filled the blocks in between. The Broad Street of the late nineteenth century was one of the most economically active streets in the interior South.
The twentieth century brought the same pressures it brought to downtowns everywhere: suburban malls, highway construction, white flight accelerated by the nineteen seventy riot and its aftermath, and the slow withdrawal of retail from the city center. Broad Street contracted but did not die.
Today the street is in the middle of another reinvention. The city is building the James Brown Linear Park along a stretch of Broad, a public space project centered on the memory of its most famous son. The bronze statue of Brown that stood at the corner of Broad and James Brown Boulevard for nearly two decades has been moved to the Augusta Museum of History during construction and will return when the park is complete.
