Brookwood Hills: Atlanta's First Planned Streetcar Suburb

In nineteen twenty-two, developer Benjamin Franklin Burdett and his son Arthur began laying out streets in the hills north of Atlanta's Midtown. They hired engineer O.F. Kauffman, who had worked on Druid Hills, and planted oak saplings along every road. Those trees, now a full century old, are the neighborhood's defining feature.

Brookwood Hills was designed as a suburb, a place where prosperous Atlantans could live in a parklike setting close to downtown. Burdett curved the streets to follow the terrain rather than impose a grid, a design choice that felt European and distinguished the neighborhood from the flat subdivisions rising elsewhere. The architectural styles ran from Classical Revival to Tudor and Craftsman bungalow. Added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-nine, Brookwood Hills remains a leafy enclave squeezed between Midtown and Buckhead, its hundred-year-old oaks the living legacy of a developer who planted for the future.