Slabtown, Atlanta
Georgia
In the eighteen forties, Atlanta was barely a town, but it already had a rough neighborhood. A cluster of shacks and shanties grew up near the rail terminus off what is now Decatur Street, thrown together from slab wood and scrap lumber left over from settler Jonathan Norcross's sawmill. The locals called it Slabtown.
Saloons, brothels, and gambling dens packed the area, and contemporary observers described it as a wicked corner of the young city. Atlanta's more respectable citizens fretted in print about how many young men had fallen into bad habits from frequenting the place. Slabtown burned, flooded, and reappeared multiple times through the nineteenth century.
Later the site was redeveloped as the block where Grady Memorial Hospital now stands, erasing almost every trace of the city's most disreputable founding neighborhood.
