Creative Loafing June 7, 1986 11-A

Tight Squeeze

Shaking off the ashes

by Gene-Gabriel Moore

By the papers I see that Tight Squeeze is back in the news. Some Spirited Midtown people are putting on a street festival, and Tight Squeeze figures in the name of it. That they have reached back 120 years for a historical curiosity like Tight Squeeze has to be heartening. The trend in this my native city is to change historical names — Ivy, Cain, Whitehall, Pryor—not resurrect them.

You wouldn't guess it from the look of the ante bellum part of town, but Atlanta history, of which Tight Squeeze is a part, is fairly sizzling and, heaven knows, full of face stompers, barn burners, pig stickers, and horse thieves. And not all of them were in politics.

About the time that hogs took to wallowing on the shady side of Five Points there were more goodtime houses on Decatur Road, as the street was called then, than there were ministers of the gospel, on both sides of the high Indian trail that became Peachtree. The first mayor was shot down and murdered, slaves were bought and sold on Alabama Street, and during the Civil War the Confederate military threw up an open air stockade for civilians who were suspected of favoring emancipation. Whatever else the Rebel South was, it wasn't altogether Jeffersonian.

The war and the profit motive made Atlanta a city worth four fierce battles in the woods and on the creek banks around the town. Richmond was the capital but red clay Atlanta, scarcely more than a mad scramble of railroad men, Irish laborers and put upon dirt farmers a decade earlier, had become the arms maker for the Confederacy. The fever in the eyes of all those men and boys from mint juleps. For a solid month before the Rebel troops ran away, leaving Atlanta defenseless, the Yankees bombarded it. People on street corners were blown to bits. It was a bad summer.

The fleeing Rebels had already blown up a lot of Atlanta; munitions trains on the tracks opposite what's now Cabbagetown were put to it, and a few dozen little clapboard cottages on Tye Street and Kirkwood, and the rolling mill, later the site of Fulton Bag, fell down. Then the Yankees got theirs. Atlanta would wrap itself in some romantic myths, not least of them the Phoenix rising from the ashes, an image that's on the city seal, but in truth Sherman's targets for the torch were structures he figured the Rebs would. put to military use when they crept back after he left for the sea. Here and there the fires got out of hand but to say that Atlanta was burned to the ground is stretching it.

It was after the war that Tight Squeeze popped up. What it was, was a bunch of shanties between the town, which by then had inched north to around 5^th street, and the country road that’s now 14^th. On 14^th was a wagon yard where freight was unloaded for the merchants on Alabama, Broad, Whitehall and Pryor, which was downtown during the century before John Portman.

Peachtree back then veered west at what's now Peachtree Place, to avoid a big wooded hollow, and followed Crescent to 11th, where it overtook the present road. The hook was straightened when Bleckley, now 10th Street became residential.

It's easy to find Tight Squeeze. Do this: when you drive along Peachtree, between 10^th and llth, notice that there is a depression in the street. If you look to the east .you'll see that old hollow, that's partly a paved parking lot now. The hollow goes all the way down to Piedmont. That was Tight Squeeze.

It was thick with brush after the Civil War, and it was thick too with freedmen and displaced Confederate veterans. Those were desperate times— it was a classic postwar period; the hungry, the homeless the wounded, the hopeless filled the city streets, kind of like today---and way out at Tight Squeeze desperation inspired rowdyism and a good deal of lewd vagrancy.

Merchants en route to the wagon yard on 14^th were waylaid about where the Theatrical Outfit is, and it was said that getting through there with your life was a '"tight squeeze."

It didn't last. The inhabitants went to the chain gang and the shanties were cleared out.

A century later, in the hippie 1960s and 70s, the area was called The Strip. You could get anything you wanted between 10th and 14th, and a few things you didn't. A young editorial writer on The Journal named Moore pulled the name 'Tight Squeeze' out of the history books and Mayor Sam Massell made it more or less official. But it didn't catch on. The hippie establishment, favoring "the Strip," pronounced that calling those blocks Tight Squeeze was a rightwing plot to overthrow spare change and Timothy Leary.

After the hippies, the deluge. The streets of the Flower Children got real mean, Strip joints, hard drugs, death and mutilation replaced the head shops, the funky little coffeehouses and the leather craft stores. The thugs eventually found other rocks to crawl under and for 10 years, and more, Tight Squeeze was on hold. Cha Gio, Theatrical Outfit, Brother Juniper's and some gay bars kept it alive. Twenty years ago the news was that Colony Square would mean a new day in Midtown, But only in the last five years has if downed. High-rise office buildings and hotels are going up on 10th, 14^th, West Peachtree; And the Texans are coming. The word as I have it is that the Tramell Crow and Ackerman companies want Midtown to jump, not become yet another canyon full of office workers by day and muggers by night. One hope is that the developers will accelerate, not eliminate, the theatre scene that's already in place. Between 10th and? 16th there are six theatres. If there are theatres, aren't cafes, bookshops, taverns and people likely to follow? Probably yes.

Adding "Tight Squeeze" to the name of the summer festival in Midtown means that somebody realizes the neighborhood has a past and a colorful, maybe unique personality. Every town has a "Strip," and dozens of American cities have buildings as high as those going up in Midtown. But only Atlanta had Tight Squeeze.