NY Times March 14, 1971, p. 34-35+

The Life and Death of Atlanta’s Hip Strip

By James T. Wooten

LIKE Moslems to Mecca, they once came to The Wall, and The Neighborhood hummed with their crowded camaraderie. The Wall belonged to them. It was theirs exclusively, a creation of their contradistinctive culture: an entire, windowless side of a long brick building on which was splashed a great, garish mural of a giant Jesus and a chorus of surrealistic disciples—and it was there at The Wall on the corner of Peachtree and 10th Streets in the heart of this city's hippie colony that all the lost children gathered in the evenings to bind up the day in a communion of castaways.

Others were drawn there as well, creeping curiously along in their cars and cabs, gawking and pointing and staring like kids at the zoo ("Look at that, Mildred, The place is crawling with hippies") and shaking their heads as they wondered aloud about the future of this country's youth, what with the drugs and long hair and strange attire ("And my God, Marvin, all that free love!"), and the Chamber of Commerce, taking note of the frequent traffic jams, announced with only half a smile that the place was one of Atlanta's most popular attractions.

That is how it was yesterday: a gay, gaudy carnival, noisy and naughty and with all the makings of a Greenwich Village South. [which future mayor Maynard Jackson proposed in 1968]

But today The Wall is a big, black, blank blotch. The colossal Christ and his chatoyant coterie are gone, obliterated by the same young artists who had painted it. Tired of their creation, they had petulantly covered it, and now The Wall looms darkly vacant, an ebony symbol of what has happened to The Neighborhood.

In the evenings, the street stands starkly still, nearly empty. Those who once came to watch or be watched, or to watch those being watched watch those watching them, do not come any more. "Some say its the weather, the winter scene, you know, but it's more than that," a shaggy inhabitant observes sadly. "We really had it all together here. Really had it going, and now it’s gone — just gone." And only those whose imaginations run to extremes believe it can ever be the same again.

The cause of the alteration of Atlanta's once happy hippie colony is fear—a fear spawned in violence. It began last summer (perhaps even before that; perhaps in the very conception of a community of gentle tolerance, the antithesis is also conceived). Riots and near riots and rumors of riots; kidnappings, murders tortures, rapes, assaults, robberies shootouts—and all of this has ripped at the fabric of the colony, multiplying the tensions with the larger community. The police, who were already anxious, have become even more unnerved, and now the fear flows freely like the sweet smell of hemp becoming ash, seeping into the very brick and mortar, lurking malevolently around the corner of every day.

There was once an élan in it; streets that fairly captured those who walked them, and now, to say the least, it is not what it once was. Substantial numbers of longtime residents are moving, and the rate of immigration has slowed to nearly zero, and those who still come discover that it is not what they were told by those who passed through few months ago.

Perhaps it is the bikers, a herd of incredibly lawless men and women on motorcycles who moved into the area last summer and have remained. Perhaps it is the presence of a small cadre of political radicals committed both to a violent revolution and to a zealous, missionary pursuit of others not quite convince their methods are wise. Perhaps it is the almost constant friction between the colony and the local government, or perhaps it is the drug that makes some of the residents both criminals and victims, caught up in their habit and set upon — beaten, raped and robbed — by those who know they will not and cannot go to the police; or perhaps it is the apathy of the people who choose to live there — a charming, comfortable, careless attitude that has its debilitating effects. Or perhaps it is simply that what was happening among the hippies at Peachtree and 10th Streets cannot happen at all.

This section of town has always had an abundance of names. The Area or The Neighborhood or The Strip or The Hip Strip, and some still refer to it as Tight Squeeze, a designation born generations ago when the width of Peachtree as it headed northward out of town would not accommodate two carriages passing side by side.

A few blocks from where it begins deep in the core of the city, Peachtree divides into eastern and western thoroughfares. After that, the cross streets begin to have numbers instead of names and when the eastern segment reaches 8th or 9th Streets, about a mile or so from the gleaming newness of Atlanta's downtown, The Neighborhood begins.

A few years ago, at the beginning of the last decade, it was a collection of small stores, bars and large old homes that had seen better days and were being used as rooming houses for the young men and women freshly arrived from all across the South. They were Dixie's ambitious sons and daughters, tired of the farms and dull little towns and the meager pay and the predictable future—and so they came because Atlanta was swinging into a war era of prosperity. The rent was cheap and the location convenient. Branch banks were opened, along with a few delicatessens, service stations and pharmacies, and its attractiveness to young people multiplied as more of them moved in.

But in the middle of the decade, the area began to attract a new breed. The youth revolution was rolling full steam and the word spread that Atlanta was a free city, that their thing could be done there, and the disciples of the new life style began pouring in—and The Neighborhood changed again.

The shops on one side of Peachtree went with their new clientele, while those across the way began catering to the tourists until, after a few months, the center stripe down Peachtree Street the came the dividing line between hip and straight. On one side were art theaters, boutiques and the snack shops and craft stops that attracted the hippies; on the other were the "redneck" bars and strip joints.

Many of the original hippies were Atlantans, drawn, like thousands of other young people across the country to a life that rejected contemporary standards and values. The first to arrive minded their own business and went about their pursuits with a quiet diligence; there was a freedom in The Neighborhood that soon became relatively famous. Former Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. told police to leave them alone unless they broke the law. They had a right, Allen insisted, to live the way they chose, as long as it was within the law—and the word got around.

By the summer of 1970, it was estimated that as many as 5,000 hippies had taken up permanent residence in The Neighborhood, and in addition to them, there were the hundreds of "street people," the passers through, on their way from nothing to nowhere, looking only for a new experience, asking only for a bed and an occasional meal.

By then, it was a genuine community, an underground newspaper, The Great Speckled Bird, was formed in 1967 and soon became one of the best if not the best, of its genre in the country. Arts and crafts projects began and cooperative outlets were established for distribution. Health clinics and drug rehabilitation centers sprang up and nearby Piedmont Park, a sprawling expanse of lawn and lakes, became their unofficial retreat. There were art festivals, pop festivals, love parades, peace marches and women's liberation demonstrations.

Any growing community inevitably generates problems, and The Neighborhood was no exception. Drugs became commonplace (in late 1969, for example, a hippie leader estimated that about 10 per cent of the residents were heroin addicts). Venereal disease was rampant, hepatitis frequent, malnutrition an everyday discovery, and the crime rate soared with the influx of junkies, pushers and others whose not so gentle life style was nourished by the free and easy aura of The Neighborhood.

Leaders In The Neighborhood recognized what had happened; moreover, they were appalled by the prospects of thousands of other jobless and homeless young people taking up residence there, threatening their relative peace. At an Atlanta Community Relations Commission meeting last May, the hippies conceded that they needed housing, jobs, better sanitation — and police protection. The commission returned a month later and said it planned to provide some assistance in the first three areas, and Mayor Sam Massell Sr. responded to the fourth plea on his own.

On the evening of June 4, in a televised address, he declared The Neighborhood to be "an intensive care area" and announced he was dispatching a special force of 64 policemen into the locale. They were headquartered in an old storefront building immediately dubbed "the pigpen" by the youngsters, but the initial reaction within the enclave was one of cautious approval. There were those who had their doubts, among them David Durrett, then the director of the Midtown Alliance, one of the many groups formed to assist in the building of the community. He said he liked the Mayor's speech (Massell had talked about making certain the rights of all were protected) but wondered "if that many cops, all coming in at once, are really needed for the protection we requested."

On the back streets and frequently on brightly lighted Peachtree itself, any of the area's more experienced residents had become victims of the robberies and rapes, and for a while they were happy with the increased police presence. So were many of the merchants who had been complaining that the hippies had so hurt their businesses that they were thinking of moving away. After the police patrols were expanded, the customers started coming back and the merchants stopped complaining.

"But the coming of the cops was the thing that started the real change," Durret said later, "It didn't take long for the tensions to build, The cops harassed the kids and the kids harassed the cops." Soon, there was a striking bitterness among the residents of the area and a growing radical sentiment. At issue were the arrests police had made for such charges as jaywalking, loitering or maintaining a dive, which were sometimes drug-related and were viewed as pure hassling by the community.

The new breach between the hippies and the police grew wider. The kids were persuaded that while the cops were diligent about busting drug users, they made little effort to protect hippies from those who preyed on their tolerance and on the loose discipline of the area. “The cops are busting all those little grass dealers," one of the resident said then, "but they're not touching the rednecks who beat on us like drums."

When an arrest took place, a crowd would gather at the scene and, as other police began to move down the street to assist, a following of hippies would fall in behind them. The bystanders wrote down badge numbers and physical descriptions, anticipating abuse on the part of the police. The pattern was predictable and so was the result: about two weeks after the large contingent of officers had been sent to the area, police were making a late night arrests on the street when about 400 irate youngsters gathered around — and out of the crowd flew a collection of bricks and bottles and stones.

"It was precisely what we had been trying to avoid and what we had feared most," remembers Clarence Greene, an employee of the city who serves as the Mayor's liaison with The Neighborhood. The Great Speckled Bird refers to Greene as "Massel's hip-pig," but there are many residents of the area who do not share that antagonism. The 53 year old Greene and his wife, Dorothy, spend almost every evening in The Neighborhood, talking, giving advice, settling disputes between police and hippies, and attempting to, as he puts it, "just keep the lid on."

In three months, nearly 1,000 arrests were made. The largest number was for public drunkenness (325), with the next most frequent charge being violations of drug and narcotics laws (315). Since most hippies do not drink and drug users with any experience seldom get caught, Greene concluded then that much of the "law and order"' problem in The Neighborhood was a product of outsiders.

BOTH Greene and the Mayor heard midsummer rumors that thousands of other "outsiders” would be coming to the city. Some of them were expected because of a rock festival at nearby Byron, Ga. On June 29, Massell submitted an advertisement to 12 underground newspapers across the country. "Unless you have bread and a pad, please find your thing somewhere else — or face a bad scene in Atlanta”, the advertisement said. The Great Speckled Bird ran The Mayor's ad along with the paper's own response, which called it "typically silly”. The editors also asked other underground papers not to print the advertisement or, if they did, to publish a statement from hippie leaders beside it

The festival at Byron on July 4 did not produce the immense influx of outsiders that bad been predicted and neither did the rest of the summer. The "pigpen" was closed and the number of policemen in the area reduced. But what the summer and the festival had brought were the bikers, and their swaggering presence soon made itself known.

Although there were some bikers in The Neighborhood as early as last spring, hundreds more were drawn to Georgia by the Byron festival, where they were hired as security guards. Some were paid in beer, just as a number or them had been rewarded for their services at an earlier festival in Altamont, Calif., where, with Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones on stage, a cadre of bikers went berserk, killing a black man. After the Byron festival, about 300 of them and their girl friends headed for Atlanta. They liked what they found, and they stayed. The beginning of the end was evident.

A long-time resident of the area says: “The biker has this kind of attitude — they see what they want and they take it, period."

The merchants on Peachtree are terrified of them. "They come in and browse around and all of a sudden they're picking up handfuls of trinkets and walking out," one of the businessmen says. "I say to them, What are you doing?' and they say, “We're shopping, and they tell me that if I call the cops they will burn the store, l do not call the cops." Other shop owners along The Strip relate similar stories, and so do the street people.

"I'm walking down the street with this girl, see," one remembers. "Up comes these two guys on bikes and one of them says he really digs my jacket — it was suede with fringes, you know — and I told him thanks and then he tells me to give it to him. I told him no and he just up and beat hell out of me with the other one standing there holding a tire wrench on the girl. He took the jacket and they left."

At least four distinct gangs of bikers now exist in The Neighborhood, with a combined membership of approximately 500, including the bikers' numerous girl friends. Although most are believed to have migrated from Florida, some are natives of Atlanta, all these different geographic loyalties are one source of feuds between the gangs. Like almost all of the hippies, the bikers are white.

They are a subculture, caught up in the glory of their machines and the delight of a life unimpeded by the law. Many are master machinists capable of dismantling and reassembling their cycles with the sure art of an infantryman repairing his weapon. Astride their behemoths. they go where they please. when they please, and perhaps the power of their mounts is too much for their psyches—the roar, the speed, the throbbing may infuse them with a notion that they, like their machines, are beyond mortal limitations.

They live in many of the old houses originally revamped for the influx of the youngsters, often in filth that exceeds even the level usually attributed to the hippies, they look much like their machines; greasy, and studded with chrome against black leather. In each group, at least one "mother” is sexually available to every male member. Theirs is a "give-and-take" community, one hippie says. "They give everybody hell and take what they want."

Many are involved heavily in narcotics traffic, stocking their shelves with drugs stolen from hippie pushers, some of whom are forced to give up their wares after beatings. The bikers, in turn, sell to the transients on the streets, those whom Greene calls the "unlearned, unhappy pseudo hippies." If a customer shows the biker-pusher money, he is likely to lose it all without getting the drugs he wants to purchase.

The police are genuinely disturbed by the bikers' presence and attitudes, but they are inhibited, they say, by the demand for fairness. "Sure, they are bad," one policeman says, "but you can't arrest bikers for just being bikers. You have to prosecute them for particular crimes within the law, and I believe me, not many crimes by bikers are ever reported."

The hippies reply that they do not notice the police enforcing loitering, jaywalking and other "nuisance" ordinances against the bikers. There are many in The Neighborhood who are persuaded that the attitude of the local police is similar to that of law-enforcement authorities in most of the South toward crime within the black community. "They say, 'What the hell, it's just a bunch of hippies and bikers." a hippie complained recently, "That's the way they are about the blacks. They say, "What the hell, it's just a bunch of niggers.' "

Greene tried to put it together. "It was already tense, you know, between the street people and the cops after they started their crackdown and the number of arrests mushroomed. That was when the real radicalism began. A lot at the kids became hawks as far as the police were concerned. They were the ones who threw the rocks. Then comes the bikers and the tension has doubled. They are getting it, the street people think, from both sides — the cops and the bikers—and a lot of them told me that they had bought guns or were going to. I knew it was building. You could tell. There was too much violence around them. It was bound to happen.''

On the evening of Oct 10, police arrested two girls at the corner of Peachtree and llth Street on charges of creating a turmoil, aiding and abetting another girl to escape and violating the state narcotics law. One of the girls screamed, the officer called for assistance, and a fellow policeman, on his way, was hit on the head by a brick. Young people tore his uniform and grabbed the badge from his shirt, and for a moment the situation was almost out of control. But the police closed Peachtree near 10th Street and for a time order was restored. Then suddenly the tension Greene had been describing erupted in full force into open violence.

Rocks were hurled at the police. Bricks zinged through the air, shattering windows and car windshields. Fire bombs landed in the streets and some witnesses reported that shots were fired both by the polite and at the police. "We are lucky that we are not today mourning the death of a dozen people from last weekend's riot," The Atlanta Constitution editorialized on Monday morning.

The violence bad finally broken through, and shots and firebombs echoing through the night became almost commonplace.

Then, on Dec. 30, Barney Leigh McSherry, a giant biker with the nickname of "Tree," was shot to death by a young hippie as he forced his way into one of the dozens of big homes converted into rooming houses in The Neighborhood. [The Great Speckled Bird account of this]

When the police searched the old mansion where the 6 foot-7, 259 pound McSherry was slain (it was once the residence of the French consul), they found 18 bottles of gasoline rigged as firebombs, a stick of dynamite, two shotguns, seven rifles and few pistols. They arrested the 17 residents, including Robert W. T’Soavas, one of those accused of murder at My Lai, and charged them all with murder,

The charges were dismissed a day later by a municipal judge who said there had been too many threats and too much violence in the area to warrant a murder charge. He ruled that the youth who had shot McSherry — 18-year-old John Wesley Roberts — had acted in self-defense: Just before Roberts had opened fire on McSherry, the biker had placed his hand in his pocket, and the police found a loaded revolver there when they searched the body.

WHAT had impressed the judge was the testimony he had heard. Harvey Partis, the man who leased the house and rented it to hippies, said its residents had been "ripped off “ (robbed) and terrorized time and again by the bikers. Two weeks before the night McSherry was killed, three arrested women who were part of a motorcycle gang robbed a group of the residents and threatened to kill anyone who called the police or gave them any trouble.

Three days later, Parks continued, more bikers came to the house and took one hippie away at gunpoint. He broke loose, returned to the house for a weapon and began firing at the bikers. They returned his shots and at least 15 rounds of gunfire were exchanged before the bikers left. The hippies demolished a car the bikers had left in the yard, decided to arm themselves, and established a "no visitors'" policy at the house.

The day after the McSherry shooting, moreover, the body of a Tampa, Fla., man was found 45 miles south of Atlanta after a wounded companion had made his way to help. With two other Florida men, the pair had been visiting in The Neighborhood, where all were beaten, tortured and kidnapped by a gang of 11 men and women who wore bikers' garb. Before the week was out, another abduction by bikers had been reported to Atlanta police — and in the next two weeks, there were two more murders and several rapes, robberies and beatings in The Neighborhood.

Police chief Herbert Jenkins told Atlanta residents it was dangerous to venture into the area. All of the magic seemed gone and Greene confirmed that the exodus was on.

Now there are still about 3,000 permanent residents in the area, with a fluctuating, transient population of between 309 and 500, and, of course, the bikers.

"It's a bummer here now" a black-bearded young man says. Bad scene after bad scene. Everybody who can is splitting, and those who aren't want to and will when they are able. Pigs on every corner, every night, all night. The bikers hassle them and hassle us and hassle everybody and hassle themselves. It could have been great — but it's over, I think."

Perhaps it could have been.

There always were quite a few folks in this town who really rather liked the idea of having those strange young people around. They didn't say that, of course. If you asked them directly, they would purse their lips like everybody else and moan a lament about the death of decency.

But somehow they had mined some metaphysical mystique from the presence of the hippies which gave them a certain pride. "This is the New York City of the South," the taxi drivers were wont to say on the way in from the airport, and there were many in Atlanta who liked that idea. Entertaining the hippies was a symbol of urbanity, their way of saying that Atlantans are neither rural nor provincial, something to show off, like the brassy new buildings downtown or their big league sports teams.

The trouble was that theirs was a minority report, and besides,-it was never read,

The fact is that right from the time the hippies began to converge on Atlanta about four years ago, the prevailing attitude of the rest of the city toward them has been negative. The kids rubbed against the genteel grain of a city that suited Scarlett O'Hara and Coca-Cola just fine, and they sensed it. There was a certain sadness in all their good times, like tots caught up in some forbidden pleasure knowing that sooner or later it would be taken from them.

Now that time seems to have come; yet there is still a certain stubbornness in The Neighborhood. The Great Speckled Bird persistently preaches that nothing is wrong and that anyone who suggests such a possibility is merely intent on hastening the day when something will be wrong. "There is no feud" between the hippies and the bikers. The Bird says, it is merely the creation of the straight world. "Stay together" is The Bird's advice—and perhaps that indomitable spirit is contagious. The Wall, where they once gathered at the feet of the Messiah, is still an empty void, but there is a small notation at one side which promises that another mural will soon be painted.

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Richard Powers’ color photos of The Wall

from The www.StripProject.com

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The Wall in 1980s photo by MysterE