DEL.ICIO.USWeb site documents Atlanta’s past and present in photos
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Two shopping centers ago, there was a ballyard at 650 Ponce de Leon Ave., across the street from the old Sears building.
Ponce De Leon Park — Wrigley Field with a twang — was home to the minor league Atlanta Crackers for nearly 60 years. Babe Ruth hit a home there, launching a ball into the magnolia tree that canopied deep center field.
Courtesy atlantatimemachine.com
This postcard from after 1958 shows downtown Atlanta.
Courtesy atlantatimemachine.com
This photo from approximately 1965, shows the first Waffle House, which opened in 1955 in Decatur.
The park was razed in 1965. The magnolia tree is still there; it now shadows a Dunkin’ Donuts. Greg Germani’s got the pictures to prove it.
His Web site, atlantatimemachine.com, features thousands of images linking the city’s past and present, providing a photographic narrative of change — sometimes for the better, other times, not so much.
“I always wanted to find out everything I could about the places I lived,” said Germani, an Air Force brat who settled in Atlanta upon graduating from the University of Georgia in 1988. “One of the things that motivated me to do the site was observing how fast things change in Atlanta.”
The clock stops around 1960 inside the Decatur bungalow Germani shares with wife, Suellen. “The universe has a sense of humor, pairing me with a collector,” said his spouse, who helps people get organized for a living.
Photos of Col. Sanders, circus midgets and go-go dancers adorn the walls. An old country tune spins on the record player — Germani also has a large library of post-war 45s.
“I try not to romanticize the past too much,” said Germani, whose day job is program scheduling for TNT. “You look at some of these old photos, and you realize, the past isn’t necessarily better. I’m glad to be living now, in the era of air conditioning and the Internet.”
Surfing the Web one night, Germani, 44, stumbled upon what would become the major source for Atlanta Time Machine: Georgia State University’s photo archives, including more than 290,000 images of Atlanta taken from the late 1930s through the ’60s.
A few of the images already were available online. But Germani found most while poring through the collection at the school’s library. He tends to focus on lifestyle-oriented photos. You won’t find any pictures of Civil War battlefields on his site.
But you will spot an ad for the old Ebbtide Lounge on Peachtree Street, featuring Dolphina, “The exotic girl in the fishbowl.” Even stranger: photos taken from inside the “World of Sid and Marty Krofft,” a psychedelic indoor amusement park that once occupied the top floor of the Omni, now CNN Center.
“My threshold is simple. If I find it interesting, I put it on the site,” Germani said.
Some of the more mundane images reveal plenty.
Take, for example, the page featuring 148 Walker St. in downtown’s Castleberry Hill district. A photo taken 56 years ago shows the Wood-Coleman company, a nondescript dairy and service station supply company; one assumes it was the favored destination of dairy farmers who owned gas stations.
A more recent picture, snapped by Germani, depicts a leafy urban loft, symbolic of in-town’s revitalized neighborhoods. The details captured in the photo are most telling.
Atlantans, circa 1952, would have never driven an import, or hung a rainbow flag symbolizing gay pride on the balcony.
And they wouldn’t have enjoyed much shade; the city’s commercial areas were noticeably bereft of trees.
“When I first started putting this site together, that really stood out. Now there’s so many it makes it difficult to get decent photos when the trees are full,” Germani said.
You won’t see many parking decks in those old photos, either, said David Henderson, a Crawford Long baby who has contributed photos of Atlanta Municipal Airport to Germani’s site. He’s been a fan of the Time Machine since it debuted online nearly five years ago.
“Most of the people I know aren’t Atlanta natives and they just assumed it was always a big metropolis,” Henderson said. “Back when I was growing up in the 70s, it seemed much more like a small town.”
Germani has collected enough images to fill more than 1,300 pages on his spartanly designed site. He spends a few hours a week updating the Time Machine, which receives about 20,000 hits a day. He doesn’t charge for content, accepts no advertising and doesn’t profit from the Web site.
Still, he said, “I don’t see an end in sight.”
His latest mission: finding an old photo of an abandoned C&S Bank building — which could have doubled as “The Jetsons” home — located near the Starlight Six Drive-In on Moreland Avenue.
“I’m determined,” he said. “And when I want to find something, I don’t give up easily.”
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