An ashtray at the City of Smyrna Welcome Center and Museum is inscribed with a confident slogan: “You can’t make a bad investment in Cobb County.” The memento calls to mind the salad days of Smyrna’s suburban development, when Belmont Hills Shopping Center, “The largest of its kind in the entire South,” according to an ad in the Atlanta Constitution, opened for business on Nov. 18, 1954.
The site of that former strip mall, which brought so much fanfare to the suburb, is, today, one of two large-scale tracts sitting poised for development, but muddy and vacant around the city’s key intersections.
There is hope these two stalled projects, plus the recent purchase of the 48-acre Hickory Lake apartments, will bring better times again to the Jonquil City.
“We’re seeing development numbers increase,” said Jennifer Bennett, community relations director for the city of Smyrna. “They’re not where they were before the crash, but they are markedly robust and encouraging.” January and February fees that the city collects, for example, have risen from approximately $63,000 in 2009 to $158,000 this year.
Smyrna was early to the live-work-play scene, opening the shops, residences and restaurants of Market Village in 2002 to complement the urban-designed flow of the nearby library, city hall, community center and veteran memorial. At the end of the month, this area will be abuzz with the popular City of Smyrna Jonquil Festival that brings in approximately 200 arts, crafts and food vendors, as well as a crawfish boil at Atkins Park, music and other performances.
The Jonquil is a small yellow daffodil-esque flower that figures large in Smyrna’s identity. The story goes that the spring bloom was introduced by the Samuel Taylor family who moved to the area in 1883. A son is said to have sent a burlap sack containing the bulbs from Spokane, Wash., back to his parents in Georgia, where they planted them, shared them with neighbors, and watched the flowers grow heartily and with little care.
The bulbs bloom in the spring and are planted in the fall, so the two yearly jonquil festivals bookend the seasons. Keep Smyrna Beautiful sells a variety of jonquil called Carlton every fall in a project known as The Great Jonquil Gold Rush that Mayor Max Bacon helped establish.
“We use the bulbs to repopulate the jonquils in Smyrna that have been lost to development and road widening,” said Ann Kirk, director of Keep Smyrna Beautiful.
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