Sarah Toton, Vale of Amusements: Modernity, Technology, and Atlanta's Ponce de Leon Park, 1870-1920; Southern Spaces

Like most small amusement parks around the nation at the turn-of-the-last-century, Ponce de Leon and its mechanized attractions fell out of fashion in the late 1920s, and its days as a tranquil natural spot and a mechanical wonderland ended by the early part of the decade. New venues and modes of mass entertainment emerged, from the baseball field that would take Ponce's place to movie palaces like the Fox Theatre only two miles away.

Although Ponce de Leon Springs and the amusement park survived only for a few decades, the leisure spot was one of many signifiers of white supremacy as Atlanta led the way into the New South. First a natural site of rest and rejuvenation, Ponce de Leon Park's popularity grew in tandem with the Atlanta streetcar system, just as Atlanta's growth in the latter half of the 1800s relied upon its status as a railway transportation hub. As the site's primary attraction shifted from the springs and its natural surroundings to the theater, casino, and rides, Atlanta itself was developing from a small Victorian town into an electrified metropolis. Even the efforts of Park Superintendent Labb and the other members of the Ponce de Leon Amusement Company to give the park a national sensibility by bringing in rides and attractions from New England foreshadowed the area's own transformation into a southeastern center for industry and distribution.

The transition of Ponce de Leon from from an amusement park began in 1907 with the filling-in of the four- acre lake to make way for Ponce de Leon Ball Park. The baseball field, bordered by wooden bleachers, opened to eight thousand white fans on May 23, 1907 as the home to the minor league Atlanta Crackers. The ballpark also hosted the Black Crackers, Atlanta's Negro Southern League baseball team, from 1919 until 1952. Following a fire in September 1923, the ballpark was rebuilt by wealthy concessionaire Rell Jackson Spiller using concrete and steel. The new Spiller Field and its ninety-eight-hundred-seat segregated grandstand (eventually expanded to hold fifteen thousand) became the home to the Crackers until 1965, when they moved to Atlanta Stadium for their last season. Ponce de Leon Ball Park was demolished in 1966.

"Watching the Game"
Ponce de Leon Ball Park postcard, circa 1915

"Two years after he had broken baseball's color barrier," writes Gary Pomerantz in Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, "the Brooklyn Dodgers' Jackie Robinson came to Ponce de Leon Ball Park in April 1949 to break the color line in Atlanta." Georgia native Robinson "had misgivings about the three exhibition games against the all-white Atlanta Crackers," and there were rumors the Klan would be waiting out by the magnolia tree beyond center field.24 In segregated seating and standing areas, some sixty thousand black and white fans attended "the city's first interracial game." The KKK did not materialize.

Concert at Ponce de Leon Ball Park

In addition to baseball games, the Ponce de Leon Ball Park also hosted outdoor concerts.

Ponce de Leon Springs became a site of industrial development as the city transformed into a major business center. In 1914 the Ford Motor company built its headquarters for southeastern operations just east of the Springs, where, until 1942, the site served as a showroom, office, and factory. Ford sold the building to the U.S. War Department to be used as Air Force storage and offices. In 1924, Sears-Roebuck purchased the area north of Ponce de Leon Avenue that had held the springs and the amusement park and established its southeastern retail and distribution headquarters. Sears sold this two-million-square-foot building to the City of Atlanta in 1990, when it was converted into "City Hall East."

In the mid-twentieth century, Ponce de Leon and the city of Atlanta underwent substantial social change as many white, middle-class families and businesses fled the city center to suburban developments, and eventually to neighborhoods outside Atlanta's I-285 perimeter.25 Houses which had been family-owned became devalued rental properties. The park site went through several distinct phases as ownership changed. For a time it was owned by Providence Life and Accident Insurance Co. until it was sold to Asian investors and transformed into the Great Mall of China. In 1998, Florida-based Sembler Co. purchased the twenty-acre site, turning it into Midtown Place, an outdoor shopping mall anchored by a Home Depot, Borders, Whole Foods, PetSmart, and Staples.

(For images of the Sears Building and Ponce de Leon Park ca. 1950 and ca. 2004
see The Atlanta Time Machine)

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The Once and Future Ponce:
In 2004, a group of local investors formed Ponce Park LLC, purchasing 6.5 acres south of North Avenue for $6 million dollars and offering to buy City Hall East for thirty-five million dollars. Following the discovery of contaminated soil from a misplaced sewer line, Ponce Park LLC purchased the City Hall East building in 2006 for thirty-three million dollars. Plans call for the one thousand City Hall East employees to move out in late 2008. The building is then to be converted into nearly fourteen hundred residential units with accompanying retail shops and office space.

Beyond the uncovering of sewer contamination and the old springs site, the transition from City Hall to private residential center provides other reminders of nineteenth-century developers' visions of the location's potential. Ponce Park lead developer Emory Morsberger intends to bring the park back to Ponce, creating a 2.4 acre greenspace as well as walking paths, seating areas, and a swimming pool. Following a string of other "live, work, play" construction projects along a proposed Atlanta Beltline, (a light-rail corridor encircling Midtown and Downtown built over Atlanta's historic railroad lines), Ponce Park's aim is to operate as a sustainable community near Atlanta's downtown. This "New Urbanism" approach, ironically, returns Ponce Park into a variation of its former self. Like Atlanta's first Ponce de Leon Park, the new development design supposedly offers a retreat where green space, recreation, and commerce can enrich the lives of urban residents. Its proximity to a potential Beltline stop evokes the relationship between transit, entertainment, and business that flourished over one hundred years earlier.