Recreating Alabama Avenue

The SIF project I have been working on most recently have involved geotagging digital scans of photos from the Atlanta Fulton County Public Library collection of glass plate negatives. The geotagging itself was relatively easy. After one of our SIFs, Alexandra Orrego, georeferenced old Sandborn maps of downtown Atlanta, myself and 3 other SIFs used the addresses associated with each photo to find the photos’ longitude and latitude. On its own this project is pretty straight forward. The content of these photos made this project a bit more interesting. The photos we were geotagging were of storefronts that would be covered by the construction of the viaduct downtown. Some of these stores are open today in Underground Atlanta. These photos might be the last time any of these stores were photographed above street level. Better still, many of these storefronts were photographed one after the other, with just a bit of overlap between each. A little work by another member of the team, Saif Ali, and we had a program we could use to stitch the overlapping photos together into one panorama. I was tasked with stitching together Alabama Avenue. While difficult, some of the pictures can be brought together. It gives you a sense of what the street would have looked like in totality. While it will likely take much more work to get the photos to all line up (the edges of many of the images have distorted over the last 89 or so years since they were taken), the potential to see an entire block of Atlanta as it was before the city buried beneath the viaduct makes any difficulties worth it. Hopefully, in the near future, the combined work of the 5 SIFs on this project will allow us to see what Underground Atlanta would look like in the light of day.