Most people believe they know Atlanta. They navigate its highways, frequent its restaurants, cheer its teams, and call it home — and yet remain, in the deepest sense, strangers to the city living quietly beneath the surface. The truth is that Atlanta is not one city but two hundred and forty-two, each neighborhood a distinct chapter in a larger story that most of its residents have never been invited to read. To know Atlanta truly is to understand that Oakhurst did not simply become Oakhurst by accident, that the canopied streets of Druid Hills and the deliberate absence of power lines overhead were not happy coincidences but the careful intentions of men and women who believed that beauty was a form of discipline — and that a city, like a life, reveals its character most honestly not in its grand boulevards but in the quiet choices made along the roads less traveled. Each of Atlanta's 242 neighborhoods is a thread, and the city we inhabit today — with all its complexity, contradiction, and remarkable resilience — is the tapestry those threads have woven together across generations. I invite you to walk these pathways with me — not as a tour, but as a journey of genuine discovery — for in learning the story of Atlanta's neighborhoods, we inevitably learn something unexpected about ourselves. The detour, it turns out, was always the destination.
And so twice a month, Beyond the Beaten Boulevard will do what maps cannot: it will ask not merely where a neighborhood is, but what it remembers, what it chose to keep, and what it refused to surrender. It will ask why Oakhurst was named for the oaks that once defined its ridge, and why Virginia-Highland did not fully become Virginia-Highland until 1972, when a group of neighbors chose a name as an act of resistance rather than description. It will ask what creek runs beneath the streets we walk without knowing it is there, and whose farm stood on the land where the bungalow now stands. These are not antiquarian questions. They are the questions of anyone who wishes to live somewhere rather than simply occupy it — who understands that a city, like a life, offers its deepest meaning not to those who pass through it quickly, but to those willing to stop, to look more carefully than the moment usually demands, and to ask what the ground beneath their feet has carried across the years. Atlanta is not finished becoming itself. Neither are we. The road is still open. The detour is still worth taking.
Most people believe they know Virginia-Highland. They know its bungalows, its restaurant patios, its Saturday morning farmers market, its sidewalks crowded on any evening worth being outside. And yet, beneath the ease and familiarity of what VaHi presents to the world lies a history that most of its own residents have never fully read — a story of farms and farmland, of streetcars that shaped the very curves of its streets, of a freeway that nearly erased it, and of a name that did not fully exist until 1972. I invite you to walk these pathways with me — not as a tour, but as a journey of genuine discovery — because in learning what a neighborhood refused to lose, we inevitably learn something about what we ourselves hold most worth keeping.
The history of Virginia-Highland begins not with bungalows, not with coffee shops, and certainly not with the intersection from which it takes its name. It begins in 1812, when a settler named William Zachary bought 202.5 acres of farmland here — more than a decade before Atlanta itself was incorporated, when this land was simply rolling Georgia countryside with no particular destiny. In 1822, Zachary sold his farm to Richard Copeland Todd, and it is the Todd family's presence that shaped the first geography of the place. Richard's brother-in-law, Hardy Ivy, had settled what is now Downtown Atlanta in 1832, and the road connecting their two farms — running between the Todd homestead and Ivy's plot in the city — came to be known as Todd Road. That road still exists in Virginia-Highland today. Most people who live on or near it have no idea who the Todds were.
The Todd family homestead itself stood near Greenwood Avenue and Barnett Street for nearly a century, until fire destroyed it on October 31, 1910. By then, the world around it had changed beyond recognition — and the change had come, as it so often does in Atlanta's story, by rail.
Between 1888 and 1890, the Nine-Mile Circle streetcar arrived — organized by Georgia Railroad executive Richard Peters and real estate developer George Washington Adair, who recognized that a city willing to extend its tracks was a city willing to extend itself. At first, the streetcar was a novelty. Atlantans rode it not to commute but to visit "the countryside" — the rolling farmland of what is now Virginia-Highland was, to the city dweller of the 1890s, a destination in itself.
What most people who walk these streets today do not know is that the streetcar's geometry is still with them. At the intersection of Virginia and North Highland Avenues — the neighborhood's namesake corner — the streets sweep with unusually wide, graceful curves. Those curves were not an aesthetic choice. They were an engineering necessity: the Nine-Mile Circle trolley required a turning radius that no sharp corner could accommodate. The streetcar has been gone since 1947. Its curves remain.
In 1922, a modest establishment called the Atkins Park Delicatessen opened at 794 North Highland Avenue. It served food. It kept its head down. And then, in 1927, it became a bar and restaurant — obtaining what is reportedly Atlanta's oldest continuously active liquor license. Atkins Park has operated under that license for nearly a hundred years, through Prohibition's aftermath, through the neighborhood's decline, through its revival, and through every trend that has swept through the restaurant industry since the Coolidge administration. It is not merely a bar. It is a document.
Here is the fact about Virginia-Highland that surprises even long-term residents most: the name itself — the name on every sign, every address, every piece of real estate marketing — was not officially settled until 1972. And it was settled not by developers or city planners but by a fight.
In the early 1970s, the Georgia Department of Transportation proposed building Interstate 485 directly through the neighborhood, connecting Freedom Parkway and Georgia 400. A group that called itself the Highland-Virginia Civic Association claimed to support the highway on behalf of residents. In the fall of 1971, Joseph Drolet and his neighbors organized the opposing force: they named it, deliberately, the Virginia-Highland Civic Association — choosing to flip the words as an act of identity, as a way of saying that this neighborhood and that pro-highway group were not the same thing. When the anti-freeway forces won, the Virginia-Highland name won with them, and the press began using it to describe the entire neighborhood.
John Howell Memorial Park, which sits at the center of VaHi today, occupies the exact land the City of Atlanta had condemned and purchased to build the freeway. The park is named for John Howell, the anti-freeway activist who led the fight and died before seeing it completed. Every picnic, every dog walk, every summer evening spent on that grass is an act of unintentional remembrance.
Virginia-Highland is one of only seven Atlanta neighborhoods to have an official neighborhood arboretum — a mapped walking route of trees identified by species, location, and significance, with markers placed at each one. Most residents have walked these routes without ever knowing the routes exist. The trees along Drewry, Virginia, and St. Charles Avenues are not simply pleasant shade. They are a living record of the landscape this place has maintained across more than a century of change. Trees Atlanta partnered with the neighborhood to make it official. The result is one of the quietest and most beautiful things Atlanta has managed to preserve.
A neighborhood is not only its history. It is also who it has chosen to feed, and the choices Virginia-Highland has made at the table are exceptional.
Murphy's has been the cornerstone of this neighborhood for forty-five years — a modern American restaurant in a brick-accented space where the food is consistently exceptional and the atmosphere feels, genuinely and without effort, like home. The Guinness-braised brisket, the seared Carolina trout, the legendary Tollhouse Pie: these are not trends. They are the kind of dishes that make a neighborhood institution, and Murphy's has earned that word honestly.
997 Virginia Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30306 · (404) 872-0904 · Check Out Murphy's Restaurant
La Tavola Trattoria is where Virginia-Highland keeps its Italian soul. Rustic brick walls, candlelight, house-made pastas, and a wine list that rewards curiosity — the spaghetti and veal meatballs alone justify the walk. On Monday nights, the Molto Monday pasta special offers three of the house's best dishes at a price that makes the evening feel like a gift from the kitchen. This is the kind of restaurant that becomes a neighborhood memory.
992 Virginia Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30306 · (404) 873-5430 · Check Out La Tavola Restaurant
Atkins Park Tavern is not simply the oldest continuously licensed tavern in Atlanta. It is the living proof that longevity and quality are not mutually exclusive. Elevated comfort — confit chicken wings slow-fried in duck fat, fried green tomato Benedict with Sriracha hollandaise, a Guinness-dipped pretzel that arrives without apology — served in a space whose muted lighting and elevated booths feel worn in precisely the right way.
794 N Highland Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30306 · (404) 876-7249 · Check Out Atkins Park
The Highland Tap is subterranean in the most literal sense — you descend into it, and the world above disappears. Since 1989, this steakhouse has served what many consider one of Atlanta's finest martinis alongside a menu built around the wood-fired and the slow-roasted. The 32-ounce tomahawk bone-in ribeye is the kind of commitment that requires no apology. The speakeasy ambiance is not affectation; it is simply what the room is.
1026 N Highland Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30306 · (404) 875-3673 · Check Out Highland Tap
The VaHi Neighborhood Arboretum Walk is free, self-guided, and available to anyone willing to download the map from the VHCA website. The route winds through the neighborhood's most architecturally significant blocks, past trees identified by species and marked by small plaques, many of them older than any building they shade. It is a quiet, unhurried, genuinely restorative experience — and it belongs, equally, to every visitor willing to take it.
Virginia-Highland Civic Association · vahi.org · Check Out VaHi Arboretum Walk
Virginia-Highland could have become an expressway. The land was condemned. The plans were drawn. The demolition was scheduled. And then a group of neighbors — ordinary people with a name, a civic association, and a conviction that the road less traveled was worth fighting to keep — said no. What they saved was not simply a neighborhood. They saved the idea that a community has the right to determine its own geometry. That the curves the streetcar left in the streets are worth preserving. That the oldest liquor license in the city, and the arboretum planted along the sidewalks, and the park built on the land that was meant to be destroyed, are all part of the same continuous act of choosing what to remember.
Walk these blocks with me. The name was hard-won. The detour, it turns out, was always the destination.
Most people who drive along Cheshire Bridge Road do not think of it as history. They think of it as a commute — a shortcut, a corridor, a place to pass through on the way to somewhere else. And yet nearly every inch of that road is a document: of two brothers who built a bridge over a creek in the 1820s, of Union soldiers who crossed it — and Confederate cavalry who burned it — in the summer of 1864, of a neighborhood that emerged from the post-war South's farmland and grew, quietly and without fanfare, into one of intown Atlanta's most genuinely distinguished places to live. I invite you to walk these pathways with me — not as a tour, but as a journey of genuine discovery — because LaVista Park is the kind of neighborhood that does not announce itself, and that is precisely what makes it worth finding.
The Cheshire Bridge Road owes its name to two brothers — Napoleon and Jerome Cheshire — who in the 1820s owned farms on opposite sides of the South Fork of Peachtree Creek and built a private bridge connecting them across the water. It was a practical act, as most great acts of naming are: two men needed to reach each other, they built a crossing, and the crossing became a landmark. In time the landmark became a road. The road became a corridor. The corridor became the spine of one of Atlanta's most layered neighborhoods.
What most people who live here today do not know is that the creek the Cheshires bridged still runs nearby — the South Fork of Peachtree Creek — still shaping the terrain, still carving the low points in the landscape that make LaVista Park's topography feel so different from the flatness of Buckhead or Midtown. The creek is not famous. It is simply present, as it has always been, doing its quiet work beneath the surface of the known city.
On July 19, 1864, two divisions of Union General Howard's Fourth Army Corps moved along Cheshire Bridge Road, advancing toward Atlanta as part of Sherman's campaign to take the city. Confederate cavalry rode ahead of them and, when they reached the original Cheshire Bridge crossing over North Fork Peachtree Creek, burned the bridge to slow the Federal advance. The Union troops had to rebuild it before they could continue south. General Stanley's division camped that night southeast of the crossing. General Wood's division followed the next morning.
The bridge they burned — and the one built to replace it — are long gone. A Georgia Historical Society marker still stands at the site, at 2531 Lenox Road, noting the engagement for those willing to stop and read it. Most drivers do not stop. Most do not know it is there. History rarely announces itself on the streets where it happened.
When Interstate 85 was constructed in the 1950s, it did something for the Cheshire Bridge Road corridor that no one had anticipated quite so literally: it made the road the first southbound exit in non-dry Fulton County. Much of northern Georgia was, at the time, dry territory — alcohol prohibited by county law. Cheshire Bridge Road, sitting just inside Fulton County's wet boundary, became a magnet. Liquor stores, bars, and a variety of establishments that catered to the appetite for refreshment arrived with the interstate, giving the road its long and complicated reputation for commerce of every description.
That history is now largely written over. LaVista Park — the residential neighborhood that grew behind and between the commercial corridor — has its own quieter story. The Armand Heights Subdivision's founding covenants, signed on January 13, 1959, required that no home sell for less than $14,000 and be no smaller than 1,200 square feet: affordable, but built to last. The neighborhood that grew from those covenants now features a remarkable mix of carefully restored mid-century modern ranch homes and thoughtful new construction, set among wide, tree-covered streets that slow the pace of a city that rarely slows down.
The LaVista Park Garden Club was founded in 1951 — making it one of Atlanta's longest-running neighborhood garden organizations. For more than seven decades, the club has tended the neighborhood's namesake park, organized plantings, and maintained the green character of a neighborhood that takes its trees and its grounds seriously. In an era when neighborhood civic organizations are often born and quickly exhausted, the Garden Club's continuity is its own form of quiet testimony: that some things are worth keeping not because they are dramatic, but because they are true.
The Tara Theatre opened in 1968 on Cheshire Bridge Road and has been showing arthouse, classic, and foreign films ever since — a neighborhood cinema in the oldest sense, a room where the commitment is to films that would not otherwise find an Atlanta audience, at a time when the multiplex has reduced the meaning of moviegoing to a transaction. Named after Tara, the fictional O'Hara plantation of Gone With the Wind — itself a novel drafted in a basement apartment a few miles southwest in Midtown — the Tara is one of those Atlanta institutions that survives because a specific community of people refuses to let it go.
Among the details that do not appear in any neighborhood brochure: Zell Miller — future Governor of Georgia, future United States Senator, the man who delivered the keynote address at the 1992 Democratic National Convention — once lived at the corner of Armand and Cardova in LaVista Park, commuting from this quiet mid-century neighborhood to his work downtown. The neighborhood has always been that kind of place: close enough to the city's center to be genuinely intown, far enough from it to feel like a different register of Atlanta entirely.
LaVista Park is surrounded by remarkable places, each one worth the knowledge that it exists.
The Colonnade has been serving Southern food at 1879 Cheshire Bridge Road since 1927 — the same year Atkins Park in Virginia-Highland got its liquor license — making it one of Atlanta's oldest continuously operating restaurants. The fried chicken, the creamed corn, the Sunday roast beef: these are the dishes of institutional memory, served in a room that has changed very little because the regulars who love it would not allow otherwise. The Colonnade is beloved across Atlanta's LGBTQ+ community, who have made it a Sunday institution for decades, and it is the kind of place that rewards anyone willing to simply show up and eat.
1879 Cheshire Bridge Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30324 · (404) 874-5642 · Check Out The Colonnade
The Tara Theatre has been Atlanta's arthouse cinema for more than fifty-five years, showing the kind of films — foreign, classic, independent, occasionally strange — that deserve a proper dark room and an audience that came to pay attention. In a city where the multiplex dominates, the Tara is a quiet act of cultural resistance, and it is all the more necessary for being one of the last of its kind in Atlanta.
2345 Cheshire Bridge Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30324 · (404) 634-6288 · Check Out Tara Theatre
The Morningside Nature Preserve — thirty acres of hardwoods and pines tucked between this neighborhood and Virginia-Highland — offers a two-mile trail that crosses a wooden bridge down to the dog beach along South Fork Peachtree Creek. It is a genuine wilderness inside the city, maintained by neighbors who understood that urban nature does not preserve itself without intention. On a weekday morning it is almost entirely your own.
Morningside Nature Preserve · Lenox Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30324 · Check Out The Nature Preserve
The South Fork Conservancy works to restore, protect, and create public access along South Fork Peachtree Creek — the same waterway the Cheshire brothers bridged two centuries ago — through a growing network of greenway trails connecting LaVista Park to surrounding neighborhoods. Their work is quiet, unglamorous, and essential, and their trail maps are worth downloading before any walk along the creek corridor.
Check Out South Fork Conservancy
Little Bangkok has been one of Cheshire Bridge Road's most quietly devoted institutions for decades — a small, family-run kitchen serving authentic Thai and Chinese dishes with the kind of consistency that only comes from people who cook because they mean it. The pad thai, the panang curry, the drunken noodles fragrant with fresh basil — these are not dishes assembled for a trend. They are the product of a family that has fed this neighborhood long enough to know exactly what it needs. Ranked among the top restaurants in Atlanta out of more than four thousand, Little Bangkok is the kind of place that earns that distinction without ever trying to. It simply shows up, every day, and cooks.
2225 Cheshire Bridge Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30324 · (404) 315-1530 · Check Out Little Bangkok
LaVista Park is not a destination in the way that Midtown or Virginia-Highland is a destination. It does not invite itself to be discovered. It simply persists — mid-century modern rooflines catching the afternoon light, a Garden Club tending its park for seventy-three consecutive years, a creek running below the streets named for the men who first crossed it. The bridge the Cheshires built is long gone. The road that bears their name is still here. The history that moved along it — soldiers, governors, cinephiles, and Southern food devotees — is embedded in every block.
Walk these streets slowly. Ask what the creek remembers. The detour, it turns out, was always the destination.
Have a neighborhood you would love for me to feature or questions regarding the neighborhoods, contact me below. Always available!
Shawn Morgan | Compass Atlanta | Luxury Intown Atlanta Expert
Seven-Time Top Producer
shawnatl.com | 404-844-9086 | [email protected]
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A thorough grasp of residential real estate marketing tactics, a keen knowledge of the Atlanta market, superior listening skills and attention to detail, make him the model Realtor® advisor. Contact Shawn today!
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