By John Ruch
When preservationists talk about saving Auburn Avenue, we know they really mean the surviving buildings that tell the neighborhood’s history as an epicenter for African American business and cultural life under segregation.
But the latest effort is a call to preserve an actual part of the pavement: a tile sign for the long-gone Gate City Drug Store embedded in the sidewalk at Auburn and Jesse Hill Jr. Drive that has somehow survived largely intact after more than a century.
The City’s Historic Preservation Studio is now moving to protect the sign, apparently by inclusion in the Martin Luther King Jr. Landmark District. That would be an expansion of a tactic to preserve similar entryway tilework on Downtown’s Hotel Row.
Reading “Gate City Drugs” in blue-and-black letters on a white background, the sign sits on Jesse Hill Jr. Drive – formerly Butler Street – at Auburn, where the store opened in 1914 in the historic Odd Fellows building’s annex or “atrium.” It’s one of Sweet Auburn’s iconic corners, with Big Bethel AME Church on the other side of Jesse Hill Jr. Drive and the tourist-attracting mural of Civil Rights icon John Lewis diagonally across Auburn. And the store was the work of another great Sweet Auburn entrepreneur, Moses Amos (1866-1928), who the APC says was Georgia’s first African American licensed pharmacist.
A call to landmark the sign arose last month from the Atlanta Preservation Center (APC), which in recent months has been involved in Georgia Works’ effort to buy and rehabilitate the Odd Fellows tower and the 229 Auburn office building across the street.
“The remnant of the tile sidewalk panel from Gate City Drug Store is significant to the story of Auburn Avenue and is an important physical reminder of its history,” said APC Executive Director David Yoakley Mitchell in an email last month asking City officials to formally protect it.
Amos came from small-town Georgia to Atlanta at the age…
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