English Avenue and Vine City, Atlanta — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in English Avenue and Vine City?

The Herndon Home crowns the district. Built in 1910 for Alonzo Herndon, the founder of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company and Atlanta's first Black millionaire, the mansion stands on a rise in Vine City and opens as a museum. A short walk east lies Rodney Cook Sr.

Park, sixteen acres of pond, splash pad, and amphitheatre laid out both to honour civil-rights history and to hold back the floods that long plagued these low streets. Mercedes-Benz Stadium looms over the eastern boundary along Northside Drive. Older brick churches and the shotgun houses of the Westside fill the blocks between.

What is the history of English Avenue and Vine City?

Two stories run side by side. English Avenue began in 1891 as a white working-class district called Western Heights, while Vine City grew just south of it as a Black neighbourhood, the two divided for decades along the old Simpson Road colour line. The Great Atlanta Fire of 1917 burned out thousands of Black families downtown and pushed them west into these streets, against violence meant to hold the line.

By the middle of the century both had become proud middle-class Black communities. Martin Luther King Jr. moved to Vine City in 1967, and Coretta Scott King kept a home here long after.

Where is English Avenue and Vine City?

This is Atlanta's Westside. Northside Drive walls it off from downtown to the east, while Joseph E. Boone Boulevard splits the English Avenue streets in the north from the Vine City blocks that run south toward Morris Brown College and the campuses of the Atlanta University Center.