Virginia Highlands

The Virginia-Highland neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia was founded in the early 20th Century as a streetcar community. The locus and origin of the name is the commercial district at the intersection of Virginia and North Highland Avenues. It is bounded on the north by Morningside, east by the Druid Hills neighborhood, on the south by Poncey-Highland and on the west by Piedmont Park and Midtown.

Unlike other neighborhoods like Inman Park and Grant Park, this neighborhood never really faltered during Atlanta's intown downturn in the 1960s. In the late 1960s a highway was proposed to connect what is now Freedom Parkway through the neighborhood to I-85 and Stone Mountain and Va-Hi residents, along with those of Inman Park and Morningside were instrumental in defeating the project. The residents were successful and became a political force to be reckoned with in city politics. In fact, the current Neighborhood Planning Unit (NPU) system is an outgrowth from the defeat of I-485. The Jimmy Carter Library and Museum sit on the very hill that was to be the major interchange between the new bypass and another new highway that would have led to Stone Mountain. The remnants of both of these cleared rights-of-way made Freedom Park possible.

Today, the neighborhood is prosperous with many restaurants and shops and hosts its major festival, Summerfest, the first weekend of June. Culturally, Virginia-Highland has recently become a small musical center, home of the "Grape Tree" scene which produced a plethora of small, mostly inconsequential garage-rock bands as well as a handful of not-so-inconsequential artists, most notably Supreeme, an internationally-themed rap group, No Face, an experimental pop band, and The Good Moods, a locally-themed mariachi group. Like many communities in the metro Atlanta area, many homes in Virginia-Highland have serious problems with rat infestations including both the Norway rat and tree rat. Source wikipedia

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