Here are two little images, but if you click either you'll get a bigger version. The one on the left is interesting if you're familiar with Atlanta. It's a map of the town from 1919 that I found on the University of Texas Austin's library website.

Our house, when eventually built nearly a decade after this map was published, would be all the way over to the right, about where the "AVE" in "GROTON AVE" is. (That appears to be what is now called DeKalb Ave., which sounds a lot less particle physicsy.) I'm guessing that the handful of Victorian houses on our street were here with sprawling yards and not much else in 1919. Today our neighborhood is so "in town" that people sometimes say "oh, you mean really in town", but it looks like in 1919 Candler Park was a quiet retreat from the hustle and bustle of urban life.

I could go on (like about how Piedmont Park, now in the heart of midtown, appears to have been on the northern edge of town in 1919), but the second image does the job much better — it's the same map superimposed on Google's imagery of Atlanta. Just for fun, I've marked our house and my workplace. AT frequently works up around the "Street View" button near the top of the image. And there are plenty of folks who live beyond the four corners of this image who would, under the right circumstances, say that they are from Atlanta.

Part of what is so interesting here is not just Atlanta's population growth (which has been amazing), but also how very poorly managed that growth has been. Have a click on the chart to the left to see a ranking of 34 U.S. cities by population density. See how if the list had been kept to 33, Atlanta would not have made the cut? Atlanta demands that you have a car, and demands that you drive it. AT and I were at dinner last night with some folks and (inevitably) the topic of Atlanta traffic came up. Someone pointed out that every city has its traffic problems, and that Atlanta is, in this regard, no different. But the list of cities used to illustrate the point — Chicago, New York, Los Angeles — are all much larger metropolitan areas. Atlanta, for it's population, is huge.

But I digress. The maps are cool, right?