Welcome to D Street!
The D Street District Alliance unites businesses and residents of the D Street neighborhood in downtown Atlanta. Here you’ll find information about the district’s history and what’s happening today in this neighborhood that’s a block away and a world apart.
History
The place now known as D Street was first inhabited long before Atlanta was founded or European settlers arrived in North America. Petroglyphs on soapstone rocks found in the district—depicting figures of humans, animals, and fantastical creatures—have been dated to the beginnings of the Archaic period, about 10,000 years ago. The hunter-gatherers who created these mystifying artifacts led migratory lives up and down the Chattahoochee River.
When the Woodland period peoples of the region developed agriculture around 1000 BCE, they formed one of the earliest permanent settlements in North America several miles away on the banks of the Chattahoochee. Later immigration from Mexico and elsewhere in the Southeast gave rise to the Muskogean-dominated Creek Confederacy that Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto encountered when he passed through the area in 1540.
De Soto’s expedition also led to the creation the first written record of this strange place. A deserter from the expedition—described in Rodrigo Rangel’s contemporaneous account as “a very shrewd black man” named Joan Vizcaíno—found his way to a village on the Chattahoochee where the indigenous people welcomed him with hospitality. As Vizcaíno later wrote in his diary of this time: “It came to pass that I accompanied one of their alektcas [medicine men] to a low, thickly timbered hilltop, where he performed rites of which I may not speak, that made me fear for my very soul.” Vizcaíno’s hilltop is where the petroglyphs were later found, approximately at the corner of D Street and Martha’s Alley.
D Street’s future as part of Atlanta became assured when the Georgia General Assembly voted to build a rail line connecting the port of Savannah to markets in the Midwest. The Zero Mile Post designating the termination of the railroad’s first segment was driven into the ground near what is now the corner of Forsyth and Magnolia Streets, not far from what is now D Street. That post became the center of a settlement first called Terminus, then Marthasville, and finally Atlanta.
Today
Since then, as Atlanta has grown up around it, the D Street neighborhood has remained secreted away in the heart of downtown. Consisting of one main pedestrian-only street with wide alleys branching off from it, the district is home to an eclectic assortment of businesses—art galleries, bookstores, restaurants, bars, cafes, piercing and tattoo salons, and a concert hall, to name a few—and an even more eclectic assortment of residents, all housed in distinctive architecture from every period of Atlanta’s history.
Explore these pages to learn more about D Street. You can also read dark tales of the district. We invite you to come down for a visit. Just remember: if you haven’t come here before, you can’t find us on your own; someone who’s already been here has to bring you first.
