Aurora House
Aurora House, the Strip, and the faith community’s response to Midtown’s hippie boom during Atlanta’s Summer of Love
LIKE MANY U.S. CITIES IN 1967, Atlanta was ablaze with the Summer of Love. As a kind of Southern-fried Haight-Ashbury, Peachtree Street teemed with young women in granny dresses and young men resembling ancient prophets with long hair and full beards.
The epicenter for Atlanta’s “hippie” population in the late ’60s was an area called “the Strip,” which stretched several blocks north of 10th Street in what is now Midtown. The Strip gained fame (or notoriety) as droves of young seekers, activists, and runaways arrived and took up residence on the streets.
At first, many curious motorists driving past the chaotic scene of the Strip regarded this new influx of hippies as mere spectacle, but as the summer dragged on into fall and beyond, concern and even disgust began to enter the public discourse about these kids who showed no signs of dissipating.
Tenth Street in Midtown Atlanta looked almost quaint back in 1966, when this picture was taken.
Governor Lester Maddox, a staunch segregationist and vehement racist who famously refused to serve three black Georgia Tech students at his restaurant in 1964 by waving a gun at them, delivered a speech to the high school chapter of the Future Homemakers of America in November 1967, decrying the hippies on the streets of the state capital as “some lower form of life” who made him “sick at heart.”
Despite some pushback from establishment channels, leaders at First Presbyterian Church, located near the heart of the Strip, took a more compassionate approach, setting up a free medical clinic on the church grounds in 1968.
Physicians in the congregation had grown worried about so many young people with limited access to health care, and knew that life for their patients wasn’t all incense and daisies. Although some of them “crashed” together in “pads” in cheap apartment buildings or boarding houses, some were homeless. Some were sick. Some were using dangerous drugs. And some young women were pregnant or raising children.
Eventually the doctors negotiated with Grady Hospital to take responsibility for the clinic’s patient population. But even with this transition in place, First Presbyterian’s involvement with the young people of the Strip had only just begun.
Young people on the Strip were expressing the need for safe hangout spaces to the 10th Street Task Force, a panel that had been formed by the Christian Council of Metropolitan Atlanta as an interdenominational group of mostly mainline Protestant and Catholic clergy and laity. The task force included a number of First Presbyterian members.
In response to the safety request, First Presbyterian and First Baptist of Atlanta agreed to set up a recreation and resource center, settling on the name “Aurora,” signifying new light, or dawn.
Bringing Aurora to fruition wasn’t easy. Some landlords refused to rent to tenants who served the kids on the street. Others set the rent too high.
On June 4, 1970, facing yet another summer of increased numbers on the street, Atlanta Mayor Sam Massell addressed the press and the public in a speech titled “Position Covering Problems of the Hippy (sic) Community.” Describing Atlantans’ concerns about “seeing a long-haired boy kissing his blue-jeaned girl companion in broad daylight” and “boys without shirts and the girls without bras unashamedly walking along famous Peachtree,” he went on to say that those very same boys and girls were nonetheless protected by the Constitution.
“To all of you, I want to say that this summer can be a time of trouble or a time of advancing mature understanding and respect,” he said, citing a list of “positive actions” being taken to address the challenge.
The first item on Massell’s list was a recreation center being established “through the coordinating efforts of the Reverend Alex Williams of First Presbyterian.” At the time, Williams, now a professional mediator living in Athens, was the church’s youth minister.
The day after Massell’s speech, Tom Branch III, a young lawyer who grew up at First Presbyterian and is still an active member, filed the paperwork to create Aurora as a nonprofit organization. A month later, the doors opened in an old retail space on 10th Street near Peachtree. Church member architects and contractors remodeled the interior.
The Strip started around Eighth Street, was in full bloom around 10th Street and wound down toward 14th Street.
“Those were turbulent times,” Williams said in a recent interview. “And the churches weren’t silent. First Presbyterian Church was very involved in the struggle… but it was a controversial ministry.”
Shortly after Aurora opened, First Presbyterian’s senior pastor, Dr. Harry Fifield, acknowledged some of the objections among some congregants to the people the center served—long hair, drugs, insufficient personal hygiene—and reminded the congregation: “This isn’t just our church. It’s Christ’s Church. And those street people are God’s children, too.”
Later he told Presbyterian Survey, the magazine of the then Southern branch of the denomination, “When a church suddenly finds itself next door to a phenomenon such as Atlanta’s hippie community, either it gropes for ways of witnessing and ministering to these people, or it had better go out of business.”
Aurora’s board of directors, which included several members of First Presbyterian Church, hired a young Baptist minister to head the center, but Williams, Branch, and other church leaders maintained direct involvement, along with volunteers from several other churches.
For Branch, the interaction was a response to a community’s need. He helped put together a wilderness backpacking trip for some of the young men, involved his family in the ministry, made talks to groups within the church, and attended Bible studies at Aurora.
For Iris Eskew, another First Presbyterian member, work with Aurora was more personal. She volunteered as the center’s secretary, spending one or two days a week there, keeping the books and passing out donated baked goods. But the real reason she went, she said recently, was “that I hoped my son would come through.” Her oldest son, the third of her five children, had left home for life on the street, she said.
She never saw him at Aurora, but he did eventually return home on his own.
For years, Williams was on call day and night, not only to church members but to other parents searching for their children, to young street people in trouble, and to police officers dealing with the crowds. Sometimes runaways and their parents would meet for mediation at First Church.
“I spent a lot of time trying to locate runaways,” Williams wrote in a reflection of his time with Aurora.
Aurora had been open less than a year when the New York Times published a lengthy obituary about Atlanta’s Strip, which had at that point spiraled into infamy. Cause of death, according to the Times, was “riots and near riots and rumors of riots; kidnappings, murders, tortures, rapes, assaults, robberies and shootouts…”
A rougher element had come on the scene, “incredibly lawless men and women on motorcycles,” the Times said, and “the original hippies,” many of them young Atlantans trying out their independence, were driven away. Drugs and disease became more prevalent.
Still, Aurora stayed.
Williams kept detailed journals of the many interesting encounters he experienced while working the Strip. Here’s a sampling:
- One young man molded the lead from bullets into peace symbols and sold them on the street.
- Another young man who had been savagely beaten showed up at Aurora. He said he had epilepsy and a religious cult had tried to expel the “evil spirits” that were causing his seizures through force.
- A young woman had a cross tattooed on the back of her left thigh, just above the knee. She said that this was a means of witnessing her faith when she wore short skirts.
- A girl attending a concert at Piedmont Park asked another girl to hold her baby. The mother never returned, and Williams ended up taking the child to Grady. As he sat waiting to turn the child over to the hospital, a police officer rushed in with another abandoned baby and, not being willing to wait, handed that one to Williams, too.
In 1972, Williams left First Presbyterian for a job as a campus minister at the University of Georgia. That same year, a fire gutted Aurora’s interior.
Many of the people who had frequented the center had moved on, but Aurora reopened. In April 1974, under the headline, “Life on Strip Isn’t Same but Aurora Still Helps,” Mike Wazlavek wrote in the Atlanta Constitution that Aurora “has outlasted almost everything and everyone from the hip days on the strip…”
Eventually, redevelopment of Midtown consumed the area, and Aurora faded away with no fanfare.
But the church’s history book, A Church on Peachtree, credits Aurora with helping to awaken the congregation’s compassion for people in the community around them.
