West End Travel Guide

The West End , Atlanta's oldest quarter, dating from 1835, is a slightly shabby but slowly reviving district southwest of downtown. Historically a black residential area, it remains so today: a buzzy, more upbeat counterpoint to Sweet Auburn. Georgia's only museum dedicated to African-American and Haitian art is displayed at the Hammonds House , 503 Peeples St (Tues-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat & Sun 1-5pm; $2), and you can tour the 1910 Beaux Arts Herndon Home , 587 University Place (Tues-Sat 10am-4.30pm; $5), designed and lived in by Alonzo Herndon, the freed slave who became a barber, founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company and went on to be the city's first black millionaire. Together with his wife (the director of Atlanta University's drama department), and such black luminaries as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, he participated in setting up progressive black institutions. The mansion's grand interior, built and crafted by black artisans, contains the family's original furnishings, including some fine Venetian glass.

The fascinating Wren's Nest , home of Br'er Rabbit author Joel Chandler Harris, at 1050 R.D. Abernathy Blvd (Tues-Sat 10am-4pm, Sun 1-4pm; $3), skewers preconceptions about the Uncle Remus stories propagated by the racist images of Disney's Song of the South . Harris, a friend of Mark Twain, was a respected journalist whose column for the Atlanta Constitution retold the slave stories he had heard while training as a printer on a plantation newspaper; recently the dialect has been reappraised as authentically African and the stories as valuable affirmation of a black folk tradition. Regular storytelling sessions take place in the peaceful, untamed garden.