10th Street

10th Street may refer to:

See also

Tenth Street (Atlanta)

Tenth Street is a street in Midtown Atlanta, Georgia.

Route and Points of Interest

History

Tight Squeeze

The area around what is now Tenth and Peachtree Streets began as Tight Squeeze, a lawless shantytown during the period following the American Civil War. It consisted of shanties, together with a blacksmith shop and several small wooden stores, beside a 30-foot-deep ravine, still visible to the east of Peachtree north of 10th Street.

During the desperate times after the Civil War, the hungry, homeless, wounded, and hopeless filled Atlanta's streets. The ravine became a rest stop to both freedmen and displaced Confederate veterans, some who had been left morphine addicts.

Just north of the ravine where Peachtree crossed a country road (now 14th Street), was a wagon yard, where freight was unloaded, destined for the merchants in the city, which lay further south. Merchants on their way to the wagon yard and carrying the cash that the freight companies demanded, or merchants returning with wagons loaded with goods, slowed down to circumvent the ravine. Tight Squeeze's residents, as well as professional highwaymen, attacked merchants and robbed them of their merchandise and cash. It was said that it "took a mighty tight squeeze to get through with one's life," the origin of the settlement's name. Desperation inspired rowdyism and "lewd vagrancy". John Plaster was a member of a pioneer farm family for whom Plaster's Bridge Road was named (now Piedmont Road). In 1866 at the age of 35, he was murdered in Tight Squeeze after delivering a load of firewood to customers in Atlanta.