The City of Atlanta and community at large have various options for preserving the Atlanta Prison Farm.
While listing in the register of National or State Historic Places does not necessarily come with protections or funding for preservation, it can be a major step in acknowledging the significance of a historic place. The Atlanta Prison Farm could be eligible for listing at the state or national level. The steps for nomination at the state level can be found at the Georgia State Historic Preservation Office’s webpage here. Any individual or community can begin the nomination process. Additionally, the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation calls for nominations to highlight historic sites at risk of destruction with their Places in Peril program. More information can be found at their website here.
If eligibility for the National Register could be confirmed, the property would be subject to a Section 106 review, in which federal agencies would have to investigate their impacts on the site. This could be an important step in discovering and mitigating any potential adverse effects by federal agencies on the property. More information about the Section 106 process can be found through the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation’s A Citizen’s Guide to Section 106 Review, available here.
Easements Atlanta is a publicly supported non-profit organization that offers historic preservation and stewardship in perpetuity in exchange for an easement (a legal right to use property for a specific purpose by a different entity than the landowner) to historic structures. Easements Atlanta provides the expertise, resources, and skills to effectively preserve and manage historical structures, and helps property owners meet the requirements for potential tax incentives, reducing the cost to maintain significant historic properties for public benefit.
If the City of Atlanta were to convey a conservation easement of the Atlanta Prison Farm to Easements Atlanta, it could receive up to 30% tax deduction. A requirement for this tax deduction would be a public benefit, which ranges from visual access from a public roadway to public offered interior or exterior tours.
Easements Atlanta currently has over 40 properties in their portfolio, including the Biltmore Tower, Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, Hotel Roxy, and Roosevelt High School.
While preservation of this space is vital, we want to point out the type of preservation we want to avoid. “Dark Tourism” of prisons, such as Alcatraz Island (which hosts an annual ‘Escape from Alcatraz’ Triathlon) or the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia (which holds popular ‘Halloween Nights’ events, with cocktail lounges set up inside the former prison), does little to move toward justice. Instead, events like these trivialize the lived experiences of the people who were incarcerated in these spaces and subjected to unspeakable violence and harm. Dr. Perry L Carter of Texas Tech has built a significant body of research on the continued exploitation of enslaved peoples by the whitewashed narratives told at plantation museums in the South; we believe this carries over to ‘prison tourism’ as well. Preservation of the Atlanta Prison Farm must be carried out with justice and repair in mind, with respect to the place and to the people incarcerated there.
The students putting this together are not professional architects, and a proper survey condition assessment is recommended. However, our terrestrial scanning and visual inspection of the buildings lead us to believe there are a few low-cost adaptations that could prevent further deterioration and preserve the structure for years to come:
Minor displacement, vegetation, and floor stability concerns were the main issues we noticed, but with the adaptations above, we believe the buildings could continue to be structurally viable for preservation. Again, we recommend a professional report be completed with more precise recommendations, and we are more than happy to share our data and models, available here.