The village of Riverside, Ga., has a colorful history. Just look at the sepia photographs showing the town in the 19th Century, or read excerpts from period novels lauding the settlement’s cosmopolitan flair. You’ll discover that the town was used as a Union garrison during the War Between the States. And that its historic buildings are being painstakingly renovated, in the tradition of town father Waymon Paulk.
The only hitch is that Paulk is fictional, and Riverside didn’t exist until this year. The account of 19th Century Riverside is a clever fabrication, created to promote a new housing and commercial development of Post Properties Inc., one of the South’s largest apartment developers.
The story “is a figment of our imagination,” acknowledges the company’s chairman, John Williams.
The appeal of “neotraditional” communities like Walt Disney Co.’s Celebration in Celebration, Fla., which evoke nostalgia for days gone by, is well-established. Now, Post is taking this “theming” concept one step further by making up a detailed history for Riverside. It’s an effort to create overnight what has evolved over hundreds of years in many other cities: a past.
Developers see this latest twist as harmless fun. But it makes some historians uneasy.
“It’s another example of the trivialization of the attempt to understand our past,” says Dan Carter, a professor of Southern history at Emory University in Atlanta. “When you make up history, you don’t have to deal with the real thing.”
Riverside’s master planner, influential Miami architect Andres Duany, praises Post for being innovative but also questions the wisdom of manufacturing a past for the town.
“The project’s real history–the process that created it–is interesting enough. You don’t need to make it up,” he says.
But Williams, who is fond of teasing credulous visitors by telling them his company was founded by cereal magnate C.W. Post (another fib), relishes the chance to spin a yarn.
“Did you know there used to be an old village here?” he asks, pointing to a model of the project with a grin. “And a ferry crossing, down here at the river.”
The idea for Riverside was hatched more than two years ago, when Post embraced “new urbanism,” which holds that neighborhood design should allow people to live near their work, interact better with their neighbors and get around more on foot.
Post decided to unveil its new approach with a $115 million showcase development–to include offices and shops, as well as more than 500 apartments–at a wooded spot on the Chattahoochee River in northwest Atlanta. The site will also house Post’s new corporate headquarters.
Post executives, at Duany’s suggestion, visited Princeton, N.J., and Manhattan’s Upper West Side to inspect streets that welcome pedestrians. And Duany himself drove around Atlanta, snapping hundreds of pictures of buildings he admired.
Then, architects and Post executives critiqued various combinations of their favorite styles during an intense, week-long brain-storming session. The result: A town square framed by three “vintage” structures, including one office building and two apartment blocks.
The seed of the town’s apocryphal history was planted during a presentation by Rafael Garcia of Niles Bolton Associates Inc., one of the architects who designed Riverside’s apartments.
Garcia says the challenge was to create a place that “looked like it’s evolved over a period of time, even though it’s absolutely new.”
To inspire his team, Garcia penned a narrative that provided a “unifying thread” pulling Riverside’s various elements together. He imagined a settlement founded at a ferry crossing before the Civil War and rebuilt during the decades between Reconstruction and World War I.
He peppered the account with fanciful details. In one incident he conjured up, a building that had housed small mills and workshops–and a secret arsenal during the war–collapsed during renovations.
Fortunately, according to the story, no one was injured, and the building was replaced by a nine-story commercial building after the turn of the century.
“You have to have a happy ending,” jokes Garcia.
He illustrated his memo with pen-and-ink drawings of 19th- and early 20th-Century buildings culled from architecture texts. Some of the story’s details are quite plausible, as there were indeed two well-known ferry crossings on the Chattahoochee.
“I’m kind of a history buff, but I didn’t try very hard to make it authentic,” Garcia recalls, noting that at the time, the memo was solely for internal use.
But that quickly changed when Post executives saw the document and recognized its potential as a marketing tool.
“I sent it right to John Williams, because I knew he’d like it,” says Katharine Kelley, senior vice president of Post’s development division.
Thus began the metamorphosis of Garcia’s memo into an advertising campaign featuring a mock historian’s treatise, “Historical Notes on Riverside.” Ads published in local newspapers feature tintypes of purported town denizens accompanied by “quotes” that closely resemble documentary film-maker Ken Burns’s technique of excerpting period correspondence to tell the story of the Civil War and other historical eras.
“You’ll find no better place for whatever your occupation than Riverside,” fictional engineer Josiah Mink writes in a “letter” to his brother.
“During those years, I often thought back to the gentle peace I discovered at Riverside, and I vowed to settle there after the war,” reads a plaudit attributed to Randall Gray Cartwright, M.D., in “Memoirs of a General Practitioner (1873).”
Bob Anderson, a recently retired Price Waterhouse partner, plans to rent a large apartment and office space at Riverside. He says he heard about the project by word of mouth and paid scant attention to the ads.
He likes the development because he will be able to walk to his new office and “it will look like it’s been there for a long time.”
