Old Fourth Ward

This guide to Old Fourth Ward in Atlanta starts with Clear Creek, buried underground in a brick sewer pipe more than a century ago, and the September two thousand nine flood that pushed it past its limits, causing roughly half a billion dollars in damage and ten deaths across the region. It follows the city's first answer, a deep tunnel proposed at forty to seventy million dollars, and an engineer named Bill Eisenhauer who argued for letting the water surface instead, inside a public park. Stand on the lawn here and think about the parking lots and warehouses that once stood in this same floodplain, before any of this was grass.