Joel H. Cowan
Oral History Memoir
Interview Number 2
Conducted by David Piet
with Randy Gaddo and Brian Hendry
October 8, 2002
Collection — Peachtree City: Plans, Politics, and People, “New Town” Beginnings and How the “New Town” Grew
Project — Peachtree City Oral History
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Interview History
The recordings and transcripts of the interview were processed at Peachtree City Library, Peachtree City, Georgia.
Interviewer: David Piet
Transcriber: Sharon Ayers (cassette #1) and Molly Stinson (cassette #2)
Editor: Molly Stinson
Final Editor: Jill Prouty
Collection/Project Detail
The Peachtree City Oral History Project at Peachtree City Library includes interviews with city founders and their families, elected officials, and other community leaders.
Transcription Style
The Joel Cowan History Room at Peachtree City Library follows the transcription style guide developed by Baylor University Institute for Oral History as well as The Chicago Manual of Style
Joel Cowan History Room at Peachtree City Library
Interview Abstract
Interviewee: Joel H. Cowan
Interviewers: David Piet, with Randy Gaddo and Brian Hendry
Collection:
Peachtree City: Plans, Politics, and People, “New Town” Beginnings and How the “New Town” Grew Project: Peachtree City Oral History
Interview #: 2
Interview date: October 8, 2002
Interview location: Peachtree City, Georgia
Recording medium; duration: Cassette tapes, digitized; 1.20 hr.
Abstract
Joel H. Cowan was born and raised in Cartersville, Georgia. As a student at Georgia Tech, he began his career in real estate development and investment under the tutelage of Peter Knox Jr. In 1958, he graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in industrial management. He is credited with founding the City of Peachtree City in 1959, serving as its first mayor from 1959-1963. He also served as CEO and Chairman of the Board for two of Peachtree City's early development and investment companies, Peachtree Corporation of Georgia and Garden Cities Corporation. He is also credited with developing the first upscale shopping center in the South—Phipps Plaza.
Cassette 1A (p. 1):
Founding and first election |00:02:14|; major political players in Fayette County |00:05:16|; first councilmembers |00:07:07|; Dave McWilliams’ store |00:09:45|; first council meetings |00:11:36|; awards franchise to Georgia Power south of Highway 74 |00:13:28|; struggle to attract industry |00:14:37|; Dixie Frozen Foods becomes first industry |00:17:14|; protecting intersection at Highway 54/74, attracting residents |00:19:37|; proving city’s viability, Bessemer’s approval of golf course |00:21:08|; Normal Paschall Company relocates from East Point |00:23:22|; averages one new industry a year |00:26:01|; first master plan developed by Arthur D. Little and Richard Browne and Associates |00:27:53|; leaving pockets in plan for higher density |00:30:37|.
Cassette 1B (p. 19):
Little plan calls for 20% green space and protecting corridors, first paid advertisement |00:01:48|; debate regarding location of center of Atlanta, effort to keep airport on south side, Title VII program |00:05:00|; water wars over Line Creek with City of Newnan and Coweta County |00:07:08|.
Cassette 2A (p. 23):
Transitioning from developer to businessman and resident |00:03:15|; Mayor Ralph Jones, police and fire protection, city increases independence from developer |00:06:22|; city transitions, gets its “sea legs” |00:07:50|; use of city powers in zoning and land-planning matters, service station on Highway 54 East |00:11:05|; denial of resident’s request to rebuild home destroyed by fire in industrial area |00:15:37|; growth of infrastructure under mayors Howard Morgan and Fred Brown |00:17:36|; hires manager for development in effort to keep business and private life separate |00:20:06|; Arthur D. Little master plan |00:22:33|; single-family vs. multi-family, evolution of plan to lower density |00:26:07|; Phipps family lawsuit, poor outlook for real estate, scaling down of developments |00:28:03|; Equitable Life acquires stake in Peachtree City through a state investment trust |00:30:34|.
Cassette 2B (p. 38):
Real estate crash, Equitable refuses to recast deal for Bessemer and forecloses on property, Cowan leaves Bessemer |00:02:58|; Doug Mitchell acquires land in foreclosure |00:05:31|; Equitable has second thoughts |00:07:04|; factors affecting real estate depression, [Fayette State] bank sticks by most builders |00:09:03|; airline industry and word of mouth |00:11:34|; cheap land with modest homes in ’60s and ’70s |00:13:11|; future challenges, increasing traffic, quality of life |00:15:54|; Tyrone controlling future of Peachtree City |00:16:53|; HOV access and Xpress bus |00:18:14|; recommends using timeline to augment oral history interviews |00:21:18|.
Note on order of interviews: A question exists as to the order of the interviews contained within. Although cassette #2 is dated 10/08/02, a question mark appears in parenthesis (?) after the date on the cassette label. Final editor suspects cassette #2 may be from an interview conducted at an earlier date, but was unable to confirm
Joel H. Cowan
Oral History Memoir
Interview Number 2
Conducted by David Piet with Randy Gaddo and Brian Hendry
October 8, 2002
Joel Cowan History Room, Peachtree City Library Peachtree City, Georgia
Project Peachtree City: Plans, Politics, and People, “New Town” Beginnings and How the “New Town” Grew
GADDO: This is the second interview with Joel Cowan as part of the Peachtree City Oral History program. The interview is being conducted on October 8, 2002. The interviewer is Dave Piet and sitting in on the interview today is Brian Hendry, who will be doing other interviews as part of the oral history program, so he’s sitting in on this interview to see how the interviews are conducted. The interview is being held in the Joel Cowan Room in the Peachtree City Library and again it is the second interview session with Joel Cowan as part of the oral history program and the interviewer again is Dave Piet―that’s spelled p-i-e-t―for the transcriber.
PIET: Good morning. Brian, would you just tell us who you are, just real quick, so we have it on the tape?
HENDRY: Local resident― been living here eighteen years a new member of the historical committee.
COWAN: Welcome. You’re a veteran, then.
PIET: Joel, uh―military requirements demand that I leave here right about ten o’clock, so um―you know, things are spinning up again. What we’d like to do, though, is start with you becoming the mayor in 1959 with sixty-five votes cast? (laughs) We were looking at this thing today. Does that sound about right?
COWAN: Yeah, well ’59 would not have been um―because that was when we founded it, which was―we didn’t have an election. That was in the bill in the legislature.
PIET: Yeah, you’re right. When was the first election?
COWAN: Let’s see, it would be three years after that. I guess that’d be ’61? Yeah, I think ’61 or ’62―right in there.
1A |00:02:14|
PIET: Let’s talk about you being the mayor. I guess a couple questions that are still not clear for me from what we talked about last―is how did you have the true vision of this plot of land and how did you organize the city? I mean, the names here―some are very, very familiar names some are not particularly familiar to me, but I am sure some of the other locals would know the names very well.
COWAN: You mean of the people already living here?
PIET: Yes, sir, and the people that you brought on to be on the council, et cetera. Would you just kind of bring us through starting with, you know, from a political standpoint as well as opposed to the developer side of things.
COWAN: Well, you have to remember that of course, back then when this all took place, we did not have any money and they knew it because we had made down payments on land
PIET: Right.
COWAN: ―or had options―and many of these farmers were, in effect, our creditors and some had varying degrees of, uh―thought that, you know, the thing would fail, or it was kind of a pipe dream that far out. And so they just sort of went along as long as there was money there and they got to continue farming the land through leaseback and could cut the timber and that type thing. The political dynamics the major players were Mr. Bob Huddleston (R.H. Huddleston); his son Hugh Huddleston; and then his son Grady Huddleston, who lived in Fayetteville. He [Grady] was the youngest and was in the legislature and a pretty good factor there. So he was sort of, while he didn’t live out here, he was in that group. Albert Pollard, J.A. Pollard, who is still alive, by the way; as a matter of fact, I really didn’t realize he was still in good health. He is eighty-four years old and lives in Griffin been living there for twenty-five years, and I called him yesterday unrelated to this; but when Claude Thompson died, I saw his niece there and she gave me his phone number, and so―and by the way, that is someone I think it might be interesting for you to interview.
PIET: (Laughing) I just wrote that note.
COWAN: I don’t know why my mind works, but his phone number is 770-227-1500, and uh―he seemed quite (unintelligible), so I think it might be interesting to get some perspective there.
PIET: Absolutely.
COWAN: He was a farmer here and, uh― Who was the other John Robinson? Who was the other member of the council?
PIET: Talking ’59?
COWAN: Yeah, we had Bob, Hugh―
PIET: The Huddlestons, Pollard, John T. Robinson
1A |00:05:16|
COWAN: Yeah, John Robinson. Johnny Robinson, that’s for whom Robinson Road is named, and he lived over there about where the funeral home is―in fact, precisely where the Mowell Funeral Home is―that was his home place.
PIET: So that was―he was your neighbor then, right?
COWAN: Yep, he was just―
PIET: (crosstalk)―originally up on the ridge?
COWAN: Exactly. He was just across the hill and in emergencies, either his or mine, that’s who you turned to and we did. But he was probably a native to the county, but he worked for the Redwines. He actually ran their farm over on Redwine Road for many, many years. Actually, I had some dispute with him, in fact, because he felt he was entitled to a part of the property (unintelligible) that they never gave him, so he had some enmity there, let’s say. But his children did not live here but Geraldine Robinson married Jimmy Townsend who became a right famous author, went to the White House, a reporter at the White House and that sort of thing, in the Carter days. But he was the fourth in that group. And that pretty much covered the power structure in the area. The strongest of all was, of course, was variously Mr. Bob Huddleston, Uncle Bob, whatever you choose to call him, who had a loan to most of the people most of the property owners here. I think I described that last time―
PIET: Um-hm.
COWAN: ―his methodology.
1A |00:07:07|
So he was the one who oh, Dave McWilliams. I forgot about Dave McWilliams ran the store over where―the store was, uh―where Richard Bearden’s service station, right across from Line Creek Drive on Highway 54 West. He lived right on the railroad about where the fire station is [Paschall Road] behind that. And by “right on the railroad,” it was within fifty feet of the railroad, so the trains going by were his present―were ever-present to him. Everybody gathered around his potbelly stove in that store. He, too, was somewhat of a remarkable fellow. He never had a cash register. As you’d go through and pick up things around the store, he just totaled it up in his head. Now, maybe he was inaccurate, and he was cheating you, but most people
PIET: (laughs)―felt comfortable.
COWAN: (laughs)―yeah, felt pretty comfortable with his internal calculator because he could total it. He had one other thing: he had a nail, or it was a rod, hanging from his roof in the ceiling of his store, which would have been at a height of about say, 6’6” or something like that from the floor, and his thing that he would demonstrate to all the strangers (unintelligible) at that point, was to demonstrate that he could kick his foot up high enough to hit that thing. And he was not as tall as I am. I don’t think he was even six feet tall.
PIET: You mean he could kick that high up above his head? Quite a feat.
COWAN: Well, he was what we’d call “short waisted ”
PIET: All legs. (laughs)
COWAN: And he was all legs, so when that leg went from this high up but he was limber enough, even at quite an advanced age, to be able to do that. So much of when I started down here in ’57, when I was still in school, that was kind of the headquarters. That’s where you would go and see everybody, particularly if it was in the winter because that was a warm place to get in. But two and three times a day, no matter what they were doing, they would all come in there to the store. That store had a basement full of brand-new antiques. He never threw anything away and much of it he didn’t sell either.
1A |00:09:45|
PIET: So the town started around the little country store, then?
COWAN: Yeah, and Albert reminded me last night. He said, “I believe it was the only Council meeting that was held under a tree.” I have to say I don’t remember it, but you might make a note when you talk to him because the tree he mentioned was directly across from, um―Dave Mac’s store. I think it was at Bill Bown’s house, who was the son-in-law, and they had some chairs around that, but he said that’s where we had the council meetings. We didn’t have many because I actually didn’t choose to function as a city. The city didn’t have any money and certainly wasn’t going to levy any tax, and if we did, it would have been on us, so it was just a place holder back then.
PIET: So how long did this kind of arrangement continue?
COWAN: Well, it went on as long as I was mayor and the developer as well, I just acted as the developer because there really would not have been any great enthusiasm for exercising police powers and it was still unnecessary in any case. There just wasn’t anything to do as a city. I wanted to do that, though, because I realized that in the future zoning matters, conceivably some municipal finance and those kind of things would be facilitated, but it was more defensive than anything because the counties were not―this county or any other county that had a similar development would not have been friendly, so you needed your own city from that standpoint.
1A |00:11:36|
PIET: So going back to last break(??), you’d gone through the process of getting the city chartered. You borrowed all the money or actually just kind of loaned, or they sold you the land on contract, and so now you have this glom of land where you technically have a city. You’re practically―not practically running the city, though, in the sense that we have meetings, and we have budgets, and we have―(crosstalk)―not exercising any police power, so effectively you are just, kind of—
COWAN: Well, one thing, as an example of that was it was very important for the industrial development to have Georgia Power involved. Well, this was REA or EMC territory and there was no good way for them [Georgia Power] to get involved. But, back then, they had the right to
serve any industry. They were the only ones that had power sufficient to serve industry. But they wanted some residential territory to make it interesting for them before they would sort of use their influence to bring industry here. So I negotiated with Floy Farr I don’t think he was―he may have been the chairman even then of the Coweta-Fayette EMC but in any case, we negotiated to allow them, so they wouldn’t object to us as a city awarding a franchise to Georgia Power, which we did, and as a result, you can see that territory that was marked off and you see just across the street was―is EMC, even today, and other than that south of 54 which was Georgia Power or is still today. But that worked very well as a strategy. It worked good for the EMC as well because they got the industry, and the people, and the development.
1A |00:13:28|
PIET: But you had a lot of help from that connection to bring in the first industry. Well, let me then digress
COWAN: Well, they didn’t get the― They weren’t helping at first, but they kept us on the map.
PIET: (crosstalk)―one of those things you can tell somebody in the market that somebody would have the power.
COWAN: Well, absolutely. But more importantly, they had an industrial development group. They actually were promoting industry, and so they could choose to drive into your city or drive into some other city.
PIET: Since you were still acting largely as developer, then when was the first industrial―when did you get your first opportunity to get an industrial commitment here?
COWAN: Well, it was hard to get anything because we had nothing. We didn’t have people, we didn’t have supermarkets, schools, we had none of those things that would suggest that one could be successful, so I realized the only way we were going to do it was by hopefully, with the use of money. I had been around the city, all the banks, everything, to let them know that we were there and was able then, because we did have money, to keep a stabilized(??) bank account with the banks.
1A |00:14:37|
And so, the Trust Company, as it happens, called me one day and said, You know, we’ve got a customer that needs to expand but doesn’t have the money to expand and, uh―would you like to talk to him? So I did. And that was the company called Dixie Frozen Foods which became HiBrand, which is located where Fifth Avenue [The Avenue]―curiously, located where the Trust Company branch is up there―all unrelated. But, there was a case where this, uh―he was quite young, he was about my age, a guy named Vernon. His nickname was Doc. His father was a doctor from Macon, I believe. Doc Lassiter ran that business and the family―his wife’s family (??) Lassiter owned most of the stock in it. It was a small frozen foods producer out in East Atlanta, out around Little Five Points, in that area. So, uh―we put it together that if they came, we would build a building and lease it for them. I thought then the building would cost
about $125,000 that sounds cheap today. It, in fact, cost about $350,000 because of all that freezer equipment and so on. We didn’t have sewers, so I had an elaborate septic system designed for it which never worked and you would imagine that it wouldn’t work because of all the grease and that kind of thing. So there was just a constant odor You could drive by at sixty miles an hour and get a whiff. And there was a man―forgot his name [G.W. Moore]―he lived right at the corner where that sign of all of the city clubs is located. He still owned two acres there, but he was a bootlegger meaning he was the dealer. He kept the back of his yard grown up out there and he would go and put pints and quarts of moonshine just out there, so you’d drive up if you wanted it and he’d walk out back and get it out of the grass. Everybody knew it, but it was just sort of allowed. It was interesting because years later when I put the sewer in, the odor went away. I want to say his name―his initials were like G.W. Someone said, G.W, glad not to have that odor anymore? And he said, “What odor?” (all laugh)
PIET: It was no big deal.
1A |00:17:14|
COWAN: But that was the first one and they wanted to be obviously right up on the road, and I sort of wanted them out of the way. And I set it back because it could have gone anywhere, but just seeing this plan in here [referring to the original plan] you’ll note that Highway 54 and 74―you see that it had a cloverleaf right there, so I didn’t want to do anything that would interfere with that even then―and so I set it back so that this ramp
PIET: Gee, I wish that would have come to pass.
COWAN: Yeah, well today it would have been great to have, but even then, I was thinking, you know, Set that back, and so I set that back and held the land all that time. Interesting, that building―I traded that building and another one we had bought in downtown Atlanta with Cousins Properties for land they had out in East Dekalb, which was an industrial park off Snapfinger Woods so I made a tax-based exchange of those two buildings for that one and just like the Trust Company’s on that location, Cousins owns Fifth Avenue [The Avenue] today although they sold it and bought (unintelligible). All of that is unrelated, but simply coincidental.
HENDRY: You saw it better to attract an industry first that would bring in the residents?
COWAN: Well, it’s the chicken or the egg and everybody always argued that conundrum, Which comes first? I thought you had only one shot at residents and that was to build a lake and exploit that with a lot of advertising. There was a development that I had observed called Norris Lake Shores back then. The problem with that was that people would come out and it was really a second home or, if it weren’t a second home, it wasn’t part of a community. It was just to get on the lake. And I just felt that would be short-sighted. You think of things differently when you have twelve, fifteen thousand acres. If you make a mistake in the early phases, you pay for it later on. So it’s a pretty good discipline, if you think about it, not to take a shortcut in the process.
1A |00:19:37|
PIET: That must have been a great―a lot of pressure on you though because although you did get some resources there, you were telling us last time, you still didn’t have deep, deep pockets.
COWAN: No, we had deep pockets theoretically. The deal we made, though, with the money was that they were buying it as a piece of land just to hold it―and the structure of the deal developed as cash and that I could spend to get started and prove the viability, which fortunately I did prove, and they put up more money, so―
PIET: So at some point they came around.
COWAN: We were never without money provided I could convince them. For example, when we built the golf course up here, which I think it was in ’64. To get that approved, I remember (unintelligible) they said, Well now, do you think people would come out there and play on it? And I said, “Well, I don’t know, but I’ll tell you, if it doesn’t, I guess we’ll just―” Back then, they had this little golf course down at Turin, and one someplace else, but people would play without their shirts, play bare-backed, because, you know―
PIET: In the country
COWAN: Oh, it was country―and so, I said we’d just turn it over to the bare-back boys. (laughs) I had mentioned that privately, but at the board meeting in New York the Bessemer board meeting a very, uh, Mr. Kingsley was a very prim and proper guy―he said that to them:
“Joel says when you’re done with it, you just turn it over to the bare-back boys.” He had no idea what a bare-back boy was. He had never been out of New England.
PIET: But he knew he could get out of it if he had to.
1A |00:21:08|
COWAN: Well, he knew something would go on out there. But the way I would prove it economically was that you’d spend that money and even if you plowed it up, the land overall would still the value would bail you out.
PIET: So you got the lake, and it’s south of 54, not north of 54, and now you’ve got the golf course, and you’ve got Dixie Foods which ultimately would become Hi-Brand. Was that the core of (inaudible)?
COWAN: Well, I of course kept going for the industry because that industry there was not―virtually not a single person, without industry, who would live here. Doc and Vinnie Lassiter moved to Newnan and liked it because there was absolutely no services or anything that would attract somebody like that here. The workers there, of course, couldn’t afford a new house, so it just gave you something as a start, more or less, so I was trying to build the cosmetics of it. And the next industry was the Norman Paschall Company and the only way we got that I think that one came through C&S. They were in East Point, but he produced this cloud of smoke. It wasn’t smoke he had cotton waste and to whiten it he would put a powdery
substance in it. You just simply couldn’t control it; it would just kind of billow out, and he was getting a lot of grief in East Point because it was right in the middle of a city and expansion, so I said, “Look, come down here and we’ll put you way back on the back side,” which I did. That’s why he is located where he is, and of course Planterra wasn’t there, and it used to be just a steam back behind it―a white steam. I said, “As long as there’s nobody here,” you know, “I won’t object. I’d pull that one (??) off the market if you’ll come in here,” and we convinced him. We loaned him the money or arranged the loan for him―a loan he couldn’t have gotten otherwise. But Norman moved down and he―they moved to Newnan for a brief time and then moved back to Atlanta.
1A |00:23:22|
Norman today, he is eighty-one years old. He and I meet commuting on the road which we have for the thirty-five years he’s been down here. He continues to commute. Mike Carroll is his sonin-law, and (unintelligible). So that was the second—so now we had two industries where most of the cities in Georgia had none. Some people still will say, “How could you do that?” and you’d say you did it with money. Well, we did, but they had money, too; they could always pass some tax or something that would allow them to subsidize.
PIET: You controlled the property. You controlled the property and had access to—
COWAN: Well, these little towns did that, too.
PIET: Really?
COWAN: They would go and buy what they called a little industrial park and build a road. They’d do things, build buildings, they’d do anything same kind of thing, but somehow, we got them. We averaged―even though we had nothing―we averaged not quite one a year, but nearly one industry a year, which was way above anybody’s record. Now again, that didn’t contribute to a residential base, but it certainly contributed to a good feeling residentially. I’d allowed myself time, and I wasn’t specific on it. I was very careful not to have any sort of advertising or promotion. I’d make speeches and things like that to people who were interested in it. But still, during the sixties, if you drove in you would see Dixie Frozen Foods. If you drove along Highway 54 here, you really wouldn’t see anything. If you ask Don Smith―and I’m sure you’ll get to him with his story―he was told to come down here because he could live cheaply and he was right in the middle of it [the City], but wondered where it was. And in fact, the development was just a block away. But I never had anything on the front. But my theory was that if we promoted, or had, uh―any, if we set any deadlines or anything, we’d be doomed to failure because it was going to be a long-term project no matter what, and I was confident we could build it at some stage because Atlanta would simply expand here. It was only in the latter part of ’68 and ’69 that I got worried that if we didn’t make a move about that time that Atlanta was moving north so fast and so aggressively, which it has that we could be bypassed and lose out totally.
1A |00:26:01|
COWAN: So it was only then that I commissioned the first real master planning effort. And it was with a combine with Arthur O. Little [Prouty note: Arthur D. Little] Company in Boston and Richard Browne and Associates. He was one of their “new town” people actually, Dick was mayor of Wayne, New Jersey, at a very young age and was known―that, and then I was on the board of this new town in Washington, St. Charles, and they had used him up there, so I got him with Arthur Little and did this first really comprehensive―you know, we had seven―seven books, and it cost $300,000, which again, was a lot of money back then for that.
HENDRY: Does that exist today that plan, that book?
COWAN: I would assume it does.
HENDRY: That would be something we really need to get.
COWAN: I may have it somewhere. I’ll tell you Floy had a lot of files, he was going to write something and give to Carolyn Cary, but I don’t know if he gave her those things, because all the p-r in the little brown books all mine and his his were the originals.
PIET: We can check with them, and we check with Carolyn. That would be a good place to start.
COWAN: There out to be some around, which ought to be recoverable. But, uh―and it had the village concept, the green space that was where we developed the concept of green space, golf
carts, all that kind of thing was developed then as the mantra or the defining thing for Peachtree City.
1A |00:27:53|
I knew then that―the reason I resisted, everybody said, Well, it’s a planned community, why don’t you have a full plan? Most of these were engineers and planners trying to sell services and I said then, and this was in the early sixties, “If you did it, people would change.” Right now, they would want one-acre lots, or three-fourths-acre lots and you’d have to use a large lot to attract them. But as you evolved over time, people’s choices would change. So we got the concept of developing it where you would, uh―you’d have what you could sell at the time, but you’d leave pockets for the higher density elements around the green space. Of course, every time―later on, it was after my time, when those pockets came up for development, the residents would say, Oh no, we don’t want that. And it was harder to sell them then anyway, so the developer typically just agreed to go on and make it single family.
PIET: Which was fortuitous for us because I was on the planning commission during some of those meetings and it would have been ugly to try to get all apartments down there at the intersection of Crosstown [Road] and the parkway [Peachtree Parkway] and those were―pretty nice, it worked out pretty nice. There are some pretty nice little developments there.
COWAN: But you notice that the density lowered down. (crosstalk) In fact, I've got also―I’ve still got it―a thing that the, uh―it wasn’t Carnegie-Mellon, it was, uh―some large university
that―they wanted to do a plan on their own, just an exercise for their students, but they made this diorama, this model―(unintelligible) photographically and that kind of thing, of ultra-high density where they left virtually everything open and you had these clusters kind of interesting because it had big (??) where to put it, but it’s a, uh―it’s an interesting phasing, and you could see if this occurred probably ten to fifteen, maybe fifteen to twenty years into the future, how you could keep going to a plan like that or be forced into a plan like that. The point is, though, that you couldn’t it’s a theoretical exercise to say we planned it rigidly and that’s the way it will be, but it is only theoretical. What I always wanted was a complete plan at any given stage and then, if you made a serious modification, then you’d do another complete plan. You wouldn’t just change this segment; it would be a total change of philosophy.
PIET: You had a general philosophy and a general concept, and you were very flexible on the details.
1A |00:30:37| pause in recording as cassette tape 1, side 1 ends; side 2 begins
COWAN: That was the lake I tried to build and couldn’t build. Actually, it wouldn’t have been a good idea as it turned out, but looking at it you couldn’t―you wouldn’t know that. So, uh―but that’s when we started. In fact, I know I had a recording of a speech I made in ’71, August of ’71, which outlined all of the―it came from the Little plan and it was calling for the 20 percent green space and protecting the corridors and those kinds of things then, which is the very same
thing we are saying today, thirty years later, with some hope of getting it done. But that was all pretty well spelled out and articulated back then. But it was at that point that we had our first paid advertisement.
PIET: ’68?
COWAN: No, ’69 the plan was there, so ’69-’70 I brought in a firm Dickey, Gil Dickey and Associates (unintelligible) professional marketers. I was nervous doing it, but I just felt we had to do it at that time or―or lose out. For example, and that’s why I’ve been so active was then and continue to be active in the downtown Atlanta power structure because there was a move on for the second airport to go north and obviously if that had happened, it would have been disastrous for the (unintelligible) south side.
1B |00:01:48|
So, uh―the coalition really turned out between John Portman and myself because he had his property, Peachtree Center downtown, was similarly vulnerable. All of downtown was vulnerable because of―because everybody would say, Well, the center of Atlanta would be at Buckhead, or, The center of Atlanta will be where Perimeter Center is―they didn’t know what Perimeter Center was then, but basically you could see that happening. And so Rich’s, Davison’s, all of the banks were clustered at Five Points so that became an alliance which I was a part of. In fact, I was vice-chairman; I was the token Southsider. But it was a deal to keep the airport there and when that was in the early seventies, ’71 or ’72, somewhere in there. We really formed that and got the agreement for a minimum of seventy-two gates before they would
consider another airport. They could go and buy property, but they couldn’t build until they filled up the seventy-two gates. My theory was that if you had that much critical mass, even it moved on, it still was going to be big. (crosstalk) It was also when the Title VII new towns came along, a government program to take what we had done and do that across the country. That’s why I supported that, not that it would have made a difference for us, but I did take a position supporting Shenandoah under the theory that to have two of us on the south side in other words, if you are a town like you’re Newnan or you’re Fayetteville, you don’t have money; you are not the developer; you don’t have the promotion dollars to just simply hold up your hand and say you’re here. And I felt like if we had one or two more doing that, that it would add some weight to the south side. Unfortunately, that [Title VII program] came in a flurry and then went broke in a flurry (unintelligible) Shenandoah came in with government money and, in effect, gave their money to the city of Newnan [for water] and they came over and wanted to pump Line Creek over there. You can see the big pumping station, but I sued. I couldn’t get the county [Fayette], the city the independent city which had no money to help, but the county basically was the one I needed to join anything, so I sued them [City of Newnan]. And the settlement there was to give half the water [to them], which violates every principle known because you’re taking it―pumping it raw―over and putting it into the Chattahoochee―taking it out of the Flint and putting it in the Chattahoochee. But the deal was they were going to pump all of it, literally all of it, and uh―except in flood times, you’d have a dry creek down there. So, uh―we got that done.
1B|00:05:00|
I also tried to do the reservoir on Line Creek back then and just could not get cooperation out of the county [Fayette]. I couldn’t get―I needed to file eminent domain to get some of the Coweta land that we didn’t own, and I had to have the county. The city [Peachtree City] was considered to be the lawyer said, just too weak to do it. And the utility company was private; we owned that and so you had to have a county to build that lake. And I said, “We will build it and pay for it. You are going to need it as a water supply and when you are ready for the water, we’ll sell it by the gallon,” which would have been a great deal for the county as it turns out. But the county commissioners over there would never agree to anything we wanted to do.
HENDRY: Did that become the suit about pumping the water out of Line Creek?
COWAN: No, that suit came later after. In fact, what I tried―what I did over there see Newnan had Newnan Water and Light Commission which, although public, it was really private. It was an ol’ boy network, and they were very stingy about selling water out in the county. They controlled all the water and, in fact, what they wanted to do there was to build, and they did build a dry lake, a reservoir, inside the city of Newnan. They were going to pump the creek raw into that lake. They didn’t even―you’d think they’d build a treatment plant here and sell the water along [the way], but they didn’t want to sell any out in the county. So I got the county [Coweta] to get interested in doing a joint reservoir. When I made a reservoir deal that was (unintelligible) so the county simply used that to blackmail the city [Newnan] to sell them water and left me without help over there. So there you have it―so the relationships were somewhat tense(??)
PIET: Joel, I apologize for having to go, but the world is what the world is.
1B |00:07:08|
pause in recording as cassette tape 1, side 2 ends; cassette tape 2, side 1 begins
PIET: If you could pick up the transcriber has got the―what we have done so far pretty well up to date and I imagine at some point we’ll get it back to you to make sure you can clarify anything that, you know, was left out. I talked to her today, she said we’ve done a pretty good job but there were some things that she couldn’t quite make out.
COWAN: Probably can’t understand when I’m talking
PIET: Yeah, we’ll give you a chance to clarify it. I was thinking maybe once we’ve got the whole thing done, we might want to ask you just one more time to sit down and maybe if we came up with any questions out of where the gaps were. And I’m sure there are some gaps, because like I say, we―none of us have ever done this before, so we’ll be much better as we go down the road. What I’ll ask you to do today is to start to pick it up from the point where you start to transition to government, from what we talked about last time from you and, you know, the previous longterm residents around here, into a viable government and how you saw that working out into, uh―well, basically, I think, what we have today, I mean, in one form or fashion. And that’s the point where I suspect you kind of stepped back into the more business side of it and then just as a community member at that point, would that be accurate?
COWAN: Yep, that would be I believe that’s one, probably not knowing what the overlap
is but the context certainly is that I knew the work that had been done up to that point was mainly as a developer, just keeping the city on ice because it was an academic issue that there was no way you could levy a tax, so that we even paid privately for the streetlights and things like that―without getting over into that taxing area(??), um― So the, um―I felt that the transition needed to be orderly. If you just put the developer hat on, nobody likes it, just they’ll turn against you immediately and say, Well, let’s just stop where we are, because that feeling existed with the best of intent nobody thought of it, but everybody would say sort of constantly, Well, isn’t this nice? It’s pleasant; we like everybody here. It would be nice if we could just stop here. And certainly, putting your developer hat on, you didn’t want that to migrate into a full-blown no-go attitude. So the key was getting a good mayor and council transitioning out of the―what you call it―the farmer interest that we had originally. In fact, I don’t remember what the council, during the five years that I was mayor—let's see three, five—I guess the all five of those, I don’t know if any of the new people who had been on―maybe that last term, that they were on but that’s a factual thing I had in mind.
2A |00:03:15|
PIET: I had it in mind. (??) (crosstalk) I had the list. They provided us a list of who the councilmen were.
COWAN: Could you pause that just a minute?
PIET: Sure, sure.
Pause in recording; recording resumes
COWAN: So I don’t know factually whether we transitioned there but, in any case, the goal was to begin a transition with a mayor that would want to continue and would be somebody new, and I guess Ralph Jones was the next one, I’m not sure, I think it’s Ralph. And I sort of, you know, negotiated that in my service to help him come in, and I got news on the council. And Ralph, working for one of the industries and that was my main thing, making sure the industries were happy and I thought, What would ensure that? And of course, not having a budget, and not having any real money except for the franchise fees and that kind of thing―kind of limited what you would do. But the first thing was to begin to put in some policing powers again, somewhat defensively. And that’s not something I wanted to have anything to do with. I just wanted to make sure it was done right, of course. Then to get over into the land, at that point, there hadn’t been enough land activity, and everybody was terribly concerned about it. And so just bringing the group along, with the evolution of the plan and that kind of thing, was important. But, um―and then various levels and then fire protection, too.
Fire was a key element because that impacted the insurance rates and everything right straight up. So that was done and pretty orderly transitioned in that case, but I encouraged that independence―actually, because I knew it had to come at some point. It still was a paternalistic environment, I guess, as long as I was there, into the uh―the ’70s and when the transition when I left the development company and that transition. I told all of the leadership, you know, this is the time when, you know, there had to be a true adversarial arrangement or relationship between the city and the developer. A friendly, but adversarial, because both
needed they needed each other.
2A |00:06:22|
PIET: (crosstalk) Approaching it from different perspectives
COWAN: ―but paternalist. The thought of us paying for the streetlights and things like that, as a developer for the people who lived here we were completely capable of doing it. It wouldn't work, but on the other hand, just jumping into every element was difficult. Now, they did jump, because, you know, you get into such issues as trees I remember one time it seemed like we actually ended up making the dogwood tree an endangered species or something―you’d cut out a Dogwood tree and it would just proliferate all over the city, but that was sort of―I felt that that was the city just getting its sea legs, you might say. It’s a little like when the African-Americans took over the city of Atlanta, you know, for a while just everything was adversarial, everything was difficult, but after everybody matured in their office and they found out what they could do, what they couldn’t do, and seeing the impacts of what they thought or seemed like a good idea at the time when it matured, then everything settled back down. I knew it had to go through that transition period here, everybody does, and I thought we got through it very well―didn’t have any particularly bad news in that case.
2A |00:07:50|
PIET: There’s none that I’m aware of, I mean not that I was here back in those days, but nobody
talks about that being as controversial. That’s why I was wondering, how did we―how did it so smoothly I mean, obviously at the detail level, it was not smooth, like you said, I’m sure there was some bumps in the road, but it appears nobody seems to talk about that period as being very traumatic for the city. As a matter of fact, it seemed like a very smooth transition into you’ve got a city; you’ve got a person or persons who own property and they’re going to develop that property.
COWAN: Well, and most everything that was being done at that time, we were doing it as a development. It wasn’t that there were outparcels or there were developments just outside, such as the area to the east on Highway 54. We didn’t have those issues because there wasn’t enough business around in those times. But at the same time, the mood then―societally and generally, particularly in the South was not to be too much of activist in zoning and land-planning matters as they are today. So, in fact, as a developer, and particularly as long as I was doing it, we probably were more sensitive to that than the city would have been, so we didn’t have many of those kinds of issues didn't have any that I can remember. I do remember once, and it was during the time and it was the only time that we used the city power in a way that I was a little queasy about it I was right about it but queasy about it, nevertheless. Over on Highway 54, just east of the lake now, there was one of the outparcels there―you know, one of the pieces of land that we were unable to acquire. And a guy who lived there his name was George London―and all of a sudden, he wanted to build a service station right there, which to me seemed like a very big issue, because we built a lake right below it and I envisioned oil coming down in there, and all this kind of thing―and it completely ruined the land plan. So I negotiated with him, tried to do everything I could to stop that, but I couldn’t, and he went on and built it.
But I tried to block that through zoning, and I’ve forgotten whether―I’ve forgotten whether we actually changed it before he built it or afterwards, but it got pretty controversial at a time when very few people were here. Of course, later I had to buy it and pay a record price for it.
2A |0011:05|
PIET: Did you keep him from developing it?
COWAN: Well, as I recall, he actually built the old store, I think, and we just bought it and tore it down. You know, that’s an area I’d have to remember—you’d think, I mean, it must have been traumatic for the people (all laugh) (??) quite that well. There was another case that we were this occurred before―this would have been probably in the 1959, 1960 area—down near the Bethany Baptist Church, the Black church that’s across from the airport. I don’t know if I’ve got the name—I think Bethany. At the entrance to the airport—in fact, today you can see this great big tree there there was a fellow who lived there. I can’t remember his name right now. He was Black, but in fact, he was very wealthy or relatively speaking, wealthy. He owned that land, and he owned land in many other areas. But his house burned down. We had zoned all that land industrial land, and his house burned down, and―he said he wanted to rebuild it. I know it was before—was it 1960?―somewhere there, because I remember the fire. I was still living up on the hill, on Shakerag Hill, because I could see it from the house. I went down there, but it was just an old country house, and what was first a fire was just one big cauldron. But in any case, came the time of do you rebuild? And I and the Council blocked his rebuilding. It was controversial only a little bit, you know, he understood it completely and he was making a lot
of money out of the deal. But the Atlanta newspaper, somebody got it and somehow implied in an article that we set the house afire burned him out, in effect―in order that he couldn’t rebuild and that would occur It was just a reference, it wasn’t an accusation. It wasn’t in the article. It was just sort of one of these stories of what happens to a poor―
PIET: (crosstalk) Read what you want out of it, yeah.
COWAN: well, a poor Black family, which wasn’t the case at all. And he was home it wasn’t anybody doing anything. There wasn’t a question about the fire.
PIET: He knew how the fire started.
COWAN: Oh yeah. It wasn’t any question.
PIET: And you say he wasn’t poor.
COWAN: No, in that case, and again, he made money out of the deal, but―it still was unusual because that was country, we had this country and then he said, “Pardon me, why can’t I build a house here? I don’t really see anything around.”
PIET: At that point it was hard to (crosstalk)
COWAN: It was hard, and again, it boiled down to a money issue. But in fact, if somebody, you
know, lived in a place and they’ve lived there forever, it’s kind of hard to say what you could or couldn’t do, but that is what zoning and planning is all about. So again, there were two areas, and those were the only two in my memory, where a city power was sort of used, you might say properly, I’d maintain―but on the other hand, used controversially
PIET: Huh. That’s not too bad. It doesn’t sound like either one of those were terribly I’d say neither one of those were nefarious, I mean they were
COWAN: (crosstalk) No.
PIET: ―circumstances, and uh―they happen.
COWAN: I’m sure anybody on the other side well, George London didn’t care, by the way―he was―the issue with him, mine was the issue with him, but (unintelligible) Posey
______(??) [Cowan note: Probably development manager Posey Davis]
PIET: So, uh, I mean we can know it factually, but what are your guesstimates, somewhere around ’70 now, we’re talking―what about was the population then? Just as a reference for me. Was it around two, three thousand? Five, six thousand?
COWAN: We really started with promotion and everything in 1969 and ’70, so I would put it in the two thousand, as opposed to five thousand. Because that was when we really had the first advertisement and were making the push, and sort of did the area.
2A |00:15:37|
PIET: So by ’70 you’re pretty much involved in the development and the government is pretty much in the hands of the citizens. And they’re on their own now to figure out how to build this, you know, viable legal entity. I guess we’ll talk to the other mayors to see how that evolved. But I want to go back right now, because I recall from out previous conversation you talked about how we got to this point how you got involved. There was a plan, but there wasn’t a plan, you had to―you had some ideas but the lake, for example, the original lake was on the―maybe the right side, aesthetically, of [Highway] 54, but the wrong side, practically, so you had to make some modifications. So now, getting into the point where your involvement now is purely developmental―and I assume, at this point, the master plan is still heavily influenced by you and the development side as opposed to the city.
COWAN: Yep, that’s factual. The evolution when Chip Conner, of course, Chip worked for me. Chip was my cousin, and Ralph ___(??) mayor when Howard Morgan became mayor, that was when most independent-type things started because Howard was a full-time mayor and a good one, by the way. He was really good at sort of pointing that evolution along. And Fred Brown, coming after him, both of those were two long-term mayors and I would think that the―the building of the city sort of infrastructure occurred, just evolved almost continuously, right through their administrations. Unfortunately, Howard is not around, but a lot of people were, but Fred is, and I hope you can get Fred pretty quick.
PIET: Oh, we are. We’ll jump on some of the older ones first.
2A |00:17:36|
COWAN: But let me say that on the development side, what I did personally was―of course, I was doing other things developmental-wise in other parts of the state and the nation, because this could only go at a certain pace. It just wouldn’t go any faster than―than that willingness of people to move out here and that was based on the services we could offer. It was a chicken or an egg you can have a little grocery store with this many people, and after you get the grocery store you can have a few more people and that kind of thing, but it’s always a chicken or an egg. But I, uh―the way we managed this― Of course, a lot of the― I brought in Alton Brown, who is dead now, but a long-time resident of Tyrone a businessman up there to be the manager of the development. From then, that point on, I always had somebody of various strength(??) for the running of the development because my problem was I lived here, went to church here, and I was known by a lot of people, but then practically every little problem, if they knew me, you know, they’d bring it to me, and what I would do typically was say “I don’t know, have you talked to Alton?” or, “Have you talked to Bob Bivens?” (unintelligible) But I’d always do it through a third party or through the bank. One or the other. If it was kind of a political thing, then I’d call on Floy, and he’d work sort of through the bank―that way if it was a straight developmental thing―and I kept those two separate. I'd do it that way so that I, myself, could always be the referee, number one, or I could back down or I could say, you know, “We’ll do this,” or that sort of thing, but I'd really do it through them. Part of that was my own peace of mind and ability to live here and the other was functionally needed, one level or another of
management, but I tried to make those fairly prominent in everybody’s eyes.
2A |00:20:06|
And again, that was before we had a lot of controversy. Those people, coupled with Floy and, you know, my own temperament it just was not controversy. We just sort of avoided controversy at all costs. You didn’t see it, but you knew it was coming. And I was glad, frankly, that I didn’t have to be here when it did come. (laughs)
PIET: ―directly, be directly involved, yeah. So at what point you know, when I first got here about ’86 and, uh so we were fairly well down the road. We have, you know―and I was on the Planning Commission for a while, we’ve got this nice new master plan and of course, it’s―if you’re not careful, you can say “Oh, well we’ve had this master plan, and this plan has been there forever,” but it wasn’t there forever. At what point do you think―at what point in the process did we have―do you feel we had a viable plan for the entire city that, although it would have to be modified based on other things over time, that you had a solid fix on something that could be developed and modified over time. At what point did you think it was pretty well settled in your mind?
COWAN: Well, of course in―you have to put it into context―in 1969, when we did the Arthur D. Little plan, which was a complete soup to nuts master plan that was the thing, at least on paper, that was state of the art had come to understanding what was planned here was not different from the fourteen or so other new towns that were planned under federal New
Communities Act. When the federal government got in it, of course it’s a planner’s dream and engineers because they can just sit and theorize. And that plan [Little plan] had all of the idealism of that. Now the good news is that the things that came out of that were the green space the _______(??) and the threshold [Cowan note: population limits per village], and the green space. The village—we'd always had the notion of villages, so that wasn’t unusual there, but we really locked in on the path system and the green space as sort of our sine qua non. That was the culture that defined what we were.
2A |00:22:33|
Now what went on in the remaining land―that plan had a, uh―obviously a much higher density than the market then would tolerate. And so the compromise to that was that we the had singlefamily land and just left the pockets of multi-family land and some of those pockets when you got here probably were still there and they would come up for zoning. Later the developer just gave in [and] said, We’ll just make that single-family just couldn’t fight the issue. Now, if you move the clock, the plan probably would be a plan if you were doing now or ten years from now or five years from now. In fact, that plan, you see it right now in Gwinnett County, they are coming back to that very kind of development, to the, uh―traditional neighborhood development, I think someone had called smart growth to the other part. But that plan really was a forerunner offer(??). But it was ahead of its time. Most everything we did was way ahead of its time well, certainly what I did. With that time the plan eroded back down to what it is today in density, so who’s to say what was right. But the first one that really came on was in the ’69 area and I think it was modified again somewhere to just take account of reality but left those
pockets―some of those pockets in. When we first conceived it, it was sixty thousand people in that red book. That plan, as I recall, was like eighty―the ’69 plan was like eighty thousand, and then I think it may have had one other iteration that dropped it back to sixty before it dropped to forty-five thousand. So that you can sort of trace the evolution of things that way.
PIET: Yeah, and it was clear by the time I was involved that there was never going to be those kinds of densities and the politics of it just would not have worked then.
COWAN: Well, you couldn’t sell it. (crosstalk) It wouldn’t be about the politics you couldn’t sell it. At some points you can sell anything, but you probably couldn’t have marketed it anyway. It could’ve just been held back―and then you could hold it, but you’d be holding it for ten years or more even at that time. But it was an interesting experience to go through the process of just theoretically saying, What is a city? What is its government?―all of that stuff―forecasting people, schools all of that, it’s pretty interesting. It’s an experience I went through it a couple times because of the one in Maryland that I was involved with. They certainly had a sameness, and the thing Shenandoah was the same type, had the same usually they had five to seven volumes. You know, I mean I could just name them all.
2A |00:26:07|
PIET: At what point did your career move you where you are not directly I know you’ve always been emotionally, up until today, involved with the city, but I mean―at what point were you no longer directly involved with the development?
COWAN: Well, directly, was ’76. In 1973, it was pretty clear. In fact, they had a―the family, Phipps family, had a big lawsuit, and they pulled up in connection with that―they pulled an inner-family kind of lawsuit, but they had me come up to testify and they did an inordinate amount of research and they had pulled out memorandums that I had written then saying, well, that the future for real estate, at least for the next several years, was going to be pretty bleak, and we actually needed to do something, including selling itself(??). The difficultly is we were selling and nobody was buying at that time, but I really forecasted a―sort of a hunker-down strategy at that point. And what we did, was we made the deal in ’73, between myself and the people I worked for in New York, to basically scale down everything, including Peachtree City, but the other things were important―that we had developed and had a very large developmental organization and I just wanted to get everybody placed, you know, in another job. So what I committed was to stay three more years, which would have been until ’76, and we had a contract, if you will, until ’76, and they had a cash settlement with me, or settlement―you know, or they paid a bonus for staying. Because frankly, I wanted to leave then.
2A |00:28:03|
I had bought the bank―control from the bank and owned some amount of land myself so in my own interest I wanted to leave but I didn’t want to leave anybody hanging them or people who worked for me so I agreed to work it out and did work it out, very satisfactorily and, uh―that got to the area, and I think in the last one I may have mentioned it, but―what I had done, we couldn’t sell, but at that point the real estate industry was really hot, and they
had―everybody was creating a real investment trust, or REIT. Equitable Life created one called Equitable, a state investment trust, and they were looking for deals to put in it. And so we brokered and got on the same file with, uh―(unintelligible) brokerage house. I was in Florida on a deal with him and he just said, “What could we do for―” or “What kind of deal could we make?” And I said basically, “The kind of deal that I would want, I don’t think you’ll do.” And he said, “Well, try me.” And I said, “Well, what I'd like is a no-recourse loan on several projects, including Peachtree City.” The other one was Snapfinger Woods up there. And so we talked more of details on that, and basically reached an agreement where we’d take the long-term land, that is to say, the south area that would be where Braelinn and that area is now and extreme north area, which would be up in, um that end, the north part―
PIET: Kedron and all that.
COWAN: Kedron. So that area―those two areas and it’s very much like our original deals that involved Phipps then―where we had the Henry Phipps Estate buy that same land and then we held the development center out. Well, in that financing, basically we made a loan on that, a norecourse loan, and the idea was there was going to be no development longer than five―four, five years, and even ten years―
2A |00:30:34|
(pause in recording as cassette tape 2, side 1 ends; side 2 begins)
COWAN: a land bank loan. And the fact is, we borrowed―forgotten the figure, but I want to say it was ’79 and $50 an acre(??) [Cowan note: It was much more. Probably $2,000. What I was trying to say was, for the people I represented, I got them a great deal at the expense of Equitable ]―but we borrowed more money than we were sold the land, at that time. Somebody would say, “Well, you wouldn’t buy the land.” We probably would have sold it cheaper, but we borrowed the money with no recourse. Now here’s two giants, Equitable Life and my company, both very sophisticated―so it was pretty clear what the terms of the deal were. And then, we borrowed―then the part that was in the center we borrowed, and in that instance, that was a full recourse of our investment. There’s no question about that. So mentally, you know, you sort of sold off the long-term land in that case. Strategically though, it turned out even better than that, because―for the people that I represented. And that was because it was misunderstood people didn’t really care until it came to the foreclosure, which occurred in something ’78 or ’79, sometime like that. But the context that that was made was near-perfect for who I represented. So when the real estate industry really crashed, really tanked that was after―it was occurring about the time because I was winding things down in’76. It was sort of in the middle of it, I guess That was the status of it, but we were still current with them, and I offered I went to Equitable in New York on my own motion. I went to them, and I said, “Look, this is not going to work out. Let me recast the deal, and if you would make it a long-term, a twenty-year, eight percent loan,” I was very specific "then I will get Bessemer to put full recourse on it so you would have a solid loan at eight percent” rather than what they had, which was eleven to twelve percent no recourse loan. So the loan officer did me a big favor, did them a big favor, by turning me down. I didn’t know, I probably could have done it, but I had not gotten any prior authority to make that offer myself, but I did make the offer. And they turned it down,
so basically, I said, “Then I think I’ll discharge all my duty,” to everybody at that point, including the owner (??) because I offered them their perfect deal. Then I left in mid ’76 according to plan. I stayed on as sort of a consultant, just to wind some things down into ’77, but I wasn’t put in charge of it.
2B |00:02:58|
They brought in a couple—Doug Mitchell, I think, was already working at that point and there were several that wanted to do various things, but it wasn’t clear what Bessemer was going to do or what Equitable was going to do because they both had good choices available to them. What they agreed to do was to just keep it going for another year or two. I believe they kept it going for two years. Even though Bessemer didn’t have to do anything, the structure of the deal that I’d done back there was that in order for them to recover on their outlying land, they basically had to control the middle because that’s where all the value was and that’s what controls the value of the things outside. It’s pretty logical. So Equitable one way or another had to step into that, so they wanted to step in gradually, and they came in on the basis that Bessemer stayed in and the general council of Bessemer, Dan Saxe who long-time, and still is, friend represented Bessemer on that, and so it had a hold composed on Equitable, because they were working out many problems, they had hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of these kinds of problems, so this was just one of them and they made a contract development deal. Doug created a company that made a contract development deal where they paid a fee for that activity. And then, uh―it was pretty clear that it was Equitible's land and so they made the deal in New York basically to hand over the deed, as it were. There wasn’t any controversy about it, the lawyers―the only
reason it was a legal foreclosure is that there was this cloud on the title. The lawyers said, Well, maybe there’s a claim, maybe not―or something like that. And so, the cleanest way to do it was to have a foreclosure, so there was no contest about it it was just a matter of you had to put the advertisement and the article in the paper.
PIET: And that just solved the technical problem.
COWAN: It was just a technical problem, because from the day, back in ’73 or ’[7]4, when that deal closed, the ultimate outcome if everything had going swimmingly and there hadn’t been a real estate depression―then we would’ve paid it off and everything wouldn’t have gone bad, but if it went down as it did, and as I thought it would, that it would, uh―you know, it worked out the way it did.
2B |00:05:31|
PIET: So actually, given the nature―if I understand what you’re saying given the nature of the real estate market during that period, you actually cut a pretty good deal with that company.
COWAN: Yeah. No question about that.
PIET: They got a lot more money than they practically could have
COWAN: History averted. Unless they were willing to go through the depression for it, of course
by then, it was absolutely clear what was happening. Frankly, by the time that loan was closed, Equitable was having second thoughts.
PIET: They might have wanted you to come back and make the offer again. (crosstalk, laughs)
COWAN: They could have stopped. There probably would have been some hard views at high levels had they withdrawn, because they had a legal commitment. But there are ways of getting out of that, so―yeah, that deal, on a business basis, was quite a good deal―but yet it doesn’t sound good, because it’s all cast in the negative. But it’s part of business (unintelligible)
PIET: That answers one question I’ve always had―when I got here about ’86, the development seemed to be fairly robust but then as I understood the basic, you know, like most new citizens somewhere in their late fifties, you know, we develop this concept of Peachtree City, and then I kind of wondered, Well, gee, I live off of Crosstown Road, of course except for Oak Grove [Elementary] School and some development, and one subdivision south of Crosstown Road, the parkway was dirt. I mean, there’s nothing up there and there’s really nothing much north of the golf course. Not―well, was past Golfview, I guess but there wasn’t much.
2B |00:07:04|
COWAN: This kind of
PIET: Well, what happened, between ’59 and somewhere in the early ’80s? I mean, it seemed
like things just kind of mucked around here and it wasn’t clear to me at what point things started to pick up again, but apparently it was some time in the late ’70s, early 80
COWAN: Yeah, and it was just a factor of when the real estate market and everything picks back up. What we went through in real estate was a full-blown depression by anybody’s reckoning during that mid ’70s period. In fact, the ’76 Tax [Reform] Act was the thing that triggered, in a lot of people’s eyes, it triggered the major impact because they changed what you could do with these tax breaks that were given on apartments and that unwound because Wall Street had just gotten billions of dollars into that, but our kind of real estate was already and you could see it coming I saw it literally written (unintelligible). In ’73, certainly in ’74 you saw it, and we were in the middle of it in ’75, ’76―you couldn’t sell anything. We had builders at the bank, we had over a hundred―loans on over a hundred houses. Now there, see, I was the lender. In the other case, I was the borrower. There, I was basically put in the position that the builder would just out and keep the grass cut and the place painted and just hold on, because we thought it would come back (crosstalk)
PIET: (crosstalk) What are you going to do with them now?
COWAN: The only guys we foreclosed out, and in fact sued, were the ones that just sort of abandoned the property, which―but we stuck with them most of those builders that stuck with us came through and it was just fine. The same is true in real estate, generally you know, you go through these periods. And if you’re weak in capital, you know, it could have taken a year.
2A |00:09:03|
PIET: Did you market aggressively, during your period, to the airlines? Because, you know, obviously when I got here, Eastern and Delta were major residents―I mean, you know, employees or was that just the nature, was that just a matter of geography.
COWAN: It’s a matter of geography. I put the main event on that was when we were building the golf course and opening that area. The kind of development that I’d started down here was not something except for lake sort of environment that appealed but putting that first-class golf course in. And it was right at that time, and that brought pilots, and it brought a lot of those people who sort of discovered it, and just word of mouth through the airline industry. It just goes around, they go “Hey, you ought to look at this.” We never advertised directly to it. We didn't put anything it in their magazines. We didn’t have email, you know, that kind of stuff so it wasn’t that. For us, it was just word of mouth. People see the (??)
PIET: Well, as a matter of fact, I heard about it in Europe.
COWAN: Is that right?
PIET: I was getting assigned here, and I was asking around, “Where’s the place to live?” We had friends in Stone Mountain. We had been up around Marietta―you know, visiting around the north side of Atlanta and north, and somebody said, “Jonesboro or Peachtree City,” and they were telling me if they had their choice, they’d make it Peachtree City. And I’m saying, “Now
where is Peachtree City?” So I mean, I’d never found much out now of course, the internet was a little immature at that point, (Cowan laughs) so I mean I couldn’t just go log in and find out. Now I imagine now I could find tons of information, but back then it was, “Okay, well, we’ll go by.”
COWAN: But word of mouth was the airline industry, and the tourist board. (Unintelligible)―so it worked in our benefit.
PIET: (crosstalk) So that solved some of your chicken and egg problem, too, didn’t it? Because you didn’t have to have an industry from here, you just had to have a viable road.
COWAN: That’s right. But it was the golf course and that atmosphere that made that attractive it wasn’t the lake, and I don’t know what the difference was, but it was a significant difference. And of course, the evolution into jet travel and the sheer growth of Delta and Eastern at that point. I never tracked it, but I’m sure you could track the employment growth there with our growth almost directly.
2B |00:11:34|
PIET: When you were talking originally to me, you know, when you set up the lake, you said you wanted to avoid the weekend home, kind of summer home kind of environment. You were looking for residential kind of set ups. But it seems to me that you got nice but modest homes built in there in the ’60s and ’70s. As a matter of fact, I had looked to purchase a house at the
very―over there on Loblolly, on the end of the road there back in ’86 it was a very small, modest, flat-roofed home. Doug Downs just sold it the one down at the dead end and he did major renovations to it after he purchased it about five, six years ago, but when I was looking at it in ’86, it was just a flat-roofed modest home and its biggest draw was, of course, that it was on the lake. But now you look down on that side those homes are becoming, you know, quite substantial.
COWAN: Well, they tore them down. A lot of people buy them just to tear (crosstalk)
PIET: (crosstalk) Or do like Doug Downs just did and just gut it and renovate the whole thing completely, add―
COWAN: Well, remember the way we did that, we didn’t have advertisement, but I made the price cheap, you know, those first lots on the lake―I think the Fultons paid probably not $2,000. And the thing is, the house―so it was a matter of for the right person, we sort of made the right, made the deal they couldn’t refuse. (crosstalk) But the strategy worked. We could have spent money on advertising trying to do something or spend it that way. I maintain we got a better quality of person by doing it this way.
2B |00:13:11|
PIET: Well, it’s still fairly modest. I mean, even in ’86, the asking price was only $117,000.
COWAN: Well, of course you can track what’s happened―(crosstalk)
PIET: (intelligible) It’s certainly not the case anymore.
COWAN: You can track that with housing, generally and particularly, anything that has lake or golf. You know, of course, the thought of these lots being a half a million dollars and that kind of thing “Who would do that?” is what you’d say.
PIET: You know, I think we’ve about covered it here. I’m just going to ask you one throw-at-you question. You’re not directly involved with the development anymore. You’re not directly involved with the government, directly―other than as a good citizen―but you are still a member of the community, well-known. Where do you see us going down the road?
COWAN: Well, I think we would go—I mean, the biggest things that impact us I think are external to here. And it involves inter-governmental getting along with the county, with Tyrone, with Coweta County, and then the broader region, and the state. My advice privately and publicly has been focus on that. Here there’s just not that much more development to be―to be done
But it’s the thing that can happen on your border or getting strangled on traffic. I am disappointed that we’re not participating in the bus program or the rail program when that comes, because to keep the quality of life, you just can’t have the kind of commutes and drives that we have at the cost we have and expect to have a community of people who (??) living.
PIET: Yeah. I’ve been doing it now since ’86 and its increasingly getting worse and I keep
hoping that the convolution of choke and my retirement date that I’ll beat it by at least a twelve-month period (laughs). You can see now the development along 74 is starting to pick up dramatically.
COWAN: And that could be absolutely, not fatal, but to our entire quality of life―I’ve forgotten what it is now, it’s eight seven traffic lights. I believe that’s the number
PIET: (crosstalk) It’s becoming burdensome.
COWAN: ―but the potential is twelve to thirteen. That is our only artery, and there’s not enough money in Atlanta in transportation. It's not a matter of “Well, we’ll build another road,” because they’re not going to build another one.
2B |00:15:54|
PIET: It seemed to me even if you had the money or politics for an alternative route, where you had no road today or just some minor little country road that you were going to put into four lanes, the politics of that would―might be even more difficult than the money.
COWAN: So I think that’s what I’m saying, that Tyrone really controls so much of the future of Peachtree City just by what it does with its share of that frontage, which is all of it. Or to see what’s happening in Fulton County. They won’t control that at all, that’ll be (unintelligible; crosstalk) up there.
PIET: (crosstalk) ―one franchise could join up
COWAN: I think you’d just―already with the addition of that truck stop up there, there might be a truck pulling out with that traffic light or two traffic lights within a hundred yards of each other.
PIET: Right, now we have a Wendy’s and a McDonalds going up across the street.
COWAN: You've added three―probably three-minutes each way average to everybody down here, or six minutes a day out of everybody’s life. That’s a lot.
PIET: (knocking) You pay a high price in time―most that live here in the first place.
COWAN: Most of that is unnecessary. (crosstalk; knocking)
2B |00:16:53|
PIET: I mean, at the best of times it seems to me my commute was thirty-five minutes one way, now it’s up to forty-five minutes―and there’s no way around that. (knocking) I mean, I can leave much earlier if I chose to and go to work a little earlier―an hour earlier if I chose to―but practically speaking, it’s only a matter of minutes. There’s no significant advantage.
COWAN: There aren’t many alternates to that stretch right there.
PIET: We’ve been fortunate in that 85 South hasn’t seemed to have the propensity for accidents that major arteries on the north side seem to have, but when it’s clogged, it’s pretty pointless. You don’t have too many alternatives.
COWAN: I think you can—because we just don’t have it that often—but when you come out here and get right up to Fairburn going that way, it’s usually pretty clear. But I think those are our threats, and I think if we—they will get this HOV access down, at least to 74 (unintelligible) right into Newnan, but if we had the Xpress bus— Xpress bus isn’t much without HOV. When you have full HOV with its own entrance and exit point, which is the goal, by then you’ve got— you know, it’s pretty clear what (??)
2B |00:18:14|
PIET: Well, again, thanks.
COWAN: Alright, I think that’s good.
PIET: We’ve got a lot of names of other folks, other than the obvious ones that you suggested, but you know, if you think of anybody else, we’ve got all the old mayors, and you’ve given us some other names, and some old hands in town like Don Smith and a few others. But I would ask you, just on the behalf of the historical committee, if you think of anybody else that might not be
obvious to us, you might want to talk to them.
COWAN: Yeah. Now, what about the I think it would be useful to take this thing that I’ve got, this timeline work and―maybe some of this transcription, we could find a way of adding that―weaving that in.
PIET: I think we could.
COWAN: But I really think to get that out to some people, for example, Francis Meaders, and people like that would work to take that as what they worked from. I think they’d get a lot of additional work done without you just― The oral part―that’s one at a time, very time consuming. Weeks go by and that sort of thing, but
PIET: That’s a good idea.
COWAN: I think you’d get it down. Everybody won’t do that, but Francis would. My guess is Fred would spend a lot of time with it.
PIET: Fred probably hasn’t gone to the effort you have to track that, but I suspect he could add to it. (crosstalk)
COWAN: Well, you know the way it’s laid out because it comes from the newspapers so if Fred saw that, then he’d dictate it, you know, "What was I thinking then?” That's the purpose of
it―to separate what the newspapers said from what the person said. Then they can add on, and we’d build something. You’d build a database that I think anybody could go through and pull off something and go home.
PIET: I think it would be useful because as these have been fascinating―this interview has been fascinating for me, and I imagine by the time I’m done with all the mayors, it’s really going to be neat. But again, tracking it all and making some sense of it it might be worthwhile. I hadn’t really thought through that. My goal has been to get organized enough so that we could facilitate getting all of the mayors interviewed as a first cut that was our charge to begin with make sure we got all the mayors first, and then branch out from there to some of the more obvious folks that we need to be able to track down.
COWAN: I do think it helps if you have a timeline, even when you interview, (crosstalk) because like―we get stuck, Well, I don’t remember (unintelligible)―it’s got it right there.
PIET: What I’ll do is―I hadn’t really followed through that, but what I’ll do is before I interview the next guy, I’ll take your timeline and this and we’ll kind of clean up yours and probably (crosstalk) give you a copy and then tie―see if we can’t tie those―(crosstalk)
COWAN: What you can do is just take―you can put it on the computer right while you’re talking to somebody and have it on your screen or your laptop. You just search for it, you know―Albert Pollard―put that name in and you can find it like that. But then it keeps the interview going.
PIET: Right.
COWAN: Alright.
PIET: Thank you, sir.
COWAN: Thank you. Good luck.
PIET: Alright.
2B |00:21:18| (cassette tape 2, side 2 ends)