The Heart of the Community

At the heart of University Home's community was its “recreation hall” and auditorium named Roosevelt Hall, possibly in honor of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She had taken especial interest in University Homes from its earliest days and had corresponded on several occasions and met with Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune and Mrs. John Hope (Lugenia Burns Hope) to discuss the vital need for a community center and auditorium. In 1936, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote personally to Secretary Harold Ickes appealing on behalf of these women for the auditorium, but the response was if the PWA were to build the community house, it would be obliged to pass the costs to its tenants in the form of increased rents. The plan was decided too burdensome. Nevertheless, an administrative building in which the recreational hall resided was located on Roach Street from the time University Homes was completed in 1937. Eleanor Roosevelt was informed that Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune had approved a social and recreational program for tenants which was added to the operating budget as early as October of 1936.

Photographs show WERD sometimes broadcasted from the stage at Roosevelt Hall. WERD’s station owner was Atlanta Housing’s first African-American Board Commissioner, Jesse B. Blayton, Sr. He was also the first black radio station owner and operator in the United States. WERD was a pioneer in radio programming "Negro appeal" music, playing early versions of rhythm and blues music that could be found nowhere else on the air. WERD diverged from other local radio stations in the early 1950s by publicizing the emerging civil rights movement.

Contemporary news clippings document that all sorts of community activities took place there from banquets, dances, band concerts, art exhibitions, pageants, plays performed by the children’s theatre, guest speakers, meetings of the Young Men’s Social Club, the Women’s Club, the Scout troop and Girl’s Reserves, and Tenant Association meetings. The earliest photographic evidence of the stage at Roosevelt dates in the early 1940s, though it is possible the stage was always part of the recreation hall or added in 1938 when news clippings suggest a renovation of the recreation hall took place. In 1938, a newspaper account describes the auditorium as: “very modern and has a capacity of fifteen hundred.” (Atlanta Daily World, Oct 28, 1938).