Rambo Estates Chose Road Less Traveled

As Labor Day weekend approached, Bruce Hamilton and Holly Walquist made plans to get out of town to celebrate their wedding anniversary.

Then, bad news arrived with a thud.

News reports confirmed that Marietta city officials were getting serious about widening Whitlock Avenue just west of the Square, or coming up with alternative ways to move traffic through the area. The options included building a new road that would slice through the Rambo Estates neighborhood where Hamilton and Walquist lived.

Happy anniversary, folks.

“All of a sudden you hear about a road,” Walquist said. “People aren’t sure–is it going to take my house? What’s the plan?  Most people didn’t really know about it because it had [become public] that week before Labor Day.”

There was fear in the neighborhood that the City Council might vote quickly.

“We had no idea,’ Walquist said. “All of a sudden you see in the paper that there is a possibility of road changes in a community. Unfortunately, the worst in your mind goes off. You think, oh, my goodness, can they really do this?”

They could but they didn’t, thanks to the quick and powerful protests of Walquist, Hamilton and their neighbors eight years ago.

They stopped something they believed would have torn them apart. Instead, in many ways, it brought them together.

“It was a pretty incredible event to see all the neighbors coming together,” Walquist remembers now about the 2003 battle. “I mean, we had lived here for several years and knew lots of people but not half of the people that showed up [to fight the road.]

“Since then we’ve really gotten to know our neighbors so well. While it was something negative that we all came together for it ended up being really positive.”

Hamilton came to metro Atlanta from Ohio; Walquist from Michigan. They met at work and got married in 1991–an outdoor wedding at the home they still live in on North Hillcrest Drive. They thought they had moved into Whitlock Heights, but it turned out that North Hillcrest is the dividing line between that large neighborhood and Rambo Estates, a much smaller area bordered by Whitlock Avenue on the north, Hillcrest on the south, Whitlock Drive on the west and the Marietta City Club golf course on the east.

One side of North Hillcrest is in Whitlock Heights, the other in Rambo Estates.

“We call it the poor side of Whitlock Heights,” neighbor Carolyn Debavadi said with a laugh.

“We loved the trees, loved the property, so we landed here,” said Hamilton. “When we looked at this house and walked into the backyard–I remember this–a squirrel came down a branch and started scolding us, and we were like, he says welcome home.”

The couple now works out of the home with their business Holly Enterprises.  He is a video producer, she is a graphic designer.

Public debate about widening Whitlock Avenue began in the mid-1990s. In 1996, led by City Councilman Johnny Sinclair, those opposed to any road changes won the day.

Rumors about widening Whitlock were heard for years after, “but 2003 was when [the plan for road changes] really came to fruition,” Walquist said. “There was actually a plan put together by Welker & Associates which included options of how to widen the road or get traffic through that stretch quicker.”

One option to widening Whitlock was to build a new road starting at the corner of Whitlock and Kirkpatrick Drive (west of Rambo Estates) that would have cut through the neighborhood to Reynolds Street, which runs west from Rambo Estates and connects to Powder Springs Road and South Marietta Parkway.

The other option would have started the new road at Whitlock Drive.

“That was the one that was most seriously considered,” Walquist said. “It would have taken, I believe, 21 houses.”

One of those would have been two doors down from her home. “We would be listening to traffic right now if it had happened.”

So anniversary plans are canceled.

“At that point we didn’t know much about politics but we knew that sometimes with politics you can blink your eyes and things have changed. You have to mobilize if it’s something you’re passionate about.”

Walquist and Hamilton found themselves as the leaders of the anti-road movement.

“We had a meeting [Sunday of Labor Day weekend] in the house where people were flowing out the doors, front and back,” Hamilton said. “We had like 80 people in this house.”

A smaller group went to the City Council meeting the following week and said, as Walquist remembers, “basically, please don’t do this.”

“We told council members, ‘We’re a neighborhood. We don’t want our neighborhood destroyed. Maybe it’s not important to somebody on the other side of Marietta, but it’s very important to us.’ ”

The public debated raged for weeks.

“We had non-stop visitors at out house,” Hamilton said. “People would just come knocking at the door for no other purpose but to talk. They just wanted to come in and sit down and say, ‘This is horrible.’ ”

Debavadi, who has lived in Rambo Estates since 1972, remembered it as the first time the neighborhood had come together.

“Holly and Bruce did that,” said Debavadi, who moved to Cobb from Orlando when her husband took a contract job as an engineer at Lockheed. 

“Marietta was trying to be a family place,” she said. “Here they were, planning to tear down houses–family-owned houses. I thought it was stupid.”

When it came time to vote, the council decided to do nothing.

“They dropped it,” said Hamilton, “because we packed city hall.”

“I believe they had to limit the amount of people that could come into City Council chambers,” Walquist added.

This was, she said, her first step into any sort of Marietta politics.

“I’ve always been an environmentalist, always been fighting for causes but on a grander scale for larger organizations.”

In 2002, Hamilton and Walquist were founders of Marietta Tree Keepers, a nonprofit, volunteer group that plants and preserves trees in the city. Walquist is now chairperson of the group.

The road fight taught Walquist the need for “staying alert, knowing what’s happening, knowing what could happen around the corner.”  In 2005, when Councilman Sinclair decided not to run for reelection, he asked Walquist to run and she did.  And she won.

“After [the road fight] the neighborhood started to ask Holly whenever they had a question, so she was doing the job anyway,” Hamilton said.

Sinclair won the seat back in 2009, and when asked if she had any interest in running for public office again Walquist said: “Right now I’m enjoying getting back to work.  But never say never. I didn’t really think about getting into politics in the first place. It just kind of fell in my lap.”