Summer 2020: Our best streetscape photos from Broad Street in Rome

Featuring the 25 best summer streetscape photos from a July 2020 visit to Broad Street in Rome, Georgia

Along with Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Huntsville, Alabama, Rome is one of the three cities that will be featured most often on this new website. See Historic downtown Rome: A fine Southern outing destination, the first in a series focused on the many historic-places found there.

I took over 180 pictures in Rome during the summer of 2020, and I couldn’t wait to share the ones from Broad Street some of which show the crepe myrtles and potted plants in full bloom.

I got hooked on historic downtowns only a few years ago. The colorful downtown Rome is the place where it happened. I had bypassed places like this for many decades. Now, enjoying a sidewalk hike to get a good look at the old downtowns in small cities, most of which were built or rebuilt after the Civil War, is one of my favorite things to do.

Rome’s actually more of a mid-sized city. With a population of about 36,800 plus the part-time residents of two small universities, it has more than twice the population of the small city where I was born, and has about six times more folks residing there than where I currently reside. The grand mixture of historic downtown commercial buildings certainly rivals those found in much larger cities.

Broad Street is the main boulevard of the historic part of the downtown. The Oostanaula River, the Etowah River and the Coosa River converge near the east end of the old commercial strip, and there are historic churches and government buildings — including the c. 1892 Floyd County Courthouse — within walking distance.

Rome has 20 listings with the National Register of Historic Places. Those include seven districts with multiple properties. During my first summer 2020 visit, I got a good look at two of them: the Rome Clock Tower, and the c. 1892 Floyd County Courthouse. I also saw much of the Between the Rivers Historic District which includes the commercial buildings of Broad Street shown on this page.