Blue=Black, Red=White.

Sadly, I don't think there's enough uncertainty to consider it a guess.

You can thank Robert Moses for that.

Still, do you see how many trees there are? That place must've still looked nice and was certainly transformable into a really nice place without unreasonable effort.

Now, it's basically a wasteland.

No, the 1950s version (actually more like 1900s; those houses were already decades old at the time they were photographed) was good. It was a traditional street grid with small blocks, and there were streetcars going all over the place. Sure it was mostly single-family (probably with more than a few duplexes sprinkled in), but it had great bones for densifying later when demand justified it.

I live only a few miles from the area pictured, in a neighborhood with the same development pattern. Even though it's been damaged by the removal of the old streetcars and having zoning superimposed upon it after the fact (which causes problems by mandating things like too-large setbacks and minimum parking requirements, as well as outlawing corner stores within residential areas), it's still mostly fine.

A little lane of asphalt please,

More pollution if I freeze,

Running over children these,

A fresh bouquet of cancers.

(Parody of Glass of Water)

And in Cities Skyline you can just pause time, delete and fix a bunch of shit, and continue. Instant and nobody complains that you just bulldozed their house.

I think highways would look nicer if real city planners had the ability to redesign everything vs add on pieces over time.

Engineer answer: being a stack interchange, it's actually easier to navigate than a cloverleaf because there's only one exit in each direction instead of separate "A" and "B" exits with an entrance ramp and weaving in between. The complexity in this case simply comes from the fact that it's superimposed on top of what used to be a street grid, so they added a bunch of exits to local streets.

Big-picture answer: the desire to put freeways there in the first place is the product of mental illness.

Just follow the arrows

Any block is a swastika block if you ignore the right set of roads.

But that's not the block's fault ;)

Sadly, that’s the intersection of I-75/85 and I-20, right in the middle of downtown ATL. Here’s a more recent picture showing some more context.

Also, here’s an article talking about the history of I-20 being built through Atlanta: https://smartgrowthamerica.org/program/divided-by-design/atlanta-ga/

As another said, that's not spaghetti junction (Tom Moreland interchange), but frankly people get pretty fast and loose with how much of the surrounding area they'll call 'Atlanta' anyway. The actual city of Atlanta proper is much smaller than most people would think by just looking at a satellite photo, and the distinction between the many cities usually doesn't matter much unless you live there.

when people say Atlanta to people that don't live in the surrounding area they really mean the greater metro Atlanta area.