ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, July 25, 1996 TAG: 9607250010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ATLANTA
TYPE: ESSAY
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
This city needs a soul.
Olympics aside, Atlanta is big, booming - and boring. Its most talked about tourist attractions are its strip joints.
The metropolitan area is by turns bleak and bland - a seemingly endless sprawl of chain stores and restaurants, high-rise office buildings and tidy suburbs around a pocket of despair.
To understand Atlanta, begin by understanding that what people call "Atlanta" is not the city at all.
The core city is 67 percent black, 26 percent impoverished. It is, as a recent Fortune magazine article expressed it "one of the poorest, most crime-ridden, least educated, worst housed municipalities in the U.S."
Metropolitan Atlanta, on the other hand, is wildly prosperous, and wildly growing. It is vast, sprawling, green and often lovely - Atlanta has been called a forest in search of a city. It flows across 20 Georgia counties.
Metropolitan Atlanta is a cloud, a weed, a mushroom. It grows and grows, from 1 million people in 1960 to 3 million-plus today - all but 400,000 of whom live outside the city limits. It swallows a population the size of Roanoke's every year.
But for all that, there's something missing.
One leaves the leafy suburbs for downtown Atlanta seeking something that isn't there. Some sign of life beyond the downtown McDonald's, the Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Cafe.
Where is the cornucopia of ethnic restaurants, the curbside vendors? The hawkers, the street musicians? The fruit stands? The bawling newsboys with their stacks of morning papers?
The city?
If Atlanta is truly great - "World Class!" one newspaper headline trumpeted when the city won the Olympics - why did it, in the week before the crowds arrived, feel so dead?
Ask an Atlantan what is great about this city and you hear about the weather, the trees - the "can-do" spirit.
"Great climate," said Ray Gowen, owner of the Buckhead News Center. Gowen, 42, is a lifelong resident of the city. "There is no better, no more beautiful place in the world in the spring and fall. ... The city has incredible trees."
Jim Babcock, a media relations specialist for the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, tallies up the positives as he sees them:
"We've got the best art museum in the South. We've got a pretty good theater community. We've got a great symphony. We've had a legacy of dreamers, like Dr. King, and the folks who started Coca-Cola, and Billy Payne."
"It's not Barcelona," Babcock conceded. "We haven't had 2,000 years of culture. It's not New York. That's probably good and bad. ... It's the New South. It's a multicultural city that has been able to set impossibly high goals, and reached those goals."
Atlantans looking to brag about their city can point to a history of relatively good relations between blacks and whites.
They can point to its Southern charm - Atlantans, in the oft-repeated phrase of a former mayor, may be "too busy to hate," but they never seem too busy to chat.
There are all those trees. Babcock said a recent survey found that Atlanta has more green space than any other metropolis in America.
Consequently Atlanta, more than many cities, seems to offer breathing room. "It is a manageable city," said Gowen, of the Buckhead News Center. "It's not overwhelming."
And there is Atlanta's undeniable grit. This city survived Sherman, after all. It survived Lester Maddox.
It survived the '60s without a major race riot, despite - or perhaps because of - the presence of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King. King's birthplace, run by the U.S. Park Service, draws many thousands of visitors a year.
Atlanta has always strived to put business interests first. Thus, while the rest of the South was stewing in its own bile in the bitter days after the Civil War, Atlanta was busy rebuilding its train tracks and inviting the carpetbaggers to lunch.
The city too busy to hate even invited back ex-Union general and fire bug William Tecumseh Sherman before he died. Sherman told a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution that burning the city was essential to end the war - but he knew it would come back.
And come back it has. During the Olympics, Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport is expected to be the busiest in the country - a distinction that seems right for a city founded as a transportation hub. (Atlanta was founded at a railroad crossroads in the 1830s.)
Meanwhile, metropolitan Atlanta led the nation in job growth in 1992, '93, '94 and '95.
It led the nation in new home permits for the same period.
Fortune magazine called it the nation's second best market for business in 1995 - behind only the San Francisco Bay area. Meanwhile, the Olympics are expected to generate some $5 billion in economic impact, much of which is clearly apparent in new construction.
None of this is in dispute.
But none of it, in and of itself, makes Atlanta memorable.
This is the city of Coca-Cola and Jane Fonda, of CNN, Elton John, the Atlanta Braves. Of Ted Turner and Martin Luther King.
But is it great?
World-class great?
Most cities, and surely great ones, have their hot spots, places where creative energy gathers and the pulse speeds up - where life throbs. Dublin has its Temple Bar, its O'Connell Street. Paris its Latin Quarter and Montmartre. New York has New York.
As for Hot 'Lanta - well, to this recent visitor, it just seemed hot.
The joke about Atlanta goes like this: It's a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit there.
In fact, Atlanta has its tourist pleasers. Number one is the Martin Luther King site, including his birthplace and Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Then there are the ritzy shopping malls. The zoo. The history museum and the Cyclorama - a wrap-around, 9,334-pound oil painting depicting the Battle of Atlanta.
It has Margaret Mitchell's home - which burned a few years ago and was nearly rebuilt when vandals broke into it and burned it all over again. Visitors looking for other vestiges of "Gone With The Wind" have their work cut out for them, however. "Tara" was, of course, a fiction - and Atlanta has very few antebellum buildings, the Chamber's Babcock said.
For that matter, anyone looking for a Georgia peach tree in Atlanta can forget it. The city has more than 50 streets with "peach" somewhere in the title, said Babcock - and, so far as he knows, not a tree to back it up.
"They need lots of sunlight, lots of rich soil and lots of room" - qualities hard to find in urban areas, the chamber official said.
Atlanta does have the High Museum of Art (on Peachtree Street) - and anyone who can get there before Sept. 29 will be treated to the blockbuster show assembled for the Olympics. "Rings - Five Passions in World Art," includes more than 100 works dating back three millennia. Included are such world-renowned pieces as French sculptor Auguste Rodin's "The Kiss" and Norwegian Edvard's Munch's recently stolen and then recovered "The Scream." (Admission is a more-than-world-class 11 bucks).
And then there is "The World of Coca-Cola" - a three-story confection complete with a miniature bottling plant, a working soda fountain-plus-jerk, coke machines and lots and lots of old Coca-Cola ads in several languages. Visitors also are invited to shop till they drop in the souvenir shop, which offers everything from Christmas tree ornaments to yo-yos - all with the Coca-Cola logo.
For those who need a shot of reality after all the fizz, the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church serves up a weekly free lunch to the city's destitute right across the street. Thus every Saturday morning one can walk out the door of the museum and see a fair number of the city's 11,300 homeless lined up on a nearby sidewalk - a tableau that must make civic boosters in these image-conscious weeks grind their teeth.
Not that the diners care very much.
"F--- the Olympics," said a man who called himself Orlando, when asked for his opinion on the biggest story in town. "If you don't got money, it ain't worth nothing."
From The World of Coca-Cola it is a short walk to the Five Points subway stop, from where you may take a train to a neighborhood of boarded-up storefronts, grim looking apartment buildings and shotgun homes. From there, a five-minute walk takes you to the formerly middle-class black neighborhood called "Sweet Auburn" - and the birthplace of civil-rights pioneer and Nobel prize-winner Martin Luther King.
King, shot to death in Memphis in 1968, is entombed nearby, in a gleaming white sepulcher in the middle of a wishing pool.
His epitaph: "Free at last, free at last. Great God Almighty, I'm free at last."
Down Auburn Street a little ways, Ruth Scott Simmons - Spellman College, class of '37 - chatted in the office of the Atlanta Daily World, the black-run newspaper founded by her family.
She, for one, believes the Olympics is the best thing that's ever happened to downtown Atlanta.
"When we had desegregation, the whites had `white flight,''' - moving out of the city to avoid the integrated schools, she said. "When white people moved out, it just kind of killed the heart of downtown Atlanta."
She spoke of recent efforts to make over some downtown buildings into high-priced apartments and condominiums, in an effort to bring them back.
"I think the attitude toward so-called desegregation has changed," she said. "When they convert these buildings, it's going to be quite a boom.''
Perhaps. Meanwhile, visitors to Atlanta can enjoy the shopping malls, the celebrated leave-nothing-to-the-imagination strip joints (said to be very popular with convention-goers). Enjoy a Coca-Cola.
And wish for something more.
LENGTH: Long : 187 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. 1. Atlanta's skylineby CNBis ever-expanding, but the real growth is in the outlying
metropolitan area, which consumes approximately 100,000 more people
each year. 2. "The World of Coca-Cola" - a museum dedicated to the
product known around the world - includes a miniature
bottling plant and an exhaustive souvenir shop. color. 3. File/1978.
Anyone
looking for a connection to "Gone With the Wind" in Atlanta will be
disappointed. Margaret Mitchell's home burned down, as did Lowe's
Grand
Theatre (above), where the motion picture made its world premiere in
1939.