The History of Atlanta (Part 2): Other People

The Braves' abandonment of the city for the suburbs got me interested in the impact of the team on our city, so I've been reading.  One of the things I've read is a fascinating essay from Georgia State University about the changes in the neighborhoods surrounding the stadiums (Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium and Turner Field).  This image is from that essay:

People used to live there, but the city forced them out not only to build two stadiums but before that to build expressways to connect the city with the suburbs.  In those days there was no requirement that "urban renewal" projects make any provision for the people who are displaced, so no one knows what happened to those people.  Larry Keating's book, Atlanta:  Race, Class, and Urban Expansion, details the pattern over decades of redevelopment plans that get rid of housing and neighborhoods where poor people live -- especially poor black people -- without (for most of the period) any effort to provide a place for them to go.  Neither the white businessmen who used to directly led the city or the black political class that replaced them paid any attention to this until the Federal government eventually forced them to, and even then efforts were half-hearted and promises were rarely kept.

It wasn't just the interests of the poor, mostly African-American, citizens of Atlanta whose interests were ignored.  The city also had a terrible track record of supporting the interests of middle-class white residents, which its support for Georgia Department of Transportation plans to turn intown neighborhoods into even more expressways so all the people who moved out of the city during desegregation could come back every day to go to work.

The Washington-Rawson neighborhood was destroyed in an early round of urban renewal, and became Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.  With little regard for the neighborhood, Turner Field was built just south of the older stadium and has adversely impacted Summerhill, Peoplestown, and Mechanicsville.  Now Mayor Reed is promising "one of the largest developments for middle-class people that the city has ever had” will replace Turner Field.

Let's just say, for purposes of discussion, that that actually happens.  What happens to the people who've lived in the area, all these years, putting up with empty lots that fill up with cars on game day and traffic and the asphalt sea that is Turner Field and no supermarket?  Just as the city's leadership -- both elected and unelected -- have felt free to make bad decisions about other people's money, they have not shown more regard for other people's homes and lives.

We'll see if this time it's different.

The History of Atlanta (Part 1): Other People's Money

On November 11, the Atlanta Braves announced that they were leaving Atlanta and moving to Cobb County.  Although I'm not a big basefall fan and have only been to Turner Field a couple of times, I couldn't believe our team -- our team! -- would abandon the city for the MARTA-refusing, car-dependent suburbs.  Baseball is an urban game.  It was just wrong.  And this lame excuse that they were moving to the I-75/I-285 area in part because of traffic?

I'm still angry but now I'm angry at others in addition to Liberty Media, the owner of the Cobb County Braves.  Soon after the announcement, there was a wonderful piece from Georgia State posted on line that detailed the impact of the stadiums -- not just Turner Field, but also Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, that preceded it -- on the neighborhood.  There were several other sources referenced -- an excellent article by Rebecca Burns that appeared in Atlanta Magazine last summer, and several books.  Since then I've been reading.  One of the books, Kevin Kruse's White Flight:  Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, I've now read most of, but I have to admit that I haven't quite finished it because it's just too depressing.  The other one is Larry Keating's Atlanta:  Race, Class, and Urban Expansion, which I finished yesterday.  It was pretty depressing too.

It's very striking, especially in Keating's book, how recurrent is the theme in recent Atlanta history of the power structure of wealthy white businessman and the black political class making decisions that didn't make fiscal sense.  Professional sports teams are not financial winners for cities, and the city has paid dearly to have the Braves here.  MARTA was not projected at the time it was built to have much ridership, but estimates were made based on anticipated high-density development around transit stations -- even though land use policy continued to allow low-density development in those areas.  But city leaders thought "real cities" had train systems, so Atlanta had to have one.  There was the Underground Atlanta debacle.  There was a continued disregard for thoughtful planning with placement of the civic center, multiple stadiums, and Centennial Olympic Park and public investment in the name of economic development in things which ended up not being good investments at all, and by people who should have known better.

Towards the end of the book, Keating wrote:

An obsession with image, however, does not fully explain why a business-led coalition would have repeatedly pursued redevelopment projects that were ineffective in terms of economic development.  A desire to enhance Atlanta's prestige explains why the city's governing elite has found glamourous, high-profile projects so appealing, but it does not explain why the governing elite has consistently ignored practical realities.  Oddly, the fundamental reason for this impracticality is that narrowly defined private interests have viewed public investment differently from private investment.  The Atlanta business powers have been willing to pursue projects that were poorly conceived from an economic standpoint because these projects either have been paid for directly with taxpayer money or have been indirectly subsidized.  City leaders have not felt that a satisfactory return on public investment should guide their actions, as would be the case with private investment.  In undertaking expensive redevelopment projects, they have not felt fiscally constrained, and as a consequence have been irresponsible guardians of the public purse.

Going back to what started this -- the Braves' move to Cobb County, to a taxpayer-subsidized stadium -- good luck with this, Cobb County.  I hope it works out better for you than it did for us.

Hidden in Plain Sight

I probably was in middle school when I read the story; it was about a boy who lived in a space inside of a bridge.  Looking back on it now, as an adult, the premise was frightening, and I don't know why it was in a middle school anthology -- a boy without caretakers or a home, living alone in a city -- but I probably first learned, reading it as a child in a small town in Kansas, that in cities there was a world that was invisible, underground or in spaces we didn't even know were there.  I am still fascinated by the stories of what's in the tunnels under Paris or London or New York City, abandoned metro stations, the places that urban explorers surreptitiously go.

But you don't have to go underground to find places you didn't know were there to explore in cities, and urban exploration doesn't have to mean creeping into abandoned buildings or utility tunnels.  There are other places where streets don't go that are empty spots on maps, and I wonder about them too.  Often these places are private property, and exploring them risks a trespass charge.  But there are the spaces under elevated highways, the cleared areas under major power lines, and sewer easements along creeks that are not necessarily accessible and sometimes not even visible from the street or sidewalk.  We all know about the accessibility that streets and sidewalks provide, but what if these invisible places got stitched together into a network?  Where could a pedestrian go?

When the Lindbergh-LaVista Corridor Coalition worked with the Georgia Conservancy on development of a plan for their community a few years ago, one of the themes identified was a desire by the neighborhood to be more connected, and not just by streets.  There's a lot in the report about improving the pedestrian environment and access to the streets by bicycles, but the authors also talk about how trails could help bring the neighborhood together.  The North Fork and the South Fork of Peachtree Creek converge there, and there is green space, some flood plain, and access via sewer easement along the creeks.

I don't know when exactly the South Fork Conservancy got started; by the time I first learned about them, they were a well-established organization, working with Park Pride on a visioning exercise for the South Fork of Peachtree Creek.  This is when I first learned about the work the Conservancy was doing to develop trails along the creek.  Since then, they've put an enormous effort into Dekalb County's new park in the Zonolite area, near us, but they've also been working with the Lindbergh-LaVista group, and now there's something to show for it.

Last Saturday two Board Members of the South Fork Conservancy led a small group on new trails in Lindbergh-Lavista.  At the end of Armand Road we walked past the private property sign (we have permission, we were assured) and onto trail that went along the sewer easement on the north side of the South Fork.

Walking these trails, there's a sense of wonder.  You know you're in the city, not far away from streets we drive on all the time, but you've never been here before and you didn't even know it was here.  But it is, and there's the creek, and even though you can hear the roar of traffic it's like you're in a hidden place that doesn't have anything to do with cars and traffic.    

The trail extends under I-85 to the confluence of the South Fork and the North Fork of Peachtree Creek.  I always wonder about the places under interstates so it was a treat to get to walk through the space.  This one is better suited for art exhibit space than, say, a pop-up restaurant.

Under the expressway there was lots of unsanctioned art work.

On the other side of I-85, it was a short walk to the point where the South Fork (on the left, in the photo below) converges with the North Fork (on the right) to form Peachtree Creek, which at the horizon of this photo is heading toward Piedmont Road.

At this point, the trail currently ends; another group is planning trails along the North Fork, and there is not yet a bridge to cross the North Fork.  So we walked back and entered the trails along the North Fork from Lindbergh.

We climbed over the guardrail to the trail that went along the North Fork.  I drive by here all the time and I had no idea there were trails here.  They aren't long, though, ending back at I-85, where large rocks make continuing under the expressway currently hazardous.

More is planned -- the Department of Transportation is building some trails on the other side of Lindbergh, and there's a planned connection somehow with the Beltline.  I've always been a little spatially challenged but it's hard to imagine where these spaces are if your view is constrained by what you've seen from the street in a car.  

One of the new DOT trails is supposed to be open in early 2014.  I don't quite understand where they are and where they go, but when it's open I'll walk it and see more of the city that I've never seen before, parts that are hidden in plain sight.