The Making of Modern Suburban Atlanta; or, The Great Dunwoody Tennis Boom of 1991

Now we all know how everyone left the city (on roads, in their cars) but to where did they go? That’s what episode three of The Making of Modern Atlanta is all about.“The development of suburbs and exurbs raise many thorny issues for the making of modern Atlanta.”

The History Twins meet us by Arabia Mountain in DeKalb County. I love when they both go casual at the same time.They are hanging out in the driveway of their producer’s log cabin in the forest. “He seems to think that this log cabin helps him maintain his ties with his Appalachian roots,” jokes Dr. White. “In the 1990s, even log cabins come with adjustable-rate mortgages,” adds Dr. Crimmins later.
This is all a big joke to them. A BIG HILARIOUS JOKE.

White then tries to explain where all the interstates are. He calls I-285 “the archetypal Main Street of today’s urban America.” Ladies and gentlemen, behold the Tom Moreland Interchange, crudely nicknamed “spaghetti junction” after an ethnic dish. You’ll meet the man behind the traffic jam soon enough in this episode.He takes us on a terrifying drive through this “between” place.
Does anyone else feel like they’ve just been kidnapped?

After that stressful trip on the interstate, let’s just be casual at a linear park. What’s this? No big deal! Just a guy with his hand on his hip, talking about Druid Hills and other planned suburbs!They quote Warren Manning, landscape architect and Frederick Law Olmsted mentee: “Atlanta now begins to seriously feel the pangs of overcrowding, and to realize that something needs to be done. The solution requires the appreciation of and the need of adequate access to the landscape beauty of the region that the automobile now makes readily accessible to the city for homes and for vacation periods. Atlanta, tomorrow a city of a million, will by the year 2000 extend more than 15 miles out – far enough out on the spokes of transportation ways to permit radial roads to again pass off from secondary centers into the country. They will lead to industries and homes on the city’s south side, and to magnificent estates on the north – a piedmont picturesque.” (1922)

Innovative! And transportation planning in the 21st century still uses the same little calculations Manning ran to arrive at his radius distance. But seriously, this spokes concept is a great idea for the Atlanta regional roundtable to consider funding. Fifteen miles of radial roads out of Five Points so we can all get to our log cabins and vacation homes in Lithonia and Pine Lake.

The first ring of suburbs began, but guess who wasn’t invited to invest in and live amongst those tasteful lawns and well-apportioned Georgian and neoclassical manors? African Americans.  The color line issue again. And so the birth of the black suburbs, starting along Ashby Street.Sociologist Dr. Larry Earvin returns to discuss the westward and southern expansion of Atlanta’s black community. He briefly alludes to Mayor Allen’s Peyton Road barriers but TMOMA spends no more time highlighting this incident, which I think is a pretty major oversight when talking about “color lines” and how the city adjusted to the growing affluence and mobility of its African-American residents. So read more about it yourself here, here, and here.

The Wits’ End Players perform “Don’t Monkey with Peachtree.” The audience LOVES it.Then Dr. Crimmins makes some awesome faces talking about suburban shopping.Two things:

1. At the time of his appearance in the parking lot of Briarcliff Plaza, the Plaza Thatre was playing La Femme Nikita for $2.50, according to the marquee.
2. He pronounces Ponce de Leon weirdly. Something off about the “Leon” – like LEEÜNE in one quick syllable.

Lenox Square, Phipps Plaza, the Federal Aid Highway Act, more Leon (pronounced LEEÜNE) Eplan talking, George Goodwin talking. The three interstates are joined Dowtown. Leon Eplan talking more about interstates pulling people out of the center city into the suburbs, especially in the northside – “where lies our ultimate suburb, Dunwoody.”(Side conversation: What is considered “our ultimate suburb” in 2011?)

A humorous monologue by a “Mrs. Ashford Dunwoody” exaggerates the blue-blooded suburban breed.
But then we meet some of The Real Housewives of Dunwoody Village.“I’m aware of the tennis jokes and all that…the one about how a Dunwoody wife goes to a funeral? In a black tennis outfit. I really don’t like those jokes. I really think people have a misconception of this area.”

“I am a tennis player but I don’t really play. I don’t like that sort of competitive tennis all the time…and women sitting around. I don’t like that. I’ve done that. I did that in New Hampshire when the tennis boom was on.”

“We like the look of the Williamsburg look here in the middle of Dunwoody Village, but I guess since I’m a child of the ’70s it bothers me that everything would have to be exactly the same. When Turtle’s built a new building they had a purple awning on it and some of the Dunwoody people are fighting it, and I just think there’s so many more important things to fight about than a purple awning to wreck the Williamsburg look. I just say relax about it.”

The tennis jokes and awning panic may be over soon enough, ladies!

“I kind of think that Dunwoody housewife is a vanishing breed at this point, too, because most most women, most households need a second income.”

As Atlanta became “The City Without Limits,” special geographic boundaries had to be created by its residents like “inside the perimeter” and “outside the perimeter.” I guess there were no acronyms for this yet in 1991.

Outside the perimeter are “the new exurbs.” “The new exurbs exist within themselves alone.” Dana White takes us on a trippy and really visually metaphorical tour of Gwinnett Place Mall. “This mall is Gwinnett Place, but it could be any place.”“There’s nothing about it that bespeaks Atlanta. The Rich’s department store in this mall isn’t like the historic Rich’s downtown that finally withered and died. Here there is no Magnolia Room, no Pink Pig, no Christmas tree. No tradition of family ownership stretching back to the 1870s. The average shopper here doesn’t relate to any of this…For many such transient households, ‘community’ is more a generic term than a vital place.” HARSH.Get it?

Let’s be fair to the suburbanites and exurbanites, Dr. White! It’s a little more complex than that! All your good friends from episodes one and two created a lot of ways for people to get out of town.

Here comes the best part of the WHOLE SERIES.“In place of the old fried egg analogy with a single center, we now how a pepperoni pizza model with many centers spreading around the metropolitan area.”That’s Gwinnett Place that he’s indicating with his plastic knife up there.I WANT TO GO TO THE MALL FOOD COURT AND MAKE PIZZA MAPS SOOOOO BADLY NOW!!!“For the future, I suspect that this process will continue and will add even more centers to the eight to ten that we now have. For example, the outer perimeter highway that’s being proposed – “

OUTER PERIMETER?!?!?! What would we even do with an extra perimeter? When the first perimeter is still so popular! What would we do with more roads? Should such a thing be built?

“I think it ought to be built. I proposed it.”INTENSE! Who will save us from this expensive nightmare?

“The outer loop is the most ridiculous proposal in the state of Georgia…Before we spend any money on it, I hope we come to some form of sanity and stop it…The expense of that, the fragmentation and dispersal of the energies and the critical mass that makes for something great and efficient begins to disperse and becomes totally inefficient. Enormous waste of capital. I hope to God it never comes to pass.”

Dr. White sums up the sprawl and fracturing of the metro’s community: “A ‘City Without Limits’ perhaps, but also a city without focus.”

Time to get this all over with. What better place than back in southeast DeKalb County where we began this episode? But this time at “a moonscape, where construction of yet another giant regional mall has been stalled for years because of poor planning.” (Is this Stonecrest? Anyone?)“Can the outback be tamed, or does it have a momentum all its own?”“Right now, in the race between regional planning and development like this, the odds are with this.”[Foreboding music.]I don’t have a lot to add to this episode since the urban/suburban conundrum has been done to death. Frankly, this episode could have stood to have dug like five seconds deeper into a couple of the issues it raised or didn’t raise. However, there are still some really delightful moments like the Sbarro map of Atlanta’s growth hubs, the reference to the New Hampshire tennis boom, and Dr. Crimmins driving his maroon Volvo while looking like he thinks he’s being tailed.

Next up: Part Four – “How We’ve Played the Game” – This one is all about sports. Ughhhhh.

Previously: The History Twins: Forget all your troubles, forget all your cares…

Tags: dana white, dunwoody, john portman, the history twins, the making of modern atlanta, tim crimmins, tom moreland